Quotes of the Day:
"The people of North Korea are the same as the people of South Korea. All are loyal to the land of their birth with the very few minor exceptions of foreign trained and foreign directed communists. This war is not a conflict between North and South; it is a conflict between the few who are communists, who by an accident got control of half of our country, and the overwhelming mass of the citizens of Korea, wherever they may live."
- President Syngman Rhee
"Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future."
- Ellie Wiesel
"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die."
- G.K. Chesterton
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 28 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. Russia-Ukraine war: situation in Luhansk ‘extremely escalated’ amid intense shelling by Russian troops
3. Ukraine war volunteers are coming home, reckoning with difficult fight
4. Feds entered school to kill gunman after local cops asked them to wait
5. Putin ties grain exports to demand that sanctions on Russia go
6. He Pushed for Democracy in China for Decades. Now He’s Accused of Spying for China.
7. Russians face prospect of Soviet-style shortages as sanctions bite
8. U.S. bill would bar Google, Apple from hosting apps that accept China's digital yuan
9. UN Corrects China on Human Rights Chief’s Actual Words to Xi
10. Jordan Has an Iran Problem. Can Israel and Saudi Arabia Unite to Combat It?
11. China’s Lockdowns Prompt a Rethinking of Life Plans Among the Young
12. China’s BRI Is Aggravating Ethnic Tensions in the Global South
13. Taiwan: From strategic ambiguity to strategic incoherence
14. The Constitutional Case Against Defending Taiwan
15. Why I Disagree With Henry Kissinger by George Friedman
16. No traction for a war-ending deal in Ukraine
17. How the U.S. Has Struggled to Stop the Growth of a Shadowy Russian Private Army
18. Without summits, a West Asia ‘Quad’ makes progress
19. How the Quad Can Take on China in the 'Gray-Zone'
20. DARPA's revolutionary seaplane wants to change how the Pentagon hauls cargo
21. As War Rages in Ukraine, the U.S. Military Studies Russian Weapons at a ‘Petting Zoo’ Outside Las Vegas
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 28 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 28
Frederick W. Kagan, Kateryna Stepanenko, and George Barros
May 28, 7:30pm ET
Russian President Vladimir Putin is inflicting unspeakable suffering on Ukrainians and demanding horrible sacrifices of his own people in an effort to seize a city that does not merit the cost, even for him.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine that aimed to seize and occupy the entire country has become a desperate and bloody offensive to capture a single city in the east while defending important but limited gains in the south and east. Ukraine has twice forced Putin to define down his military objectives. Ukraine defeated Russia in the Battle of Kyiv, forcing Putin to reduce his subsequent military objectives to seizing Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in eastern Ukraine. Ukraine stopped him from achieving that aim as well, forcing him to focus on completing the seizure of Luhansk Oblast alone. Putin is now hurling men and munitions at the last remaining major population center in that oblast, Severodonetsk, as if taking it would win the war for the Kremlin. He is wrong. When the Battle of Severodonetsk ends, regardless of which side holds the city, the Russian offensive at the operational and strategic levels will likely have culminated, giving Ukraine the chance to restart its operational-level counteroffensives to push Russian forces back.
Russian forces are assaulting Severdonetsk even though they have not yet encircled it. They are making territorial gains and may succeed in taking the city and areas further west. The Ukrainian military is facing the most serious challenge it has encountered since the isolation of the Azovstal Plant in Mariupol and may well suffer a significant tactical defeat in the coming days if Severodonetsk falls, although such an outcome is by no means certain, and the Russian attacks may well stall again.
The Russians are paying a price for their current tactical success that is out of proportion to any real operational or strategic benefit they can hope to receive. Severodonetsk itself is important at this stage in the war primarily because it is the last significant population center in Luhansk Oblast that the Russians do not control. Seizing it will let Moscow declare that it has secured Luhansk Oblast fully but will give Russia no other significant military or economic benefit. This is especially true because Russian forces are destroying the city as they assault it and will control its rubble if they capture it. Taking Severodonetsk can open a Russian ground line of communication (GLOC) to support operations to the west, but the Russians have failed to secure much more advantageous GLOCs from Izyum partly because they have concentrated so much on Severodonetsk.
The Russians continue to make extremely limited progress in their efforts to gain control of the unoccupied areas of Donetsk Oblast, meanwhile. Russian troops have struggled to penetrate the pre-February 24 line of contact for weeks, while Russian offensive operations from Izyum to the south remain largely stalled. The seizure of Severodonetsk could only assist in the conquest of the rest of Donetsk Oblast if it gave the Russians momentum on which to build successive operations, but the Battle of Severdonetsk will most likely preclude continued large-scale Russian offensive operations.
Russian progress around Severdonetsk results largely from the fact that Moscow has concentrated forces, equipment, and materiel drawn from all other axes on this one objective. Russian troops have been unable to make progress on any other axes for weeks and have largely not even tried to do so. Ukrainian defenders have inflicted fearful casualties on the Russian attackers around Severodonetsk even so. Moscow will not be able to recoup large amounts of effective combat power even if it seizes Severdonetsk, because it is expending that combat power frivolously on taking the city.
Ukrainian forces are also suffering serious losses in the Battle of Severodonetsk, as are Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure. The Russians have concentrated a much higher proportion of their available offensive combat power to take Severodonetsk than the Ukrainians, however, shaping the attrition gradient generally in Kyiv’s favor. The Ukrainians continue to receive supplies and materiel from their allies as well, however slow and limited that flow may be. The Russians, in contrast, continue to manifest clear signs that they are burning through their available reserves of manpower and materiel with no reason to expect relief in the coming months.
Evidence of eroding military professionalism in the Russian officer corps is mounting. The Ukrainian Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported that Russian commanders are attempting to preserve military equipment by forbidding drivers from evacuating wounded servicemen or providing supplies to units that have advanced too far.[1] Refusing to risk equipment to evacuate wounded personnel on the battlefield—other than in extraordinary circumstances—is a remarkable violation of core principles of military professionalism. Such behavior can have serious impacts on morale and the willingness of soldiers to fight and risk getting injured beyond their own defensive lines. ISW cannot independently confirm the GUR’s report, but commentary by Russian milbloggers offers some circumstantial support for it. Russian milblogger Alexander Zhychkovskiy criticized the Russian military command’s disregard for reservists on the deprioritized Zaporizhia Oblast front. Zhychkovskiy reported that Russian commanders trapped lightly-equipped infantry units in areas of intense Ukrainian artillery fire without significant artillery support and did not rotate other units through those areas to relieve them.[2] Zhychkovskiy noted that Russian commanders are responsible for high losses and cases of insanity among servicemen. Another milblogger, Alexander Khodarkovsky, said that Russian commanders are not sending reinforcements in a timely matter, preventing Russian forces from resting between ground assaults.[3]
Waning professionalism among Russia’s officers could present Ukrainian forces with opportunities. Russian morale, already low, may drop further if such behavior is widespread and continues. If Russian troops stuck on secondary axes lose their will to fight as the Battle for Severdonetsk consumes much of the available Russian offensive combat power, Ukraine may have a chance to launch significant counteroffensives with good prospects for success. That prospect is uncertain, and Ukraine may not have the ability to take advantage of an opportunity even if it presents itself, but the current pattern of Russian operations is generating serious vulnerabilities that Kyiv will likely attempt to exploit.
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces pressed the ground assault on Severodonetsk and its environs, making limited gains.
- Russian forces in Kharkiv continue to focus efforts on preventing a Ukrainian counteroffensive from reaching the international border between Kharkiv and Belgorod.
- Ukrainian forces began a counteroffensive near the Kherson-Mykolaiv oblast border approximately 70 km to the northeast of Kherson City that may have crossed the Inhulets River.
- Russia’s use of stored T-62 tanks in the southern axis indicates Russia’s continued materiel and force generation problems.
- Ukrainian partisan activity continues to impose costs on Russian occupation forces in Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts.
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. We have stopped coverage of Mariupol as a separate effort since the city’s fall. We had added a new section on activities in Russian-occupied areas:
- Main effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and three supporting efforts);
- Subordinate Main Effort—Encirclement of Ukrainian troops in the cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
- Supporting Effort 1—Kharkiv City;
- Supporting Effort 2—Southern Axis;
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces unsuccessfully attempted an offensive operation southeast of Izyum, likely in an effort to advance toward Slovyansk or Siversk. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces retreated after attempting to advance to Pasika, approximately 20 km southeast of Izyum.[4] Russian Telegram channels reported that Russian forces successfully seized Pasika on May 28, but ISW cannot independently confirm this claim.[5] Russian forces did not attempt to advance directly south of Izyum and are likely prioritizing an advance north of Lyman.[6] The Ukrainian General Staff also noted that Russian forces continued launching air and artillery strikes on settlements near Siversk, approximately 30 km west of Severodonetsk.[7] Russian forces from Izyum may join units in Lyman to conduct an offensive on Siversk or pursue a separate drive on Slovyansk. Russian forces are also reportedly transferring additional artillery and military equipment via Kupyansk, approximately 40 km west of the Russia-Kharkiv Oblast border.[8]
Russian forces continued ground assaults on Severodonetsk’s northern neighborhoods and have not fully encircled the city from the west. Luhansk Oblast Administration Head Serhiy Haidai reported that Russian forces seized a hotel and advanced to Severodonetsk’s bus terminal on May 27 and continued fighting with Ukrainian defenders in the area on May 28.[9] Haidai stressed that Russian forces have not isolated the city, despite damaging a bridge along the Lysychansk-Severodonetsk road.[10] Haidai indicated that Ukrainian forces may withdraw from the area to avoid getting surrounded.[11] Pro-Russian milblogger Alexander Sladkov (who has 850,000 followers) criticized Russian military commanders for beginning the Battle of Severodonetsk before fully encircling Ukrainian troops.[12] Sladkov also criticized the lack of coherent offensive tactics among Russian commanders, despite their successes around Lyman.
Russian forces launched ground assaults west and east of Popasna but did not gain access to the Lysychansk-Bakhmut nor the Lysychansk-Hirske highway. Russian Telegram channels reported that fighting continued over Komyushuvakha, approximately 8 km east of Popasna, with the aim of allowing the Russians to launch an offensive on Zolote and secure the T1303 highway to Lysychansk.[13] Haidai reported that Ukrainian forces secured positions in a settlement along the T1303 highway, likely to hinder the Russian drive on Severodonetsk.[14] Haidai also noted that Russian forces have yet to seize the T1302 highway from Bakhmut to Lysychansk despite repeated attempts to secure the road from positions northeast of Popasna.[15] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces attempted to advance toward Bakhmut from settlements approximately 25 km southwest of Popasna.[16] Russian forces will likely continue offensive operations on Bakhmut as well as the T1302 and T1303 highways to isolate Ukrainian forces in the Severodonetsk-Lysychansk area.
Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations in western Donetsk Oblast on May 28. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued shelling near Avdiivka.[17] The Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) claimed to have advanced by 1.5 km in the Avdiivka area, but ISW cannot independently confirm this claim.[18]
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Withdraw forces to the north and defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum)
Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations north of Kharkiv City but continued to maintain their positions along the Ukrainian-Russian border on May 28. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian engineering elements improved their positions near Kozacha Lopan, approximately 36 km northwest of Kharkiv City.[19] Russian forces continued to shell Kharkiv City and settlements to its north.[20] Russian forces are likely maintaining their positions in the area to defend Belgorod City from Ukrainian artillery. Russian milblogger and former Russian proxy commander Igor Girkin (also known as Igor Strelkov) noted that Russian forces rely on "old-fashioned methods” such as artillery to defend the Ukrainian-Russian border instead of more-effective drones.[21]
Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporozhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Ukrainian forces reportedly launched a counteroffensive in northern Kherson Oblast on May 28. The Ukrainian General Staff issued a vague report that Ukrainian defenders pushed Russian forces to “unfavorable borders” in three settlements along the Mykolaiv-Kherson Oblast border, approximately 70 km northeast of Kherson City.[22] Ukrainian military sources did not specify if Ukrainian forces liberated any occupied settlements. The Ukrainian General Staff’s report may support unconfirmed social media reports that Ukrainian forces crossed the Inhulets River on May 27, as the three villages are located on the eastern bank of the river.[23]
Russian forces continued to fortify and equip their positions throughout southern Ukraine in an effort to retain permanent control over the territory. Zaporizhia Oblast Administration Head Oleksandr Starukh reported that Russian forces have accumulated a large number of old T-62 tanks in Melitopol since withdrawing them from storage on May 25.[24] Starukh noted that Russian forces will commit the tanks to stationary firing points in Zaporizhia Oblast, rather than committing the obsolescent tanks to combat in the oblast. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian forces are replenishing equipment losses with T-62s in northern Kherson Oblast, however, despite the tank’s vulnerabilities in modern warfare.[25] Russian forces continued to increase air defense systems in southern Ukraine.[26]
Activity in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)
The Zaporizhia Oblast Military Administration reported that Russian forces converted a Melitopol police station into an office of “People’s Militia” with 35 collaborators.[27] The Zaporizhia Oblast Military Administration also reported that fully-armed Russian servicemen broke into two universities in Melitopol and demanded that professors reapply for their positions under the occupation regime or resign.[28] Russian forces are likely aware of their lack of control over occupied Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts and fear Ukrainian civil resistance. Russian forces closed all Kherson Oblast borders near Ukrainian-controlled territories on May 28, possibly in anticipation of Ukrainian counterattacks or partisan activity.[29] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that a new Russian collaborationist and mayor of Enerhodar, Ruslan Kirpichev, fortified the entrance to his apartment due to rising partisan activity. The Ukrainian Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported that Russian commanders stationed their personnel in a penal colony in Kherson Oblast.[30]
Russian forces likely intend to loot occupied industrial sectors in Mariupol and Zaporizhia Oblast. Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Head Denis Pushilin reported that occupation forces will not repair Azovstal Steel Plant for ecological reasons on May 28.[31] Russian forces began exporting metal from Mariupol Port to Russia.[32] Pushilin noted that the Azovmash machine-building plant will resume its operations, even though the plant has faced severe financial problems for over ten years and is unlikely to generate profit. The Zaporizhia Oblast Military Administration reported that Russian forces just began to operate the spare tractor parts plant in Melitopol after confiscating it from the rightful owner.[33]
[1] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/rosii-ne-vdaietsia-vyrishyty-problemy-zabezpechennia-okupatsiinykh-pidrozdiliv.html
[30] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/okupanty-rozmishchuiut-svii-osobovyi-sklad-v-ukrainskii-vypravnii-kolonii.html
2. Russia-Ukraine war: situation in Luhansk ‘extremely escalated’ amid intense shelling by Russian troops
Russia-Ukraine war: situation in Luhansk ‘extremely escalated’ amid intense shelling by Russian troops – live
Governor of Luhansk region says impossible to gauge extent of damage and casualties amid Russian onslaught
Situation in Luhansk has 'extremely escalated', says governor
A dispatch here from Reuters reporters in Ukraine, as Russia continues its assaults to try to capture the Donbas region.
Ukrainian forces were on Sunday resisting a Russian assault on Sievierodonetsk, the largest city they still hold in the eastern Donbas region, but were weathering heavy artillery barrages, Ukrainian officials said.
The shelling was so intense it was not possible to assess casualties and damage, the governor of Luhansk region, Serhiy Gaidai, said. Dozens of buildings have been destroyed in the past few days.
“The situation has extremely escalated,” Gaidai said.
The Ukrainian government meanwhile urged the west to provide it with more longer-range weapons in order to turn the tide in the war, now in its fourth month.
The battle for Sievierodonetsk, which lies on the eastern side of the Siverskyi Donets River, has become the focus of attention as Russia ekes out slow but solid gains in the Donbas, comprising of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions.
Russia’s fixation on Sievierodonetsk had drawn resources from other battlefronts and as result they had made little progress elsewhere, according to the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the military situation in the Donbas – parts of which are controlled by Moscow-backed separatists – was very complicated but defences were holding up in a number of places, including Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk.
“It’s indescribably difficult there. And I am grateful to all those who withstood this onslaught,” he said in his nightly video address.
Updated at 06.56 EDT
3. Ukraine war volunteers are coming home, reckoning with difficult fight
Ukraine is not Afghanistan or Iraq or a video game. But it is a just cause.
Excerpts:
Military veterans, in particular, have been drawn to the war, emboldened by their combat training and an eagerness to apply their skills in a conflict that, for many, feels like a struggle of good versus evil.
But the conflict also has drawn Western military veterans who either have never deployed into combat previously or have experienced only asymmetrical insurgencies — not this type of war, with contested airspace, unrelenting rocket bombardment, and swarms of drones with sophisticated thermal targeting technology.
...
In quiet moments, he reflects on what he has taken from the experience, good and bad. He’s more relaxed at work and doesn’t stress about small inconveniences the way he used to. But something is missing, he said, and he is tempted every day to get it back.
“Once you see that life-and-death contrast, and you come back to a peaceful life and a peaceful job,” he said, “everything seems to be less meaningful by comparison.”
Ukraine war volunteers are coming home, reckoning with difficult fight
Americans and other foreign fighters who’ve taken up arms against Russia describe glaring disparities in what they expected and what they experienced
May 28, 2022 at 7:07 p.m. EDT
To Dakota’s surprise, it wasn’t the shelling that terrified him most.
A Marine Corps veteran who volunteered to fight in Ukraine, he has taken cover behind walls as Russian gunfire punched through and felt the throttle of artillery so many times that his catchphrase, “It’s normal,” became a joke within the unit.
What wasn’t normal, he said, was the feeling of dread while he hid and listened as Russian attack helicopters strafed the position his team of tank hunters had just fled. That moment, he said, “was quite honestly the most unsettled I had been the entire time.”
Dakota, who is home in Ohio now after seven weeks of fighting abroad, is among the legion of Western volunteers who have taken up arms against Russia. Like others, he spoke on the condition that his full name not be disclosed, citing concerns for his safety and that of family and friends.
In interviews with The Washington Post, foreign fighters from the United States and elsewhere described glaring disparities between what they expected the war to be like and what they experienced. They recalled going into battle underequipped and outgunned, the occasional thrill of blowing up Russian vehicles, and feeling torn over whether to go back to Ukraine. Some intend to do so. Others saw friends die and decided enough is enough.
For several, an inflection point came in late April when 22-year-old Willy Joseph Cancel, another Marine Corps veteran, was killed in combat northwest of Mykolaiv, a region that has seen ferocious violence as Russian commanders have sought to widen territorial gains. The full circumstances surrounding Cancel’s death remain a mystery, and his body has not been recovered. Attempts to speak with Cancel’s family were unsuccessful.
There are no known U.S. military personnel in Ukraine, and the Biden administration has sought to discourage American citizens from independently joining the fight, though it is not against the law to do so. Officials have said that the battlefield is complex and dangerous, and that Americans wishing to help the Ukrainian cause should look to do so by other means. And while the exact number of Americans volunteering is unknown, an estimated 4,000 expressed interest after the invasion in late February. Many entered the fight after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky personally appealed to foreign volunteers to journey there and fight.
Military veterans, in particular, have been drawn to the war, emboldened by their combat training and an eagerness to apply their skills in a conflict that, for many, feels like a struggle of good versus evil.
But the conflict also has drawn Western military veterans who either have never deployed into combat previously or have experienced only asymmetrical insurgencies — not this type of war, with contested airspace, unrelenting rocket bombardment, and swarms of drones with sophisticated thermal targeting technology.
Dane Miller, a U.S. Army veteran, went to Poland to take on a quieter but significant role — helping to run logistics for refugee aid centers and sending crucial supplies over the border into Ukraine. He has also assisted volunteer networks in reviewing prospective foreign fighters’ military records, to assess whether they “have the chops … to take on a massive military,” he said. While many do, a common theme is that swagger sometimes stands in place of relevant experience, he noted. He has advised some veterans against going into Ukraine.
“There’s this idea of heroism and it’s glorified. I will look at your 214 and tell you if you’re ready for this,” he said, referring to the U.S. military’s discharge paperwork, DD Form 214, that lists the training and certifications completed while in uniform.
In the Marines, Dakota spent four years as an antitank missile gunner, according to his service record provided by the Marine Corps. He never saw combat but did spend time in Afghanistan as a contractor, he said.
He put his first semester of college on hold so he could fight the Russians, saying a “righteous indignation” compelled him to go for it. He arrived in Ukraine within days of the invasion. Commanders were eager, he said, to tap his knowledge of U.S.-manufactured Javelin anti-armor weapons, thousands of which have been transferred to the Ukrainian army.
Dakota’s cohort of foreign volunteers was attached to a Ukrainian military unit and brought by yellow school bus to Kyiv, from which they were sent northwest into an embattled town outside the capital. It was early March. They were issued antitank weapons and Javelin missiles but no batteries for the launch unit, he said. Without a power source, the equipment was inoperable.
Homes were on fire, Dakota recalled. His unit gathered for a patrol through the woods. A commander motioned with his hand: “Everything that way is Russian.” Artillery blanketed the area. The Ukrainians and their volunteers dispersed. Some went into trench lines, other went into homes. One abandoned residence still had a Christmas tree set up, he recalled. Some Russian troops fell back as the fighting intensified, and they left behind a wounded comrade who wailed into the night, Dakota said.
By the end of the second night, eight of the 20 volunteers in Dakota’s unit had abandoned their posts, he said, including a fellow Marine veteran who appeared to break his machine gun with a rock in the hope of passing it off as battle damage. Another feigned an injury, he said.
Dakota fought throughout the Kyiv region and later was dispatched to the south to help train others on using the Javelin. On one mission, he said, he was unable get a lock on a Russian tank with a cold thermal signature. Then, four men climbed onto the hull to sit and smoke. The sight locked on their body heat. His missile pulverized the vehicle, a strike captured on video.
Russian artillery pounded their position a half-hour later, and Dakota’s team withdrew under the cover of night. About a week later he felt nauseated and carsick. He was diagnosed with a brain injury linked to his proximity to the shelling, he said, and left for home toward the end of April. He has been in recovery ever since.
“It’s not over. It’s not done. It’s not finished,” he said.
Other volunteers described different frustrations. Pascal, a veteran of the German army, was on a team with Cancel, the American killed in combat in late April. Problems arose during their first mission, he said.
The team suspected their two-way radios were being monitored by Russian forces, and they lacked extra batteries, forcing them to rely on unsecured cellphones and WhatsApp to communicate. Soon after they exchanged plans, their position was attacked by Russian artillery, he said.
The volunteers felt underinformed during many of their missions, not knowing where they were — and, vitally, where the Russians were, Pascal said. The day Cancel was killed, he said, they took fire from a position they believed to be Ukrainian but didn’t have radio communication to confirm. Two members of the team ventured out to investigate. Gunfire sounded, and they never returned, he said.
The remaining team members came under heavy fire, including artillery rounds, from the same direction, Pascal said. One team member was killed in the shelling. Pascal and another volunteer turned their attention to Cancel, who had be struck by shrapnel, he said. They applied tourniquets in a fruitless attempt to stop the bleeding. Their bodies were left behind as Pascal and another survivor withdrew.
That was Pascal’s last mission. He later crossed into Poland. Miller, the American volunteer, met him at a bar in Warsaw and noted how shaken up he seemed. They stepped outside and Miller consoled him, using Google Translate to find the right words in German. They hugged.
“From the beginning, we had no chance,” Pascal said in an interview. “I was asking myself why I survived and the others did not.”
A Ukrainian-born man who is a naturalized U.S. citizen spoke with The Post on the condition he be identified only by his radio call sign: Texas. He recalled how, early in the war, he saw images of his hometown on fire and left to join the fight two days later.
Texas, who earlier this month returned to his home in Houston, never served in the military. He works in an office. But he’s a quick study, he said, and soon was imparting lessons learned from his American colleagues to the Ukrainians whom he fought alongside — things like tactical theories for conducting ambushes, and staying out of sight from Russia’s surveillance drones and vehicle-mounted optics.
Texas patrolled in hunter-killer teams in southern Ukraine, he said, including one mission where he spotted a T-72 tank dug into a berm near Mykolaiv, its turret barely visible from more than two kilometers away. Texas fired a missile and it sliced through the tank just next to the turret. A success — but the rest of the team let out a groan. They wanted to see a column of fire propel the tank’s turret high into the air.
“It didn’t explode the way we wish it would,” said Texas, whose lessons were documented in an April report by the Wall Street Journal. “We were kind of bummed about that.”
Life at home lacks the sense of purpose and excitement, Texas said. He’s mired in divorce proceedings, initiated before he left for Ukraine, and occasionally hears from friends who update him over text about their successful tank harvests.
In quiet moments, he reflects on what he has taken from the experience, good and bad. He’s more relaxed at work and doesn’t stress about small inconveniences the way he used to. But something is missing, he said, and he is tempted every day to get it back.
“Once you see that life-and-death contrast, and you come back to a peaceful life and a peaceful job,” he said, “everything seems to be less meaningful by comparison.”
4. Feds entered school to kill gunman after local cops asked them to wait
Even 30 minutes is too long but at least these federal agents took the initiative.
But it certainly seems like the root of the problem lies with the chief of police for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District. We can attribute his incorrect (or lack of) decision to the fog and friction of the situation in the initial minutes but not for 78 minutes (or even 30 minutes).
21 Americans - 19 children - gave their lives so we could learn lessons on how to respond to these incidents. (though there are probably not new lessons - this incident only reinforced old ones that go back to Columbine - do not wait - you must go after the shooter as quickly as possible - speed, surprise, and violence of action).
Feds entered school to kill gunman after local cops asked them to wait
NBC News · by Julia Ainsley · May 27, 2022
According to the officials, agents from BORTAC, the Customs and Border Protection tactical unit, and ICE's Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) arrived on the scene between noon and 12:15 p.m. on Tuesday. Local law enforcement asked them to wait, and then instructed HSI agents to help pull children out of the windows.
The BORTAC team, armed with tactical gear, at first did not move toward the gunman. After approximately 30 minutes passed, however, the federal agents opted of their own volition to lead the “stack” of officers inside the school and take down the shooter.
Steven McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said Friday that Peter Arredondo, the chief of police for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, had stopped at least 19 officers from breaking into the school as the gunman opened fire for at least an hour.
Arredondo believed that the shooter had barricaded himself and that the children were not under an active threat, said McCraw at a news conference.
“From the benefit of hindsight where I’m sitting now, of course, it was not the right decision. It was a wrong decision. Period. There was no excuse for that,” McCraw said. “There were plenty of officers to do what needed to be done, with one exception, is that the incident commander inside believed he needed more equipment and more officers to do a tactical breach at that time.”
Law enforcement outside Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas.Jordan Vonderhaar / Getty Images
According to McCraw, Arredondo believed there was no active threat, so instead of sending officers in, he spent time finding keys that would let him into the school. During this time, however, Ramos had unencumbered access to carry out the attack. Nineteen students and two teachers were killed.
Arredondo was not present among law enforcement officials standing with McCraw on Friday, and McCraw did not explicitly name him.
Arredondo did not immediately return a request for comment by NBC News.
This is a developing story, please check back for updates.
NBC News · by Julia Ainsley · May 27, 2022
5. Putin ties grain exports to demand that sanctions on Russia go
This may be the biggest effect of Putin's war - food shortages around the world. What are we going to do about it?
Putin ties grain exports to demand that sanctions on Russia go
ajot.com · by Bloomberg News · May 26, 2022
Russian President Vladimir Putin said he’s willing to facilitate grain and fertilizer exports as global concern mounts about food shortages and rising prices—but only if sanctions on his country are lifted.
Putin didn’t specify if he was referring to Russian exports or those from Ukraine that have been stopped by Moscow’s blockage of ports since its invasion began in late February. The U.S. and its allies would be highly unlikely to agree to remove the extensive sanctions placed on Russia for its actions in Ukraine in response to the Russian leader’s move to link it to the growing food crisis.
Russian President Vladimir Putin
Putin’s comments were made in a phone call Thursday with Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, according to a Kremlin statement. Putin told Draghi that disruptions to global food supplies were exacerbated by the sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, and that Russia is “willing to make a significant contribution to overcoming the food crisis through the exports of grain and fertilizers on the condition that the West’s politically-motivated restrictions are lifted.”
The call focused on a shared solution to the food crisis, Draghi’s office said in a statement that did not mention talk of removing sanctions. A senior diplomat with knowledge of the matter said there would be no quick lifting of penalties on Russia as it persists with a war now in its fourth month.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko said this week the government in Kyiv is to blame for the halt to grain exports from Ukraine because it mined its ports. Ukraine denies that, says it is Moscow that is preventing ships from docking and accuses it of stealing grain stores from occupied regions.
A White House spokesperson said Russia’s actions were increasing world hunger. Before the war broke out, Ukraine was a key supplier of wheat, corn and sunflower oil to other countries, particularly poorer nations including in north Africa. Grain is now sitting in silos in Ukraine and unable to be shipped.
“Sanctions from the United States and our allies and partners target Putin’s war machine” the spokesperson said. “They do not prevent the export of Ukrainian or Russian agricultural commodities, including food and fertilizer, nor are they preventing the ordinary transactions that are necessary for these exports, such as banking or shipping.”
Nations including Estonia and Lithuania are pushing for a system where grain freighters are escorted through the Black Sea by warships from allied nations in order to get Ukrainian exports flowing again. But that requires mines around the ports to be cleared first, and for Russia to agree to allow the vessels safe passage.
Draghi and Putin discussed Russian steps to ensure shipping from Ukrainian ports, the Kremlin said in its statement. Russia’s defense ministry on Wednesday said it was opening two daily humanitarian maritime corridors from Black Sea and Azov Sea ports.
Ukraine wants guarantees that safe passage wouldn’t allow Russian forces to enter the harbor in Odesa and attack the city, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said at a press conference in Davos this week.
ajot.com · by Bloomberg News · May 26, 2022
6. He Pushed for Democracy in China for Decades. Now He’s Accused of Spying for China.
Excerpts:
Despite knowing how extensive China’s surveillance network is, Teng, the legal scholar, cautioned against rash attempts to root out spies. “As much as I hate spies, I am against making unfounded accusations because it is almost impossible for ordinary people to identify them,” Teng said. “Pointing fingers might harm the innocent and would only sow distrust in the community.”
But like many other dissidents, Teng saw the disclosure of the investigation as a positive sign that Washington is taking these surreptitious activities seriously. “It is a warning from the U.S. administration to the Chinese government that we are investigating these incidents and we will not sit on our hands and do nothing.”
He Pushed for Democracy in China for Decades. Now He’s Accused of Spying for China.
A veteran Chinese pro-democracy activist based in New York is accused of snitching on his peers for the Chinese government.
For decades Wang Shujun was known among Chinese activists in America as a dedicated champion of their cause. The unassuming dissident co-founded a group advocating democracy in China, where he rubbed shoulders with some of the best-known political exiles of his generation.
But to their shock earlier this year, the 73-year-old was accused of being an informer for Beijing.
Arrested by U.S. authorities in March, Wang was charged with espionage in a federal court in Brooklyn last week, along with four Chinese intelligence officers who allegedly acted as his handlers. A criminal complaint filed by U.S. prosecutors detailed how China’s secret police ostensibly planted a snitch in the inner circles of Chinese dissidents.
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“There have always been people posing as activists but are in fact collecting information for the Chinese government,” said Teng Biao, a human rights lawyer and legal scholar, who was repeatedly detained in China for his work and fled to the U.S. in 2014. “But the news left many activists flabbergasted, because no one ever suspected him.”
Wang first set foot in the U.S. in the 1990s as a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York, where he received a special talent visa for outstanding professors and eventually became a naturalized American citizen in 2003. Three years later, he founded the Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, in honor of the ousted Chinese leaders who favored liberal reforms.
The death of Hu, who led the Communist Party toward economic and political liberalization, in April 1989 precipitated protests in Beijing that ended in the Tiananmen Square massacre, prompting a political exodus. Wang, a social science professor at the time, was among those who left the country.
Hu Ping, a veteran democracy campaigner who served on the board of the foundation, remembered Wang as a cordial administrator who always wore a smile on his face. “He helped organize events and would ring up each member one by one and notify them before each meeting,” Hu told VICE World News. “He got along with everyone.”
But Wang’s enthusiasm might have been a facade. The FBI found that Wang had used his position and status within the Chinese diaspora communities to covertly collect information on prominent activists and human rights leaders since at least 2011. The four Chinese agents, who remain at large, directed him to snitch on individuals and groups that China considers subversive, including pro-democracy activists from Hong Kong, advocates for Taiwanese independence, and Uyghur and Tibetan activists. VICE World News could not reach Wang or his legal representatives for comment.
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Based on a filing by the FBI, Wang carried out the spying discreetly and methodically. To reduce his digital footprint and avoid detection, Wang communicated with his handlers through encrypted channels, saving their contacts in a black, physical address book, instead of his phone. He detailed private conversations he had with other dissidents and their activities in “diaries,” which were saved as drafts in an email account the Chinese agents could access from China.
In one entry in March of 2019, Wang listed possible speakers and attendees at a protest in New York that commemorated the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, highlighting a speaker who was expected to deliver an hour-long speech “without any reservations.” He also reported a possible attempt by a protester to block Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s car when he visited former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The trip was eventually canceled. U.S. authorities found more than 160 such entries at Wang’s residence.
Another prime target of Wang was said to be Albert Ho, former chairman of the Democratic Party in Hong Kong. To cozy up to the former opposition lawmaker, Wang spent more than $4,000 treating him and his family to dinner and offered to host him in New York when he visits. After a phone conversation with Ho in 2016, Wang immediately reported to an officer at the Guangdong State Security Bureau named Little Li, saying he received “candid” answers to “necessary questions.” “Great,” Little Li replied with a thumbs-up emoji, instructing Wang to write it in a “diary.”
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As the investigation found, Wang’s surveillance of Ho was only part of “a multifaceted effort” by the Chinese government to track Ho, who is now behind bars in Hong Kong for a separate case related to charges of unlawful assemblies.
Wang’s alleged double life finally came to light last year. Playing Wang at his own game, an undercover law enforcement agent visited him at his apartment in Norwich, Connecticut, posing as a messenger from one of his handlers, Boss He. Claiming Wang’s electronic communications might be monitored by the FBI, the agent offered to cover his tracks and tricked Wang into handing over his electronic devices and the passwords of the email account.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
02.23.22
“If anyone doubts how serious the Chinese government is about silencing its critics, this case should eliminate any uncertainty,” said Alan E. Kohler Jr. of the FBI’s national security branch, noting that the Chinese government’s aggressive tactics are no longer confined to its borders.
The Chinese embassy in Washington has denied the spying accusations, calling them “pure fabrication,” according to a statement to Reuters.
In hindsight, Hu, the democracy campaigner, recalled that Wang frequently shared books he wrote and published in China about the history of the Pacific War. It struck Hu as odd that Wang, a critic of Beijing, traveled frequently to China and was warmly received there, but he brushed it off at the time. Hu speculated that it was during one of these visits when Wang was co-opted by Chinese security officers.
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“The Chinese Communist Party is constantly seeking to recruit informers. Dissidents who return to the country would be approached by relevant departments and asked to cooperate and collect intelligence,” Hu said. “Some do and some don’t.”
Deng Yuwen, a political commentator who is the secretary-general of the foundation Wang co-founded, said some associates noticed something was off with Wang well before his arrest.
“His methods are too clumsy,” Deng told VICE World News. “He appeared too eager, taking pictures at occasions where photos aren’t called for. Some activists, who were more cautious, took pains to avoid events where he would be present.”
The U.S. authorities might have acted on tip-offs, he added.
As much as I hate spies, I am against making unfounded accusations because it is almost impossible for ordinary people to identify them.
Despite the revelation, most activists have long been familiar with the tactics of China’s United Front Work department, which seeks to neutralize and co-opt perceived threats to the Chinese Communist Party, and were therefore not alarmed. “Since we began the foundation, we knew there would be an infiltrator among us,” Hu said. “But the damage he can do is limited, because most of our activities and remarks are public in the first place.”
Wang is neither the first informer, nor would he be the last, Deng said. But with U.S. authorities now keeping a close eye, it will be increasingly difficult for China’s intelligence officers to operate under their nose, he added.
Yangyang Cheng
03.12.21
Despite knowing how extensive China’s surveillance network is, Teng, the legal scholar, cautioned against rash attempts to root out spies. “As much as I hate spies, I am against making unfounded accusations because it is almost impossible for ordinary people to identify them,” Teng said. “Pointing fingers might harm the innocent and would only sow distrust in the community.”
But like many other dissidents, Teng saw the disclosure of the investigation as a positive sign that Washington is taking these surreptitious activities seriously. “It is a warning from the U.S. administration to the Chinese government that we are investigating these incidents and we will not sit on our hands and do nothing.”
Vice · by Shayma Bakht · May 26, 2022
7. Russians face prospect of Soviet-style shortages as sanctions bite
Can or will there be collective action among the Russian people in response to this?
Russians face prospect of Soviet-style shortages as sanctions bite
In aviation, a lack of crucial parts could ground much of the country’s fleet and make flying a game of ‘Russian roulette’
Mary Ilyushina
May 26, 2022 at 3:00 a.m. EDT
Stung by Western sanctions, Russia is starting to devolve into a secondhand economy dependent on poor substitutes, where shortages are stirring memories of the consumer wasteland that was the Soviet Union.
While it may be able to find new purveyors for some Western-made goods and components in friendly countries such as China and India, Russia is increasingly determined to make its own — returning to policies of import substitution that yielded a vast, if globally uncompetitive, industrial complex before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Already, Moscow is facing serious challenges.
Unable to secure spare parts from Western airplane manufacturers, for instance, the Russian aviation sector is facing a crisis. About 80 percent of Russia’s commercial fleet consists of foreign-made planes, predominantly from Airbus and Boeing, both of which have stopped doing business with Moscow.
Ural Airlines, which has over 50 Airbus planes, has projected that it can safely fly them for only a few months before it will need to start “cannibalizing” from other aircraft — permanently grounding some planes to strip them for parts. The low-cost airline Pobeda, part of the state-run Aeroflot group, has already reduced its fleet from 41 to 25 planes, using its grounded aircraft for “cannibalized” parts.
The decision by Ericsson and Nokia to freeze business with Russia, meantime, has left cellular providers there suddenly scouring the world for used towers and parts to maintain and expand a network that had more or less kept pace with the United States and Europe. Even China’s Huawei appears reluctant to fill the gap, indefinitely delaying a Russian rollout of next-generation 5G technology, a service that providers had been testing before the Ukraine invasion.
“Within five years, there will be a huge gap between Russia and in the rest of the world” on cellular service, said Grigory Bakunov, an expert on Russian technology.
Following the recent exit of French automaker Renault, Russia is moving to restart production of the Moskvich — a Soviet-era make that went bankrupt two decades ago after failing to achieve foreign quality standards. Its resurrection, potentially with Chinese assistance, could either jump-start the production of domestic alternatives or see a new generation of clunkers clogging Russian roads.
Supply disruptions, however, have hit not only assembly lines that rely on advanced technology but also those using imported materials. Sanctions “on the Russian Federation have practically broken all the logistics in our country,” Russian Transport Minister Vitaly Savelyev, conceded to journalists last weekend during a visit to Russia’s Astrakhan region.
Under the hood of the Russian economy
The ruble has rebounded since its initial swoon after sanctions were imposed in the winter, and Russian government coffers are flush from a bonanza of oil revenue. European countries have taken halting steps toward their pledge to curb reliance on Russia’s oil and gas, by far its largest exports, even as Moscow boosts sales to Asia.
JPMorgan this month projected that the recession triggered by sanctions would be less sharp, if more drawn out, than had been predicted earlier. Some economic indicators, including electricity consumption, point to better-than-expected business activity.
But look under the Russian hood and a grimmer picture comes into focus.
Russia was never a standard-bearer for globalization. In a globalization ranking published last year by the KOF Swiss Economic Institute, Russia ranks 51st — behind Mauritius, Jordan and Ukraine. Following an initial wave of Western sanctions in 2014, after Moscow annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region, Russia turned inward, seeking to rely even more on domestic production.
But that shift never really worked. Russia found some success in food production, reducing reliance on imports and satisfying more of its domestic demand. But a 2021 report from the Russian Central Bank found that 65 percent of domestic companies still required imports for manufacturing.
Sanctions have now shut the door on a wide range of those crucial inputs. Though many have not been explicitly banned, their availability has vanished as foreign companies avoid the taint of doing business in Russia. For Russians, the prospect of diminished consumer choice and poorer quality harks back to a tragicomic era famously lampooned in a 1980s Wendy’s commercial that depicted a Soviet fashion show in which Russian “daywear,” “evening wear” and “swimwear” were all the same dull gray smock.
“Especially for anything more sophisticated, they will have to rely on what they can produce, and they will use designs or templates that are maybe 10 or 20 years old,” said Tomas Malmlöf, a senior scientist at the Swedish Defense Research Agency. “The technological gap [with the West] will become larger, and they will not be able to breach it.”
Those industries requiring microchips and other difficult-to-acquire advanced technology are being hit the hardest. “Automobiles, tanks, hygiene products, even print paper. This is where you need microchips, but also specialized chemicals and other imports that Russia is having problems getting,” said Anders Aslund, an economist who has long studied Russia.
In the aviation sector, even Russian-manufactured planes rely on critical Western-made components. Several Russian airlines operating Russia’s Sukhoi Superjet 100s have informed the government that they can no longer ensure proper maintenance of its French-Russian SaM146 engine. If a solution is not found quickly, the airlines have warned, most of their Russian-made fleets could be grounded by fall, the Russian business daily publication RBC reported.
Even the most optimistic analysts say it could take at least a couple of years for Russia to develop assembly lines for commercial planes made almost exclusively with local components. Other analysts project it could take far longer, if it happens at all.
“We don’t think on the commercial front it is particularly viable for them to, in the near or medium term, maintain or start the manufacture of competitive domestic civil aviation aircraft,” said a senior Biden administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal assessments.
Before the invasion, most of Russia’s commercial fleet was leased from foreign companies: planes that Moscow seized in the aftermath of sanctions. Most of the planes had been registered in Bermuda and Ireland, where local inspectors certified their airworthiness. European aviation authorities have expressed alarm that Russian airlines have limited engineering and technical support to maintain the planes and that Russian inspectors lack necessary expertise.
Some Russians are particularly concerned that Rosaviatsiya, Russia’s aviation regulator, has loosened rules on who can conduct aircraft maintenance now that Western companies are no longer able or willing to do it. The task will fall to local firms, whose capacity and training have been questioned by critics. Russia is beginning to issue its own certificates of airworthiness for planes, which had been largely determined by foreign inspectors.
“Russia’s safety record was not stellar before, maybe at the level of Indonesia,” said aviation analyst Volodymyr Bilotkach. “But now, flying a Russian carrier is turning into a game of Russian roulette.”
Shortages of American alcohol and Italian fabric
In Moscow, business remains brisk at restaurants that feared just months ago that sanctions would force them to close. It is a sign, at least in the capital, that money from oil exports, and government steps to lower interest rates and raise wages and pensions have blunted the impact. Several establishments have sought to adapt by sticking to locally sourced foods. A bigger problem, though, is booze.
Russian distributors estimated that the United States exported about 7 million liters of whisky, rum, gin, and bourbon to Russia each year. To make up the shortfall, they are turning to smaller, lesser-known brands.
“Even if all other cities in Russia are suffering and barely have bread to eat tomorrow, there will still be money in Moscow,” said a cocktail bar owner in Moscow, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized by his investors to discuss business matters. “Plus, people seem to have grown used to the situation … My main problem right now is [the lack of] American alcohol.”
Where good are still available, they are often more expensive — which is helping fuel inflation at higher rates than in the West — or of poorer quality.
“Look, I’ll be honest, if we need to sew a high-quality garment, we normally would go and buy a nice Italian fabric,” said the owner of a textile factory in the Moscow region, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of government reprisals. The company, she said, was still working with existing inventory of high-end fabric but was now weighing whether to switch to making cheaper clothing, or just shut down after stocks run out. “The quality of what’s available in Russia is just not on par,” she said.
Natalia, the owner of a Moscow logistics firm who declined to give her last name because she fears the government, described how sanctions were spurring price hikes. The ban on E.U. trucks entering Russia or Belarus means that goods traveling by land must now be offloaded at the border, then onloaded to new trucks that can travel into and across Russia. Meanwhile, flight bans had shut down a legion of air routes.
“What happens? What do you think happens? The price goes up and up and up,” she said.
Where possible, Russian manufacturers have tried to make up shortfalls by turning to Turkey and markets in Asia. But pandemic-related supply chain disruptions have hampered those efforts.
In addition, many Russian assembly lines were designed using European or other Western technologies or materials in mind. “The assembly lines are sometimes dependent on French conveyor belts or bearings from the United States and Germany,” Natalia said. “That’s not as easy to change as you think.”
Moreover, she said, essential parts for even run-of-the-mill businesses, including furniture and coffin makers, have also been affected because their foreign suppliers are reluctant or unwilling to provide export declarations certifying that those parts would not be used for military purposes.
In the best cases, that means delays; what used to ship in two weeks now takes six weeks, she said. But some parts, such as industrial fan propellers and rubber seals used by Russian furniture makers as well as Russian defense industries — were being indefinitely held up.
“Production won’t stop for shoes, clothing, sausages, those kinds of things, but we will go back to what Russia was like in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, where the quality is worse and the price is higher, when you can actually get the product,” she said.
“I remember how, if you wanted a kitchen, you would have to go to the shop and get a number and stay in a queue,” she continued. “But not for hours or days. You’d sometimes wait half a year for a kitchen. I’m afraid those days are coming back.”
8. U.S. bill would bar Google, Apple from hosting apps that accept China's digital yuan
Excerpt:
While stopping potential national security threats related to China is a rare point of bipartisan agreement in the deeply divided U.S. Congress, prospects for the bill's passage ahead of midterm elections are uncertain.
U.S. bill would bar Google, Apple from hosting apps that accept China's digital yuan
WASHINGTON, May 26 (Reuters) - Republican senators want to bar U.S. app stores including Apple and Google from hosting apps that allow payments to be made with China's digital currency, amid fears the payment system could allow Beijing to spy on Americans.
The bill, unveiled Thursday and first reported by Reuters, states that companies that own or control app stores "shall not carry or support any app in [their] app store(s) within the United States that supports or enables transactions in e-CNY." It is sponsored by Senators Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio and Mike Braun.
According to Cotton's office, digital yuan could provide the Chinese government with "real-time visibility into all transactions on the network, posing privacy and security concerns for American persons who join this network."
The Center for a New American Security, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, said in a January 2021 report that China's digital currency and electronic payments system was "likely to be a boon for CCP surveillance in the economy and for government interference in the lives of Chinese citizens," noting that "transactions will contain precise data about users and their financial activity."
The move comes after WeChat, a messaging and payment application owned by China's Tencent with over 1.2 billion users, announced it would begin supporting the currency earlier this year. Alipay, the hugely popular payments app owned by Jack Ma's Ant Group, also accepts the digital currency. Both apps are available in the Apple and Google App stores.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington called the legislation "another example of the United States wantonly bullying foreign companies by abusing state power on the untenable ground of national security."
While stopping potential national security threats related to China is a rare point of bipartisan agreement in the deeply divided U.S. Congress, prospects for the bill's passage ahead of midterm elections are uncertain.
Reporting by Alexandra Alper Editing by Nick Zieminski and Leslie Adler
9.UN Corrects China on Human Rights Chief’s Actual Words to Xi
UN Corrects China on Human Rights Chief’s Actual Words to Xi
(Bloomberg) -- The United Nations issued a “clarification” of its human rights chief’s remarks during a call with President Xi Jinping, in an apparent suggestion Chinese state media mischaracterized her comments.
Most Read from Bloomberg
“In response to widely reported remarks attributed to High Commissioner Bachelet, please find here a link to her actual opening remarks at her meeting with the President of China,” a spokesperson for the office of Michelle Bachelet said in an emailed statement late Wednesday.
Shortly after the video call held earlier that day, state broadcaster China Central Television issued a readout saying Bachelet had told Xi that she admired the “efforts and achievement China has made in the areas of poverty elimination, human rights protection.”
The UN transcript, in contrast, said Bachelet stressed in her opening remarks that human rights must be at the core of “development, peace and security,” and that China had a crucial role to play within multilateral institutions on issues such as inequality. The excerpt contained nothing that could be construed as praising China’s human rights achievements.
The UN didn’t reply to a request for more information about the apparent discrepancy between the two sides’ accounts. When asked about the discrepancy Thursday at a regular press briefing in Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin referred reporters to his ministry’s statement on the call, which mirrored CCTV’s readout.
READ: Blacklists, Trade and More U.S.-China Flashpoints: QuickTake
Bachelet’s trip has been criticized for failing to secure guarantees she would have unfettered access to the remote Xinjiang region, where the US accuses China of genocide against the mostly Muslim Uyghur people. US Ambassador Nicholas Burns told Bachelet he had “profound concerns” about attempts by Beijing to manipulate the trip, according to multiple people on a Monday call who asked for anonymity as they weren’t authorized to speak.
Her video meeting with Xi came a day after tens of thousands of apparently hacked files provided new evidence of the alleged abuse of Uyghurs in mass detention camps in Xinjiang.
Hacked Data Shows Ethnic Abuse in China’s Xinjiang Camps
Beijing claims the facilities are vocational training centers to counter religious extremism and bring prosperity to the region, and vehemently denies accusations of genocide, a major source of tension between the world’s two largest economies.
(Updates with reaction from Chinese Foreign Ministry.)
Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek
©2022 Bloomberg L.P.
10. Jordan Has an Iran Problem. Can Israel and Saudi Arabia Unite to Combat It?
Excerpts:
Saudi Arabia and Israel can take things a step further, too. Building upon the Red Sea talks, they can now enter into the most important normalization agreement yet. Such an agreement would be viewed as an unparalleled diplomatic achievement in the region, given Saudi Arabia’s prominent role in the Arab world.
For a White House that still seeks to differentiate itself from the previous administration, this is the moment they have been waiting for. And given Saudi Arabia’s leadership role in the Arab and Muslim worlds, it’s not difficult to imagine a domino effect, with other countries looking to follow suit.
Does the road to regional peace run through Jordan? It’s time for President Biden to find out.
Jordan Has an Iran Problem. Can Israel and Saudi Arabia Unite to Combat It?
The situation also presents an opportunity for the Biden administration.
May 27
King Abdullah II meets United States President Joe Biden at the White House in Washington, United States on May 13, 2022. (Photograph by Royal Hashemite Court/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.)
In a conversation last week with former U.S. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, Jordan’s King Abdullah II expressed concerns that Iranian forces in Syria could soon destabilize his country. Russia may soon redeploy assets and forces from Syria to their mired war effort in Ukraine, and Iran seeks to fill the void.
The Jordanian monarch asserted, “That vacuum [left by the Russians] will be filled by the Iranians and their proxies. So unfortunately, we are looking at maybe an escalation of problems on our borders."
But challenges can also yield opportunity. In this case, Jordan’s security woes can help to cement an emerging alliance between Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. These two unlikely partners both view Iran as a mortal enemy that threatens the broader Middle East. They both share borders with Jordan. And they both view Jordanian stability as critical to their national security.
Saudi Arabia is already mulling a move in this direction, particularly after the signing of the Abraham Accords in September 2020. When its neighbors United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel, Saudi Arabia seemed next in line. However, the leadership in Riyadh moves more slowly and deliberately than its Gulf partners.
A Saudi-Israeli agreement was widely expected in Donald Trump’s second term. But that second term was not to be.
When the Biden administration came in, the winds shifted significantly. For months, the White House refused to acknowledge the Trump administration’s normalization achievements (the State Department spokesman wouldn’t utter the words “Abraham Accords”). New pacts were clearly not a priority.
That may be changing now, with reports that the Biden administration is helping to broker the transfer of two Egyptian islands in the Red Sea (Tiran and Sanafir) to Saudi Arabia. The deal requires Israeli buy-in, pursuant to the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement of 1979. The transaction could amount to a first step toward normalization.
For Saudi Arabia, this is all welcome change. On the campaign trail, Joe Biden not only ignored the possibility of brokering a normalization agreement—he openly vowed to blackball the Saudis in Washington. Once sworn in, Biden followed up to the delight of a handful of anti-Saudi lawmakers, releasing known information about the Saudi killing of journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi. After that, the White House pulled support for the Saudi war in Yemen, and it removed the Houthi terrorist group from the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list, even as the Houthis were firing rockets at Saudi civilian and oil infrastructure.
Things appeared to hit rock bottom before the war in Ukraine. The resulting energy crisis, however, prompted the Biden administration to rekindle ties with the government sitting atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves. According to Saudi officials, the relationship is getting back on track.
Meanwhile, Israel continues to demonstrate its value to Saudi Arabia as an ally. In recent years, the Israelis have been slugging it out with the Iranians in Syria, in cyberspace, on the high seas, and beyond. It’s an asymmetric campaign that the Israelis call “the war between wars.” It has proved two things to the Arab states. First, Israel is not afraid to battle Riyadh’s mortal enemy. Second, the Islamic Republic is not as strong as many believed.
All eyes are now on Syria, where Israel has been stepping up strikes on Iranian assets. The tempo is expected to increase if and when Russian redeploys forces and assets to Ukraine. Freedom of operation could yield new opportunities, even as Iran seeks to expand operations in the war-torn territory.
Part of Iran’s expansion effort, as the Jordanian monarch noted, includes the destabilization of Jordan from the north, where drug smugglers are already wreaking havoc. Jordan also faces a threat from the south, with Iranian assets reportedly operating in the Red Sea. This all amounts to a direct threat to both Saudi Arabia and Israel. Both view the Hashemite Kingdom as a valuable asset. Stability on their respective borders is something both countries will protect at great cost.
Building on the momentum of the Red Sea islands negotiations, the White House has an opportunity to push the two sides in the right direction. After Abdullah’s recent visit to Washington, the Biden administration has renewed its commitment to Jordanian security. Enlisting the help of Riyadh and Jerusalem, separately and together, is the next logical step.
Admittedly, both Saudi Arabia and Israel remain wary of Biden’s declared intent to re-enter the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran. Talks have stalled in Vienna over the regime’s demands to remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the U.S. terrorism list. Biden has refused, which comes as a relief to the Israelis and Saudis. But the White House has not given up yet on a deal. Should an accord be reached, the Israelis and Saudis both worry that the accompanying sanctions relief would yield hundreds of billions of dollars to the regime in Tehran. That windfall would only help Iran destabilize Jordan, not to mention other countries around the region.
This is a message that Riyadh and Jerusalem can now convey to Washington. They can also offer the Biden administration an alternative. They can offer the White House an opportunity to broker a new defense pact, leveraging their participation in CENTCOM. Israel was recently added to this strategic region, and this has already afforded the Saudis and Israelis opportunities to work together.
Saudi Arabia and Israel can take things a step further, too. Building upon the Red Sea talks, they can now enter into the most important normalization agreement yet. Such an agreement would be viewed as an unparalleled diplomatic achievement in the region, given Saudi Arabia’s prominent role in the Arab world.
For a White House that still seeks to differentiate itself from the previous administration, this is the moment they have been waiting for. And given Saudi Arabia’s leadership role in the Arab and Muslim worlds, it’s not difficult to imagine a domino effect, with other countries looking to follow suit.
Does the road to regional peace run through Jordan? It’s time for President Biden to find out.
Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the United States Department of the Treasury, is senior vice president for the nonpartisan Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.
11. China’s Lockdowns Prompt a Rethinking of Life Plans Among the Young
I wonder what will be the long term impact on Chinese society.
China’s Lockdowns Prompt a Rethinking of Life Plans Among the Young
Restrictions feed a sense of insecurity among many middle-class Chinese; ‘We are the last generation’
May 29, 2022 7:00 am ET
For many Chinese who saw Shanghai as a magical place to pursue their dreams, the city’s two-month-long Covid-19 lockdown has been a wake-up call.
It wasn’t just the isolation and living under the threat of being hauled to a quarantine center. Many describe how a forced switch to survival mode created a deep sense of insecurity. Now, some are outlining drastically altered life plans.
Earlier this year, Sandra Shen, a 27-year-old who teaches piano in her apartment, was discussing with her husband, also from Shanghai, whether they would soon have children. She was hesitating. Now, she has decided: It’s a firm no.
It wasn’t any one thing, but a combination of factors that led to her decision. First came authorities’ decision to lock down the whole city—after officials signaled no such move would be necessary. Then came the difficulty in securing online grocery delivery and the forced entry by officials into apartments whose residents had been taken to quarantine centers. Perhaps the last straw for Ms. Shen, who has two dogs, was video footage of a Corgi being beaten to death by a community worker after the owner was taken to quarantine.
“It’s enough that our generation is being bullied,” she said. Her new plan is to travel and retire early, maybe as young as 40.
Stringent restrictions in Shanghai forced many residents, who reported difficulty obtaining groceries or healthcare, into survival mode.
PHOTO: ALY SONG/REUTERS
Versions of Shanghai’s lockdown are playing out across the country, adding to anxiety among many younger Chinese over limited upward mobility. Many middle-class citizens who have believed if they work hard and obey the rules they can expect a brighter future now are coming to the realization that the “China Dream” laid out by President Xi Jinping might not include them,
People around the world have made big life changes during the pandemic, such as moving away from big cities or resigning from jobs that felt too stressful. In China, the responses have been influenced by authorities’ zero-tolerance approach to even small outbreaks, which has meant rolling lockdowns, mass testing and quarantines in centralized facilities. For some, that has led to a form of awakening to how easily their lives can be upended to fit government dictates, dissipating their desire to start families, buy apartments or start businesses.
There was already a catchphrase to describe young people’s disenchantment: “lying flat”—a rejection of long working hours and traditional expectations of marriage and children within certain age milestones. A new expression for deeper despair is now gaining ground: “let it rot.”
Even small outbreaks of Covid-19 could lead to quarantines in centralized facilities under China’s zero-tolerance approach.
PHOTO: ALEX PLAVEVSKI/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK
The pessimism and frustration with draconian Covid measures among especially younger Chinese is crystallized in a now-censored video clip showing a conversation between a young man in Shanghai and authorities who were trying to take him to a quarantine center. Responding to pandemic-control workers’ warning that if he didn’t obey, the consequence could carry over into the next three generations of his family, the man said matter-of-factly: “We are the last generation.”
A 36-year-old theater manager in Shanghai who has been single for years says she is now completely scrapping any thoughts about getting married.
The woman, who agreed to be identified only by her last name, Yuan, moved to Shanghai in late 2020 from Beijing, where the performance company she worked for was battered by strict Covid controls. She was attracted by Shanghai’s success in keeping cases low while avoiding major disruptions to businesses and people’s lives, and hoped to eventually start her own theater company.
In March, when cases of the Omicron variant of the virus started popping up, she assumed Shanghai authorities would have the outbreak under control within a week or two.
The severity of the lockdown was a shock, Ms. Yuan said. In early April, she was sending food every day to neighbors who had failed to stock up. After seeing even the most affluent residents in her high-end apartment compound begging for food, she said she realized that in today’s China, even basic essentials can’t be guaranteed.
She now hopes to save a large sum of money to either put in a low-risk investment product or open a grocery store in her hometown in Heilongjiang province. “I’m rethinking my career and family plans. I’m very cautious, very pessimistic,” she said.
Traffic remained mostly absent from Shanghai’s normally busy streets last week, nearly two months into a lockdown.
PHOTO: QILAI SHEN/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Even before the pandemic, Chinese authorities were worried about declining births and a drop in marriage rates. The Communist Party has over the past years put emphasis on “family values.” Mr. Xi has called families the cells of society that underpin the prosperity of the nation.
Shanghai already has one of the lowest birthrates in the country, with the total number of children a woman in the city has over her lifetime at 0.7 in 2021. There were more deaths than births in Shanghai last year.
Covid-related confinement has been linked to a rise in depression and mental-health issues around the world. In early 2020, when Covid-19 first erupted in Wuhan in central China, months of isolation and anxiety took a toll on the mental health of residents, leading to an increase in suicides.
This spring, around the time when Shanghai’s 25 million residents started grappling with Covid restrictions, including lockdown measures, the number of searches on Chinese search engine Baidu Inc. for “psychological counseling” saw a spike.
A Beijing-based therapist, who volunteered her counseling services during both the 2020 lockdown in Wuhan and the one in Shanghai this year, said she saw a surge of calls for help through free hotlines in both cities as people hunkered down at home. Meanwhile, her paying clients have struggled to keep up with regular sessions. Some of them have lost their jobs and can’t pay for sessions, while others are locked down with their parents or young children and don’t have any privacy, she said.
Covid-related confinement has been linked to a rise in depression and mental-health issues world-wide.
PHOTO: ALY SONG/REUTERS
Amelie Hu, a 44-year-old in-house lawyer at an American company in Shanghai who has been under orders to stay home since March 10, said she has been devouring sweets to cope with anxiety and depression, made worse by reading about other residents who couldn’t get prompt medical care due to the lockdown.
Ms. Hu said after she returned to Shanghai from New York in 2013, she had thought she would live in her hometown for life. Married to an American citizen, she hadn’t considered pursuing U.S. permanent residency until the lockdown. “If the government could lock us in for three months, I don’t know what can happen in the future,” she said. While she is critical of American politics, a green card is now on her agenda. “I just need an option,” she said.
George Chen, a salesman at a technology company in Beijing, said that for months he hasn’t been able to travel much for work due to Covid-19 restrictions. Failing to meet his sales targets, he has lost his bonuses. Most of his basic monthly salary of about 3,000 yuan, equivalent to about $445, goes to pay rent for an apartment he shares with others. Mr. Chen, in his late 20s and a native of Hebei province, said he now has shelved his plan of trying to buy an apartment and finding a girlfriend.
“Let’s be realistic. Do I look very marketable now?” he said. His short-term plan is to move back in with his parents in Hebei and then figure out what’s next.
Late one night recently, he received an automated phone call from Beijing authorities saying he had been in proximity to someone with a confirmed Covid infection, which means he can’t go to public places until the health code on his phone turns green. That could involve two PCR tests and several days’ wait.
Although he knew it was an automated message, he said, he couldn’t help yelling at his phone.
12. China’s BRI Is Aggravating Ethnic Tensions in the Global South
Excerpt:
In all these examples, the BRI has exacerbated existing ethnic cleavages in host countries, thanks to China’s preference for dealing exclusively with the those who hold positions of power. Analysis of the BRI should go beyond the “debt trap,” geopolitics, or economic spillovers, but also examine the social fissures that emerge from the massive inflows of Chinese capital in host countries.
China’s BRI Is Aggravating Ethnic Tensions in the Global South
Pakistan’s CPEC is a case study in Chinese investment further disenfranchising ethnic minority groups – in this case, the Baloch.
By Gulalai Ismail and Alvin Camba
May 29, 2022
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While Western analysts see the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as the centerpiece of China’s political and economic power projection abroad, China promotes it as a gamechanger for the economic development of the Global South. Departing from both perspectives, we illustrate that China’s institutional approach to largely work with regimes in power, which often comprise the majority ethnic group, unintentionally aggravates ethnic tensions in the host country.
China and Pakistan have boasted about their bilateral relations as “rock-solid and unbreakable.” Indeed, the military establishment controls the foreign policy of Pakistan, so the changing civilian governments do not have a major impact on relations with China. However, due to the ineptness of Imran Khan’s regime in Pakistan, disagreement on the roadmap between two countries, and political fragility, CPEC has faced significant slowdowns in the past four years.
But CPEC also faces a more immediate threat, in the literal sense. On April 26, three Chinese teachers were killed in a suicide attack near the Confucius Institute of the University of Karachi. The attack was claimed by a separatist group, the Baloch Liberation Army. It was the first suicide attack by a Baloch woman.
This tragic incident was one of many attacks targeting Chinese workers by Baloch insurgent groups since the inception of CPEC. Balochistan shares a disproportionate burden of CPEC projects, providing 62 percent of the land, including the Gwadar coastline, but it receives the least benefits from the endeavor. Out of the $62 billion projects, Balochistan gets only 4.5 percent of the budget. In contrast, the comparatively developed eastern rim of the country, the provinces of Sindh and Punjab, get the most lucrative highways and projects through CPEC.
The unjust distribution of burdens and benefits is fueling social unrest among the people of Balochistan. They have long been campaigning against the exploitative policies of the federal government, which they say benefit other provinces at the cost of Balochistan’s population.
For example, as Rafiullah Khan wrote for The Express Tribune, “Out of the $21 billion worth of ‘priority energy projects,’ there is only one project in K-P [Khyber Pakhtunkhwa] (worth $1.8 billion) and two in Balochistan (worth $1.3 billion).” Political parties from Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa assert that while their resources are being used, the benefits accrued go mainly to the other two provinces from this multi-billion-dollar project.
In 2018, the Balochistan Assembly passed a resolution urging the federal government to constitute a national commission to settle the “injudicious distribution of projects and funds under the CPEC.” Still, it didn’t change the mood of the federal government.
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Pakistan leased Gwadar port to a Chinese state-owned company for 40 years, promising that Gwadar port city would become the Singapore of Pakistan. But the people of Balochistan are blaming the Chinese for food, water, and electricity scarcity. In recent months, thousands of people participated in protests against the water and electricity shortages amid the detention of Chinese illegal fishing trawlers in nearby waters, perceived as a threat to the livelihoods of locals.
The opaque terms of CPEC investments and the secrecy around its contracts, which are typical of Chinese financial practices, exclude the provincial lawmakers of Balochistan from decision-making and prevent them from holding the federal government accountable. These lawmakers have repeatedly complained of being excluded from the decision-making process regarding CPEC by the federal government. It is deepening the existing mistrust between the federal government and Balochistan’s provincial government.
Pakistan accepted China’s investment in the hopes that it would bring economic prosperity. Balochistan’s inequitable share in this project and the resulting worsening insurgency in Balochistan are major roadblocks to this goal. Baloch nationalists view the project with suspicion; they fear a higher volume of outsiders will change the demographics, making them a minority in their own province. Baloch insurgent groups see CPEC as an imperialist endeavor and want to oust the Chinese investors. Terrorist groups are increasing attacks on CPEC’s Chinese workers to pressure them into leaving Balochistan. CPEC has thus further aggravated the ethnic grievances and led to increased tensions between the federal and provincial government.
The Council of Common Interests, a constitutional body in Pakistan that addresses inter-provincial grievances, can facilitate an inclusive political solution around the equitable distribution of the benefits and burdens of CPEC, acceptable to all stakeholders. A democratic solution for addressing the grievances of the people of Balochistan would require a reduction in the military’s presence in the province and the establishment of an U.N.-monitored truth commission to investigate the grave human rights abuses by state authorities.
CPEC is illustrative of how ethnic tensions among the host country population can easily erupt when BRI projects bring in massive amounts of capital. The BRI’s Chico River Pump Irrigation Project (CRPIP), which is in Kalinga province in the Philippines, illustrates the same issues. Kalinga province is located in the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR), which encompasses the lands of multiple Indigenous groups across the country. The Kalinga group makes up the majority of the population in the province that bears its name.
As one of the authors wrote in a previous analysis: “The Chico River connects Mountain province, another provincial district within the CAR, to Cagayan province… The CRPIP is designed to provide water to 7,530 hectares of agricultural land in the municipalities of Tuao and Piat, located in Cagayan province, and another 1,170 hectares in the municipality of Pinukpuk in Kalinga province.”
Water from the Chico Pump will “benefit the lowland Filipino landlords and the Filipino farm holders,” according to a political broker in the Philippines. The resources of the Kalingas, one of the most oppressed minorities in the Philippines, will be literally siphoned off to support the interests of the people in power both locally and in Manila instead.
Another case is the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP), a 5,000-hectare fully integrated smelting and manufacturing park in the Central Sulawesi regency. The Tsingshan Holding Group Co., Ltd., the Chinese investor, and Bintang Delapan group, the Indonesian host country partner, comprised the investors of IMIP. IMIP has exploited the ethnic cleavages among its Indonesian work force. For instance, the Torajas, a Southern Sulawesi ethnic group, have been brought in as workers in the smelters. IMIP hired other ethnics groups that do not get along with the Torajas in the adjacent work unit, increasing the hurdle for Indonesian workers to collectively mobilize against IMIP.
In all these examples, the BRI has exacerbated existing ethnic cleavages in host countries, thanks to China’s preference for dealing exclusively with the those who hold positions of power. Analysis of the BRI should go beyond the “debt trap,” geopolitics, or economic spillovers, but also examine the social fissures that emerge from the massive inflows of Chinese capital in host countries.
GUEST AUTHOR
Gulalai Ismail
Gulalai Ismail is an award-winning Pakistani human rights activist, founder of Aware Girls, and a Sie Fellow at Josef Korbel School of International Studies.
GUEST AUTHOR
Alvin Camba
Alvin Camba is assistant professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and a faculty affiliate at the Climate Policy Lab at Tufts University. Camba has conducted in-depth research on Chinese capital in Southeast Asia.
13. Taiwan: From strategic ambiguity to strategic incoherence
Excerpts:
In a large-scale Chinese attack on Taiwan, the US would face considerable challenges to live up to any defense commitment. In principle, the US could forward deploy military resources on a larger scale, perhaps even on the territory of Taiwan itself.
But deploying to Taiwan would itself escalate tensions with China to an unprecedented degree. It would also further complicate US-China strategy which is also dealing with major international issues which require a measure of cooperation, including on trade, climate change, managing North Korea and political crises in other regions.
Therefore it is likely that strategic ambiguity will remain US policy on the security of Taiwan for the foreseeable future, even if the US feels it necessary to highlight its option of coming to Taiwan’s defense.
Taiwan: From strategic ambiguity to strategic incoherence
Biden says the US would defend Taiwan militarily against a Chinese invasion but its not clear the US actually could
MAY 29, 2022
China is becoming “more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad”, according to the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken. Blinken made a major statement on US foreign policy on May 26 at George Washington University.
It received a great deal of attention, internationally – not least because reporters and foreign policy analysts wanted to know whether Blinken would clarify remarks made earlier in the week by the president, Joe Biden, to the effect that the US would take military action to defend Taiwan if China launched an invasion.
This appeared to be a shift away from the US policy of “strategic ambiguity”, by which the US is committed to supplying Taipei with weapons systems and training to defend itself, but leaves open whether it would intervene militarily.
Biden’s remarks suggested a substantial change of emphasis and drew a sharp response from Beijing, which said the US was “using the ‘Taiwan card’ to contain China, and will itself get burned.” His statements prompted some commentators to describe US policy has moved from strategic ambiguity to strategic incoherence.
Blinken appeared to row back slightly on Biden’s position. He acknowledged that Washington had a limited ability to counter China directly, but said: “We will shape the strategic environment around Beijing to advance our vision for an open and inclusive international system.”
Shifting priorities
It is important to consider Biden’s remarks in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Until recently, the main areas of competition between the US, China and Russia had been perceived to be political and economic.
The concept of a large-scale war of aggression involving a nuclear power against a weaker neighbor had been considered unlikely. But Ukraine has raised disturbing parallels with security risks in east Asia.
Just as the Russian government views Ukraine as part of its own territory without a right to independence, China sees Taiwan as part of its territory. Russia’s actions in Europe raised fears that the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, might seriously consider a similar invasion of Taiwan.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has spoken frequently about ‘reunifying’ Taiwan with the mainland. Photo: Twitter
In this context, the Biden administration might decide it is necessary to deter Beijing by stating more clearly that the US would use its military to defend Taiwan in response.
Military analysts are divided on what lessons China might draw from Russia’s attempt to invade Ukraine. Russian military setbacks might remind China how problematic and costly such an attempt to invade of Taiwan would be.
But China may also be carefully analyzing Russian military operations in order to absorb the lessons of what problems to avoid.
One China?
After the US established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China in January 1979, the US Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), passed the same year, defined relations between the US government and “the people of Taiwan.”
Washington subsequently drew up a list of “Six Assurances” in 1982, by which the US pledged not to recognize Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan and stated its intention to continue to supply Taiwan with arms without reference to China.
But the foundation of US policy has been the “one China” policy, reaffirmed by the Trump administration in 2017 and again by Biden in February 2021. Under the one China policy, the US recognizes the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the sole legal government of China. but only acknowledges the Chinese position that Taiwan is part of China.
The Taiwan Travel Act of 2018 elevated US-Taiwan relations to a more formal basis and the following year a consular agreement was concluded. In January 2021, all restrictions on governmental relations with Taiwan were removed, meaning that US cabinet officers could directly engage with their counterparts.
But defense relations continued to be based on the provision of advanced military equipment and the principle of strategic ambiguity.
In recent years, China has sharpened its rhetoric and military pressure on Taiwan, insisting that “the party has chosen to make reunification with Taiwan a symbol of the strength and legitimacy of CPP rule.” But that does not mean that an attack on Taiwan is planned in the foreseeable future.
Strategic dilemma
Washington now faces a serious dilemma. It is concerned that strategic ambiguity may no longer be sufficient to deter China from invading Taiwan, particularly in the face of China’s increasingly assertive talk of “resolving” the Taiwan issue through reunification. This could imply that the US needs to clarify and strengthen its security commitments.
But this would require more concrete steps to demonstrate it could effectively defend Taiwan – and China’s military buildup has made this much more problematic than it was 30 years ago. There are only two US bases within a 500-mile radius of Taiwan that would allow fighter aircraft to operate without refueling.
Both are vulnerable to China’s increasingly sophisticated arsenal of land-based conventional ballistic missiles. The US might have to operate from its aircraft carriers, which are also becoming increasingly vulnerable to attacks from the Chinese mainland.
Military helicopters carrying large Taiwan flags do flyby rehearsals on October 5 ahead of National Day celebrations amid escalating tensions between Taipei and Beijing. Photo: AFP / Ceng Shou Yi / NurPhoto
In a large-scale Chinese attack on Taiwan, the US would face considerable challenges to live up to any defense commitment. In principle, the US could forward deploy military resources on a larger scale, perhaps even on the territory of Taiwan itself.
But deploying to Taiwan would itself escalate tensions with China to an unprecedented degree. It would also further complicate US-China strategy which is also dealing with major international issues which require a measure of cooperation, including on trade, climate change, managing North Korea and political crises in other regions.
Therefore it is likely that strategic ambiguity will remain US policy on the security of Taiwan for the foreseeable future, even if the US feels it necessary to highlight its option of coming to Taiwan’s defense.
14. The Constitutional Case Against Defending Taiwan
An interesting argument:
It was, apparently, a British historian who once said about the British Constitution, “I know it works in practice, but does it work in theory?” I sometimes wonder if the opposite statement may be true of the U.S. Constitution: “I know it works in theory, but does it work in practice?”
In theory:
- The Constitution does not explicitly give the President the authority to use military force against China to defend Taiwan;
- The War Powers Resolution only allows the President to respond to Chinese aggression against Taiwan if it includes an attack on U.S. military forces, and
- The Taiwan Relations Act explicitly sates what the President is supposed to do in the case of such an attack, which does not include the immediate use of military force.
In practice, the President will do whatever he/she wants to do, but if that includes using military force on their own authority to defend Taiwan, it means assuming expansive powers not enumerated in the Constitution and violating two specific Federal laws. I’m pretty sure the Founding Father’s didn’t have that in mind…
The Constitutional Case Against Defending Taiwan
Well, he’s done it again. For the third time, President Biden has unmistakably said that the United States would employ military force in the defense of Taiwan if China were to try and seize that island by force.[i] And for the third time, Administration officials have had to “walk back” his comments and try to ensure the world that the policy of “strategic ambiguity” with regards to Taiwan remains in place. And, again, much ink has been spilt discussing the issue.[ii]
It is fair to assume that what the President meant was that he believes the U.S. should use military force to prevent China from seizing Taiwan by force. But what exactly does the Constitution have to say about this use of military power by the U.S.?
The first point, of course, is to recognize that practically all Presidents since George Washington have interpreted Article II Section 2 of the Constitution as giving them the authority to use the military to safeguard U.S. interests at their discretion alone.[iii] This would seem to be a highly expansive interpretation of the intent of the Constitution; a more conservative interpretation would be that Congress would decide who to go to war with, and the President, a civilian elected by the people, would direct the armed forces in that war.[iv] But that would seem to be too limiting in the case of an immediate emergency – surely the U.S. should have some mechanism to respond militarily to an immediate threat?
As the footnote points out (you do read the footnotes, don’t you?), after the experience of the Vietnam “War” (in quotes, because war was never declared, which is the whole point), Congress passed the War Powers Resolution (or Act), to try and rein in Presidential use of military forces to conduct foreign combat operations.[v] Contained within the Resolution are the three cases in which Congress interprets the Constitution as allowing the President to intro:
“The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities … are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”
The third case is the one at issue. Congress recognized that the immediacy of some crisis may not provide the President time to go to Congress to seek authorization of military force, through one of either the first two cases. Fair enough. But in the third case, the law directs the President to seek Congressional approval for the continued use of military force.
(b) Within sixty calendar days … the President shall terminate any use of United States Armed Forces … unless the Congress (1) has declared war or has enacted a specific authorization for such use of United States Armed Forces, (2) has extended by law such sixty-day period, or (3) is physically unable to meet as a result of an armed attack upon the United States.
Frankly, it’s hard to imagine a case where the U.S., it’s territories or possessions, or its military is attacked and Congress would not approve continued military action to rectify the situation – but there it is.
Since the passing of the War Powers Resolution, no President, Democrat or Republican, has recognized the limitations it places on their authority to use military force. But in the case of an attack on Taiwan by China, the Taiwan Relations Act specifically states exactly what the President is supposed to do in response to an attack by China on Taiwan:[vi]
The President is directed to inform the Congress promptly of any threat to the security or the social or economic system of the people on Taiwan and any danger to the interests of the United States arising therefrom. The President and the Congress shall determine, in accordance with constitutional processes, appropriate action by the United States in response to any such danger.
It was, apparently, a British historian who once said about the British Constitution, “I know it works in practice, but does it work in theory?” I sometimes wonder if the opposite statement may be true of the U.S. Constitution: “I know it works in theory, but does it work in practice?”
In theory:
- The Constitution does not explicitly give the President the authority to use military force against China to defend Taiwan;
- The War Powers Resolution only allows the President to respond to Chinese aggression against Taiwan if it includes an attack on U.S. military forces, and
- The Taiwan Relations Act explicitly sates what the President is supposed to do in the case of such an attack, which does not include the immediate use of military force.
In practice, the President will do whatever he/she wants to do, but if that includes using military force on their own authority to defend Taiwan, it means assuming expansive powers not enumerated in the Constitution and violating two specific Federal laws. I’m pretty sure the Founding Father’s didn’t have that in mind…
[iv] Pick your least favorite President and say out loud three times, “I trust President ___________ ‘s judgement in taking the United States to war against any opponent, for any reason.” Closing your eyes and tapping your heels together is optional…
15. Why I Disagree With Henry Kissinger by George Friedman
Excerpts:
It is good to overestimate your enemy so that you are prepared for the worst. But excessive miscalculation will blind you to opportunities and make you beholden to moves by the other side. I think that for Kissinger the failure of the British and French to understand how powerful Germany was drove him to fear repeating their mistakes. This informs his positions on ceding territory to Russia and China. The weaker party must be the cleverer one and approach the obvious with utter caution. Global stability is at stake. In my view, Russia and China are declining powers, while the U.S. is the surging one. This is where you nail the door shut on your adversary.
I will confess, of course, that in the 1970s, as I rose to awareness, my fears of the Russians were as intense as anyone. But over time, as I studied their military and spoke to expatriates, I came to see them differently. That was a long time ago, and I have little right to criticize a man I admire. But thinking him wrong is not the same as being reckless. He played the game he thought he had to. He still is.
Why I Disagree With Henry Kissinger - Geopolitical Futures
Why I Disagree With Henry Kissinger
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
May 27, 2022
3757
Henry Kissinger recently spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he made two significant statements. One was that Ukraine must be prepared to cede some territory to Russia in order to reach a peace treaty, and in doing so allow Russian President Vladimir Putin to hold on to his position, which Kissinger regards as essential. He also said that Taiwan should not be allowed to become a major issue between the U.S. and China, implying that the U.S. was making it an issue, and by my inference that the Chinese seizure of Taiwan should not trigger a U.S. response.
In both cases, Kissinger believes it is in Washington’s interest to accommodate its adversary. He’s arguing that America’s utmost concern should be global stability, which requires accommodating the interests of nations that want to shift the regional balance of power. In other words, the stability of the former Soviet Union, including the political survival of Putin, will stabilize the region and increase global stability. Likewise, ceding Taiwan to China would stabilize the Western Pacific and increase global stability.
Kissinger held this view when he was advising presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. During the Vietnam War, the goal was not to win the war – he correctly regarded it as unwinnable – but to avoid a confrontation with China and the Soviet Union. In order to do that, he retained U.S. forces in Vietnam in an unwinnable war to give Moscow and Beijing a sense of American inflexibility, even as he carried out intense bombing in the north to demonstrate America’s willingness to wage aggressive warfare. The ultimate goal was to force the North Vietnamese and its allies to reach an agreement that would allow the U.S. to withdraw from Vietnam in due course and thereby stabilize relations with the Soviet Union. He wanted to show the U.S.’ mettle while maintaining a degree of flexibility. In this convoluted fashion, the war was extended, even lost, but the fundamental goal of a detente with Russia was achieved.
Likewise, his mission to China in the early 1970s had a strategic payoff. The Soviets and the Chinese had fought battles along the Ussuri River. The Russians were considering strikes on China’s nuclear facility at Lop Nor, and China was challenging Russia for leadership of the communist world. Kissinger approached the Chinese with the offer of an understanding between the U.S. and China. The strategic concern of the United States was a Soviet attack on Western Europe. Aligning with China created the possibility of a two-front war. Kissinger had no interest in a war, but the threat would reduce that danger by creating an unacceptable risk for Russia, which paradoxically helped the U.S. reach an understanding on coexistence, reduced the risk of war and stabilized the global system. It also laid the groundwork for the emergence of contemporary China.
Kissinger’s thinking was complex, sometimes seemingly heading away from his ultimate goals, but he focused on a single issue: the threat of the Soviet Union, and thus the threat to the global order. The Soviets threatened Europe, they threatened China, they fished in the Caribbean Sea, and they were a nuclear power. He was prepared to pay any price for that because he saw the Soviets alone as a threat to the global system.
The Soviets postured as though they were willing to risk up to and including nuclear war. In my opinion, they used this posture as a cape to goad the bull into spending energy on matters the Soviets were not interested in. For all his subtlety, Kissinger had a very simple end: avoid direct war with the Soviets and allow them the initiative so that the U.S. could respond and thus demonstrate its will to Moscow. Kissinger was obsessed with the Soviet Union, so when it started to support groups in Latin America, the U.S. responded. The Soviets did not see themselves as nearly as powerful as Kissinger did, but learned that if the main was quiet, Chile, Syria or Angola could be agitated.
Kissinger’s response to the Russian attack on Ukraine flows from the same logic. He sees a conflict between Iraq and Syria as frightening the Russians concerning U.S. intentions. He sees Putin as he saw Leonid Brezhnev: as a potentially stabilizing force that is less dangerous than a power vacuum filled by a less flexible person. In that sense, defending Ukraine could simply make things worse.
With China, I think a different but related dynamic was at play. Kissinger’s greatest achievement was opening China and making it an ally. In his mind, he achieved it through accommodation, but in fact it was because China never lost its fear of the United States. After the U.S. inflicted massive casualties on the Chinese army, Mao saw the U.S. as powerful, the U.S. saw China as a possible ally, and each went away relieved by the deal.
It is good to overestimate your enemy so that you are prepared for the worst. But excessive miscalculation will blind you to opportunities and make you beholden to moves by the other side. I think that for Kissinger the failure of the British and French to understand how powerful Germany was drove him to fear repeating their mistakes. This informs his positions on ceding territory to Russia and China. The weaker party must be the cleverer one and approach the obvious with utter caution. Global stability is at stake. In my view, Russia and China are declining powers, while the U.S. is the surging one. This is where you nail the door shut on your adversary.
I will confess, of course, that in the 1970s, as I rose to awareness, my fears of the Russians were as intense as anyone. But over time, as I studied their military and spoke to expatriates, I came to see them differently. That was a long time ago, and I have little right to criticize a man I admire. But thinking him wrong is not the same as being reckless. He played the game he thought he had to. He still is.
George Friedman is an internationally recognized geopolitical forecaster and strategist on international affairs and the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures.
Dr. Friedman is also a New York Times bestselling author. His most recent book, THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM: America’s Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond, published February 25, 2020 describes how “the United States periodically reaches a point of crisis in which it appears to be at war with itself, yet after an extended period it reinvents itself, in a form both faithful to its founding and radically different from what it had been.” The decade 2020-2030 is such a period which will bring dramatic upheaval and reshaping of American government, foreign policy, economics, and culture.
His most popular book, The Next 100 Years, is kept alive by the prescience of its predictions. Other best-selling books include Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, The Next Decade, America’s Secret War, The Future of War and The Intelligence Edge. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Dr. Friedman has briefed numerous military and government organizations in the United States and overseas and appears regularly as an expert on international affairs, foreign policy and intelligence in major media. For almost 20 years before resigning in May 2015, Dr. Friedman was CEO and then chairman of Stratfor, a company he founded in 1996. Friedman received his bachelor’s degree from the City College of the City University of New York and holds a doctorate in government from Cornell University.
16. No traction for a war-ending deal in Ukraine
Excerpts:
There is much more and any settlement will need to be worked out quickly. Neither Zelensky nor Putin can stand for a long and drawn-out diplomatic process. Each one has enemies within and a short timeline.
It is far from certain the war will end. After all, it could drag on for years, costing thousands more lives on both sides. But the country has all but been wrecked and recovery will be difficult and costly.
On top of everything else, while Ukraine may have prospects for raising Western capital, Russia has none. In both cases we are looking at decades, supposing the fighting is ended to restore normal life to now war-torn Ukraine.
No traction for a war-ending deal in Ukraine
US suddenly desperate for a ceasefire as battlefield turns in Russia’s favor but Moscow isn’t taking the bait
As the US celebrates its Memorial Day weekend, remembering its fallen war heroes, the situation in Ukraine has shifted dramatically.
While a week ago Ukrainian leaders were confident that they could drive the Russians from Ukrainian territory, now it appears they are heading for a major defeat in the Donbass region, the area of Eastern Ukraine that stretches all the way down to the Azov Sea and beyond.
If the Russians do defeat the main force of Ukraine’s army, or trap them in an unfolding pincer operation, Ukraine will inevitably have to reach a settlement with Russia.
All of this could happen very quickly. The US and European press, in particular, has started to tell the real story of the unfolding battle, after weeks of disgorging Ukrainian propaganda on how they were slaughtering Russian forces.
Now, with the tables turned, leaders in the US and in NATO, and especially the British, are likely to be almost as unhappy as the Ukrainians.
No matter what deal may be made, and one seems likely if the Russians give a green light, the West will have another big black eye, and NATO membership will look less and less attractive.
The US is hurrying to send new types of weapons to Ukraine, including HIMARS, a high mobility precision rocket system. These will have to be yanked from war stocks, which could very well weaken US capabilities elsewhere, especially in East Asia.
But even if the US resolves to send HIMARS, it is probably too late for Ukraine’s resistance. Furthermore, the Russians have warned that there will be a price to pay if HIMARS is delivered and deployed.
The US could seek to send the HIMARS missile system to Ukraine. Image: Wikipedia
Nevertheless, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is preparing the ground to reach a deal with the Russians. Whether he can do so, however, is altogether unclear.
For Zelensky, oddly enough, the good news is that the troops who could put a lot of internal pressure on him, the Azov Brigade of ultra-nationalists, are now mostly in Russian prisoner camps after losing in Mariupol.
They are not likely to be returned to action any time soon. While Zelensky has locked up his pro-Russian opponents and squeezed many others, the diplomatic front is a different kind of battlefield.
On May 13, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called his Russian counterpart, Defense Minister General Sergei Shoigu, where he reportedly asked Shoigu for a ceasefire in Ukraine.
On May 19, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (JCS) of Staff General Mark Milley called his Russian counterpart General Valery Gerasimov. Details of that discussion have not been publicly released, but it can be surmised it was another US push for a ceasefire.
So why is Washington suddenly in such a hurry to clinch a ceasefire? One explanation is that they already saw that the Russians were moving into a position to trap Ukraine’s army in Donbass and that there was no good way out.
Despite both phone calls – marking the first contact between Russia’s and America’s military since the Ukraine war started – no ceasefire was agreed. This probably touched off even greater alarm in Washington and among US allies who also are supplying tons of weapons to Ukraine.
It is easy to forget that part of the reason behind Biden’s almost irrational commitment to fight in Ukraine has been to cover up his massive failure in Afghanistan, marked by the hasty and chaotic retreat of American troops last August that allowed the Taliban to declare a clear victory.
The Ukraine gambit appears to have been a shrewd, if not cynical policy: NATO seems together as never before, the US and its allies are shipping in weapons at an unprecedented pace and Ukraine seems to be shoving the Russians back. It looked as if Biden could walk away a big hero, linking arms with Zelensky.
Biden was even desperate to go to Kiev to stand side by side with Zelensky. But intelligence sources were telling a different story. Instead, Biden sent his wife to meet Mrs Zelensky while he stayed home. His secretary of defense and JCS chairman pleaded with the Russians to stop and agree to a ceasefire.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has a headache in the Donbass. Photo: NDTV / Screengrab
Maybe they dangled some other incentives – we still don’t know – but Russia was not about to take the bait.
There are at least two reasons why Russia declined. The first, and easiest to understand, is that at last they thought they had turned around the Ukraine disaster and were heading for a win.
The second, closely related to the first, is that President Vladimir Putin needs a victory, not a ceasefire. He is under the gun at home and his job is very much on the line. Either Putin wins or he is out. A ceasefire is negative for him on both counts.
What this means for the Ukrainians is that they will get the war to end only after a full deal is agreed, not before. At that point, the fighting will stop, as it stopped on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the armistice, when Germany agreed to surrender.
There are certain things the Russians want that Ukraine will have to find a way to accept. The biggest one of all is no NATO, and no pseudo-NATO, presence on Ukrainian soil. Zelensky has previously signaled he is prepared for that.
But the Russians may go further, and want Ukraine in its pet security alliance, known as the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), made up of Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
The Russians might want that to replace Ukrainian NATO membership, and the CSTO could also offer Ukraine security assurances if Ukraine would accept them.
Alternatively, Ukraine might propose an association with the Committee on Security Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), which is a party to both Minsk agreements, giving it credibility for both Ukraine and Russia.
But it will take movement by Putin to agree to it, especially since CSCE was unable to deliver a final deal under the Minsk II (2015) agreement, opening the door to NATO and the US to train up and supply the Ukrainian military and to begin setting up naval and air bases for NATO on Ukrainian territory.
Along with no NATO and possible security guarantees, there are two difficult questions. One of them involves the status of the two “republics,” Luhansk and Donetsk.
Russia recognized them as independent states just before Russia invaded Ukraine. Before that, their status was awaiting a solution under the Minsk II agreement, that promised these areas “autonomy” – but an autonomy realized under the Ukrainian constitution and supported by Ukrainian enabling legislation.
A Russian soldier takes aim in the Donbass. Image: Tass / Река Александр
Whether that remains on the table in any way is an unresolved question. It is noteworthy that one of the key cultural issues impacting the Donbass region is that these are largely (or at least were before the war) Russian- speaking parts of Ukraine.
The Ukrainian parliament had banned the Russian language in all official correspondence, in hospitals, banks and other public entities, and pulled Russian language teaching in the schools. It was announced this week that the schools in Mariupol, or at least the ones that survive after Russia’s victory, will now once again be teaching Russian.
The second issue involves the territory of the two republics, which will be changed as a result of the war. If these two areas are broken off entirely from Ukraine, then they will be considerably larger if Ukraine is forced to agree to the armistice line as the border between these two regions and Ukraine.
Of course, it is less of a problem if these regions are autonomous but that is much more difficult to achieve now because between 2015 and now there have been no serious negotiations of autonomy under the Minsk framework.
There are plenty of other issues. The Russians will demand some form of Ukrainian demilitarization but Ukraine will surely try and avoid that outcome. Ukraine will also need economic concessions, particularly the ability to ship grain and other commodities out through the Black Sea. Oil and gas transit is also an important trade issue that will need to be resolved.
There is much more and any settlement will need to be worked out quickly. Neither Zelensky nor Putin can stand for a long and drawn-out diplomatic process. Each one has enemies within and a short timeline.
It is far from certain the war will end. After all, it could drag on for years, costing thousands more lives on both sides. But the country has all but been wrecked and recovery will be difficult and costly.
On top of everything else, while Ukraine may have prospects for raising Western capital, Russia has none. In both cases we are looking at decades, supposing the fighting is ended to restore normal life to now war-torn Ukraine.
17. How the U.S. Has Struggled to Stop the Growth of a Shadowy Russian Private Army
Excerpts:
In response to questions for this story, E.U. spokesperson Nabila Massrali said the E.U. aggressively sanctioned Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine and sanctioned Wagner “to take tangible action against those threatening international peace and security and breaching international law,” noting that all sanctions require unanimity among member countries.
As the Ukrainian conflict drags on and the Kremlin becomes further isolated from the global economy, experts say that Wagner is likely to play an increasingly important role in Russian foreign policy. The Wagner Group’s expansion could help Russia evade the impact of sanctions, entice governments to support it in the U.N. General Assembly and secure strategic positions in its fight against the NATO alliance.
Economically, Russia pales in comparison to superpowers like China and the United States. But in the Wagner group, officials said, Russia has found a cheap and novel foreign policy tool that America has yet to find a way to address. Client governments appear to absorb most of the cost.
“The Russians don’t have a blank checkbook,” said Nagy, the former top U.S. diplomat for Africa. “They are playing a fairly weak hand extremely, extremely well.”
How the U.S. Has Struggled to Stop the Growth of a Shadowy Russian Private Army
Vladimir Putin has increasingly relied on the Wagner Group, a private and unaccountable army with a history of human rights violations, to pursue Russia’s foreign policy objectives across the globe.
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For nearly a decade, U.S. officials watched with alarm as a shadowy network of Russian mercenaries connected to the Kremlin wreaked havoc in Africa, the Middle East and most recently Ukraine.
A number of them now say they wish the U.S. government had done more.
President Vladimir Putin has increasingly relied on the Wagner Group as a private and unaccountable army that enables Russia to pursue its foreign policy objectives at low cost and without the political backlash that can come from foreign military intervention, U.S. officials and national security experts said.
In recent years, governments in the Middle East and Africa hired the fighters to crush insurgencies, protect natural resources and provide security — committing grave human rights abuses in the process, according to U.S. officials and international watchdogs.
In Syria, Wagner fighters were filmed gleefully beating a Syrian army deserter with a sledgehammer before cutting off his head. In the Central African Republic, United Nations investigators received reports that the mercenaries raped, tortured and murdered civilians. In Libya, Wagner allegedly booby-trapped civilian homes with explosives attached to toilet seats and teddy bears. Last month, German intelligence officials linked Wagner mercenaries to indiscriminate killings in Ukraine.
The U.S. was slow to respond to the danger, and it now finds itself struggling to restrain the use of the mercenaries across the globe, according to interviews with more than 15 current and former diplomatic, military and intelligence officials. Unilateral sanctions have done little to deter the group. Diplomacy has stumbled.
“There was no unified or systematic U.S. policy toward the group,” said Tibor Nagy, who served the State Department for nearly three decades, most recently as the assistant secretary of state for African affairs until 2021.
Tibor Nagy Credit: Eduardo Soteras/AFP via Getty Images
The Kremlin officially denies any connection with the activities of Russian mercenaries abroad, and much about Wagner’s structure and leadership remains unclear. But experts say that Wagner’s top officers have participated in meetings between foreign leaders and top Russian officials. They also say the Russian air force has transported Wagner fighters to launch the group’s international missions.
Wagner has spread around the world, particularly in Africa, because it presents an enticing package to leaders of embattled nations, experts said. It offers to quash terrorism and rebel threats with brutal military crackdowns, while rallying public support for their government clients through disinformation campaigns.
U.S. officials said they have felt underequipped in trying to curtail the mercenaries’ incursions, in part because American diplomacy in Africa has been gradually stripped of resources over the past three decades. Some also said the U.S. was slow to appreciate the severity of the Wagner threat before it became a formidable weapon in the Kremlin’s arsenal.
In Africa, American efforts to persuade governments not to work with Wagner have generally been late and ineffectual, the officials said. U.S. diplomats have been surprised when Wagner arrives in a faltering country, leaving them scrambling to counter the group’s influence with limited tools and incentives.
During the Cold War, America’s policy of containing the spread of Soviet communism led to a substantial investment in courting African leaders, offering developmental aid, university exchange programs, even concerts. But when the Berlin Wall fell, so too did the U.S. government’s interest in the African continent, the officials told ProPublica. Embassy staffs shrank; programs shriveled.
“America’s soft power is unbeatable, but it needs to be deployed,” Nagy told ProPublica. “The quiver is empty.”
Nagy and other current and former high-level State Department officials said embassies in Africa tend to employ few public diplomacy officers, with barebones staff that must juggle everything from routine visa issues to terrorist threats.
“That doesn’t leave a lot of time for a thin staff to develop the expertise or the relationships necessary to have or pursue a robust engagement strategy,” one senior State Department official said about efforts to steer foreign officials away from Wagner. “The ability of a fairly junior diplomatic officer to build a relationship with the Cabinet member who’s going to be making the decision — that is just not realistic in most cases.”
The State Department declined to comment. The Pentagon and the Kremlin did not respond to questions for this story.
The most visible U.S. effort to keep Wagner out of a specific country transpired in Mali, where the mercenaries arrived last December to fight jihadists rampaging in the north. Malian President Assimi Goïta had recently come to power in the latest of a series of coups that prompted international sanctions.
Before Wagner landed, Gen. Stephen Townsend, the head of the U.S. military’s Africa Command, traveled to Mali to meet with Goïta. “I explained that I thought it was a bad idea to invite Wagner,” Townsend told Congress in March. “Wagner obeys no rules. They won’t follow the direction of the government.”
But the entreaties from Townsend and other U.S. officials were unsuccessful. Former diplomats say the effort was part of a troubling pattern where American officials parachute into complex situations equipped with little more than talking points. Africa Command declined to comment.
The Americans were telling the Malians not to work with the Wagner group but offering no meaningful alternatives, said J. Peter Pham, who served as the first-ever U.S. special envoy to the Sahel region until last year and maintains close contact with Malian and other African officials.
“You either have concrete programs of assistance, or you have personal relationships and diplomatic capital built up over the years that you can call upon,” Pham said. “Many American officials, often of middling rank, are often dispatched with neither.”
In March, the French newspaper Le Monde reported that Wagner mercenaries had participated in the torture of civilians, including by electrocution, while working with Malian soldiers. Last month, Human Rights Watch issued a detailed report accusing Russian fighters of participating in a massacre of roughly 300 civilians during a military operation. The killing began at a crowded cattle market on March 27 and continued for several days. In a statement, State Department spokesman Ned Price said, “We are concerned that many reports suggest that the perpetrators were unaccountable forces from the Kremlin-backed Wagner Group.”
The Malian government has said that the Russians are helping their military as formal instructors, and that their army killed 203 “terrorists” and arrested 51 more during the operation. The Malian Embassy in the U.S. did not respond to requests for comment.
The Wagner group first attracted public notice in 2014, during the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine. Its mercenaries fought alongside Russian federation forces, attacking Ukrainian forces in the still-contested Donbas region.
Gary Motsek, then a U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense, was alarmed by the emergence of what seemed to be a new breed of Russian mercenary.
For years, the Pentagon had been aware of Russian military contractors disregarding international law, Motsek said in an interview with ProPublica. But the contractors had mostly been consigned to securing oil tankers and other Russian assets. Now the Wagner Group was in combat, like a private army.
“Looking at the growth of the Wagner Group, it was clearly a missed opportunity” from roughly 2008 to 2010, Motsek said. “We should have made it a priority.”
At the time, Motsek led a Pentagon office that helped create international standards for private military contractors. He said the office focused on voluntary compliance and companies active in American warzones. When the Russians chose not to sign on to the standards, he was not aware of any effort to rein them in.
“It was probably my fault, more than anyone else, because I was the only one working on this on an almost daily basis,” Motsek told ProPublica. “We never went and said, ‘Let’s control these guys.’ I didn’t have the mandate to do that. And I guess I didn’t have the vision.”
American officials say Wagner operates through a web of shell companies controlled by the Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, a food industry magnate with close ties to Putin, sardonically referred to as “Putin’s Chef.” Prigozhin has vehemently denied his involvement in the group, supposedly named after the German composer — a favorite of one of the mercenaries’ alleged commanders. Efforts to reach Prigozhin were not successful.
Yevgeny Prigozhin Credit: Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images
The U.S. sanctioned Prigozhin in 2016 and the Wagner Group in 2017 in response to their role in the Ukrainian conflict. Prigozhin was subsequently indicted for his alleged involvement in meddling with the 2016 U.S. presidential election through the troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency.
Experts say the Wagner Group appears to be paid in proceeds from natural resources like oil, gold and diamonds in countries where they are fighting. The Kremlin has used them as a cheap alternative to Russian armed forces.
“Russia has opened up military operations in two continents, for the first time since the 1980s,” said Sean McFate, a professor at the National Defense University. “The tip of the spear is the Wagner Group.”
In 2015, Russia sent its military to fight in the Syrian civil war on behalf of the dictator Bashar al-Assad. It was the Kremlin’s first armed intervention outside former Soviet territories since the end of the Cold War. Soon, Russian Federation forces and fighters from Wagner and other mercenary groups helped tilt the war in Assad’s favor.
On Feb. 7, 2018, Wagner mercenaries and Syrian soldiers carried out an assault on a U.S. special forces outpost near the town of Khasham, hammering the American position with artillery rounds as the Russians and Syrians advanced. Americans responded with airstrikes in a four-hour battle, killing an estimated 200 combatants. No Americans died.
Joseph Votel, a retired four-star general, was then the head of U.S. Central Command. In an interview, he told ProPublica that he believes the assault was financially motivated, and that Wagner sought control of an oil field near an ongoing U.S.-led counterterror operation.
But Votel said U.S. commanders regarded the fight as an isolated incident rather than a significant development in souring relations between the two nations.
“I didn’t particularly dwell on it,” Votel said. “I wasn’t pressed on it. What happened, happened.”
Joseph Siegle, director of research at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, said Russian military successes in the Syrian conflict represented an “inflection point for Russia.”
“They saw how quickly they could gain influence in a region where they’d had relatively little influence,” Siegle said.
In 2019, Wagner began to fight in the Libyan civil war, supporting a campaign by the warlord Khalifa Haftar to overthrow the country’s internationally recognized government. Haftar had appeared to be faltering, but, together, Wagner and rebel fighters launched a new offensive that brought their combined forces to the outskirts of Tripoli.
At the top levels of American foreign policy agencies, alarm bells were beginning to sound.
“We were watching it change the course of the war,” David Schenker, then assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, said in an interview with ProPublica. “This was the beachhead. Wagner was the landing party.” Haftar’s attempt to retake Tripoli ultimately stalled after Turkey intervened on the opposing side. But if Haftar had succeeded, Schenker worried, Russia could have been rewarded with “a base on NATO’s southern flank.”
Schenker said he believed the most immediate potential countermeasure was to push the European Union to impose sanctions on Wagner and crack down on its finances. But he said many of his colleagues in the U.S. government and in Europe didn’t view that as realistic.
“I really pressed hard for a designation from the E.U. What’s complicated is that Russia routinely goes and assassinates dissidents in foreign countries,” he said. “People weren’t interested in angering Putin. Putin for these guys is like Voldemort.”
In response to questions for this story, E.U. spokesperson Nabila Massrali said the E.U. aggressively sanctioned Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine and sanctioned Wagner “to take tangible action against those threatening international peace and security and breaching international law,” noting that all sanctions require unanimity among member countries.
As the Ukrainian conflict drags on and the Kremlin becomes further isolated from the global economy, experts say that Wagner is likely to play an increasingly important role in Russian foreign policy. The Wagner Group’s expansion could help Russia evade the impact of sanctions, entice governments to support it in the U.N. General Assembly and secure strategic positions in its fight against the NATO alliance.
Economically, Russia pales in comparison to superpowers like China and the United States. But in the Wagner group, officials said, Russia has found a cheap and novel foreign policy tool that America has yet to find a way to address. Client governments appear to absorb most of the cost.
“The Russians don’t have a blank checkbook,” said Nagy, the former top U.S. diplomat for Africa. “They are playing a fairly weak hand extremely, extremely well.”
ProPublica will continue to report on the Wagner group and the power struggle between the U.S. and Russia as it plays out around the globe. We are especially interested in relationships between Western companies and Russian mercenaries.
If you know about these issues, please contact reporters Joaquin Sapien at [email protected] or Joshua Kaplan at [email protected]. We take your privacy seriously and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.
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Doris Burke and Lynn Dombek contributed research.
18. Without summits, a West Asia ‘Quad’ makes progress
Excerpts:
The West Asia Quad – a grouping of India, Israel, the UAE and the United States – was launched in October 2021 with a lot less fanfare than what accompanies the Indo-Pacific partnership. But it has already resulted in a free trade agreement and multiple cooperative arrangements. Unlike the Indo-Pacific Quad, which avoids hard security questions, the West Asian partnership embraces a realistic assessment of shared threats.
...
The West Asia Quad works because it brings together two key economies of the Middle East – Israel and the UAE – with a more assertive India and the resident external power, the United States. If the Indo-Pacific Quad is to succeed, it too will have to find complementarities among its members similar to those members of the West Asian Quad have successfully identified.
Without summits, a West Asia ‘Quad’ makes progress
BY HUSAIN HAQQANI AND APARNA PANDE, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 05/28/22 2:00 PM ET
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
President Biden’s participation in a summit meeting of the Indo-Pacific “Quad,” which groups Australia, Japan, India and the United States in competition with China, demonstrates the importance of East Asia and the South Pacific in current U.S. policy. But it is a different group of four countries that seems to be making greater progress.
The West Asia Quad – a grouping of India, Israel, the UAE and the United States – was launched in October 2021 with a lot less fanfare than what accompanies the Indo-Pacific partnership. But it has already resulted in a free trade agreement and multiple cooperative arrangements. Unlike the Indo-Pacific Quad, which avoids hard security questions, the West Asian partnership embraces a realistic assessment of shared threats.
The idea for the West Asia Quad came from Israel and the UAE with strong support from the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke of the four countries leveraging each other’s “complementary capabilities” in the Middle East while Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid emphasized the “synergy” in “infrastructure, digital infrastructure, transport, maritime security.”
Instead of focusing on the challenge from a single rising power, the West Asia Quad is brought together, in the words of UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah Bin Zayed, by the special bonds that “distinguish” relations between these countries. Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar has noted that UAE, Israel, and the United States are India’s “closest relationships,” and these close ties make the four countries more willing to work together.
In early May, UAE’s minister of economy led a 70-member business delegation to Delhi and Mumbai to discuss ways to further promote trade and investments in India and the UAE. This was a follow up to the February 2022 free trade agreement that both countries signed and that came into force on May 1. A similar free trade deal already exists between Israel and the UAE, while one between India and Israel is in the pipeline.
The UAE is already one of India’s top trading partners, just behind the U.S., China and the European Union in trade volume. Bilateral trade between the two countries was $59 billion last year, and Emirati companies have invested $18 billion in India. The UAE also hosts 3.4 million Indian workers, whose remittances are an important component of India’s $83 billion hard currency earnings in remittances. The UAE has helped address India’s concerns about oil security by contributing to India’s strategic oil reserves.
The Israel-India partnership is also robust, and Israel is one of the top three suppliers of defense equipment to India. Forty-three percent of Israel’s arms exports are sold to India. India’s bilateral trade with Israel, currently at $4.14 billion, is growing. Israel exports agricultural technology, cyber technology, health care technology and defense equipment to India, while India sells mineral products, machinery and textiles to Israel.
The West Asia Quad is brought together by shared interests and complementary capabilities. This differs from the Indo-Pacific Quad, where, notwithstanding American enthusiasm, the partners do not always offer what the other needs. The four countries do not have free trade agreements like Israel, India and the UAE seem to have worked out. Each of them knows they must work together against China, but they seem to be taking time in figuring out what they might get from one another. Japan, for example, wants to replace China as Australia’s major trading partner but is unable to offer any security advantage to Australia in return.
There is no such ambiguity in the West Asia Quad. While the U.S. brings its military prowess to the table, other partners are able to make significant contributions to each other’s security or economy. The UAE’s strategic pragmatism provides a glue for the grouping while assuring India of energy supplies and employment opportunities for a vast population. The UAE sees India as an external power that balances China and is not viewed by the U.S. as a threat.
Israel’s technological and economic muscle, and military-intelligence prowess, partners well with India’s ability to provide manpower and access to a large market. The UAE’s bold move to recognize Israel, and its firm commitment to the Abraham Accords, has drawn it close to Israel.
This puts the UAE in a position to influence Israel in protecting Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, while also being the staunchest Muslim opponent of radical Islamist extremism. India, which is home to 200 million Muslims and has been a victim of terrorism like the November 26, 2008, Mumbai attacks, appreciates Israeli and Emirati support against terrorists
The West Asia Quad works because it brings together two key economies of the Middle East – Israel and the UAE – with a more assertive India and the resident external power, the United States. If the Indo-Pacific Quad is to succeed, it too will have to find complementarities among its members similar to those members of the West Asian Quad have successfully identified.
Husain Haqqani is director for South and Central Asia at the Hudson Institute. He served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., 2008-11. Aparna Pande is fellow and director of the Initiative on the Future of India and South Asia at the Washington-based Hudson Institute.
19. How the Quad Can Take on China in the 'Gray-Zone'
Excerpts:
Combined efforts at maritime domain awareness also demand that the partners coordinate their institutional practices in the common interest. So there’s a human dimension to the initiative alongside the obvious technical dimension. Not only are the Quad partners different societies, with different heritage and cultural traits; their intelligence and military services have their own distinct bureaucratic cultures and worldviews. That adds another layer of complexity. Aligning unlike entities toward the common goal of maritime domain awareness and, ultimately, a common policy and strategy toward aggression will cause headaches for those engaged in the initiative. In short, there’s more to maritime domain awareness than widgets. It’s about building the daily habit of working together. That’s the best palliative for bureaucratic headaches.
But such are the intricacies of marine diplomacy. Let’s get on with it.
How the Quad Can Take on China in the 'Gray-Zone'
Last week the heads of state of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, convened in Tokyo. Afterward, the White House released a communique announcing that the partners—Japan, Australia, India, and the United States—intend to work together to bolster “maritime domain awareness” throughout the vast geographic expanse that is the combined Indian and Pacific oceans. According to the White House, the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness will “transform the ability of partners in the Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean region to fully monitor the waters on their shores and, in turn, to uphold a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Maritime domain awareness is a clunky phrase connoting reconnaissance, surveillance, and intelligence relating to the sea. Back in 2005, the George W. Bush administration’s Department of Homeland Security defined it as “the effective understanding of anything associated with the global maritime domain that could impact the security, safety, economy, or environment of the United States.” It’s “a key component of an active, layered maritime defense in depth,” fortified by “improving our ability to collect, fuse, analyze, display, and disseminate actionable information and intelligence to operational commanders.”
The Quad initiative is a saltwater, multinational version of the “intelligence cycle,” whereby intelligence services plan what information they need to collect to attack issues at hand; gather raw data from technical and human sources; process and analyze the data to distill useful insights from it, and disseminate their findings to the right customers to help them devise and execute strategy and operations. And then customers provide feedback on the planning process, shaping future rounds of the cycle. The intelligence cycle goes on without end. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Harnessing foreign partners for the intelligence cycle makes sense for a multitude of reasons. This is a time of tense peace, when malefactors such as China and Russia try to make geopolitical gains without actual resort to arms. China in particular excels at “gray-zone” operations, using its weight of resources vis-à-vis outmatched neighbors to bully them into accepting unlawful behavior. The South China Sea is the most prominent example of China’s gray-zone strategy, which aims at making most of that body of water, including exclusive economic zones apportioned to coastal states, part of metropolitan Chinese territory—“blue national soil,” as Chinese Communist Party magnates style it. But it also deploys the same approach on land, often at the expense of Quad partner India. In recent months, for instance, it has built military and civil infrastructure on the contested ground along the frontier with India and dared the Indian leadership to evict Chinese soldiers from that ground at the risk of war. It creates facts on the ground and defies others to undo them. If China’s rivals blanch from the prospect of armed conflict, China wins.
This is a hard strategy to beat. Maritime domain awareness is no cure-all for gray-zone aggression, but Quad intelligence operations might help deter aggressors from unlawful behavior. Detecting and exposing such actions to international opprobrium could amplify their repercussions beyond anything Beijing, Moscow, or other offenders stand to gain. And maritime domain awareness would help the Quad respond to misconduct at sea in more forceful ways. After all, it’s tough to vector assets to the scene if you have no idea where the scene is or what’s transpiring there. Small wonder the late Captain Wayne Hughes, the dean of naval tactics, designated “scouting”—reconnaissance and surveillance, in effect—as one of three fundamental determinants of tactical efficacy, alongside command and control and weapons range. The ability to detect, track, and the target is crucial.
Captain Hughes was writing about open naval warfare, but the same logic applies in peacetime strategic competition. Muscular nautical diplomacy depends on the ability to stage superior combat power at points of impact, reminding everyone that you possess a latent military option should peaceful diplomacy fail to resolve a situation. Grafting the intelligence cycle onto Hughes’s scouting and command-and-control functions adds detail and texture—showing how the Quad partners could swing the big stick of naval and military force to deter or coerce in Indo-Pacific waters and skies, and to hearten Indo-Pacific nations that aren’t part of the Quad to stand up for their own rights. And, of course, the logic of maritime domain awareness maps to wartime operations. It is the foundation of everything maritime services do throughout the continuum from peace to war.
But pooling resources and effort will take work. The chief challenge to Quad information operations at sea is interoperability, meaning the ability of unlike armed forces and intelligence services to work together in harmony. Hardware will doubtless capture most of the attention among decisionmakers in Tokyo, Canberra, Delhi, and Washington. And there’s no gainsaying the importance of compatible sensor and command-and-control technologies. The United States, Japan, and Australia are allies of long-standing, accustomed to working together and working around any equipment dissimilarities. Working with India could prove more troublesome, if only because the Indian intelligence, military, and law-enforcement services have a habit of procuring hardware from disparate domestic and foreign suppliers. Interoperability is taxing even within the Indian national-security apparatus, to say nothing of collaborating with foreign services. Overcoming such disparities will pay dividends, but the Quad is sure to encounter problems along the way.
Combined efforts at maritime domain awareness also demand that the partners coordinate their institutional practices in the common interest. So there’s a human dimension to the initiative alongside the obvious technical dimension. Not only are the Quad partners different societies, with different heritage and cultural traits; their intelligence and military services have their own distinct bureaucratic cultures and worldviews. That adds another layer of complexity. Aligning unlike entities toward the common goal of maritime domain awareness and, ultimately, a common policy and strategy toward aggression will cause headaches for those engaged in the initiative. In short, there’s more to maritime domain awareness than widgets. It’s about building the daily habit of working together. That’s the best palliative for bureaucratic headaches.
But such are the intricacies of marine diplomacy. Let’s get on with it.
A 1945 Contributing Editor, Dr. James Holmes holds the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and served on the faculty of the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. A former U.S. Navy surface warfare officer, he was the last gunnery officer in history to fire a battleship’s big guns in anger, during the first Gulf War in 1991. He earned the Naval War College Foundation Award in 1994, signifying the top graduate in his class. His books include Red Star over the Pacific, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of 2010 and a fixture on the Navy Professional Reading List. General James Mattis deems him “troublesome.” The views voiced here are his alone. Holmes also blogs at the Naval Diplomat.
20. DARPA's revolutionary seaplane wants to change how the Pentagon hauls cargo
DARPA's revolutionary seaplane wants to change how the Pentagon hauls cargo - Breaking Defense
DARPA’s revolutionary seaplane wants to change how the Pentagon hauls cargo
By on May 27, 2022 at 11:42 AM
Concept art of DARPA’s future Liberty Lifter vehicle. (Courtesy DARPA)
WASHINGTON: The Pentagon’s premiere research agency is moving forward with an effort to build an unusual kind of plane that, if successful, will rival the lift of the Air Force’s storied Globemaster, cost half the price and not be constrained by a traditional runway. That’s if the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency can get right what the Soviet Union got wrong.
Dubbed the “Liberty Lifter,” DARPA says the seaplane will use a trick of physics to serve as “a long-range, low-cost X-plane capable of seaborne strategic and tactical lift.”
Alexander Walan, a DARPA official overseeing the program, told Breaking Defense the agency decided to move forward with the Liberty Lifter program after receiving enthusiastic feedback from industry in response to a request for information published last summer.
While DARPA has an early, dual-hulled concept in mind (as seen in the image above), Walan said the agency expected to receive proposals from industry this week in response to a solicitation for conceptual and preliminary design work, with two contracts up for grabs and scheduled to be awarded later this summer.
DARPA hopes to build and fly a prototype vehicle within five years.
“The biggest thing I took away [from industry’s responses] is that US industry was ready to do this,” he said in a May 24 interview. “They had some innovative ideas. They were excited about it. And there was an industrial base out there that we could tap into.”
Rivaling The C-17
The plane itself will likely be a similar in size to a C-17 Globemaster, weighing somewhere between 500,000 to 600,000 pounds. Meanwhile, DARPA wants the price tag to be half that of the Air Force plane, which costs roughly $340 million each. The Liberty Lifter should be capable of carrying two Marine Corps Amphibious Combat Vehicles, which weigh roughly 35 tons each, or six 20-foot conex storage containers.
The lower price tag will come from a focus on affordability. Walan described it as more comparable to building a B-17 Flying Fortress than a C-17 Globemaster. “Less touch labor, less exquisite materials, lower manufacturing costs,” he said.
The price tag and capabilities of the Air Force’s C-17 Globemaster are heavily influencing the goals for DARPA’s Liberty Lifter program. (U.S. Air National Guard photo by Master Sgt. Matt Hecht)
Critical to designing this plane is a concept known as the “wing-in-ground” (WIG) effect. The premise of the effect is that when an aircraft is flying at low altitudes, the air being forced underneath the wings presses upward from against the ground giving the aircraft extra lift.
“If you’ve ever been on an airliner or watched a 737 land, sometimes they come in close, and then they almost kind of like go to a hover,” Walan said. Large birds passing over bodies of water while searching for food also serve as an example of the wing-in-ground effect.
During those moments of low-altitude updraft, the aircraft experiences less drag and can more easily maintain what little altitude it has left. “For very long-range operations, a few percentage points [of increased lift and reduced drag] actually start really adding up” in terms of fuel efficiency, he said.
But while it might be hard to maintain low altitude over varying terrain, there is one area where the “ground” is more or less consistent: at sea. A key element of the Liberty Lifter will be “runway independence,” the capability to take off, land and maneuver in shallow waters. Walan said DARPA’s initial vehicle designs had drafts between six and 12 feet. The draft is important because DARPA wants the plane to be capable of entering ports and being as close as 100 meters from the beach.
But if the wing-in-ground effect is so potent, why isn’t the US military already producing planes that utilize it? There are some serious challenges standing in the way.
Studying The Soviets And How They Got This Wrong
An artist’s concept of a Soviet wing-in-ground effect vehicle. (Archive.gov)
To get any benefit from the WIG effect, Walan said a plane’s altitude needs to be less than that of its wingspan. In other words, if the plane’s wingspan is 100 feet, then the WIG effect demands the aircraft be less than 100 feet off the water.
“The challenge is you’re low, and you’re going fast,” he said. Rough waves, small islands and other ocean-going vessels are all potential hazards to a future Liberty Lifter. Walan said DARPA feels confident they can overcome the obstacle avoidance problems through advanced sensor technology.
Another issue is how rough waters could result in a choppier ride for the plane. Larger waves passing by the aircraft will interrupt the natural air flow underneath the plane’s wings, resulting in turbulence. On a traditional aircraft, turbulence is an inconvenience, but heavy turbulence for a WIG vehicle means losing fuel efficiency — defeating the whole purpose of trying to utilize the ground effect.
But Walan argued modern flight controls could help to keep the plane steady even while near rough water. The Liberty Lifter will be designed to fly in sea state 5, a universal measurement of the ocean’s conditions that work on a scale from 1 to 9. Sea state 5 indicates the presence of waves as high as 13 feet.
The physics, of course, isn’t new, and there have been scattered attempts by both American companies, such as Boeing’s Pelican concept, and other nations to design vehicles that effectively utilize the WIG effect. But Walan said DARPA is mostly studying the Soviet Union’s doomed efforts.
“The Soviets really showed how not to do this, like a lot of things, right?” he said.
The Soviet Union made two key errors when trying to build WIG vehicles, Walan argued. The first problem was their aircraft, one of which was called the Caspian Sea Monster, had short wings.
Because the WIG effect is partly dependent on wingspan, the Caspian Sea Monster had to fly as close as five to 10 feet off the water to see any meaningful lift or drag benefits. The result was that even mildly rough seas threaten to damage or disrupt it while in flight.
The second problem is the Soviets focused explicitly on designing aircraft that utilized the ground effect, resulting in a vehicle that could not ascend to the higher altitudes where traditional planes cruise. That greatly limited where the Caspian Sea Monster could go.
Walan emphasized the Liberty Lifter will utilize the WIG effect, but the ground effect is just a means to an end. If the water becomes too crowded or too rough, DARPA’s aircraft will be able to climb to safer, higher altitudes.
“Fundamentally, we think you have to be able to operate out of ground effect,” he said. “We’re not trying to shoehorn in to this one narrow concept.”
As for which branch might transition the Liberty Lifter into a program of record, it’s up in the air. The program is still relatively nascent, and Walan said a formal transition agreement won’t be discussed until later in the program. But for now, he added, the Liberty Lifter has attracted the interest of all the military services.
21. As War Rages in Ukraine, the U.S. Military Studies Russian Weapons at a ‘Petting Zoo’ Outside Las Vegas
A creative name. Photos at the link below.
As War Rages in Ukraine, the U.S. Military Studies Russian Weapons at a ‘Petting Zoo’ Outside Las Vegas
An Air Force intelligence unit outside Las Vegas uses a collection of Soviet weaponry to teach how to recognize—and defeat—an adversary’s arms
By Sharon Weinberger | Photographs by Maria Alejandra Cardona for The Wall Street Journal
May 28, 2022 9:00 am ET
NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, Nevada—A 20-minute drive from the Las Vegas Strip is a repository for some of the most coveted secrets of the Cold War, accumulated over the years from forgotten battles, arms dealers and foreign governments hungry for hard cash.
The Threat Training Facility on Nellis Air Force Base houses the collection of Soviet weapons, many lying idle in the desert heat. It offers visitors a close-up look at the MiG-29 jet fighter, once one of the Soviet Union’s most feared aircraft because of its air-to-air combat capabilities. Visitors can also crawl into an SA-13, a mobile Soviet surface-to-air missile system that menaced Western aircraft in the first Gulf War. And then there’s the Mi-24 Hind, an attack helicopter the Soviets used extensively in their war in Afghanistan, where it became a target of CIA-supplied
Stinger missiles.
In Pentagon parlance, these prized samples from the Soviet arsenal allow for “foreign material exploitation,” or studying another country’s weapons. The collection has earned a more cuddly moniker from curious visitors: “the petting zoo.”
Now, this quasi-graveyard of aging weaponry is getting another moment in the sun as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While most of the petting zoo’s weaponry is decades old, the war in Ukraine, in which both sides are often using aging Soviet arms, serves as a reminder for why the collection exists in the first place.
The exact origins of some of the equipment is still shrouded in Cold War mystery of spies, gun runners and defectors. Some of the pieces were captured in war, like the Mi-24 Hind. U.S. forces scooped up the Russian-built attack helicopter from the defeated Iraqi military in the first Gulf War.
“We don’t like to say war trophy,” said Lt. Col Brian Redstone, the commander of the Air Force’s 547th Intelligence Squadron, which operates the facility. He preferred to call it an “acquisition to help educate and train our war fighters.”
Lt. Col. Brian Redstone, commander of the Air Force’s 547th Intelligence Squadron, with an SA-8 Gecko surface-to-air missile system.
Lt. Col. Redstone, who was in second grade when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, said the military needs to make sure it doesn’t forget what it learned fighting against Russian weapons in the past, particularly when some of the same arms are being used in the Ukraine conflict.
“This allows us to make sure that we don’t do that,” he said.
The reasons for collecting the equipment go back to the Vietnam War, when U.S. jet fighters suffered mounting losses against Soviet-built aircraft. To help better understand those losses, the U.S. secretly acquired Soviet aircraft and then flew them in Nevada as part of a classified test squadron known as the Red Eagles.
After the Soviet Union collapsed and the Red Eagles were disbanded, the Air Force decided to lift the veil of secrecy over at least some of its foreign weaponry. In 1993, the Air Force declassified the Threat Training Facility, and opened it to the public in 1996.
“We spent quite an amount of time training and working on that equipment, so we didn’t want to just throw it in a junkyard,” Lt. Col. Redstone said.
Since the 1990s, the intelligence squadron has used the equipment to help develop tactics and procedures for members of the U.S. military who may end up fighting in wars against the weapons. The exhibits at the facility allow visitors to experience the look and feel of real Soviet weapons, which is how it became dubbed the “petting zoo.”
“I don’t like that term, quite honestly,” Lt. Col. Redstone said. “It reinforces the narrative that it’s a museum, that there’s no training value. But there absolutely is training value to me.”
A Russian MiG-23, whose NATO designation is Flogger. This fighter aircraft was given the nickname "Captain Carlisle" after a now-retired U.S. Air Force general.
A rusting Soviet-made DSHK 12.7mm heavy machine gun.
The Mi-24 Hind is a Russian-built attack helicopter that has been operated by dozens of countries including North Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The advantage of having the physical weapons available is the ability to demonstrate some of the problems an enemy might face on the battlefield, said Maj. James Livsey, the squadron’s director of operations.
He pointed to the cramped interior of an SA-13. “It is hot. It is tight. It is bumpy,” Maj. Livsey said. “It’s not an overall pleasant experience, but it’s good to realize the human factors that go into this.”
Another lesson that can be gleaned from the petting zoo is why so many countries, including Ukraine, still use these weapons. While some governments have opted for the equipment because of historical ties to the Soviet Union, the weapons can be easier to use and maintain than those produced by the U.S.
The war has spurred Ukraine—which was part of the Soviet Union until its dissolution—and Western allies to acquire even more Soviet weaponry for Kyiv’s military, such as aircraft and air defense systems.
A former American military official who had worked for several decades with Russian weapons said he was approached in March about trying to recondition some of the 547th Intelligence Squadron’s Soviet aircraft for potential use in Ukraine.
The former military official said he was asked if he could “make the petting zoo’s aircraft flyable?” He said he couldn’t.
“‘There’s fuselage damage to the ones that I am familiar with that make them unserviceable,’” he said.
The Threat Training Facility at Nellis Air Force Base traces its origins back to a secret test squadron of Soviet jet fighters that the U.S. flew during the Cold War.
That wouldn’t be the only example of the U.S. military trying to resurrect its inventory of Soviet weapons. The U.S. military and intelligence community still own some Russian weapons that remain classified, according to those familiar with the foreign material exploitation program.
The Pentagon was planning to send some of its Soviet air defense systems to Ukraine, including an SA-8, The Wall Street Journal has reported. The Pentagon hasn’t publicly disclosed what was sent, but a defense official said: “Parts of Soviet-era missile defense systems stored by the U.S. in Alabama have been delivered to Ukraine.”
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The Air Force’s 547th Intelligence Squadron has an SA-8 at the petting zoo, but isn’t sending it, or any of its other weapons, to Ukraine. By all accounts, the equipment there is in poor shape. The aircraft can’t fly; the tanks can’t fire; and only two pieces in the collection can move on their own.
One former defense contractor, who previously worked with the U.S. military’s collection of foreign equipment, was skeptical that any of the U.S.-owned Soviet air defense systems could make it to the battlefield. ”We have systems that can limp along,” he said. “They may or may not make it to the transporter, and they may or may not work for more than a couple hours.”
Even if the equipment is old, the petting zoo still provides a critical service for the military, the former American military official said. The collection allows American troops to see what Russian equipment looks like in real life before they potentially encounter it on the battlefield.
Modern aircraft may have radar systems that can look down and identify a potential target, but it is still important, the former official said, for members of the military to recognize by sight a foreign aircraft.
“Sometimes your look-down, shoot-down equipment is not quite as accurate as a set of eyeballs,” he said.
Soviet-built tanks, like the T-72 on the left, are still used by many countries around the world, including Ukraine. The tank on the right is a T-62.
Nancy A. Youssef contributed to this article.
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De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
