Quotes of the Day:
"A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil. To think is to do."
- Victor Hugo
"Today we need a special kind of courage. Not the kind needed in battle, but a kind which makes us stand up for everything that we know is right, everything that is true and honest. We need the kind of courage that can withstand the subtle corruption of the cynics, so that we can show the world that we are not afraid of the future."
- Elizabeth II
"I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self."
- Aristotle
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 23 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. As Western Arms Pour Into Ukraine, Zelensky Promises Victory
3. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky Awaits Easter Visit From Top U.S. Official
4. The Belarusian railway workers who helped thwart Russia’s attack on Kyiv
5. Claymores: Bringing Russian Convoys to a Dead Halt
6. As Finland considers NATO membership, citizens mobilize for an invasion by Russia
7. Poor Quality Of Russian Officers And Soldiers Makes More Bucha-Type Crimes ‘Inevitable’ – OpEd
8. Leading Strategist Questions Russian Forces’ Ability To ‘Act Like A Western Army’ – Analysis
9. Pandemic chaos proves the world isn't prepared for biological warfare, experts say
10. How Kyiv was saved by Ukrainian ingenuity as well as Russian blunders
11. NATO Membership for Sweden Would Be ‘A Small Step For The Military, But A Giant Leap For The Political System’
12. State National Guards to send armored vehicles to Ukraine
13. Lloyd Austin presses hard on Ukraine — but quietly
14. NATO's SFA Operator Profile | SOF News
15. Aid groups helping Ukraine face both cyber and physical threats
16. The Embarrassing Truth Behind Putin’s War Failures
17. Russia shifts forces for battle over Ukrainian heartland
18. The Future of SOCOM’s ‘Killer Egg’
19. Czech companies to repair damaged Ukrainian tanks
20. Biden's escalating aid to Ukraine reflects a sea change in U.S. foreign policy
21. Putin's mighty war machine on the SCRAPHEAP
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 23 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 23
Frederick W. Kagan, Kateryna Stepanenko, and Karolina Hird
April 23, 6:30 pm ET
Russian forces continued offensive operations along multiple axes even as they completed moving reinforcements drawn from the retreat from Kyiv into the east and continued redeploying some forces from Mariupol to the north. The Russians have not taken time to refit troops moving from Kyiv or Mariupol before recommitting them to combat operations. They are not pausing offensive operations to wait until they have concentrated overwhelming combat power, and they do not appear to be massing forces on a few decisive axes of advance. They are continuing the pattern of operations they have followed throughout the war: committing small collections of units to widely dispersed attacks along multiple axes and refusing to accept necessary operational pauses to set conditions for decisive operations.
Russian forces have thus far only committed a handful of battalion tactical groups (BTGs) to offensive operations in their various sectors, however, and could still launch a massed offensive operation. We assess that such an operation is unlikely given observed patterns and the inherent limitations of available actual combat power in troops that have fought hard and suffered many casualties, as well as observed challenges with command-and-control at the regiment/brigade and division level. It is possible that the Russians are addressing or attempting to address some of those challenges and will soon launch an offensive in a new and better-coordinated form, but it remains unlikely.
The objectives of Russian offensives around the Izyum-Donetsk City salient are unclear. Russian forces may seek to reach the Izyum-Debaltseve road along two or more axes to encircle a large concentration of Ukrainian forces and built-up areas. Ukrainian officials suggested on April 23 that Russian forces near Rubizhne and Popasna may seek to encircle the Severodonetsk-Lysychansk area rather than pursue the deeper envelopment.[1] It is too soon to evaluate the likelihood of this Russian course of action or the probability of its success.
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces continued their pressure on the Azovstal facility in Mariupol.
- Russian troops drawn from the retreat from Kyiv are re-entering combat in eastern Ukraine.
- Russian forces from around Mariupol are redeploying to the vicinity of Donetsk City and are likely to enter combat again soon and without rest or refit.
- Russia continued conducting small-scale ground offensives at multiple points along the front from Izyum to Zaporizhia Oblast.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
ISW has updated its assessment of the four primary efforts Russian forces are engaged in at this time:
- Main effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate supporting efforts);
- Supporting effort 1—Kharkiv and Izyum;
- Supporting effort 2—Southern axis;
- Supporting effort 3—Sumy and northeastern Ukraine.
Main effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate Main Effort—Mariupol (Russian Objective: Capture Mariupol and reduce the Ukrainian defenders)
Russian forces continued to attack Ukrainian defenders in the Azovstal Steel Plant and are likely attempting to starve out those remaining within the facility.[2] Advisor to the Head of the Ukrainian President’s Office Oleksiy Arestovych stated that Russian troops tried to storm the plant and “strangle” Ukrainian resistance, though ISW cannot independently verify this claim.[3] Russian forces allegedly organized buses for civilian evacuation from Mariupol but canceled the evacuation on the grounds that Ukrainian ”nationalists” were planning on attacking the civilians.[4] Such actions that spoil the evacuation process likely represent further attempts to shape the information space in Mariupol and globally, as well as to extend administrative control in captured portions of the city.[5]
Subordinate Main Effort—Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces conducted limited ground offensives in Rubizhne, Popasna, and Marinka on April 23 but did not make any significant territorial gains.[6] The Ukrainian General Staff said that Russian forces are focusing on preparing to assault Severodonetsk while continuing unsuccessful ground attacks in the direction of Slovyansk and shelling settlements all along the frontline.[7] Social media users and foreign journalists geolocated Russian forces to the northeastern part of Rubizhne, where street fighting continued as of April 23.[8] Russian forces paused offensive operations on Avdiivka, just north of Donetsk City, after consistently targeting the settlement throughout the week. Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and Russian units have reportedly been arriving in the vicinity of Donetsk City from Mariupol since April 21, and the Russian command will likely recommit these degraded units to offensives in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.[9]
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv and Izyum: (Russian Objective: Advance southeast to support Russian operations in Luhansk Oblast; defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to the Izyum axis)
Russian forces conducted ground attacks from Izyum on April 23.[10] Arestovych said that Russian troops seized Lozova, approximately 100 km west of Izyum, on April 23.[11] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that elements of the 35th Combined Arms Army’s 1st Tank Army and the 68th Army Corps are participating in active combat in the area as of April 23.[12] The Ukrainian General Staff stated that elements of the 64th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade of the 35th Combined Arms Army, which had fought in Bucha, are operating in the vicinity of Izyum.[13] Elements of the 64th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade sustained losses while fighting on the Kyiv axis earlier in the invasion, redeployed to the Izyum axis quickly, and therefore likely add limited combat power to the fight.[14]
Russian forces maintained their positions northeast of Kharkiv city and continued to shell surrounding areas on April 23.[15] Reports of Russian reinforcements from the Kyiv axis in Kharkiv Oblast likely indicate that Russia intends to maintain pressure on Kharkiv city, contradicting the Russian claim that Moscow’s focus is on securing the borders of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts. Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) do not currently run through or even near Kharkiv city, and the most recent Ukrainian counteroffensives near the city are unlikely to threaten Russian GLOCs from Belgorod to Izyum.
Supporting Effort #2—Southern axis: (Russian Objective: Defend Kherson against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces continued a limited offensive in Zaporizhia Oblast but paused ground offensive operations in northern Kherson Oblast on April 23.[16] Oleksiy Arestovych, chief advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said that Russian forces advanced several kilometers in the direction of Hulyaipole, Zaporizhia Oblast, likely intending to stop Ukrainian counteroffensives in the area or to secure the N15 highway.[17] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that one Russian BTG from the 19th Motorized Rifle Division of the 58th Combined Arms Army moved in the direction of Zaporizhia. This unit was likely one of three sent to Melitopol early in March and is not likely a fresh unit, although it may have had time to refit and replace losses.[18] Russian forces are reportedly regrouping separate units of the 8th and 49th Combined Arms Armies, the 22nd Army Corps, Black Sea Coastal Troops, and airborne troops to retain occupied frontiers in southern Ukraine.[19]
Ukraine’s Military Intelligence Directorate claimed that Ukrainian forces struck a command post of the 49th Combined Arms Army in an unspecified frontline location in southern Ukraine on April 22, killing at least two generals and destroying the post.[20] ISW cannot independently verify this strike or its casualties. The Ukrainian Resistance Center also reported that an organized resistance movement has killed 100 Russian occupation personnel since the start of the war, including 30 since April 12.[21] Russian forces are attempting to forcibly mobilize residents of temporarily occupied settlements in Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts, despite growing resistance movements.[22]
Supporting Effort #3—Sumy and Northeastern Ukraine: (Russian Objective: Withdraw combat power in good order for redeployment to eastern Ukraine)
There was no significant change in this area in the past 24 hours.
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces will likely continue attacking southeast from Izyum, west from Kreminna and Popasna, and north from Donetsk City via Avdiivka or another axis.
- Russian forces will attempt to starve out the remaining defenders of the Azovstal Steel Plant in Mariupol and will not allow trapped civilians to evacuate.
- Russian forces will likely increase the scale of ground offensive operations in the coming days, but it is too soon to tell how fast they will do so or how large those offensives will be. It is also too soon to assess how the Russians will weight their efforts in the arc from Izyum to Donetsk City.
[11] https://focus dot ua/voennye-novosti/513227-vs-rf-otchasti-prodvinulis-v-zaporozhskom-i-izyumskom-napravleniyah-arestovich-video
[14] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/rosiiskykh-viiskovykh-iaki-chynyly-zvirstva-v-buchi-znovu-povertaiut-v-ukrainu.html; https://gur.gov dot ua/content/voennye-prestupnyky-neposredstvenno-uchastvuiushchye-v-sovershenyy-voennykh-prestuplenyi-protyv-naroda-ukrayny-v-h-bucha-voennosluzhashchye-64-otdelnoi-motostrelkovoi-bryhady-35-oa-vvo.html; https://inforesist dot org/razvedka-obnorodovala-imena-voennyh-rossijskoj-brigady-kotoraya-byla-v-buche/
[17] https://focus dot ua/voennye-novosti/513227-vs-rf-otchasti-prodvinulis-v-zaporozhskom-i-izyumskom-napravleniyah-arestovich-video
2. As Western Arms Pour Into Ukraine, Zelensky Promises Victory
As Western Arms Pour Into Ukraine, Zelensky Promises Victory
April 23, 2022, 5:57 p.m. ET
Ukrainian soldiers pausing for early Orthodox Christian Easter services on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, on Saturday, as the war’s theater shifted to the east. Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
“We will be able to show the occupiers that the day when they will be forced to leave Ukraine is approaching,” Mr. Zelensky said in an overnight address to the nation.
The statement seemed to mark a decisive shift for Mr. Zelensky, who has spent months begging and shaming allies around the world to provide Ukraine with longer-range, heavy weapons to repel Russian forces as they assault the east in the latest offensive in the two-month-old war.
At a news conference on Saturday, Mr. Zelensky said that the American secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, and the defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, planned to visit Kyiv, the capital, on Sunday to discuss the “military assistance we need.” They would be the highest-ranking American officials to visit since the invasion began. The Pentagon and the State Department declined to comment.
President Volodymyr Zelensky speaking at a news conference in Kyiv on Saturday.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
World leaders “should not come to us with empty hands, not just presents and cakes,” Mr. Zelensky said, but with “specific weapons.”
Military analysts said that the tanks, howitzers, deadly drones, armored vehicles and mountains of ammunition pouring into Ukraine from Western allies have been a significant factor in helping the country’s troops fend off the larger and better-equipped Russian military.
Despite increased fighting, Russian forces have made “no major gains” in the past 24 hours, as Ukrainian counterattacks continue to hinder their efforts, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said on Saturday, in its latest assessment of the war.
The ministry said that, despite Russia’s claim that it had conquered the heavily battered southern port of Mariupol, where the last remaining Ukrainian fighters have holed up in a steel plant with civilians, “heavy fighting” continued to frustrate Russian attempts to capture the city, slowing their progress into the Donbas region.
A firefighter taking cover behind a wall during a Russian bombing attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine, the site of fierce fighting on Saturday.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
The fighting in the eastern theater has increased the sense of urgency among Western allies to bolster Ukraine’s defenses with more powerful arms. The terrain there is mostly open farmland, which tends to favor tanks and other heavy weapons over the quick-hit, guerrilla-style tactics that the Ukrainians employed to such devastating effect in the country’s north.
Canada on Friday announced that it had delivered heavy artillery, including M777 howitzers and anti-armor ammunition, to Ukrainian forces in conjunction with the United States.
The shipment came after President Biden announced another $800 million in military aid to Ukraine on Thursday, saying he wanted to send the “unmistakable message” to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, that he would “never succeed in dominating and occupying all of Ukraine.”
At Saturday’s news conference, Mr. Zelensky reiterated his willingness to meet directly with Mr. Putin, saying while “I don’t want” to meet with him, “I have to see the president” in order to end the war. He also appealed to the Russian people, saying, “Living in the Russian Federation is like virtual reality, like a video game. Come back to the world. It’s more beautiful and more truthful.”
While Russia has failed to make any significant territorial gains since launching its renewed assault in Donbas this week, the Ukrainian defense intelligence agency warned that Russian forces were trying to identify the Ukrainian military’s most vulnerable points in order to mount a larger offensive. It also said that some of the elite Russian troops who had been fighting in Mariupol had begun moving east to join the battle in Donbas.
The pulverized remnants of Mariupol, Ukraine, on Friday. Despite Russian claims of having taken the city, heavy fighting continued.Credit...Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters
The secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, said Ukraine had managed to deliver weapons via helicopter under cover of darkness to the steel plant in Mariupol, The Associated Press reported.
The city has been the scene of growing desperation for the 100,000 people who are trapped there and struggling to survive under Russian occupation, said Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister. On Saturday, an aide to the city’s mayor said that Russian forces had thwarted the latest attempt to evacuate civilians from Mariupol.
Most of the fighting over the past week has been for control of towns and villages directly on the front line, which stretches across 300 miles in Ukraine’s east and includes many communities already devastated by weeks of war.
In villages and towns largely in the country’s north that have been retaken by Ukrainian troops, officials have been working with international investigators to document violence against civilians.
Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, said she was examining more than 8,000 reported atrocities, including summary executions, sexual violence and the forced deportation of children to Russia.
Moscow shifted its focus to Donbas after failing to seize Kyiv in the north, where Russian troops were hampered by logistical and tactical problems as well as sagging morale. Those issues are likely to persist in the battle for Donbas, according to independent analysts, who said Russia did not adequately rest, reinforce or resupply its troops before beginning its latest assault.
Ukrainian soldiers waiting in a house on Friday near Zaporizhzhia, in the Donbas region, as a Russian drone flew overhead.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
While Russia has been focused on seizing the east, at least eight people were killed and 18 were wounded on Saturday when two cruise missiles struck a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of the southern city of Odesa, Ukrainian officials said. Among the dead was a 3-month-old child, said Andriy Yermak, the head of the presidential administration.
Mr. Zelensky reacted angrily to the attack, denouncing Mr. Putin as “this bastard” and asking “what sort of God they believe in” that the Russians could kill a 3-month-old.
Photographs and video from the scene appeared to show extensive damage to a large housing complex, which was partly obscured by plumes of thick black smoke. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said on Twitter that “terror” was the “only aim” of the strike on Odesa.
Lyubov Lubivteluk, right, and her cousin Galina Marchenko waiting for humanitarian aid in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on Saturday. The two women had fled their village near Huliapole a few days earlier as Russian fighting intensified.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Three people were also killed and seven wounded in shelling on the northeastern city of Kharkiv on Saturday, the region’s governor said.
For its part, the Ukrainian military claimed to have blown up a Russian forward command post in the southern region of Kherson, which is largely under Russian control.
“This only confirms what I have said many times,” Mr. Zelensky said. “The Russian invasion of Ukraine was intended only as a beginning, then they want to capture other countries.”
Military and political analysts have cast doubt on the claim by the Russian general, Rustam Minnekayev, suggesting that it might have been intended to confuse Ukraine and its supporters, and that it would be difficult for Russian forces, already engaged in heavy fighting in the east, to fight their way deeper into the south.
A warehouse in Kharkiv was damaged in a Russian bombing attack on Saturday.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
But the commander’s hint that Russia had far broader ambitions rattled the region, setting off alarms in Moldova, a former Soviet republic where Moscow-backed separatists have controlled a breakaway territory known as Transnistria since 1992.
Responding to General Minnekayev’s claim that Russian speakers were being oppressed in Transnistria, the Moldovan government summoned the Russian ambassador to complain that such comments were “not only unacceptable, but also unfounded” and led to “increased tension.”
Moldova is among the nations along Ukraine’s border that have accepted the more than five million refugees who have fled since the war began on Feb. 24. But even as many have raced to leave Ukraine, more than one million Ukrainians have returned to the country, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Some have risked the journey back home after Russian forces withdrew from areas around Kyiv, bringing a sense of stability to the area and allowing some business and foreign embassies to reopen there.
Poland, which has absorbed nearly three million Ukrainian refugees, more than any other country, said that nearly 24,000 crossed back into Ukraine on Saturday alone. Lesia Vasylenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker, shared a photograph on Twitter of cars that she said were lined up and waiting to cross from Poland into Ukraine for Orthodox Christian Easter, which will be celebrated on Sunday.
“Ukrainians are coming home,” she wrote. “Easter is a time to stand united and pray for Ukraine.”
A priest blessing worshipers on Saturday, ahead of the Orthodox Easter celebration, at the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin in Lviv, Ukraine.Credit...Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times
Victoria Kim and Alexandra E. Petri contributed reporting.
3. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky Awaits Easter Visit From Top U.S. Official
I hope the premature announcement from Zelensky does not force a cancellation due to OPSEC. I also hope that there will be a full US fighter escort for the aircraft bringing in the SECSTATE and SECDEF. Would the Russians try to conduct an air ambush and shoot down their aircraft? If so how would we respond (e.g., the response that would follow US aircraft shooting down Russian aircraft in self defense).
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky Awaits Easter Visit From Top U.S. Officials
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin are due in Ukraine Sunday, Ukrainian government says
Updated Apr. 24, 2022 8:24 am ET
The meeting, which the U.S. hasn’t confirmed, is set to be the highest-level visit by U.S. officials to Ukraine since the start of the conflict and comes as Orthodox Christians, the largest religious group in Russia and Ukraine, celebrate Easter two months into the war.
António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, had appealed for a four-day truce during the Orthodox Holy Week to allow for the evacuation of civilians from frontline towns and the delivery of humanitarian aid.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky attends a news conference at a metro station in Kyiv on Saturday.
PHOTO: GLEB GARANICH/REUTERS
The cease-fire proposal was rejected by Moscow, which said it was a ruse to allow Ukraine’s military to regroup. Russia’s First Deputy Permanent Representative to the U.N., Dmitry Polyanskiy, told a Security Council session on Ukraine last week that a pause in hostilities would give Ukrainian forces time to receive new shipments of drones, anti-tank guided missiles and man-portable air-defense systems.
Mr. Guterres is due to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow this week before traveling to Kyiv. At a press conference on Saturday, Mr. Zelensky criticized Mr. Guterres’s decision to visit Russia first. “The war is in Ukraine, there are no bodies in the streets of Moscow,” he said.
On Sunday, Mr. Zelensky posted a video message from Kyiv’s Saint-Sophia Cathedral on the Telegram social-media platform, saying Ukraine on Easter asks “God for great grace to make our great dream come true – this is another great day – the day when great peace will come to Ukraine.”
After rapid initial gains by Russian forces, the Ukraine conflict has settled into grinding war with Russia making incremental gains in the south and east of the country, where it is concentrating its firepower after pulling back from Kyiv and other northern regions.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said Sunday it had destroyed a gunpowder-and-explosives factory in Pavlohrad, a city near the eastern Donbas area where Russian troops are focusing their offensive, as well as four weapons depots in the northern Kharkiv region.
An Orthodox priest blesses the Easter Basket of a Cossack at the gate of a Church in Sumi, Ukraine, on Sunday.
PHOTO: MANU BRABO FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The window of a residential building on fire due to Russian shelling in Northeast Kharkiv.
PHOTO: ALEX CHAN TSZ YUK/ZUMA PRESS
Ukraine’s southern operational command said on Sunday its forces had recaptured eight settlements in the southern region of Kherson, most of which is occupied by Moscow. Russian advances on the towns of Oleksandrivka, Tavri and Mykolaivka were also beaten back by Ukrainian artillery, it said in a statement.
There was no independent confirmation of the claims by either side.
Ukrainian officials have warned that Russia is planning to conduct a referendum in May on establishing a “Kherson People’s Republic” along the lines of the Donetsk and Luhansk statelets in the east, which Moscow created in 2014. Mr. Putin recognized the independence of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics on the eve of the war in February.
In a press conference on Saturday, Mr. Zelensky said no further negotiations would be held with Moscow if the referendum went ahead, or if Russia killed any more of the unknown number of civilians and fighters who are holed up in a steel plant in the southern port city of Mariupol.
The city has seen some of the heaviest fighting of the war. Mr. Zelensky said in his nightly address that new evidence was emerging that Russian troops have killed tens of thousands of Mariupol residents since the start of the invasion and are seeking to cover up “traces of their crimes.” He also accused Russia of deporting Ukrainians, including children, to far-flung parts of Russia.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, said on Sunday that Russia was shelling the Azovstal plant with artillery and airstrikes and massing forces and equipment to storm Ukraine’s last redoubt in the city. He called for an Easter truce, a humanitarian corridor for civilians and talks for an exchange of military personnel.
People gather next to their cars after arriving at an evacuation point for people fleeing Mariupol and the surrounding towns under Russian control on Saturday.
PHOTO: CHRIS MCGRATH/GETTY IMAGES
Russian military vehicles move in an area controlled by Russian-backed separatist forces in Mariupol on Saturday.
PHOTO: ALEXEI ALEXANDROV/ASSOCIATED PRESS
A senior Russian military commander said last week that Moscow aimed to control all of southern Ukraine from Mariupol in the east to Moldova’s Transnistria region, where he said Russian-speakers suffer from discrimination.
That would secure a land corridor to Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that Moscow annexed in 2014, and deny Ukraine access to the sea.
On Saturday, two Russian missiles hit an unspecified military asset and two residential buildings in Odessa, killing eight people, including a mother and child in the deadliest attack inside the city since the war began, according to Odessa’s Mayor Gennadiy Trukhanov.
In an Easter message posted to the Kremlin website on Sunday, Mr. Putin thanked the Russian Orthodox Church for its assistance to those who need care and support “in our difficult time.”
4. The Belarusian railway workers who helped thwart Russia’s attack on Kyiv
Excerpts:
The attacks were simple but effective, targeting the signal control cabinets essential to the functioning of the railways, members of the activist network said. For days on end, the movement of trains was paralyzed, forcing the Russians to attempt to resupply their troops by road and contributing to the snarl-up that stalled the infamous 40-mile military convoy north of Kyiv.
...
The saboteurs drew inspiration from an earlier episode in Belarusian history, during World War II, when Belarusians opposed to the Nazi occupation blew up railway lines and train stations to disrupt German supply lines. The Rail War, as it is known, is venerated as a moment of triumph for Belarus, taught in schools as the most successful of the tactics deployed by resistance fighters that eased the way for Soviet troops to drive the Germans out.
Eight decades later, it is Russia’s presence in Belarus that has stirred dissent. The deployment of tens of thousands of Russian troops in Belarus in preparation for the invasion of Ukraine triggered widespread domestic opposition and rekindled opposition networks formed during the 2020 protests against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, said Hanna Liubakova, a Belarusian journalist living in exile in Lithuania.
The Belarusian railway workers who helped thwart Russia’s attack on Kyiv
A clandestine network of railway workers, hackers and dissident security forces wreaked havoc on supply lines
The Washington Post · by Liz SlyYesterday at 5:28 p.m. EDTBy Liz SlyYesterday at 5:28 p.m. EDT · April 23, 2022
When Russian troops first streamed across the Belarusian border into Ukraine for what they had assumed would be a lightning assault on Kyiv, they were intending to rely on the region’s extensive rail network for supplies and reinforcements.
The Russians hadn’t taken into account the railway saboteurs of Belarus.
Starting in the earliest days of the invasion in February, a clandestine network of railway workers, hackers and dissident security forces went into action to disable or disrupt the railway links connecting Russia to Ukraine through Belarus, wreaking havoc on Russian supply lines.
The attacks have drawn little attention outside Belarus amid the drama of the Russian onslaught and the bloody aftermath of Russia’s humiliating retreat. Fierce Ukrainian resistance and tactical errors by an ill-prepared Russian force were likely enough to thwart Russia’s plans, analysts say.
But the Belarus railway saboteurs can at least claim a role in fueling the logistical chaos that quickly engulfed the Russians, leaving troops stranded on the front lines without food, fuel and ammunition within days of the invasion.
Alexander Kamyshin, head of Ukrainian railways, expressed Ukraine’s gratitude to the Belarusian saboteurs. “They are brave and honest people who have helped us,” he said.
The attacks were simple but effective, targeting the signal control cabinets essential to the functioning of the railways, members of the activist network said. For days on end, the movement of trains was paralyzed, forcing the Russians to attempt to resupply their troops by road and contributing to the snarl-up that stalled the infamous 40-mile military convoy north of Kyiv.
How much of the chaos can be attributed to the sabotage and how much to poor logistical planning by the Russians is hard to tell, especially as there is no independent media reporting from Belarus, said Emily Ferris, a research fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute. But without automated signaling, trains were forced to slow to a crawl and the number of them traveling on the tracks at any one time would have been severely restricted, she said.
“Given the Russian reliance on trains, I’m sure it contributed to some of the problems they had in the north. It would have slowed down their ability to move,” she said. “They couldn’t push further into Ukrainian territory and snarled their supply lines because they had to rely on trucks.”
The attacks also bought time for Ukrainian troops to formulate an effective response to the Russian invasion, said Yury Ravavoi, a Belarusian activist and trade unionist who escaped to Poland under threat of arrest during the anti-government protests that rocked Belarus in 2020.
“I can’t say we were the most important factor, but we were an important brick in the wall,” he said.
The saboteurs drew inspiration from an earlier episode in Belarusian history, during World War II, when Belarusians opposed to the Nazi occupation blew up railway lines and train stations to disrupt German supply lines. The Rail War, as it is known, is venerated as a moment of triumph for Belarus, taught in schools as the most successful of the tactics deployed by resistance fighters that eased the way for Soviet troops to drive the Germans out.
Eight decades later, it is Russia’s presence in Belarus that has stirred dissent. The deployment of tens of thousands of Russian troops in Belarus in preparation for the invasion of Ukraine triggered widespread domestic opposition and rekindled opposition networks formed during the 2020 protests against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, said Hanna Liubakova, a Belarusian journalist living in exile in Lithuania.
This second Rail War has taken a more benign form than its predecessor. The partisans were keen not to inflict casualties, Ravavoi said. So they focused their attacks on damaging equipment to stop the railways from functioning.
“We didn’t want to kill any Russian army or Belarusian train drivers. We used a peaceful way to stop them,” he said.
He and other Belarusians involved in organizing the attacks decline to reveal precise details of how the attacks were carried out and by whom, citing the need for secrecy and concerns for the safety of the railway partisans, as the saboteurs are loosely known.
Three main groups have been involved, representing railway workers, security force defectors and cyber specialists, said Lt. Col Alexander Azarov, a former security official living in Warsaw who heads the security force group called Bypol.
Railway employees sympathetic to the partisans have leaked details of Russian movements and the locations of key railway infrastructure to a group called the Community of Railway Workers, which shares them on Telegram channels. Supporters on the ground link up to carry out the attacks, but there is no formal chain of command, Azarov said.
“Our movement is not centralized,” he said. “It’s not like there’s a leader of the resistance. It’s horizontal, with dozens of groups working on the ground.”
The third group, the Cyber Partisans, is formed of exiled Belarusian IT professionals who have carried out several cyberattacks on the Belarusian government since joining in 2020.
The Cyber Partisans launched the first attack, hacking into the railway’s computer network in the days leading up to the invasion and snarling rail traffic before Russian troops had even crossed the border. Infiltrating the railway network’s computers was relatively easy, said Yuliana Shemetovets, a spokesperson for the group, which is based in New York, because the railway company is still using Windows XP, an outdated version of the software that contains many vulnerabilities.
Starting on Feb. 26, two days after the invasion began, a succession of five sabotage attacks against signaling cabinets brought train traffic to an almost complete halt, said Sergey Voitekhovich, a former railway employee now based in Poland who is a leader in the Community of Railway Workers.
By Feb. 28, satellite photographs began to appear of the 40-mile convoy of Russian trucks and tanks ostensibly headed from Belarus toward Kyiv. Within a week, the convoy had completely stalled as vehicles ran out of fuel or broke down.
The Belarusian authorities have since launched an intense effort to prevent attacks and hunt down the saboteurs. The Interior Ministry has decreed that damaging railway infrastructure is an act of terrorism, a crime that carries a 20-year prison term.
Dozens of railway workers have been randomly detained and their phones searched for evidence that they were in touch with the partisans, the activists say. At least 11 Belarusians are in custody, accused of participating in the attacks, according to human rights groups.
In early April, security police captured three alleged saboteurs near the town of Bobruisk and shot them in the knees. State television broadcast footage of the bleeding men, their knees bandaged, and claimed they had been shot while resisting arrest.
The shootings have had a chilling effect on the saboteur network, Azarov said. Belarusian troops are patrolling and drones have been deployed to monitor the railway lines. “It has become too dangerous to do attacks,” he said.
But by the time of the police shooting, Russia’s withdrawal from the area around Kyiv was in full swing and the Kremlin had announced it would refocus its military effort on capturing the east of Ukraine. The majority of the Russian troops that entered Ukraine from Belarus are now in the process of being redeployed to the east, the Pentagon says.
“We believe the fact that the Russians gave up on taking Kyiv is a result of our work because the Russians didn’t feel as safe in Belarus as they had expected,” said Franak Viacorka, spokesman for Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. “Thousands of Russian troops didn’t receive food, they didn’t receive fuel, and they didn’t receive equipment on time.”
Now, a new phase in the rail war may be underway. In recent days the railway activists have posted on Telegram photographs of damage to signaling cabinets along Russian railway lines being used to transport troops into eastern Ukraine. The attacks can’t be independently confirmed, but Voitekhovich claimed members of his railway network are involved. “There are open borders between Belarus and Russia,” he said.
The Washington Post · by Liz SlyYesterday at 5:28 p.m. EDTBy Liz SlyYesterday at 5:28 p.m. EDT · April 23, 2022
5. Claymores: Bringing Russian Convoys to a Dead Halt
Simple tools and weapons - a mix of old and new. The first half of this article is all about the claymore in some technical detail. The end describes how the Ukrainians employed it.
Excerpts:
Remember a few days into the war; there was a 40-mile-long Russian convoy slowly heading down muddy roads into Ukraine? The satellite image below showing Russian trucks packed together like sardines in a can was taken on 28 February of this year. The red arrows are mine. I’ll talk about those in a minute.
A group of 30 Ukrainian Special Forces operators and drone operators on quad bikes managed to bring this thing to a screeching halt within hours. Munitions such as Claymore mines played a role in that.
The unit commander was Lt Col Yaroslav Honchar, and he gave an account of the ambush and the Ukrainian epic David vs. Goliath resistance.
Claymores: Bringing Russian Convoys to a Dead Halt
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The M18 Claymore antipersonnel mine comes with easy to follow directions written on the front of the weapon. Image Credit: YouTube/Army News and Docs
President Biden said in an address Wednesday that his administration has authorized yet another $800 million block of military aid to Ukraine. Included in the weapons package will be numerous Claymore antipersonnel mines and US training on how to use them.
The basics. A claymore is simple and efficient. Image Credit: man.fas.org
The Claymore Explained
We’ve all likely heard the term Claymore by now. They’ve been in use since 1960. Sometimes you’ll hear them called “Claymore mines.” And that’s a fair term; they are antipersonnel mines. The proper military name of them is the M18A1 Claymore Antipersonnel Mine. The name says it all; they were designed and built to take out people.
You’d be wrong if you assumed the name came from the person who built the first one. Instead, its inventor, Norm McLeod, named it after a large Scottish medieval sword that was used with two hands to “cut people down.” Clever guy, that McLeod.
Claymores are not conventional landmines; they are command-detonated and directional. This means they are fired (usually) by remote control and shoot a pattern of metal balls into their kill zone, much the same as a shotgun.
Claymores blowing up a bunch of stuff. Video courtesy of YouTube and United States Defense Media.
The Claymore fires steel balls, about the size of small ball bearings, out to around 110 yards in a 60-degree arc in front of the device. They are primarily used in ambushes and as anti-infiltration devices against enemy infantry.
War Stories, Turn About is not Fair Play
From listening to countless war stories from guys who spent time in Vietnam, I learned that the VC would sneak their way through concertina wire in a perimeter area that had been mined with Claymores. Once they reached the mines unnoticed, they would turn them around, so the “Front Towards Enemy” side was now facing friendlies on the inside of the wire.
They would next sneak their way out through the concertina wire again, undetected, and retreat a few meters into the woodline. Now the tricky bastards would fire off a couple of rounds and throw some rocks towards the perimeter area to make our troops believe they were being attacked. Hearing this, the anxious young troop with the detonator would blow the Claymore and most likely be killed by the blast that was now headed his way.
After this happened a time or two, we started getting smart and putting reflective tape on the backsides of the Claymore to ensure they were pointing in the right direction before they were used.
If you want to learn a lot more about these deadly mines, click here to access the 96-page training circular the US Army has put out regarding their use.
A self-explanatory crude illustration of the type seen in Army field manuals. Image Credit: The United States Army
See where it says “Keep out of here”? That would be an excellent idea if you want to live to see another day. It’s a little hard to read in the illustration, but the information is vital. The “Keep out of here” arrow points to “16 meters”. For those of you who don’t speak metric, that’s about 50 feet. If you clack off one of those things while standing right behind it, it’s an instant lights out for you.
The first time I used one of these things, I literally said to myself, “Holy s**t!” the noise was deafening, and I could feel the concussion from the blast deep in my chest. It was in a wooded area, and the thing took small branches off of trees in the kill zone. Our instructors set up human torso-sized paper targets at various ranges from the weapon. The ones within 50 meters were ripped to shreds. The targets within 100 meters were peppered with holes large enough to stick your thumb through. A hit from that distance would likely kill you as well.
Have We Seen Claymore Mines Already Used In Ukraine?
Remember a few days into the war; there was a 40-mile-long Russian convoy slowly heading down muddy roads into Ukraine? The satellite image below showing Russian trucks packed together like sardines in a can was taken on 28 February of this year. The red arrows are mine. I’ll talk about those in a minute.
Maxar satellite imagery from February 28 of the northern end of the convoy with logistics and resupply vehicles, southeast of Ivankiv, Ukraine. Image Credit: Maxar Technologies/Getty Images. Augmentations by the author.
A group of 30 Ukrainian Special Forces operators and drone operators on quad bikes managed to bring this thing to a screeching halt within hours. Munitions such as Claymore mines played a role in that.
The unit commander was Lt Col Yaroslav Honchar, and he gave an account of the ambush and the Ukrainian epic David vs. Goliath resistance.
The Ukrainian soldiers on the quads were able to approach the advancing Russian convoy from the front, riding through the woods on either side of the road. This was done at night, and they were equipped with night vision goggles, sniper rifles, remotely detonated mines (such as Claymores), drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras, and others capable of dropping small 1.5kg bombs.
Colonel Honchar explains what happened:
“This one little unit in the night destroyed two or three vehicles at the head of this convoy, and after that it was stuck. They stayed there two more nights, and [destroyed] many vehicles.”
Brilliant plan. The red arrows I drew on the map are where I would have secretly placed Claymores. You’ll note some are positioned closer to the vehicles, and some are further away, in the woodline. To cripple the convoy, I would have detonated the inner line of mines once the convoy was halted. Then, after the surviving occupants of the vehicles had exited their trucks and made their way towards the woodline, I would have detonated the back row of mines to take them out. All the while, drones would be dropping their 1.5kg bombs on the convoy to ensure it wasn’t going anywhere.
And that’s basically what the Ukrainian SF did.
Colonel Honchar is understandably proud of their accomplishment. “The first echelon of the Russian force was stuck without heat, without oil, without bombs, and without gas. And it all happened because of the work of 30 people,” he said.
Ukrainian forces already know how to effectively use these weapons, and I’m sure they’ll be put to good use in the future.
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6. As Finland considers NATO membership, citizens mobilize for an invasion by Russia
Unconventional deterrence and resistance. A modern capability necessary for any freedom loving democratic country threatened by an authoritarian power.
As Finland considers NATO membership, citizens mobilize for an invasion by Russia
HELSINKI —
When the Finnish Reservists’ Assn. recently announced wartime defense courses for civilian women in the southern town of Haemeenlinna, the 400 slots filled almost immediately, with a waiting list of 500 more.
Topics will include shooting, cybersecurity and how to manage the first several days of an invasion from abroad.
“I wouldn’t call it fear,” said Sgt. Sonja Airikki, a 39-year-old reservist who will lead the training next month. “It’s more about being prepared.”
Military readiness is ingrained in the culture of this country of 5.5 million people that shares an 833-mile border and a long, complicated history with Russia.
The relationship has grown increasingly tense since Russia invaded Ukraine two months ago. For the first time, Finland is considering seeking membership in NATO, prompting threats of retaliation from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Finnish women learn to fire weapons.
(Finnish Reservists’ Assn.)
The reservists group is primarily responsible for keeping its call-up soldiers ready for war. Its civilian classes — like those Airikki leads — have always been popular, but nothing prepared it for the nationwide enrollment spike since the attack on Ukraine.
“The change has been enormous,” said Ilpo Pohjola, a top official with the association who has been with it since its inception almost 30 years ago. “It’s something very special. I haven’t seen anything like this before.
“We have known for 100 years that there is evil on the opposite side of the border, but now I think people have woken up,” he said. “They understand that we must be prepared.”
Wariness of Russia dates back to 1809, when Russia added Finland to its empire after winning it in a war with Sweden. Finland declared independence in 1917, while Russia was distracted by revolution, but 22 years later the Soviets invaded.
Enrollment for civilian military training in Finland has soared since Russia invaded Ukraine.
(Finnish Reservists’ Assn.)
The Finnish army was vastly outnumbered, but using snipers to terrorize enemy soldiers in the frozen forests and Molotov cocktails — its own invention — to attack their tanks, it fended off the Soviets in two separate wars.
In the end, Finland signed a peace treaty — the Moscow Armistice of 1944 — that ceded about 10% of the country to the Soviets.
The Cold War brought an uneasy coexistence with the Soviet Union that caused Finland to cool relations with the United States and the West in an effort to remain free and Western.
Finland traded more with the Soviets than any Western country and even flew their MiG-21 fighter jets for a time.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, appeasing Russia continued as a pragmatic survival tactic. As a matter of foreign policy, Finland would point out its allies but never publicly mentioned its enemies, even if there was only one and everyone knew who it was.
Finnish Reservists’ Assn. training.
(Finnish Reservists’ Assn.)
That changed when Russia invaded Ukraine.
“Now masks have been removed,” Finland’s president, Sauli Niinisto, said on the day of the attack. “Only the cold face of war is visible.”
Asked by the national newspaper Ilta-Sanomat last month to name the biggest threat to the country, 74% of respondents said Russia — up from 15% last year.
Suddenly, Finland was talking about joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. On no other issue has public opinion swung so drastically. As late as 2017, when the country celebrated its centennial, only 19% of the population favored joining the defense alliance. Polls show that figure is now 68%.
Pundits have predicted it could rise to 80% should the country’s leaders endorse the idea. Prime Minister Sanna Marin and her government have yet to take a position.
For Finland to join NATO, the Finnish Parliament must vote to apply and all 30 members of the alliance must vote in favor of the application. Only then would Finland be covered by NATO’s most important provision, Article 5, which states that an attack on one ally is an attack on all.
Putin hasn’t said how he would retaliate if Finland were to become a member, but experts suggested that economic sanctions, cyberattacks or even military action were likely. The question for lawmakers is whether the risks of not joining are greater than the risks of doing so.
Speaking to reporters this month, Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said that the invasion of Ukraine had revealed Russia to be a dangerous aggressor, capable of mobilizing 100,000 soldiers against a neighboring country and perhaps even making good on its threats to use nuclear or other unconventional weapons.
“People in Finland are concerned about what if we see these type of weapons used. What is our response? How do we protect our people?” he said. “These are the issues that have changed.”
Charly Salonius-Pasternak, a defense specialist at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, a government-funded think tank, said Haavisto’s words marked a Rubicon-crossing moment in Finland’s relationship with Russia.
“It may not be dramatic to most people outside Finland, but in Finnish politics to say that Russia is a potential threat and the cause for reevaluating our security policy is quite dramatic,” he said. “It was always obvious, but to say it is quite new.”
In many ways, Finland has always been preparing for war with Russia.
There are more than 5,000 bomb shelters throughout the capital, Helsinki. The extensive subway system — which features a swimming pool, a museum, shops and restaurants that have made it a playground — also includes emergency shelters and an estimated two-week supply of food that could protect the city’s population of 630,000 should Russia attack again.
Finnish civilians receive military training.
(Finnish Reservists’ Assn.)
With an army of 280,000 soldiers and 900,000 reservists, Finland already spends more than 2% of its gross domestic product on defense — the NATO target that the majority of its members fail to meet.
It is also one of the few countries in the European Union that requires all men to serve in the military — or perform other national service — when they turn 18.
In polls, about 80% of Finns say they stand ready to defend their country, one of the highest rates in the world. The national character, galvanized during the Soviet invasions, is reflected in the Finnish word “sisu,” meaning determination, stoicism, perseverance, strength of will, and never backing down in the face of adversity.
“It’s a big deal to be a Finn,” said Janne Kuusela, director general of the Defense Ministry’s policy division. “On one hand we have created a society which the U.N. many times over has concluded that Finland is the happiest nation on Earth. Sometimes that surprises us, but we very much like our country and our society and understand on the other side of the coin that everyone here needs to be prepared to defend it.”
Finnish public broadcaster Yle reported last week that since late February the military supply store Varusteleka has seen an 80% jump in sales.
The Finnish Reservists’ Assn. expects its membership to double this year to 100,000. About 90% of members are reservists and the rest are civilians. All its classes for 2022 are full.
The Defense Ministry released a statement Thursday saying it “urgently” wants to change its policy to allow civilians who enroll in the shooting courses to use military weapons and ammunition, with supervision from the army.
“When people enroll, we don’t ask why they are here,” said Airikki, the trainer leading the course for women in Haemeenlinna.
“I’ve been reading on Facebook pages for moms about their concerns,” she said.
“A lot more people are aware of the possibilities of war. It’s not said out loud, but reading between the lines you can see that people are concerned.”
Hunt is a special correspondent.
7. Poor Quality Of Russian Officers And Soldiers Makes More Bucha-Type Crimes ‘Inevitable’ – OpEd
It may seem cliche to say, but leadership and training are the two most important components of any military force.
Poor Quality Of Russian Officers And Soldiers Makes More Bucha-Type Crimes ‘Inevitable’ – OpEd
No one should have been surprised by the brutality Russian officers and soldiers displayed in Bucha and other Ukrainian locales, Yuzef Davydovsky says. Both Kremlin fears of having a genuinely professional army and its pattern of recruitment and training of officers makes such war crimes inevitable.
According to the Russian analyst, “one of the most important factors” behind the descent of Russian officers into looters and rapidest is “the quality of the office corps.” The regime doesn’t want the military to become a political force and so it does not promote the values that lie behind a professional army (theins.ru/obshestvo/250200).
“The Kremlin constantly has to deal with a dilemma: how can it make Russian officers capable of fighting effectively and at the same time now allow them to have extraordinary influence or be transformed into political subjects in the framework of an authoritarian administration,” Davydovsky says.
“In general,” he continues, “in a democratic republic, the politicization of the army is restrained by procedures and the political status of citizens,” but “an authoritarian system blocks the politicization of the army by means of the fragmentation of the siloviki apparatus, party and/or political and police control.”
That became a particular challenge after the Russian military did so poorly in Georgia in 2008. Moscow decided reforms were needed but it did not really introduce the fundamental ones that were necessary because those in power recognized that professionalizing the army could make it into a political actor the regime couldn’t control as easily or well.
As a result, despite much talk, Moscow didn’t really reform the military and especially the education of officers. In order to keep the military up to the size the Kremlin likes to claim, it has had to drop standards to levels far beyond civilian higher educational institutions and allow all the problems flowing from that to flourish.
And these problems are concentrated in the land forces because more qualified people go into the air force, the navy or the strategic rocket units. Thus, in the units Moscow must use in a war like the one Putin is conducting in Ukraine, it is deploying the least qualified and least well-trained officers. The decay of discipline and Bucha-like brutality follow.
Such officers, Davydovsky says, are quite willing to delegate responsibility to those above them and behave brutally to those below them, a set of attitudes that almost in every case promotes a sense of irresponsibility and impunity when one is talking about individual units who actually interact with the population.
And the constant delegation of responsibility for decisions to the top and actions under constant control from this very top lead to the fact that in a situation where an officer is without direct control, he has a feeling of irresponsibility and impunity. This is how the brakes are released.
Adding to this problem is the fact that most of the soldiers drafted for service in the land forces are from rural areas or non-Russian republics. They are quite often less well-educated and acculturated to modern standards and behave in the authoritarian ways their own officers do, a background that also explains why so many more casualties from rural areas and the republics.
“The character of the current war and the active even when unarmed resistance of Ukrainian citizens to Russian aggression thus makes military crimes by Russian forces INEVITABLE,” Davydovsky says. The way in which Moscow manages the army thus exacerbates broader problems in Russian society rather than mitigates them.
8. Leading Strategist Questions Russian Forces’ Ability To ‘Act Like A Western Army’ – Analysis
Again, the "super power" of modern, democratic militaries is leadership and training. Without those two you will end up like the Russian military in Ukraine.
Leading Strategist Questions Russian Forces’ Ability To ‘Act Like A Western Army’ – Analysis
By Vazha Tavberidze*
(RFE/RL) — The Ukraine conflict has punctured Western perceptions of a mighty Russian Army since President Vladimir Putin seized Crimea eight years ago, and the Russian leader’s refusal to let his invading army “reset and reform” is “good news for Ukraine and good news for the West,” according to a former U.S. naval commander who heads a prominent strategic think tank.
But James Foggo III, a retired U.S. Navy admiral who heads the Virginia-based Center for Maritime Strategy, also said the “ugly” conflict has underscored a “trust gap” between the warring sides and he can’t easily envisage Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy sitting down to peace negotiations.
“I don’t know how Ukraine gets out of this other than to defeat Russia, and that’s a wild card that’s up in the air right now,” he told RFE/RL’s Georgian Service in a recent interview. “You know, if the Russians continue to be beaten, then eventually, public opinion will catch up with Vladimir Putin.”
Foggo offered a damning assessment of Russian military performance so far across all four axes of its initial full-scale attack on Ukraine, adding that “they ran out of fuel, they ran out of food, didn’t have sustainment of ammunition, and they got hit pretty hard, particularly in the battle [for] Kyiv.”
Putin launched the war on February 24 against Ukraine and its government, which Moscow has overtly and covertly opposed since unrest ousted a pro-Russian presidential administration in 2014, citing a need to “demilitarize” and subdue its much smaller post-Soviet neighbor.
“They’re kind of stuck on fighting the last war, World War II,” dominated by tank movements across Europe, Foggo said of what he’s seen from the Russian war planners. “Can they figure out in a very short period of time how to act like a Western army, and inculcate leadership in noncommissioned officers which don’t exist, using weapons systems that are not exactly state of the art?” he asked. “Certainly not before May 9.”
Putin has suggested publicly that it is crucial to achieve military aims in Ukraine by the May 9 holiday marking the anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in 1945.
Russia’s massive invading force has taken major swaths of eastern and southern Ukraine but also suffered “significant” casualties, in the words of Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, and been beaten back in offensives targeting Kyiv and other places. Russia’s navy has so far lost two warships, including its Black Sea Fleet flagship, the Moskva.
Foggo cites long-running Russian failures including a reliance on conscripts instead of a professional cadre of soldiers, underestimation of logistics as the “sixth domain of warfare,” and misperceptions in Moscow that Russians can “operate in the Black Sea with impunity.”
“I think the Russian Navy and the Russian naval infantry understand that they might get ashore, but they won’t get very far inland,” Foggo said.
Putin has recently replaced the top commander of what Moscow officially deems a “special military operation” in Ukraine, appointing Chechnya and Syrian campaign veteran army General Aleksandr Dvornikov to lead a new strategy to consolidate gains in eastern Ukraine.
Foggo said Dvornikov’s “got a huge task ahead of him, but I believe he also knows that if he doesn’t succeed, it’s his head on the line because Putin is ruthless not only with his adversaries, but also with his own people and his own generals.”
He said Dvornikov’s first move was likely to be replacing Russian casualties in the first eight weeks of battle — estimated by NATO to include at least 7,000 deaths in the first month, although Ukrainian estimates are higher. (Russia has classified its casualty figures in an effort to better control domestic fallout from the conflict.)
Foggo said the Russian casualties so far had “reduced their ability to fight” and Dvornikov was probably in a “recruitment and training cycle” at the moment. He predicted that Dvornikov “is in no hurry.”
“He’ll fill the gaps and seams in those units [and] he’ll fix his armor — the Russians have taken huge losses,” Foggo said.
Putin was said to have pivoted away from storming Ukrainian troops holed up at the Azovstal metalworks in the encircled strategic city of Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, with an April 21 order for troops to seal it off so “not even a fly” could pass through the city. The order, during a televised meeting with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, was said to have been issued in an effort to protect the lives of Russian soldiers.
“If they take Mariupol, then with the other territory they’ve taken, they have built this coveted land bridge that they want down to the Black Sea — a bridge across the Sea of Azov to connect Crimea with Mother Russia,” said Foggo, speaking days before news of the Mariupol pivot.
He said the Russian side could then essentially consolidate its gains and control a corridor to reach the Black Sea without taking Odesa, a defiant and dug-in seaport of more than 1 million people before the current conflict.
But Foggo likened any campaign to take the capital, Kyiv, to famously painful military campaigns in Aleppo, Syria, or Fallujah, in Iraq.
“If you’re fighting in an urban environment, in high-rise buildings with snipers around the corner at every corner, and every Ukrainian having an AK-47 or a Molotov cocktail on his balcony to drop on your tank, it’s a losing proposition,” he said. “So if the Russians make that decision, I think it’s a bad decision. And they’re going to take another licking just like they did the last time they tried to move on Kyiv.”
U.S. President Joe Biden on April 21 announced a new $800 million package of military and security assistance for Ukraine, the second such allocation in the past five weeks. Foggo said the U.S. supply so far of hardware, including Stinger surface-to-air missiles and Javelin anti-tank missiles, had seemingly been “very effective,” adding that Ukrainian troops had “proven their ability to use them.”
He also praised Western allies’ provision of Soviet-era equipment that Ukraine’s troops already know how to operate, and cautioned against the practical obstacles to effective use by Ukrainians of some “high-end weapons systems that they have not been trained on.”
“Ukraine does not have the luxury of that training and garrison and certification before going to war,” he said, “they’re in war right now.”
“Western powers, NATO, and the United States, have done a good job of flowing a lot of equipment [to Ukraine]. It may not be everything that the Ukrainians want, but they are proving effective on the battlefield,” Foggo said. “The question is, how much longer can they last? They’ve got to be tired. The Russians are tired, too, but what the Ukrainians have going for them is leadership from the top down.”
Written by Andy Heil based on an interview by RFE/RL’s Georgian Service contributor Vazha Tavberidze
- Vazha Tavberidze is a Vaclav Havel Journalism Fellow working with RFE/RL’s Georgian Service. As a journalist and political analyst, he has covered issues of international security, post-Soviet conflicts, and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations. His writing has been published in various Georgian and international media outlets, including The Times, The Spectator, The Daily Beast, and IWPR.
9. Pandemic chaos proves the world isn't prepared for biological warfare, experts say
In 2020 some recognized that we need to learn to "fight through" the pandemic as if it were a biological attack, especially the military.
I fear that a lesson for US adversaries, based on the way certain segments of the US population and elected officials in the government act, that a biological attack, even a minor one, will sow such division that it will be the ultimate act of subversion and bring about political and societal collapse.
Pandemic chaos proves the world isn't prepared for biological warfare, experts say | CBC News
New technology has made it easier than ever before to custom-design pathogens for maximum spread
Meredith Healey · CBC News · Posted: Apr 24, 2022 4:00 AM ET | Last Updated: 6 hours ago
With the globe now in its third pandemic year, biosecurity and public health experts say that COVID-19 and its variants have demonstrated how vulnerable nations are to biological warfare.
"COVID was a wake-up call," said James Giordano, executive director of the Institute for Biodefense Research and a professor of neurology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He studies how bioscience technologies can be weaponized.
"What COVID really brought into the light is the lack of preparedness for a biological threat, whether it's naturally occurring or man-made, or some combination of both."
In the United States, the patchwork response to COVID-19 caused the pandemic to spin out of control in every single wave. More than 980,000 Americans have been killed by the virus — a death rate far higher than those experienced by other wealthy countries.
China, meanwhile — an economic rival of the U.S. with close ties to Russia — has followed a zero-tolerance strategy. Any small cluster of COVID cases prompts the government to swiftly impose strict lockdowns.
A community volunteer wearing personal protective equipment disinfects an area before conducting a test for the COVID-19 coronavirus during a lockdown in Pudong district, Shanghai on April 17, 2022. (Liu Jin/AFP/Getty Images)
While this approach is viewed by many as draconian, China argues it works. Out of 1.4 billion residents, China reports fewer than 14,000 deaths (there is widespread skepticism about the accuracy of that figure). Canada, with a population of 38 million, has lost more than 38,000 lives to COVID.
The U.S. and Canada also imposed lockdowns, but mistrust in government and science and rampant misinformation led small pockets of the population to loudly resist the measures. And jurisdictional division of powers meant each province and state decided on their own courses of action, with some opting for fewer restrictions than others.
People gather for a protest in Calgary against COVID-19 vaccinations and vaccine passports on Sept. 13, 2021. (Nancy Walters/CBC)
Then there's the political turmoil. COVID-19 policy became a political wedge issue, dividing the population and fuelling partisan rhetoric in the middle of a public health emergency.
"Our near-peer competitors and potential adversaries are watching," Giordano said.
"COVID demonstrated a mass disruptive effect. Over and above the destruction it had for human life with regard to mortality, the disruptive effect on infrastructure, economies, stabilities, even the political span with regard to social integrity, was overwhelming."
Protesters against restrictions implemented in response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak gather near Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker’s house in Swampscott, Massachusetts on May 16, 2020. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)
Mixed opinions on risk of biological attack
Giordano said he believes there is an "almost 100 per cent risk" of bioweapons "of some new or novel sort" being deployed somewhere in the world "within the next five years."
Dan Kaszeta is less pessimistic. He's a specialist in biological weapons who worked with the U.S. Army, the White House Military Office and the U.S. Secret Service.
Kaszeta describes the threat as "low but not negligible." He said there's no real incentive for a nation state to trigger a pandemic because there's a high risk of the virus spreading back to the country that released it — making COVID-19 and other fast-spreading pathogens unpredictable and unappealing bioweapons.
"Achieving a raging global pandemic that nobody can control — that's nihilism," Kaszeta said. "The whole arc of military technology is towards precision lethality, not indiscriminate lethality."
And conventional weapons like guns and bombs have become much cheaper for armies to acquire in recent decades, he added.
But Kaszeta and Giordano agree that the technology needed to weaponize pathogens no longer requires massive lab facilities and hundreds of scientists. It's available to anyone — including rogue actors.
New technology elevates the threat
The big concern is gene-editing technology. Giordano said it's "available literally over the counter" and can give any university-educated person the means to modify existing organisms or make new organisms that are highly infectious.
He points to CRISPR, gene-editing tech available online for less than $300. The American Security Project has warned that this technology "could be a danger to humanity."
Used in cancer research, CRISPR allows researchers to alter organisms at a genetic level by taking DNA from one and moving it to another.
Petri dishes with citrus seedlings are prepared for gene editing research at the University of Florida on Sept. 27, 2018. (Federica Narancio/The Associated Press)
David Gisselsson is a pathologist and geneticist with Lund University in Sweden who has worked with the Swedish government on pandemic preparedness. He said the alarming thing about this technology is that it can be used by virtually anyone, anywhere — and the results don't have to be sophisticated to serve as a terror weapon.
"If you have someone who wants to use this for maleficent purposes, then it's quite easy to do. And you don't even have to be a state actor. You can act on your own," says Gisselsson.
"My thought is that [the pathogen doesn't] really have to be a very good organism. It can be quite sloppy. As long as it causes fear, this new elevated wariness that we have about pandemics will trigger an enormous pandemic response and maybe an overreaction."
Gisselsson, who recently wrote a paper on the topic, said he fears that even the smallest bioweapon leak could create social chaos.
"I can only imagine what will happen next time if there's something which is new, seemingly dangerous but maybe not so dangerous, and this could trigger a very pronounced effect," he said.
COVID-19 put bioterrorism back on the world's radar
In April 2020, not long after the pandemic struck, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that bioterrorists could take inspiration from the pandemic's impact.
"Non-state groups could gain access to virulent strains that could pose similar devastation to societies around the globe," he said.
The Canadian Armed Forces runs a biological defence system. The government is in the process of procuring and building an improved one, but it won't be ready until 2030.
CBC News asked for an interview with Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino and Defence Minister Anita Anand. Both declined.
A statement issued by Mendicino's office acknowledges COVID-19 could "heighten the risks associated with bioterrorism, biological weapons proliferation and the deliberate use of disease as a weapon" and said the government is "working to address it on a variety of fronts."
The Justice Department released this image of an anthrax-laced letter, which was sent to then-Senate majority leader Tom Daschle in Washington on October 23, 2001. (REUTERS)
Real-world examples of bioterrorism are rare. Shortly after 9/11, letters containing samples of anthrax — a rare infectious disease — were mailed to politicians and members of the media, killing five people and infecting 17 others. Anthrax has a high fatality rate (as high as 80 per cent), but unlike COVID-19, it can't be spread from person to person.
In 1993, a Japanese cult called Aum Shinrikyo attempted to kill thousands by spraying anthrax from a rooftop in Kameido, but it had no apparent effect.
All eyes on Russia
Some have suggested Russia is preparing to use biological weapons in its war on Ukraine and may already have deployed chemical weapons. The U.S. and Britain are investigating a report that Russian troops dropped a poisonous substance on the besieged city of Mariupol, causing respiratory failure in victims.
Chemical weapons involve toxic chemicals that immediately suffocate or burn its victims. Biological weapons are viruses or bacteria that are slower-moving and, as a result, harder to detect and contain.
Nadiya Trubchaninova, 70, cries at the funeral for her son Vadym, 48, in the cemetery of Mykulychi outside Kyiv, Ukraine on April 16, 2022. Vadym was killed by Russian soldiers in Bucha. (Rodrigo Abd/The Associated Press)
The White House has warned that Russia may be creating a pretext for a biological weapons attack. In February, Moscow accused the U.S. of hiding bioweapon labs in Ukraine containing deadly pathogens like anthrax and the plague. China backed up that accusation soon after.
"Now that Russia has made these false claims, and China has seemingly endorsed this propaganda, we should all be on the lookout for Russia to possibly use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, or to create a false-flag operation using them. It's a clear pattern," tweeted Jen Psaki, White House press secretary.
The "clear pattern" Psaki cited is a reference to Russia making similar claims before chemical attacks were launched against civilians during the Syrian civil war.
Global bioweapons treaty lacks teeth
The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) is a global, legally-binding treaty between 130 countries that has been in force since 1975. It outlaws the development or use of biological weapons. But critics argue it has significant flaws.
Walter Dorn is an arms control expert and professor of defence studies at the Royal Military College of Canada. He was part of an expert group in the 1990s that pushed for more teeth in the BWC.
Dorn said the treaty needs a verification protocol along the lines of nuclear and chemical weapons treaties — a way to confirm that countries are complying. The BWC does not have the means or authority to investigate a threat. The UN Security Council does — but it never has.
"I think we need to both be prepared to prevent a spread and also to make the treaty more effective," said Dorn. "Even though biological weapons are low probability of actual use, there are programs now to develop them. And there are violators of the BWC that need to be held to account."
10. How Kyiv was saved by Ukrainian ingenuity as well as Russian blunders
Just a reminder. It is the human domain where victory takes place.
And luck is when opportunity meets preparation. The Ukraine military and resistance were prepared and the inept dysfunctional Russian military. provided the opportunity for Ukrainian success.
It is not the technology that brings success. It is the soldiers' and peoples' ability to exploit technology and use whatever tools are available in creative ways that brings success.
How Kyiv was saved by Ukrainian ingenuity as well as Russian blunders
Gym mats and mobile phone apps helped Ukraine’s forces win the battle for the capital
Stand on the railway embankment near Hostomel and look north-east and the story of Russia’s rout in the Battle of Kyiv comes together.
Three kilometres away you can see the village of Moschun, the site of a big battle and just south of it are the woods where Oleksandr Konoko, a battalion commander, described how, armed with anti-tank weapons, small groups of his men advanced to encircle the Russians.
It was at Moschun, and in the other suburban towns and villages north-west of Kyiv, that after a month the Russian ambition of capturing the Ukrainian capital sank into the area’s boggy wetlands.
The Russian attempt to take Kyiv was defeated by a combination of factors including geography, the attackers’ blundering, Ukrainian ingenuity and modern arms — as well as smartphones: used for the first time in military history as weapons powerful in their own way as rockets and artillery.
Moscow’s forces were thwarted, too, by pieces of foam mat — the Ukrainians call them karemats — costing as little as £1.50. The mats prevent Russian thermal imaging drones from detecting human heat. “We held the karemats over our head,” said Konoko, explaining how his men moved stealthily in tiny groups at night.
In that way soldiers armed with anti-tank weapons supplied by the US, Britain and others could sneak up on the Russians, fire their deadly and accurate missiles and then slip away.
Beyond the north-western outskirts of Kyiv before Hostomel, 30km from the city centre, lies a belt of forest. By the side of the road and at strategic junctions are massive trench and fortification systems which the Ukrainians began building immediately after the Russian invasion began early on February 24.
Here too, somewhere in the forest, are the missile systems that kept Russian planes out of Kyiv and shot down incoming missiles. The Russians were unable to destroy these air defence batteries at the beginning of the war, an important failure. But, prioritising the capital, Ukraine did not have air defences for other towns.
Other failures in those first days compounded Russia’s overall defeat on the outskirts of the capital, said Serhii Kuzan, chair of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre, a think-tank.
The Russians failed to knock out important parts of Ukraine’s military infrastructure, such as Kyiv’s air defence system, he said, meaning their campaign quickly ran into trouble. Commanders of different units continued to follow their original orders, even though events were not going to plan, thus compounding problems which arose as Ukraine’s military rose to the challenge.
Ukrainians examine a captured Russian tank in Irpin after regaining control of the town outside of Kyiv © Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Ukrainian forces have undergone profound reforms in recent years and unlike the vast majority of Russian army officers, thousands of their Ukrainian counterparts have battle experience from the eight-year war in the east. When they ran into problems, says Kuzan, Russian officers could only refer upwards in an old-fashioned, bureaucratic way while the Ukrainians were able to adjust to rapidly changing circumstances.
Konoko’s story exemplifies this. Sitting on his karemat in his HQ in Kyiv, his pistol on the coffee table and his Kalashnikov propped up by the sofa, he explained that he had been wounded several times fighting in the east after the war began in Donbas in 2014, where pro-Russian militants and Russian forces carved out two breakaway states.
He then retired to run a market garden. When the Russians attacked, he and his friends, all Donbas veterans, volunteered to join the new Territorial Defence Force. Its aim is to release soldiers to go to the front while leaving others to perform duties behind the lines.
They were assigned to guard checkpoints, said Konoko. But he had not put his potatoes aside for this.
“I have got a lot of experience,” he said indignantly. Very soon his newly formed unit, a combination of veterans and highly motivated younger men, left for Moschun, which had been occupied by the Russians. The unit was also transferred to the command of the regular army. Today the battalion consists of 725 men.
According to Kuzan, the recent military reforms and a new generation of battle-hardened commanders were central to the defence of Kyiv. Co-ordination between the army, Territorial Defence, the police and several other armed units of Ukraine’s security services worked well, in a way which they had failed to do in 2014. Then the army had been run down by Viktor Yanukovych, a Moscow loyalist who served as Ukraine’s president from 2010 until he was ousted in 2014. The security services were riddled with pro-Russians who have since been purged.
Look at the map and it is easy to understand the Russian plan for Kyiv. The mighty Dnieper River runs through the capital. North of the city it is kilometres wide and runs all the way up to the border with Belarus. The Russians came for Kyiv in a pincer movement advancing south. But on both banks they were quickly stymied.
On March 10 their advance on the left or east bank was stopped in the town of Skybyn when an armoured convoy was ambushed and forced to retreat. The Russians found themselves blocked on the right bank too. On February 24 they seized Hostomel airport using helicopters only to be driven out by the Ukrainians. The next day the Russians were back, but this time by road. They took the town of Hostomel, though fighting was intense, and then neighbouring Bucha. But then they failed to take Irpin, the next domino. Irpin falling would have brought them to the gates of Kyiv.
The remains of a church in the town of Hostomel after it was recaptured by Ukrainian forces © Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto/Reuters
At this point Ukrainian ingenuity and Russian blundering brought the campaign to a halt.
The house of Dmytro Lysovyy’s parents lies 200m from the railway embankment near Hostomel. The Samsung executive had come there at the beginning of the war thinking he would be safer than in Kyiv.
On the second day of the invasion elderly friends of his parents, who did not have a smartphone, called to tell them where they had seen a Russian convoy close to the airport. Lysovyy immediately opened “STOP Russian War”, a Telegram chatbot created by the security services, and input the location. He also put a pin in the Google Maps location, screenshotted it and sent that, plus everything else he knew.
“I think many others made the same report,” he said.
About 30 minutes later the convoy was attacked by the Ukrainian military. In the distance the sky glowed orange from the flames, Lysovyy recalled.
Officials have since made it easier for citizens to upload enemy locations through the Diia app, a government portal for digital documents such as driving licences and Covid passes used by millions of Ukrainians.
Mstyslav Banik, a director at the ministry of digital transformation which created Diia, said that in the first days of the defence of Kyiv, before the Russians destroyed mobile masts to prevent Ukrainians disclosing their positions, their reports played “really a great role”, in defending the city.
Everyone was trying to help, he said, and this “is the new reality of war”.
People trapped behind Russian lines using chatbots, he said, were playing a 21st century version of partisans behind Nazi lines during the second world war. To make sure that the Russians do not feed Ukrainian positions into the chatbot, says Banik, somewhere in Ukraine teams filter reports before they are passed to the military.
Dmytro Lysovyy stands by a crater at the location of a Ukrainian military strike on a Russian armoured convoy in Hostomel after he had reported its location via a chatbot © Tim Judah
Paranoid about what was happening, Russian troops went from house to house hunting for smartphones, according to Lysovyy and other witnesses in the newly liberated territories. They also destroyed laptops and any other device that could be used to communicate. A Kindle and a smashed phone still lie on the grass in front of his house.
Just as it was dangerous being a partisan behind the lines in the second world war, using a smartphone today can be equally deadly. In the village of Motyzhyn, 50km west of Kyiv, Hennadiy Merchynskyi was executed and dumped down a drainage shaft. Zoya Merchynskaya, his widow, reckoned he was murdered after the Russians found pictures of their tanks on his phone.
To cut off Ukrainians in the occupied territories Russian troops set about destroying 4G mobile transmission units. But that meant they could not use their own encrypted system. They also need 4G. This in turn made it harder for units following the original plan to communicate.
On the Dnieper 30km north-east of Hostomel lies the Kozarovychi dam, which controls the inflow of the smaller Irpin river. Soon after the war began the Russians attacked and damaged this dam. “It was a crucial mistake,” said Konoko — because the whole flood plain of the Irpin became inundated.
Blocked by Ukrainian resistance further south at Irpin, the Russians found it impossible to cut across eastward in significant numbers at Moschun and then turn south to attack and enter the capital. By blowing up the dam the land that lay between Hostomel and Moschun had returned to the impenetrable wetland it had been before it was built.
In normal times you can reach Kyiv through Horenka, another small town south of Moschun, but the damage here and the shattered warehouses and the massive crater at the Kuehne+Nagel warehouse testify to the ferocity of the failed Russian attack. As at Irpin the Russians were simply unable to break Ukrainian resistance.
The Russians had taken Moschun at the beginning of the war. But with their path to Kyiv blocked at Horenka, where the Ukrainians had also partially blown the bridge, now only a couple of small, single-track roads across the railway remained to reach the capital. These were vulnerable to attack.
So, said Konoko, the Russians tried to get across using pontoons but as the water rose it became impossible to get significant numbers of vehicles and men across fast enough. Konoko’s men attacked with anti-tank weapons or called in artillery strikes. They took back Moschun on March 26.
The Russians had, in effect, come down a funnel and been blocked, creating the widely reported traffic jam of military vehicles stretching along 65km of road to the north. Unable to move forward, bombarded by the Ukrainians, harried by their small mobile units and fast losing men and equipment, the Russians decided to cut their losses on March 31 and run.
Kyiv had been defended and so the first chapter in Russia’s latest onslaught on Ukraine ended. Now the war has moved to the east. But it is telling that the Ukrainians are not yet talking of victory in Kyiv.
On Friday, Brigadier General Oleksandr Hruzevych, the army’s deputy chief of staff, said that if the Russians succeeded in taking Donbas they might attack the capital once again. “Yes, now there is a certain lull in Kyiv Oblast [district] but not for the military,” he said.
11. NATO Membership for Sweden Would Be ‘A Small Step For The Military, But A Giant Leap For The Political System’
Can Russia handle the second and third order effects and blowback its actions are creating?
NATO Membership for Sweden Would Be ‘A Small Step For The Military, But A Giant Leap For The Political System’
It would be just a “technical step” for the militaries to formally join, a Swedish military official said.
BY JACQUELINE FELDSCHER
SENIOR NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT
APRIL 22, 2022
NATO
EUROPE
RUSSIA
Looking nervously to the East, Sweden and Finland are considering giving up their long histories of military independence by joining NATO, a potentially seismic shift driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
A decision to apply for membership would kick off a protracted political process and reshape European geopolitics, but Swedish military officials have no qualms about integrating with allies with whom they already train and fight closely.
Sweden has regularly worked with NATO for more than two decades, including conducting joint exercises and operating on the battlefield together in Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Lt. Gen. Michael Claesson, the Swedish chief of joint operations, told Defense One at the Swedish Embassy in Washington this week. The military already knows that its technology and values are interoperable with the alliance.
“The standards and the procedures and the colleagues and friendship are there already. In that regard, it’s a rather technical step to become a full member for the military,” said Claesson, going on to paraphrase Neil Armstrong: “A small step for the military, but a giant leap for the political system.”
For decades, Sweden and Finland have pursued a policy of neutrality and declined to join NATO. Even last month, after Putin sent forces into Ukraine, Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said that joining the alliance would “further destabilize this area of Europe.” But as Putin’s unprovoked and brutal attack continued, both Finland, which shares a 830-mile border with Russia, and Sweden, which faces it across the Baltic Sea, have warmed to the idea. Both countries' parliaments are currently debating the issue. Last week, Andersson said that “the security landscape has completely changed,” while Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said her country will make a decision on applying in “weeks.”
Russia’s invasion has influenced the publics in both Nordic nations as well. A poll released Thursday found that 51 percent of Swedes supported joining NATO, a six-point increase from a similar poll just a week before. That number jumps to 64 percent if Finland also joins the alliance, and experts all predict the two countries will act together.
“They have not made a decision yet, so the train has not left the station already, but indeed all signals are on green currently,” said Pierre Morcos, a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Opinion polls have dramatically shifted in terms of joining the alliance, political parties are reconsidering their historical reluctance to join NATO” and “both countries have prepared the necessary steps to join the alliance.”
The process of joining the alliance is typically long and arduous, beginning with conversations about the country’s goals and changes it would need to make to be aligned with NATO. Potential applicants can then join the Membership Action Plan program to help meet the criteria to join, including having a democratic political system and treating minority populations fairly. All NATO members must unanimously agree to admit the applicant, and each member’s governing body must approve the application.
The process of approving Finland and Sweden, however, would likely move much faster. Previous applicants, many of whom were former Soviet states, have needed years to learn Western military doctrine and begin using Western military equipment, said Christopher Skaluba, the director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. But Finland and Sweden already train and operate with NATO, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said both countries could “easily” join if they decide to apply.
“Finland and Sweden are completely different. They’re advanced democracies….They’re Western militaries in every sense of the word,” Skaluba said. “The way we’ve done NATO enlargement for the last 25 years, it just doesn’t apply to Finland and Sweden in the same way.”
Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., who co-chairs the Friends of Sweden Caucus, said he expects Congress would quickly approve Finland and Sweden’s membership, especially because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine negates any concerns that accepting members on Russia’s border would anger Moscow.
“I think that ship has sailed. I don’t think we’re worried about whether we’re going to upset Russia by having NATO members so close,” Beyer told Defense One. “When their reaction to the sphere of influence is to invade, they’ve given up any right to demand that we not include NATO countries on their borders.”
Some critics argue that defending Finland’s long border with Russia would be a “burden” to NATO, but Skaluba pointed out that Finnish forces have been successfully defending that border for decades. Claesson stressed that Sweden and Finland would both be “immediate net contributors” to NATO, and Beyer said their presence in the alliance would mean more troops in the neighborhood to protect vulnerable countries on the eastern front with smaller militaries.
“The more members of NATO, the stronger NATO is,” Beyer said. “If we’re thinking about Article 5 guarantees, that would mean more close well-armed, well-governed nations to help a Poland or an Estonia in case there ever were a Russian incursion.”
Ensuring a quick accession to NATO for Sweden and Finland would give Russia, which has threatened to deploy nuclear weapons in the Baltic Sea region if the countries join the alliance, a smaller window to attack the countries in retaliation for applying before they had the Article 5 security guarantee provided by the alliance. Officials also are likely working behind the scenes to figure out how to offer both countries some level of protection if Russia did attack while their applications are being considered.
“If we have a two-year-long process, that opens up a large window for chaos, which you want to avoid,” Skaluba said. “The U.S. or U.K. could say if you apply for membership, we’ll look favorably on it and come to your support in the event that Russia should cause some kind of disruption.”
That could, however, prove politically difficult, given that Ukraine applied for membership in 2008 and has received no protection from NATO during the Russian invasion, though allies have sent a huge influx of weapons to help Ukrainian fighters.
Beyer predicted the United States would help protect Sweden and Finland if Moscow attacked while their application to NATO was still being considered.
“My inclination would be strongly to honor the Article 5 guarantee as if it were already in place,” Beyer said. But he also questioned whether Russia would be able to mount an attack against Finland and Sweden given how much combat power it has lost during the war in Ukraine.
“Russia is running a two-front invasion against countries who do not want them and deeply value their own independence and freedom, that doesn’t seem that likely,” he said.
Even if a conventional invasion is unlikely, Russia could still target Finland and Sweden with cyber or disinformation warfare, both areas where the European Union has “a strong toolbox,” Morcos said. Though NATO’s Article 5 would not automatically apply, Finland and Sweden are both members of the European Union and would have protection under Article 42.7, which means an attack on one member is perceived as an attack on all.
“If they were attacked by Russia, they could trigger that clause and ask for assistance from all EU member states,” Morcos said. “I expect they would step up and make sure they are fully supported in such a situation.”
12. State National Guards to send armored vehicles to Ukraine
I'll take the venerable M113. I lived through the M113 through the M2 Bradley transition in the early 1980s. One of the big differences was that drivers and battalion mechanics could maintain the M113s to a high level of operational readiness. But the Bradleys required contract maintenance because of the complexity. I just hope Virginia and Ohio are sending sufficient spare parts with the vehicles to sustain them. Of course the difference is the M113 is an Armored Personnel CARRIER while the Bradley is an Infantry FIGHTING vehicle. Sure, it would be great to have Bradleys but I think the Ukrainians will make excellent use of the M1113s for battlefield mobility to transport infantrymen who will fight dismounted.
State National Guards to send armored vehicles to Ukraine
Multiple governors announced this week that their state National Guards would be sending armored vehicles to Ukraine in response to a request from the Pentagon.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) and West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) announced this week that their state National Guards would be providing an unspecified number of M-113 armored personnel carriers (APC), which help move equipment and soldiers “while providing protection from small arms fire and the effects of artillery,” according to press releases from both governors’ offices.
The M-113 APCs are a part of a Pentagon inventory drawdown for Ukraine support.
“As we continue to learn about Russian war crimes in Ukraine, those of us in Ohio stand ready to help the Ukrainian people in any way possible,” DeWine said in a statement on Wednesday. “Ohio has a strong Ukrainian community, and we stand behind them and their families overseas.”
“By joining with other states in sending numerous of these armored vehicles to Ukraine, we hope and pray that this will give Ukrainian forces a major leg up in their defense of their home country,” Justice said in his own statement on Friday.
The development comes just days after President Biden announced that the U.S. will send Ukraine another $800 million in military support, which includes 72 155mm howitzers and more than 121 “Ghost” drones, according to a fact sheet from the Pentagon.
A separate round of $800 million in aid to Ukraine that was authorized by Biden earlier this month included 200 M113 APCs, 300 Switchblade drones and other equipment.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Saturday that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin will be traveling to Ukraine on Sunday.
13. Lloyd Austin presses hard on Ukraine — but quietly
I think a SECDEF should be in a Teddy Roosevelt image - talk softly and carry a big stick. Let the diplomats lead the public discourse and quietly back it with actions that demonstrate strategic reassurance and strategic resolve. But of course a SECDEF is limited by what the political leadership will allow.
I am going to borrow this new law: the "law of bureaucratic physics."
“It’s easy for folks who are not in the system to say ‘Why aren’t you doing more? Why aren’t you going faster?’” Kahl said. “But I don’t know anybody who resides in the system who is making that argument. … We are literally defying the law of bureaucratic physics by how fast we are going.”
Lloyd Austin presses hard on Ukraine — but quietly
The U.S. defense secretary has taken on a major, behind-the-scenes role in countering the Russian invasion, officials say
Six days before the invasion of Ukraine, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin took a final crack at getting his Russian counterpart to admit that the Kremlin was about to launch a massive assault after assembling more than 100,000 troops at the border with its neighbor.
“I know what you’re doing,” Austin told Sergei Shoigu in an icy, deep baritone.
It was Feb. 18, and Shoigu, the Russian defense minister, had been trying to convince Austin, who was visiting Poland at the time, that the buildup of Russian forces to the north and east of Ukraine was only for routine military exercises. Austin didn’t buy it. He had seen the intelligence, and while he had yet to convince every NATO member of the inevitability of a full-scale Russian invasion, the Pentagon chief was certain of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions.
The tense, last phone call between the two top defense officials — described by people familiar with how it unfolded — was among numerous actions that Austin took in the run-up to the Ukraine war, both to warn Russia and to prepare NATO for what was to come, officials said.
Austin’s blunt, forceful manner with Shoigu, and his near daily engagement with allied defense officials, stands in sharp contrast to his public image in Washington as a taciturn, sometimes silent partner on President Biden’s national security team who serves in the shadow of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and CIA Director William J. Burns.
Austin appears content with a backstage role.
“He wants to succeed in this job,” said retired Adm. Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who stays in touch with the Pentagon chief. “But he’s not really concerned about focusing on his legacy. It will be whatever his legacy will be, so he’s not going to burnish that up front, or try to.”
This portrait of the defense secretary is based on interviews with 15 current and former government officials, some of whom have known Austin for years. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive issues. Austin, through a spokesman, declined to be interviewed.
Austin has faced criticism that he didn’t argue forcefully enough to get large quantities of arms to Kyiv until Russia was already crossing the border — and that his guarded approach to public advocacy could have been a factor in Washington’s reluctance to flood Ukraine with arms before the invasion.
The response to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has been “necessary but not sufficient,” said Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), an Army veteran on the House Armed Services Committee, in an interview. “What we’re doing is certainly better than nothing — but it’s often been too little, too late.”
The Ukrainians, Waltz said, would have been better off if the United States had sent more weaponry before Russia’s invasion, rather than rapidly expanding deliveries afterward.
“Where Austin stood in that,” Waltz added, “I don’t know.”
The surprising choice
Austin seemed an unlikely pick for the top civilian position at the Pentagon — and not only because he was a retired four-star general assuming a role that many in Congress didn’t want to go to someone who had just been in uniform.
Retired generals were supposed to spend seven years as a civilian before they could be considered for defense secretary. Lawmakers had legislated an exception for retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, President Donald Trump’s choice, and prominent Democrats didn’t want to repeat the exercise. Austin, the former head of U.S. Central Command who oversaw military operations in the Middle East, had another apparent deficit: a discomfort with the public-facing parts of the job, including appearing before Congress and dealing with the news media.
Austin, however, had personal and professional connections with President Biden. The general — a devout Catholic — had attended mass with Biden’s son, Beau, when the two were stationed in Iraq. Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wanted to pivot the country to a diplomacy-first model and did not want a swashbuckling secretary at the Pentagon. Austin, 68, could be trusted to provide counsel without upstaging his boss, officials said.
In the E-Ring of the Pentagon, Austin’s office projects a sense of humility and history. Few personal photographs or effects are present, despite a 40-year military career that included a Silver Star for valor earned during the 2003 U.S. assault on Baghdad. There are, however, framed homages to military pioneers, including Henry Flipper, a personal hero of Austin’s. Another Black son of southern Georgia, Flipper became the first formerly enslaved person to graduate from the defense secretary’s alma mater, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., just a dozen years after the Civil War’s conclusion.
“I’m honored to be the first African American secretary of defense, the 28th secretary of defense ― but I really don’t want to be the last African American secretary of defense,” Austin said at a Black History Month event in February.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said that while Austin “wasn’t someone who just walked in off the street,” he faced the same “dramatic” learning curve that all new Pentagon chiefs do.
“It’s one thing to have been in the military for more than 30 years; it’s something else to be the secretary of defense,” Reed said. “You have to answer more directly to the president, you have to answer to the Congress, you are constitutionally the civilian in charge.”
The biggest misconception about Austin is that because he is not “flashy or bombastic in public,” he is not a dynamic player in the administration, said Sullivan, the national security adviser. Austin offers Biden his unvarnished advice, Sullivan said, and does not muzzle his disagreements during weekly meetings with Sullivan and Blinken, a longtime Biden confidant, to hash out issues.
“It’s not just like everyone is agreeing with one another,” Sullivan said — though he declined to cite any specific examples of Austin swaying administration policy. “It’s an active process of going back and forth and coming up with a solution that we can all buy into.”
Two crises
Within weeks of taking office, Biden set out to follow through on a campaign promise: Ending the U.S. war in Afghanistan after 20 years. The administration deliberated on the issue for months, with senior Pentagon officials — including Austin — advising Biden that it would be wise to leave behind a force of a few thousand troops.
With Biden adamant on the issue, Austin held his tongue in public, frustrating U.S. military officials who wanted him to speak up more on behalf of the position of military leaders. Biden announced last April that he would pull all U.S. troops within a matter of months, promising an “orderly withdrawal” even as an ascendant Taliban battered Afghan forces.
The subsequent crisis consumed virtually every waking hour for Austin and his team. Armed Taliban fighters seized Kabul on Aug. 15, prompting the United States and allies to launch a chaotic and deadly evacuation from a single runway, as thousands of desperate Afghan civilians attempted to make their way past Taliban checkpoints into the airport.
Some veterans of the war called for Austin and Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to resign. U.S. commanders later vented to military investigators that it appeared to them that Washington did not have a grasp of what was happening in Kabul.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), a Marine Corps veteran who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said that it was apparent to him that both Austin and Milley were “trying to do the right thing” during the Afghan withdrawal, like starting the evacuation of Afghans who supported the war effort earlier in the face of broader administration resistance.
“But at the end of the day, he is the secretary of defense — and it’s his responsibility to ensure an operation’s success,” Moulton said.
Republicans are harsher in their critiques.
“This was a moment worth pushing back as hard as possible, to the point of doing what Secretary Mattis did during the Syria context and offering to resign if the plan was executed,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), a Marine Corps veteran who sits on the same panel. “If he was pushing back, clearly he was not successful in convincing the president.”
Officials said that the crisis in Afghanistan prompted Austin and his team to adopt a crisis-management mind-set during the summer of 2021, typically meeting both morning and evening on the third floor of the Pentagon to manage the exit. Weeks later, Austin brought the meetings back as the possibility of a Russian invasion emerged.
It immediately helped improve coordination, said Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy.
“Those 17 or 18 days in August were among the most intense that I think any U.S. policymakers focused on national security have engaged in in a long time,” Kahl said. “But it generated various habits, procedures, rhythms, that have actually carried over into the Ukraine crisis in a way that, had we had to invent those processes out of whole cloth at the beginning of Ukraine, I think would have been slower.”
In addition to his regular meetings, Austin began spending early weekend mornings in the basement of the Pentagon, typically joined by his senior military assistant, Army Lt. Gen. Randy George, as he quizzed intelligence analysts about the situation in Ukraine. In October, Austin punctuated that work by making the first trip by a Biden administration Cabinet official to Ukraine, where he met with President Volodymyr Zelensky and declared that U.S. support for Ukrainian sovereignty was “unwavering.”
The trip also included stops in Georgia and Romania, and a visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels. Putin took notice, responding with a warning that Ukraine’s military development — a key component of its bid to join NATO — “really poses a threat to Russia.”
He set to work, “providing the facts, the numbers, the intelligence indicating so plainly that Russia was preparing a full-scale invasion of an independent sovereign nation in Europe,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview.
Stoltenberg said that Austin’s “wealth of experience” and his knowledge of what was needed “makes others listen to him when he speaks.” Another NATO official said that he speaks with gravitas punctuated with a “James Earl Jones” voice.
“He doesn’t lecture the allies,” the NATO official said, “but he knows how to put his thumb on the scale to get results.”
A deal emerges
A month ago, Austin found himself in Slovakia trying to broker deal to get the Ukrainians a familiar Soviet arms system — the S-300 surface-to-air missile. The Slovaks wanted a similar system in return, or assurances that the protection of one would be provided.
The Pentagon had anticipated that Slovakia would want to keep their pending agreement quiet, said Celeste Wallander, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. But Jaroslav Nad, the Slovak defense minister, surprised them by disclosing the possible deal at a news conference on March 17 while standing alongside Austin. Slovakia, Nad said, was ready to turn over its S-300 “immediately” as long as its terms could be met.
Austin pressed U.S. military officials in Europe for days afterward to explain why site surveys required to send the U.S. Patriot missile system to Slovakia had not been completed, defense officials said.
“Why don’t we have an answer?” he asked during a video conference April 1. When military officials said that it would take another two or three days to complete, Austin was not satisfied.
“We need to have it tomorrow,” he said flatly.
The following Monday, the United States informed Slovakia that it would be getting a fully-manned Patriot battery deployed as soon as it wanted it. The Slovaks announced the S-300 was on its way into Ukraine, and Austin monitored its delivery, defense officials said.
“He’s not a leader who leads by fear; he’s a leader who leads by inspiration and motivation and just the quiet confidence he has in his team,” Wallander said. “He really brings the team along, and I’ve seen him be effective in that instance of Slovakia and other places.”
Sullivan said the Pentagon chief has pushed other ministers of defense “outside their comfort zones” to seal weapons transfers that have had “enormous” impact in Ukraine. Austin keeps a color-code chart tracking weapons shipments into the war zone, and keeps the president up to date with it, Sullivan added.
Gallagher, the House Republican, is unimpressed. While it’s a “welcome development” that NATO allies now appear eager to spend more on their own defense and provide weapons to Ukraine, it took “a country being invaded and pillaged in order to galvanize the West into action” under Austin’s defense strategy, Gallagher said.
Kahl, a senior adviser to Austin, rejects the criticism. For months, he said, it has been “all hands on deck, 24/7,” at the Pentagon on Ukraine.
“It’s easy for folks who are not in the system to say ‘Why aren’t you doing more? Why aren’t you going faster?’” Kahl said. “But I don’t know anybody who resides in the system who is making that argument. … We are literally defying the law of bureaucratic physics by how fast we are going.”
14. NATO's SFA Operator Profile | SOF News
NATO's SFA Operator Profile | SOF News
A new publication, SFA Operator Profile, by NATO offers a information about advisors, mentors, and trainers in the security force assistance environment. The report is published by the NATO Security Force Assistance Centre of Excellence (NATO SFA COE) located in Italy.
The document identifies lessons learned and best practices to enhance NATO HQs and NATO nations’ abilities to select, recruit, train, and deploy personnel in security force assistance operations. The project focuses on the job descriptions as well as the human and professional requirements necessary in a strategic, operational, and tactical environment. The publication aims to be a tool in understanding the complexity of the SFA field and the pivotal role of the human dimension in the SFA environment.
The recommendations in the report will assist in elaborating the profile and job description of the SFA operator. The report examines three broad topics:
- Address the differences and peculiarities of the SFA functions of advising, mentoring, and training
- Outline considerations concerning SFA training
- Focus on the analysis of behavioral aspects and core competencies of the SFA population
There are two main chapters in the report – “Research Outcomes Analysis” and “Psychological Profile”. The SFA Operator Profile has a conclusion and recommendation for each chapter. The end of the report includes a list of acronyms and biographies of the authors. This is a good read for those who are training officers and NCOs to become advisors, mentors, or trainers as well as military personnel who are or will be serving in those roles.
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The NATO SFA COE is a multinational entity accredited by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a “Centre of Excellence”. It is sponsored by the countries of Italy, Albania, and Slovenia. The Centre is recognized as a hub of reference in the Security Force Assistance field by NATO and other countries around the world.
SFA Operator Profile, NATO SFA COE, April 2022, PDF, 62 pages.
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Reference: Watch a two-minute long video that describes the intent of the report cited above. “SFA Operator Profile Analysis Report”, NATO SFA COE, April 12, 2022, YouTube.
15. Aid groups helping Ukraine face both cyber and physical threats
Whole of society.
Aid groups helping Ukraine face both cyber and physical threats
Updated 12:00 AM ET, Sat April 23, 2022
CNN · by Sean Lyngaas, CNN
(CNN)Employees at Insecurity Insight, a Switzerland-based nonprofit, received a string of malicious links and pornographic material on their cell phones after publishing a report last month on Russian attacks on hospitals in Ukraine.
The phishing messages were "on a scale we had never experienced" and came as staff members spent late nights documenting the war's destruction, Christina Wille, the director of Insecurity Insight, told CNN. She suspects it was an (unsuccessful) attempt to deter her team from reporting on Russia's war in Ukraine.
It's just one example of a range of digital threats facing humanitarian-focused organizations as Russian President Vladimir Putin shows no sign of ending his brutal war on Ukraine.
In several other cases, malicious software has been used to target charities and aid organizations working on Ukraine "in order to spread confusion and cause disruption" to the provision of medical supplies, food or clothing, according to Amazon Web Services, Amazon's cloud-computing division.
Humanitarian groups responding to the war remain focused on the physical safety of civilians and their employees. But overwhelmed aid organizations have also had to consider how closely linked the physical security of Ukrainians is to the cybersecurity of their data.
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Cybersecurity experts are concerned that scammers or spies could use data exposed during Russia's war to re-victimize people well into the future, by extorting or surveilling them. And many organizations lack the resources to recover from a big breach.
"There is your immediate safety, security life, and then there is actually, 'How can cyberattacks repeat this harm over time with the data?'" said Klara Jordan, chief public policy officer at CyberPeace Institute, an organization that works to protect humanitarian groups from hackers.
'Who protects the aid organizations?'
It is unclear how many humanitarian-related organizations responding to the Ukraine war have experienced cyberattacks. There are only anecdotal reports of incidents, documenting them is complicated by the chaos of war, and aid workers are understandably reluctant to discuss specific cases.
One Ukrainian cybersecurity specialist, Vadym Hudyma, said several civil society groups in Ukraine managed to avoid major disruptions by preemptively scaling back their online footprint on the eve of Russia's invasion.
"Those organizations withstood these cyberattacks pretty well against websites," said Hudyma, co-founder of Digital Security Lab Ukraine, an organization that helps secure the online accounts of journalists and activists.
But for aid organizations in Ukraine and abroad, there aren't enough people like Hudyma.
"The most vulnerable are protected by aid organizations, but who protects the aid organizations?" said Adrien Ogée, CyberPeace Institute's chief operating officer. "A lot of these NGOs [non-government organizations] don't even monitor their networks ... They don't even know when they get attacked."
Some NGOs are "worried that Russians may get their hands on on-prem [computer] servers," Ogée said, referring to data physically stored in Ukraine that could contain information on political activists, refugees or donors.
Ogée and his colleagues are trying to cut into the cybersecurity resource gap through a program that connects NGOs around the world, including those working on Ukraine, with experts to mitigate the impact of potential hacking incidents. The CyberPeace Institute was able to help Wille, the Insecurity Insight director, assess the hacking attempts aimed at her organization, she said.
Help with the basics of cybersecurity— strong passwords, backed-up data and another layer of authentication for logins — can greatly reduce the likelihood that an organization gets hacked.
The alternative, Ogéee said, is unacceptable. NGOs working in Ukraine and other war zones that fail to secure the data they handle are "potentially creating conditions for further attacks," he argued.
There is also the risk of an already rampant disinformation environment around aid work in Ukraine being amplified by hacking.
In late February, hackers attempted to breach the email accounts of European government officials "involved in managing the logistics of refugees fleeing Ukraine," according to cybersecurity firm Proofpoint, which discovered the incident.
Proofpoint investigators suspect that Belarusian state hackers may be behind the activity. One theory is that the attackers could try to use intelligence collected on refugees in NATO countries "that could be used to marshal anti-refugee sentiment" in Europe, said Ryan Kalember, Proofpoint's executive vice president of cybersecurity strategy.
Cyber activity and the Geneva Conventions
There is a meticulous project, involving thousands of investigators across Ukraine, to collect information on potential war crimes. There is no equivalent effort to catalog potential violations of international law in cyberspace during the war in Ukraine.
One reason is that any alleged crimes in cyberspace of course pale in comparison to the impact of mass killings.
But legal scholars and advocates are still paying close attention.
Cyberattacks on emergency response and humanitarian organizations in Ukraine "raise serious concerns under the Geneva Convention," Microsoft President Brad Smith argued on February 28, four days into Russia's latest war in Ukraine.
Tilman Rodenhäuser, a legal adviser at the International Committee for the Red Cross, went a step further.
Cyber espionage — which involves lurking on computer systems and collecting intelligence, rather than disrupting systems — against humanitarian organizations responding to a war could also break international law, Rodenhäuser told CNN.
The Red Cross, he said, is mandated to visit prisoners of war and to interview them about how they're being treated.
"This confidentiality is protected in the Geneva Conventions," Rodenhäuser added. "So, conducting espionage against such data would be very hard to reconcile" with that legal obligation.
The Red Cross itself was breached by unidentified hackers in November, an act the aid organization discovered in January. The personal information of half a million of the world's most vulnerable people was exposed to the attacker, and the incident temporarily disrupted a global Red Cross program for reuniting refugees with their families.
The cyberattack "has not had a substantive impact" on the Red Cross program's work in Ukraine, Red Cross spokesperson Jason Straziuso told CNN. But it "could have impacted our ability to reconnect separated families ... around the Ukraine crisis" had the Red Cross not made "immediate repairs" to its computer systems, he said in an email.
There is no evidence that the hack was connected to the subsequent war in Ukraine. But it typifies the brazenness of computer intrusions targeting aid groups.
"Humanitarian organizations must be respected and protected online as they are offline," Rodenhäuser said.
CNN · by Sean Lyngaas, CNN
16. The Embarrassing Truth Behind Putin’s War Failures
Putin is a failure. That should be a theme and message.
Our weakness may be in failing to sufficiently anticipate. But at least we learn and adapt. Russia does not seem to learn and does not adapt.
The Embarrassing Truth Behind Putin’s War Failures
RED-FACED
Russia had the chance to hone its war-fighting strategy in Syria but Putin’s forces failed to heed the lessons and now they are paying the price.
Updated Apr. 24, 2022 2:34AM ET / Published Apr. 22, 2022 11:52PM ET
The Daily Beast · by David VolodzkoPublished Apr. 22, 2022 11:52PM ET · April 23, 2022
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty
The ongoing war in Syria was supposed to be a crucible for the modern Russian war machine, reforming its operational capabilities in preparation for future conflicts. Now that Russia is facing a test of those skills in Ukraine, it is turning into a disaster that they should have seen coming.
Moscow officially lost only 112 servicemen in six and a half years in Syria, compared to what it admits are 1,351 in a single month in Ukraine—the true numbers are likely to be far higher. And they have been forced to humiliatingly pull out around 40,000 troops from around Kyiv and Chernihiv having failed to make any significant progress in those regions and falling back to their old targets in eastern Ukraine. This raises the question of exactly what the Kremlin learned in Syria and, more importantly, what it should have learned but obviously has not.
Unlike Ukraine, Syria’s cities would never be part of the Russian federation and could therefore be flattened. Meanwhile, its non-white population was framed as foreign terrorists. Jabhat al-Nusra fighters, ISIS, and hundreds of children were portrayed to the voters back home as equally fair targets. By contrast, Ukrainians are largely seen by the Russian public as Russians themselves or, at the very least, close cousins. These factors freed Russia up to use Syria as merely a means to an end, or more specifically, two ends.
First, it used Syria as a proving ground to enhance command-and-control coordination. Like its Soviet predecessor, Russia's military is an artillery force with armored battalions and the ground-based nature of its power is not as fast nor flexible as air or naval forces, making such coordination critical. Not to mention, if such command coordination is achieved, then as the Institute for the Study of War’s lead Russia analyst, Mason Clark, wrote in a 2021 report, it “will erode one of the United States and NATO’s key technological advantages.”
Second, Moscow declared a withdrawal from Syria in March 2016, then again in January 2017, and again in December of that year. This wasn’t just a feint to get its enemies to lower their guard, it also helped prevent Russia from being pulled too deeply into the war, thus minimizing losses. But just as importantly, it broke the war into a series of campaigns, allowing Moscow to rotate its forces through Syria, giving them ample combat experience. As Michael Kofman, director of the Russia studies program at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), wrote in a 2020 report, “The entire Russian military must now serve [in Syria] in order to progress in rank.”
According William Alberque, the director of strategy, technology and arms control at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), some of the lessons that were not learned well enough include use of drones for artillery spotting, the danger of MANPADS on the contested battlefield, and the need for secure supply lines. Each of these factors have proven devastating for Russian forces in Ukraine.
But the biggest lessons, he said, have been how to detect, disrupt, and destroy small groups of fighters, the importance of the destruction not just of suppression of enemy air defenses, the use of secure comms, the value of precision-guided missiles , and the benefit of drawing the enemy out rather than engaging in urban warfare.
Albuquerque added that Russia learned a few more things in Syria. Namely, “how to destroy cities, terror tactics to make civilians flee, and the use of proxies as holding forces/cannon fodder.”
So what went wrong? For one thing, Russia is one of the most corrupt nations in the world, and by far the most corrupt major power. Ruling a mafia state has its advantages if you’re the Godfather, but it’s hard to know who to trust. Moscow recently purged 150 Federal Security Service (FSB) agents and sent Sergei Beseda, the head of the FSB’s 5th Service, which handles intelligence in Ukraine, to Lefortovo Prison, which was used under Stalin to conduct torture-based interrogations and mass executions. One theory says Beseda gave information to the CIA, but the official reason, which may very well be true, is that he lied to the state and stole funds meant for espionage activities in Ukraine. If true, this means Putin’s own spy chiefs not only let him bring a knife to a gun fight—they sold off the combat blade and bought a cheap butter spreader.
Another thing that led Putin astray was his own over-confidence. Since taking office in 2000, he has been involved in six wars—Chechnya, Georgia, the North Caucasus, Syria, the Central African Republic (CAR), and Ukraine.All but the last have been victorious. Syria and the CAR are ongoing, but the preservation of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and Faustin-Archange Touadera’s administration represent strategic wins. Putin thought he couldn’t lose.
Corruption and over-confidence prepared a path, but the biggest problem was Putin’s lack of experience ina war of this scale. Syria was a limited deployment in a far-off desert nation with minimal ground forces, Georgia only lasted 12 days, and Russia supported Touadera in the CAR from a distance with weapons, military instructors and Wagner mercenaries. Besides, even if Ukraine was the same game as Syria, and Russia could simply copy/paste its lessons, it still wouldn’t help since Moscow has apparently forgotten those lessons.
Russia did apply its Syria lessons in Ukraine—but it did so in 2014, when it used Crimea to train a rapid-reaction professional force. Now, however, Moscow is running four combined arms headquarters independently with only partial management at the defense center in Moscow. Why? Partly because it’s not just propaganda when Putin talks about a “special military operation.” He truly believed the rest of Ukraine, like Crimea, would offer little resistance and that the war would only last a matter of days.
In Syria, says military historian Peter Caddick-Adams, “they were not up against a peer adversary—in fact they have never been: Afghan, Chechnya, Georgia, Syria—unlike in Ukraine. Syria was predominantly an air war, with little threat, so Russian pilots treated it more as range practice, dumping munitions on preselected targets” he told The Daily Beast.
“Thus, what Russia did not learn from Syria was how to coordinate an all arms battle (artillery, armor, anti-tank, air defense, infantry, engineers, etc) at high tempo in complex terrain with aircraft of different types, helicopters, airborne and marine troops, with a well-balanced logistics and supply system—which is what they have needed for Ukraine.”
He added, “Russian communications are very low brow, and they are using unencrypted mobile phones in Ukraine, a bad habit picked up in Syria, where few opponents could understand Russian or had the technical competence to intercept.”
Simply put, Russia’s PhD in desert warfare is making for a poor career in Ukraine. Indeed, few things have revolutionized the modern Russian military like the war in Syria, but nothing will affect it quite like Ukraine. One might even call this Russia's Vietnam moment. But one thing’s for certain, Russia looked at Ukraine and mistook a tiger for a cat. Now even if it decides to cut its losses and completely withdraw, it may not be so easy. As the old Chinese saying goes, when you’re riding a tiger, the hard part is getting off.
The Daily Beast · by David VolodzkoPublished Apr. 22, 2022 11:52PM ET · April 23, 2022
17. Russia shifts forces for battle over Ukrainian heartland
Russia shifts forces for battle over Ukrainian heartland
AP · by DAVID KEYTON and YESICA FISCH · April 23, 2022
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia and Ukraine hurtled toward what could be an epic battle for control of the country’s industrial heartland as Ukrainian officials reported that Moscow had shifted a dozen crack military units from the shattered port of Mariupol to eastern Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russia reported Friday that one serviceman was killed and 27 others were left missing after the fire on board the warship Moskva, which sank a week ago following what the Ukrainians boasted was a missile attack. The Russian military previously reported everyone aboard had been rescued.
Also Friday, new satellite images showed a second possible mass grave site in a town near Mariupol, where Ukrainian defenders are holed up in a steel plant.
The Russian Defense Ministry did not acknowledge an attack on the warship. It continued to say a fire broke out after ammunition detonated, without explaining how that happened. The loss of the guided missile cruiser — the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet — was a humiliating setback for Moscow.
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In Mariupol, reduced largely to smoking rubble by weeks of bombardment, Russian state TV showed the flag of the pro-Moscow Donetsk separatists raised on what it said was the city’s highest point, its TV tower. It also showed what it said was the main building at the city’s besieged Azovstal steel plant in flames.
The Kremlin has thrown over 100,000 troops and mercenaries from Syria and Libya into the fight in Ukraine and is deploying more forces in the country every day, said Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council.
“We have a difficult situation, but our army is defending our state,” he said.
Numerous cities and villages came under bombardment in the Donbas — the industrial region in the east that the Kremlin has declared the new, main theater of war — as well as in the Kharkiv region just to the west, and in the south, authorities said.
Russian forces pummeled the 2,000 Ukrainian fighters still holed up inside the sprawling Azovstal plant, the last known pocket of resistance in the strategic southern port city, the mayor’s office reported.
“Every day they drop several bombs on Azovstal,” said Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor. “Fighting, shelling, bombing do not stop.”
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In other developments, a senior Russian military official publicly outlined Russian war aims that appeared to be wider than what the Kremlin has stated in recent weeks. Rustam Minnekayev said Russia’s forces aim to take full control of southern Urkaine, in addition to eastern Ukraine, and that doing so would open the way to the nation of Moldova, where Russia backs the breakaway region of Transnistria.
Responding to Minnekayev’s declaration about Russian forces opening a route to Moldova from southern Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned: “The Russian invasion of Ukraine was assumed to be just the beginning; further, they want to grab other countries.”
Moldovan officials are warily watching Putin’s actions in Ukraine, and Zelenskyy adviser Mykhailo Podolyak added that Russia “was always lying to everyone and that, in fact from the very beginning, it wanted stupidly to steal some of Ukraine’s territory to secure an outlet to Transnistria.”
The latest satellite photos from Maxar Technologies revealed what appeared to be a second mass grave site near Mariupol. The site at a cemetery in the town of Vynohradne has several newly dug parallel trenches measuring about 40 meters (131 feet) long, Maxar said in a statement.
A day earlier, Maxar released photos of what appeared to be rows upon rows of more than 200 freshly dug mass graves next to a cemetery in the town of Manhush, outside Mariupol. That prompted Ukrainian accusations that the Russians are trying to conceal the slaughter of civilians in the city.
“This confirms again that the occupiers arrange the collection, burial and cremation of dead residents in every district of the city,” Andryushchenko said on the Telegram messaging app.
The Ukrainians estimated that the graves seen in the photos released Thursday could hold 9,000 bodies.
The Kremlin did not respond to the satellite pictures.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared victory in the battle for Mariupol despite the steel-mill holdouts. He ordered his forces not to storm the plant to finish off the defenders but to seal it off instead in an apparent bid to force them to surrender.
Mariupol has taken on outsize importance in the war. Capturing it would deprive the Ukrainians of a vital port and complete a land corridor between Russia and the Crimean Peninsula, which Putin seized from Ukraine in 2014.
It would also allow Putin to throw more of his forces into the potentially climactic battle for the Donbas and its coal mines, factories and other industries, or what the Kremlin has now declared to be its main objective.
Danilov reported that some 12 to 14 of Russia’s elite military units have, in fact, left Mariupol and begun moving to the east to take part in the fighting there.
“It will now be difficult for our forces, because our guys in Mariupol were taking (those units) on themselves. It is their courage and feat,” he said.
Danilov also said Kyiv managed to deliver weapons via helicopter at great risk under cover of night to the Mariupol steelworks, which have been bombarded for weeks.
Putin said Russia gave Ukrainian forces inside the plant the option to surrender, with guarantees to keep them alive, and offered “decent treatment and medical care,” according to an account of a phone call with European Council President Charles Michel, provided by the Kremlin.
“But the Kyiv regime does not allow them to take this opportunity,” Putin charged.
More than 100,000 people — down from a prewar population of about 430,000 — are believed trapped in Mariupol with little food, water or heat, and over 20,000 civilians have been killed in the nearly two-month siege, according to Ukrainian authorities.
Most attempts to evacuate civilians from the city have failed because of what the Ukrainians said was continued Russian shelling.
Days into the Russian offensive to take the east, the campaign has yet to become a full-out assault, with military analysts saying Moscow’s forces are still ramping up and have not achieved any major breakthroughs in the Donbas or gained any significant ground.
But shelling attacks killed three civilians in a small town and two villages Friday in the Donetsk region, which is part of the Donbas, the regional governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, posted on a messaging app. Kyrylenko said the Russians opened fire on at least 20 of the region’s settlements.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said talks between the two countries have “ground to a halt” because Moscow hasn’t received a response from Kyiv to its latest proposals, the details of which have not been released.
Putin’s lead negotiator at the talks, Vladimir Medinsky, said he held several lengthy conversations Friday with the head of the Ukrainian delegation. He gave no details.
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Fisch reported from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. Associated Press journalists Mstyslav Chernov and Felipe Dana in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Inna Varenytsia in Kviv and Robert Burns and Aamer Madhani in Washington contributed to this report, as did other AP staff members around the world.
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AP · by DAVID KEYTON and YESICA FISCH · April 23, 2022
18. The Future of SOCOM’s ‘Killer Egg’
The Future of SOCOM’s ‘Killer Egg’
4/22/2022
By Yasmin Tadjdeh
EPNAC photo
Special Operations Command’s A/MH-6 Little Bird — affectionally known as the “Killer Egg” — made its debut into the American psyche following the release of the classic book and movie “Black Hawk Down.” In it, Little Birds ferry commandos in the besieged city of Mogadishu, Somalia, and sealed the helicopter’s place in pop culture history.
Hollywood aside, the now iconic aircraft — originally manufactured by McDonnell Douglas and now Boeing — has been a mainstay in Special Operations Command’s inventory for decades, offering commandos a niche capability not found in other air platforms. The helicopter’s small size, agility and speed make it an ideal rotorcraft for getting in and out of hairy situations, experts say.
The exclusive user of the aircraft is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment — also known as the Night Stalkers — out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The mission set for the A/MH-6 are light attack and light assault, respectively.
“The aircraft provides a unique and highly-capable platform for employing extremely lethal and accurate fires as well as inserting small numbers of special operations forces into a variety of combat environments and special mission situations,” said Army Maj. Jeffrey Slinker, a public affairs officer at Army Special Operations Aviation Command.
The platform offers special operations forces two hours of flight time, has a maximum cruise speed of 126 knots, a range of 179 nautical miles, and a maximum service ceiling of 20,000 feet, according to Boeing, which declined to be interviewed for this story and referred questions to SOCOM.
Despite the platform’s success, the Little Bird — which was introduced in the 1960s — continues to age. So what is in store for the future of the Killer Egg?
For one, Slinker says the platform isn’t going anywhere. So far, no requirements have been put forward to replace it.
“There is no definitive plan to end the service life of the Little Bird,” he said. “The H-6 platform was officially introduced in 1966. While the majority of these aircraft were eventually phased out of service, ARSOA identified a significant utility in keeping the airframe in service. With continued maintenance and upgrades, there is currently no service life end in sight.”
These upgrades consist of a “zero-time” aircraft primary structure, he noted.
“Zero-time refers to the amount of time on the aircraft at upgrade,” Slinker said. “As with many military vehicles, ‘new’ doesn’t always mean new. For example, previous iterations of upgrades to the H-6 platform required modifications to an airframe that may have been 40-plus years old. Zero-time means the structure of the aircraft will be ‘brand new’ off the line with no flight time logged.”
Additional modifications include new modernized glass cockpits and an upgraded aircraft performance package, Slinker said in an email to National Defense.
Special Operations Command is currently fielding these upgraded aircraft at a rate of seven systems per year, he said.
However, there has been some discussion in the helicopter community that the aircraft could one day be replaced by a platform developed by the Army’s Future Vertical Lift, or FVL, family of systems — particularly the future attack reconnaissance aircraft. The service has been working for years to develop a new set of rotorcraft that can replace its aging Chinook, Black Hawk, Apache and Kiowa Warrior platforms. Sikorsky and Bell were selected by the Army in 2020 to build systems under the FARA effort. Sikorsky is offering its S-97 Raider and Bell its 360 Invictus, according to the Congressional Research Service.
However, Slinker threw cold water on the idea that FARA could replace the Little Bird.
“There has been no aircraft proposed under FVL so far that replaces the current aircraft for the light assault role required by SOCOM,” he said.
The main challenge for an aircraft like FARA or another in the FVL family is finding a platform that is “small enough, maneuverable enough, transportable enough and simple enough to conduct the light assault/attack role of the A/MH-6,” he said.
Aviation expert Richard Aboulafia, managing director of AeroDynamic Advisory, an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based aerospace consulting firm, said that while technically conceivable, replacing the Little Bird with the future attack reconnaissance aircraft would be unlikely because the platform would be too big.
“Even if FARA goes ahead, I just don’t see it producing anything relevant for this. These are really small, small agile machines,” he said.
“Nobody’s designing a new one.”
A tiltrotor platform would be unfeasible for SOCOM, he said.
“That’s the exact opposite of what these guys want for this mission,” Aboulafia said. “Good luck flying through buildings and chasing cars.”
A coaxial rotor would also pose difficulties. “Maybe that’s a little better, but that’s still bigger,” he said.
While there once was a civil market for the Little Bird, the platform has since been replaced by inexpensive light turbine aircraft such as the Robinson R66, Bell 505 and the Airbus H125, Aboulafia said.
Those “really don’t have the power and agility of the Little Bird,” he said. “Maybe they could be up-engined and re-transmissioned and whatever else, but why?”
With a new aircraft likely not on the horizon, Slinker said SOCOM will be focusing on upgrades to the platform.
“Weight reduction initiatives and affordable, reliable, simplistic performance increases [will] continue to make the A/MH-6 platform more relevant in the future,” Slinker said.
The platform currently carries weapons such as multiple calibers of machine guns, the full family of 2.75-inch rockets as well as laser-guided munitions, he noted. Currently, there are no plans to integrate new weapons onto the platform.
But with the Pentagon shifting its attention to great power competition with Russia — which recently launched an unprovoked war with neighbor Ukraine — and China, will the Little Bird play a role?
Slinker said: “There is always a need for the unique light attack/assault aircraft role” that the platform offers users.
However, Aboulafia believes the Killer Egg’s role will be limited.
“They’re just not for great power competition,” he said. It’s not relevant in terms of range, deployability and battlefield survivability, he added.
However, the aircraft will likely continue to be a mainstay in SOCOM’s inventory for years to come, Aboulafia said. With an active production line available, Special Operations Command could replace small numbers of platforms or engage in block upgrades.
“SOCOM has a few dozen of everything,” he said. “You never know when there might be a contingency.”
The pricey aviation items that often eat up Special Operations Command’s budget are on the other side of the spectrum with the Little Bird, he noted, including CV-22 Ospreys and MH-47G Chinooks.
“That’s just a monstrously different order of magnitude,” Aboulafia said. “Even if you wanted full up, replacement Little Birds, … you’re talking about maybe $5 million an aircraft … as opposed to the $70-something-million for a CV-22.”
He added: “They’re cheap and cheerful. So why not have them on hand?”
The Little Bird represents a niche capability that gives the platform longevity, Aboulafia said.
“Every so often you find aeronautical niches that are built that way,” he said. “You just sort of stake out this position [and] no one really comes after you in any meaningful way and you defend it.”
19. Czech companies to repair damaged Ukrainian tanks
Not "sexy" warfighting but absolutely critical.
Czech companies to repair damaged Ukrainian tanks
A Ukrainian tank drives next to a destroyed Russian vehicle, marked with the "Z" symbol, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in the village of Husarivka, in Kharkiv region on Apr 14, 2022. (Photo: Reuters/Alkis Konstantinidis)
20 Apr 2022 03:23AM (Updated: 20 Apr 2022 03:23AM)
PRAGUE: Czech defence companies will repair Ukrainian tanks and other military vehicles that have been damaged in fighting or need servicing after long-term storage, the Czech Defence Ministry said on Tuesday (Apr 19).
The Czech Republic has been among the most active countries in supporting the Ukrainian military with donations and sales of weapons and ammunition, including shipments of Soviet-era tanks, multiple rocket launchers, howitzers, infantry fighting vehicles and anti-aircraft weapons.
"Small faults or fighting damage will be repaired by the Ukrainian army's and Ukrainian defence industry's own efforts," the ministry said.
"Czech assistance will utilise the capacities of Czech defence industry companies for more extensive works, including overhauls and bringing equipment in long-term storage to service."
The first contract will include repairs of an unspecified number of Soviet-era T-64 tanks, it said.
It said the T-64 tanks would be repaired at privately held arms trading and production firm CZECHOSLOVAK GROUP, which is also one of the sources of equipment sent to Ukraine.
The repairs will be done at Czech firms' facilities in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the ministry said.
Ukraine has repeatedly called on the West to supply heavy equipment and ammunition to help it resist the Russia assault.
Russia attacked Ukraine in February in what it calls a special operation to demilitarise the country.
Western countries and Ukraine accuse Russian President Vladimir Putin of unprovoked aggression.
20. Biden's escalating aid to Ukraine reflects a sea change in U.S. foreign policy
Excerpts:
“Putin’s war has been exactly that sort of mind-focusing stimulus, and its effects are likely to be lasting ones,” he said.
If he’s right, the broader effects of the Ukraine crisis could include a Cold War-style division of the world into two blocs, one led by the United States, the other by China and Russia; long-term pressure from Congress for higher defense spending; and perhaps even a modest revival of bipartisanship in foreign policy.
Those trends will all feel familiar to Biden, who served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the last half of the Cold War. A year or two ago, his fondness for NATO and other traditional U.S. alliances may have sounded like a throwback, but it has come in handy now.
He and his aides worked to focus NATO on Putin’s threats long before the invasion, enabling the alliance to impose coordinated sanctions as soon as the tanks rolled. His old-fashioned return to alliance-building turned out to be exactly what the West needed.
Biden’s foreign policy has been far from perfect. His withdrawal from Afghanistan, to take only the most painful example, was a fiasco.
But in Ukraine, at least, the president’s experience and instincts have served him well.
Biden's escalating aid to Ukraine reflects a sea change in U.S. foreign policy
WASHINGTON —
When President Biden took office last year, he had three top foreign policy priorities: to revive NATO and other alliances that President Trump had savaged, to withdraw the last American troops from Afghanistan, and to compete more effectively with a newly assertive China.
Russia, a declining power, seemed almost an afterthought. All Biden wanted from Moscow, he said last year, was “a stable, predictable relationship.”
Vladimir Putin had other ideas. Two months ago, Putin invaded Ukraine — and the result has been not only a tragic war, but a sea change in U.S. policy.
The struggle for Ukraine is now Biden’s main national security focus. The United States and Russia appear locked in a long-term confrontation reminiscent of the 20th century’s Cold War. The challenge of China is still out there, but strategists who hoped to shift U.S. troops from Europe to Asia have put those plans on hold.
Last week, Biden announced that he was sending an additional $800 million in military aid to Ukraine, bringing the total over the last two months to more than $3 billion. More important than the dollar figure were the weapons included: heavy artillery, helicopters, armored personnel carriers, antiaircraft radar systems and the Phoenix Ghost, a new kamikaze attack drone.
The shopping list reflected a gradual escalation since the opening weeks of the war, when Biden and his aides emphasized the limits of what the United States was willing to do — in part to avoid risking direct conflict between Russian forces and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
There would be no boots on the ground, they said, no long-range offensive weapons, and no U.S.-enforced “no-fly zone” to stop Russia’s air force from bombing Ukrainian cities. Nor would the United States agree to move MiG-29 aircraft from Poland through Germany to Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and American hawks complained, but last week, Zelensky said the new aid package was “just what we were waiting for.”
What changed? As Ukraine’s armed forces performed better than expected — and Russia’s performed worse — the administration’s commitment to Kyiv deepened.
“Our policy is unequivocal that we will do whatever we can to help Ukraine succeed,” Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, said in a TV interview. “At the end of the day, what we want to see is a free and independent Ukraine [and] a weakened and isolated Russia.”
The administration’s attitude was also hardened, he added, by “what the Russians have done, frankly — killing civilians, atrocities, war crimes.”
More broadly, Biden’s commitment to Ukraine appears to signal the end of a period of retrenchment in which Presidents Obama and Trump sought to disengage from the military entanglements launched by President George W. Bush.
Columbia University scholar Stephen Sestanovich has long argued that U.S. foreign policy tends to alternate between cycles of assertive international engagement, which he calls “maximalism,” and retrenchment.
“What puts an end to retrenchment is almost always some sort of shock,” he told me last week, something that “makes people think that downsized policies, however desirable they might have seemed a few years earlier, just won’t cut it in a more dangerous world.”
“Putin’s war has been exactly that sort of mind-focusing stimulus, and its effects are likely to be lasting ones,” he said.
If he’s right, the broader effects of the Ukraine crisis could include a Cold War-style division of the world into two blocs, one led by the United States, the other by China and Russia; long-term pressure from Congress for higher defense spending; and perhaps even a modest revival of bipartisanship in foreign policy.
Those trends will all feel familiar to Biden, who served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the last half of the Cold War. A year or two ago, his fondness for NATO and other traditional U.S. alliances may have sounded like a throwback, but it has come in handy now.
He and his aides worked to focus NATO on Putin’s threats long before the invasion, enabling the alliance to impose coordinated sanctions as soon as the tanks rolled. His old-fashioned return to alliance-building turned out to be exactly what the West needed.
Biden’s foreign policy has been far from perfect. His withdrawal from Afghanistan, to take only the most painful example, was a fiasco.
But in Ukraine, at least, the president’s experience and instincts have served him well.
21. Putin's mighty war machine on the SCRAPHEAP
Putin's mighty war machine on the SCRAPHEAP: After two months of fighting, Russia has now lost 873 tanks, 179 aircraft, 21,800 troops... and the pride of its navy is lying on the bottom of the Black Sea
- Ukraine's land forces released new figures today, suggesting more than 21,000 Russian troops have died
- A total of 873 tanks are said to have been destroyed, along with 2,238 armoured vehicles and 333 aircraft
- The flagship of Russia's Black Sea Fleet - the Moskva - sank last week after being hit by a Ukrainian missile
- Putin's troops pulled back from Kyiv in late March, suffering low morale amid stiff resistance and heavy losses
- Russia has now launched an assault designed to seize territory in the Donbas region in the east of Ukraine
- But experts believe the war could go on for months or even years as Ukraine's military continues to defy the invaders, while Western allies continue to send financial aid and arms shipments to the defenders
PUBLISHED: 06:35 EDT, 24 April 2022 | UPDATED: 10:18 EDT, 24 April 2022
Daily Mail · by David Averre For Mailonline · April 24, 2022
The scale of Russian troop losses in Ukraine has tipped 21,000 as Putin's war rumbles into its third month today.
The latest statistics, published by the Ukrainian Land Forces this morning, suggest 21,800 Russian fighters have been killed amid bitter resistance from Ukraine's armed forces and territorial defence units - though this figure could not be verified.
Meanwhile, the land forces claim to have dealt massive damage to Russia's military equipment and machinery.
A total of 873 tanks are said to have been destroyed, along with 2238 armoured vehicles, 179 planes, 154 helicopters and 408 artillery systems.
Putin's forces rolled across the border on February 24 from the north, east and south, and quickly made a beeline for Kyiv.
But they were forced to withdraw from the outskirts of the capital in late March and refocus their efforts on a targeted offensive in the eastern Donbas region after Ukraine successfully repelled their advances, inflicting heavy losses.
Valentyna Sherba, 68, stands next to a Russian tank in the backyard of her father's home, both destroyed, in the aftermath of a battle between Russian and Ukrainian troops on the outskirts of Chernihiv, northern Ukraine, Saturday, April 23, 2022
A man rides his bicycle next to a destroyed Russian tank in Chernihiv, Ukraine, on Thursday, April 21, 2022
A man jumps from a Russian T-72 tank destroyed during Russia's invasion, in the village of Yahidne, Ukraine April 20, 2022
This image, released by General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on April 3, 2022 shows the burning wreckage of a downed Russian fighter jet in the Kharkiv region
Ukrainian sappers search for unexploded explosives at the burnt remains of a Russian helicopter destroyed during recent fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces at the Antonov airport in Hostomel, outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, April 18, 2022.
The wreckage of a downed Russian helicopter lies in a field near Kharkiv on April 16, 2022
Russia's vast troop losses have been put down to poor tactical decisions by Russian military leaders and a considerable underestimation of the capabilities of Ukraine's armed forces.
At the start of the war, Russia's military dwarfed that of Ukraine and led many to believe that the invasion would be swift and effective.
On February 24, Russia's land army consisted of 280,000 full-time active soldiers compared with Ukraine's 125,600.
But the amount of Russian soldiers needed to seize the whole country and control the entire population would be close to 1 million, according to Michael Clarke, a visiting professor in King's College London's department of war studies - suggesting the Kremlin woefully underestimated the amount of force needed to force its neighbours into submission.
In addition, Ukraine's fighting force has grown dramatically thanks to the number of reservists who signed up in the weeks prior to the invasion, the influx of foreign fighters volunteering to fight for Ukraine, and the introduction of conscription.
Facing stiff resistance, morale among Russian troops is said to have tanked as they were shipped off to battle, underprepared, untrained and poorly equipped.
These issues have continued to plague the Russian invasion force, even as they pulled from Kyiv and other cities in order to concentrate on the seizure of the Donbas region.
'Despite Russia making some territorial gains, Ukrainian resistance has been strong across all axes and inflicted significant cost on Russian forces,' the UK Ministry of Defence said.
'Poor Russian morale and limited time to reconstitute, re-equip and reorganise forces from prior offensives are likely hindering Russian combat effectiveness.'
Experts say this 'second phase' of the war - Russia's attempt to seize territory in the Donbas region of Donetsk and Luhansk - is likely an outcome of its army's slow progress and massive losses of troops and equipment early in the war, which prompted a change in tactics.
Director of the FMES strategic studies institute Pascal Ausseur said the Russian army, having failed in its initial shock-and-awe assault of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, may well be hoping to establish an axis from Kherson in the south to Izyum, cutting off huge swathes of territory in eastern Ukraine over the course of several gruelling weeks or months.
'They realised that the Blitzkrieg option didn't work out, so they returned to the traditional Soviet bulldozer model. If you can't break the will of your enemies, you grind them down,' Ausseur said.
'They will Mariupol-ise the operation,' he added, in reference to the southern port city that has been subjected to relentless Russian bombardment over the past two months.
Colin Clarke, a senior research fellow at the Soufan Center think tank, concurred with Ausseur's analysis, stating: 'It looks like the Russian military is simply pursuing a scorched earth approach, attempting to break the will of the Ukrainian military through the use of overwhelming force and indiscriminate shelling to force remaining civilians to flee.'
On Friday, Russian Major General Rustam Minnekaev was quoted as saying that 'one of the tasks of the Russian army is to establish full control over the Donbas and southern Ukraine', adding this would provide 'a land corridor to Crimea', the peninsula Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
But this ambition brings challenges, according to Michel Goya, a former French army colonel.
'The deeper Russian forces go into Ukraine, the more vulnerable they are,' he said on Twitter.
Russia has succeeded in controlling the overwhelming majority of Mariupol, with only a few hundred Ukrainian fighters thought to remain in the city, holed up in the Azovstal steel plant by the port city's harbour.
But Putin's declaration that the city had been 'successfully liberated' earlier this week came only after it had endured constant bombing campaigns over the course of eight weeks, effectively reducing most of the city to rubble.
An aerial view shows damaged buildings, amid Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine, in Mariupol, Ukraine in this handout picture taken with a drone released April 24, 2022
A man walks near damaged buildings in the course of Ukraine-Russia conflict in the southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine April 22, 2022
Russia has succeeded in controlling the overwhelming majority of Mariupol, with only a few hundred Ukrainian fighters still holed up in the Azovstal steel plant (pictured) by the port city's harbour. But Putin's declaration that the city had been 'successfully liberated' earlier this week came only after it had endured constant bombing campaigns over the course of eight weeks, effectively reducing most of the city to rubble
Multiple videos from Odesa yesterday showed the missile strike, with a huge ball of fire and smoke erupting from the building. At least eight people are believed to have been killed, and a further 18 injured
Valeria Hlodan (pictured), 27, and her baby daughter Kira were killed when a missile struck an apartment block in Odesa yesterday. Ms Hlodan's mother - who was originally from Russia - was also killed
Mariupol's mayor Vadym Boychenko said earlier this month that 90 per cent of Mariupol's infrastructure had been damaged, with 40 per cent completely destroyed.
Odesa, another port city in southern Ukraine, also endured a rocket attack yesterday which killed at least eight civilians, including a three-month-old baby and her mother, sparking fears Russian commanders may order further air and missile strikes given the progress made in Mariupol.
Ausseur said Ukraine would need to orchestrate a robust air defence system, perhaps with the support of Western military aid packages, to defend itself from continued air attacks - Russia's most effective weapon in the war thus far.
'They need a shield that makes the equation less favourable to the Russians,' he said, adding that otherwise Russia could pursue air strikes indefinitely.
'The emerging scenario is one of high-intensity bombings lasting several weeks, or maybe several months.'
But experts no longer believe Russia has any designs on Kyiv, having sustained too many losses to continue pursuing control of the capital.
A steady stream of images and videos captured by Ukrainian armed forces personnel and regular citizens has provided constant evidence of Russian losses in Ukraine.
Footage obtained earlier this week from the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade - a formation of the Ukrainian Ground Forces - showed how a Russian tank was caught in an anti-tank missile system's crosshairs before the projectile soared through the air and blew it to smithereens.
The brigade titled the video (in Ukrainian): 'Stugna against T-72: attackers of the 128th brigade destroyed a Russian tank with a Ukrainian missile from a distance of 4.5 km'.
It comes as separate footage emerged of a Russian Ka-53 attack helicopter being blown out of the sky over Zaporizhzhia by another Ukrainian man-portable missile system.
This is the moment a Russian tank is blown to smithereens by a Ukrainian anti-tank guided missile fired from almost three miles away (R). Footage obtained today from the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade of the Ukrainian Ground Forces shows how the tank is caught in the missile system's crosshairs (L) before it is destroyed
A Ukrainian service member stands next to a damaged Russian tank T-72 BV, as Russia's attack on Ukraine continues, in Donetsk region
The Stugna-P is a Ukrainian anti-tank guided missile system developed by the Luch Design Bureau, located in Kyiv.
It can attack from both long range - up to three miles in the daytime, depending on the type of missile - and close range - 100 yards.
The brigade said that it took the missile just 21 seconds to travel almost three miles before obliterating the invaders' armour.
'The missile from the Stugna anti-aircraft missile system flies at a speed of 200-220 metres per second, so the enemy tank was at a distance of about 4.5 kilometres,' the brigade's statement read.
'(The tank) did not stand still, it moved, but this did not prevent the ATGM [anti-tank guided missile] operator from hitting him.'
The brigade added: 'Neither the Swedish-British anti-tank complex NLAW, nor the American Javelin work at such long distances.
'And our Stugna destroyed a moving tank 4.5 kilometres away.'
NLAWs have a typical maximum firing range of roughly half a mile (800-1000m), while the Javelin is effective at distances of over a mile (2-2.5km).
The brigade did not specify where in Ukraine the strike took place. However, fighting has recently been most intense along a 300-mile front in the country's eastern Donbas region.
The T-72 referred to by the brigade is a family of Soviet main battle tanks that entered production in 1969.
They are currently operated by over 40 countries, including both Russia and Ukraine, though the latter has retired most in favour of the earlier T-64.
Meanwhile in Zaporizhzhia, drone footage showed a Russian attack helicopter blown out of the sky by a Ukrainian 9K38 Igla man portable air defence system (MANPADS).
The footage, shared by Ukrainian telegram channel Unian and later distributed on Twitter, showed the Russian Ka-53 hovering over farmland and lakes, before the missile streaked through the air and engulfed the chopper in a huge fireball
Footage from yet another video shows a Russian helicopter erupting into a fireball after being hit by a Ukrainian missile
A Ukrainian soldier gestures towards a destroyed Russian helicopter in the outskirts of the village of Malaya Rohan, amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in Kharkiv region, Ukraine, April 20, 2022. Picture taken April 20, 2022
The Igla, or 'needle', is a Soviet-era anti-aircraft missile launcher which was first deployed in the early 1980s, but has proven incredibly effective in Ukrainian hands against Russian choppers.
The footage, shared by Ukrainian telegram channel Unian and later distributed on Twitter, showed the Russian Ka-53 hovering over farmland and lakes, before the missile streaked through the air and engulfed the chopper in a huge fireball.
Though Russia's armed forces outnumber their Ukrainian counterparts and have more equipment and machinery at their disposal, poor tactical decisions have been preyed upon by Ukrainian fighters, who have used their anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry to great effect.
And despite most of the conflict in Ukraine being waged on the ground and with air and missile strikes, Russia has even lost 8 of its boats - including the flagship of its Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva, in an embarrassing moment for Putin's navy.
The flagship was severely damaged by Ukrainian missiles last week before it sank to the bottom of the Black Sea, yet Russian authorities took more than a week to recognise the ship had been lost.
The Kremlin reported that one serviceman died and 27 dozen others were missing after the ship sank, having previously stated that all members of the crew - believed to be roughly 500-strong - had been rescued.
The loss of the Moskva, one of three missile cruisers of its kind in Russia's fleet, was shrouded in mystery from the moment it was first reported early on April 14.
Ukraine said it hit the ship with missiles, but the Russian Defence Ministry would not acknowledge an attack, saying only that a fire broke out on the vessel after ammunition detonated, causing serious damage.
Despite most of the conflict in Ukraine being waged on the ground and with air and missile strikes, Russia has even lost 8 of its boats - including the flagship of its Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva (pictured), in an embarrassing moment for Putin's navy.
Images captured before the vessel sank appeared to show damage to the left-hand side of the vessel close to the water line, smoke and fire damage along its left-hand side, missing lifeboats and open helicopter bay doors - suggesting the aircraft had taken off
To avoid encirclement in the east amid Russia's latest assault on the Donbas, the defending Ukrainians may disperse into several fronts, Colin Clarke of the Soufan Center think tank said, in order to stretch Russian supply and communication lines. 'That strategy has been successful so far,' he said.
Western aid has been boosted in recent days, notably with the announcement of an $800-million military package by US President Joe Biden, specifically aimed at the struggle in the Donbas.
But the clock is ticking. Armoured personnel vehicles 'will take weeks or even months' to get to the Ukrainian army, according to Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
'Even if the vehicles come out of stocks already in Europe, they will require some servicing before they are ready for shipping,' he said.
NATO countries have started supplying Ukraine with - originally Soviet-developed - S300 missile systems but experts noted their deployment also takes time.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin travel to Kyiv today to discuss with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelesnky the kinds of weapons he needs to fight off Russia, after Biden's announcement of the mammoth $800m military support package.
Alexander Khramchikhin, of the Moscow-based Institute for Political and Military Analysis, said the fighting could even go on for years in light of the capabilities of Ukraine's armed forces, reinforced with Western aid packages and arms shipments.
'Russia has so far achieved none of its objectives, and it's not easy to see how it will achieve them in the future,' he told AFP.
Russian troops invaded Ukraine on 24th February in what the Kremlin is calling a 'special military operation' to 'demilitarise and denazify' the country.
The invasion has now lasted two months, with Russia 'most likely' to intensify attacks in Ukraine before its 9th May Victory Day celebrations, according to UK intelligence.
Daily Mail · by David Averre For Mailonline · April 24, 2022
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
