Quotes of the Day:

"Be a free thinker and don't accept everything you hear as truth. Be critical and evaluate what you believe in." 

- Aristotle

"Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities."

- Ludwig von Mises

"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied."

- John Stuart Mill

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 30, 2023

2. Ukraine-Russia ‘demilitarised zone’ floated for peace deal

3. Ukraine peace plan is only way to end Russia's war, says Zelenskiy aide

4. Putin and the Psychology of Nuclear Brinksmanship

5. China Is Flirting With AI Catastrophe

6. ​Japan, China to Resume Military Exchanges in July After 4 Years

7.  Estonia Will Ask For a Clearer Path for Ukraine to Join NATO

8. Taking War Seriously (Ukraine)

9. New US aid package for Ukraine will total about $300 million

10. Video shows Chinese fighter jet flying close to US aircraft

11. USINDOPACOM Statement on Unprofessional Intercept of U.S. Aircraft over South China Sea

12. Treasury Sanctions China- and Mexico-Based Enablers of Counterfeit, Fentanyl-Laced Pill Production

13. Poland Hardens Its Defenses Against Russia

14. Congress Must Save the Marine Corps by Newt Gingrich

15. A Closer Look at Preventing Veteran Suicide

16. Ukrainian shelling kills five, drone sparks fire at refinery - Russian officials

17. North to Hokkaido: The Case for a Permanent US Army Presence on Japan’s Northern Frontier

18. Divided by a Common Language: How Europe Views Irregular Warfare

19. NATO intel chief: Russia’s war on Ukraine and a hybrid war aimed at us

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 30, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-may-30-2023

Key Takeaways

• Russia claimed that Ukraine conducted a series of drone strikes against Moscow on May 30 as Russia again targeted Ukraine with Iranian-made Shahed drones.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin attempted to downplay the drone attack on Moscow to avoid exposing the limited options he has to retaliate against Ukraine.
• The drone attack on Moscow generated varied responses from the Russian information space.
• The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is likely attempting to conceal the high Russian losses in Ukraine by artificially inflating Ukrainian casualties in the war.
• EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell stated that Russia will not enter negotiations while trying to win the war.
• Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks northeast of Kupyansk and northwest of Svatove, and Russian sources claimed that Russian forces conducted a ground attack south of Kreminna.
• The tempo of Russian and Ukrainian offensive operations in the Bakhmut direction remains low as of May 30.
• Russian forces made marginal advances amid continued ground attacks on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
• Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks along the southern axis.
• Russian officials are establishing domestic veteran support programs which likely aim to advertise the perks of military service in Russia.
• Russian occupation officials continue to deport Ukrainian children to Russia under the guise of providing pediatric healthcare.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 30, 2023

May 30, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 30, 2023

Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, Nicole Wolkov, George Barros, and Fredrick W. Kagan

May 30, 2023, 8pm ET

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

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

Note: The data cutoff for this product was 3pm ET on May 30. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the May 31 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Russia claimed that Ukraine conducted a series of drone strikes against Moscow on May 30 as Russia again targeted Ukraine with Iranian-made Shahed drones. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) accused Ukraine of attacking Moscow with eight drones on the morning of May 30, and claimed that Russian forces shot down five of the drones and suppressed three drones with electronic warfare systems.[1] Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyev, however, claimed that Ukraine launched 32 drones of which some targeted the prestigious neighborhood of Rublyovka in Moscow Oblast.[2] A Russian independent outlet claimed that the drone strikes predominantly targeted areas near Russian President Vladimir Putin’s residence in Novo-Ogaryovo and other elite neighborhoods in Moscow Oblast.[3] Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin stated that several buildings in Moscow suffered minor damage, and Russian sources amplified footage of a minor explosion in the Novaya Moskva neighborhood.[4] A Russian milblogger claimed that drones flying over Moscow resembled Ukrainian attack drones.[5] Geolocated footage shows Russian forces shooting down drones identified as Ukrainian by OSINT accounts in several different areas of Moscow and Moscow Oblast.[6] Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak denied that Ukraine was directly involved in the drone strike but forecasted that there could be an increase in such attacks in the future.[7]

Russian forces conducted another Shahed 131 and 136 drone strike against Kyiv overnight on May 29 to May 30. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces shot down 29 of 31 Russian Shahed 131 and 136 drones that targeted Kyiv.[8] Senior Russian officials claimed that Russian forces struck high profile targets in Kyiv during recent strikes, likely to appear successful in retaliation for the recent Belgorod Oblast incursion.[9] Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu claimed that Russian forces struck a Patriot air defense system in recent days.[10] Ukrainian Air Forces Spokesperson Colonel Yuriy Ihnat denied Shoigu’s claim, however.[11] Russian milbloggers’ recent complaints about the perceived lack of Russian escalation in response to the Belgorod border raid and Moscow drone strikes do not give Russian forces credit for the unprecedented scale of their air campaign against Kyiv. Many milbloggers, including high-profile voices like former Russian officer Igor Girkin and Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin have frequently and recently complained about the lack of full scale general and economic mobilization in Russia, the only feasible measure likely to satisfy the broader information space outcry.[12]

Russian President Vladimir Putin attempted to downplay the drone attack on Moscow to avoid exposing the limited options he has to retaliate against Ukraine. Putin claimed that Russian forces struck the Ukrainian military intelligence headquarters “two [to] three days ago” and claimed that the Russian Armed Forces continue to respond to Ukraine’s “war against Donbas” by striking Ukrainian military infrastructure.[13] Putin insinuated that the drone strike on Moscow was Kyiv’s response to Russian strikes, and the Russian MoD conveniently claimed on May 30 that Russian forces carried out “a group of strikes with long-range high-precision air-launched weapons at main decision-making centers” in Ukraine.[14] The Russian MoD did not claim that it had struck the Ukrainian military intelligence headquarters recently and there is no available confirmation of Putin’s claim.[15] Putin stated that Ukraine is trying to provoke a response and make Russia “mirror” its actions. Putin’s emphasis on past and ongoing missile strikes is likely an attempt to signal that Russia is already actively retaliating and does not need to respond to further Ukrainian provocations. Putin has consistently retaliated against genuine and purported Ukrainian actions by ordering massive missile and drone campaigns, likely due to Russian forces’ inability to achieve any decisive effects on the battlefield.[16]

Putin additionally pushed numerous Kremlin boilerplate narratives aimed at maintaining domestic support for the Russian war effort and villainizing the West. Putin also noted that, while the Moscow air defense systems “worked normally,” Russia still needs to “work” on improving these systems – a notable attempt to preempt criticism from Russian ultra-nationalists who have been criticizing Russia’s ineffective air defense systems in Moscow and along the Russian border regions with Ukraine.[17] Putin also accused Ukraine of threatening to destabilize the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) and using “dirty devices” – both default Russian false narratives that the Kremlin uses during Russian military failures.[18]

The drone attack on Moscow generated varied responses from the Russian information space. Moscow Duma Deputy Andrey Medvedev claimed that the Ukrainian forces hurriedly executed the drone attack as part of an information operation with negligible kinetic effects.[19] Some Russian milbloggers used the drone attacks to criticize the Russian withdrawal from Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy oblasts in April 2022.[20] Igor Girkin used the strikes against Rublyovka to criticize Russian elites who he claimed have “never thought about the country and never will” and will not respond to Ukrainian attacks in Moscow, Belgorod Oblast, or Russian-occupied Ukraine.[21] Girkin also mocked Putin for continuing to assert that the war is a “special military operation,” despite drone attacks on the Russian capital.[22] Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin reprimanded the Russian MoD and called on Russian officials to actually defend Russia instead of “sitting quietly.”[23] Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov threatened the European countries, claiming that, if they continue to supply Ukraine with weapons, they will not have the weapons needed to defend themselves when Russia “knocks on their doors.”[24]

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is likely attempting to conceal the high Russian losses in Ukraine by artificially inflating Ukrainian casualties in the war. Defense Minister Shoigu claimed on May 30 that Russian forces had destroyed an absurdly high number of Western-provided Ukrainian weapons, including long range missiles, in the past month.[25] Shoigu celebrated claimed successes and training efforts, including by awarding Russian formations and bragging about the upcoming summer military exercises. A Wagner Group-affiliated milblogger criticized Shoigu, implying that Shoigu’s statements are so unrealistic that they appear to be fake to readers.[26] Dutch open-source group Oryx reported on May 29 that it confirmed that Russia has lost over 2,000 tanks and 2,366 infantry fighting vehicles (including over 850 BMPs) since the war began.[27]

EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell stated that Russia will not enter negotiations while trying to win the war, supporting ISW’s assessment that Russian statements expressing willingness to negotiate are part of an ongoing information operation intending to weaken Western willingness to aid Ukraine.[28] Reuters reported on May 29 that Borrell said that Russia has repeatedly signaled that it would not end the war until it achieved its military goals and that it has over 300,000 personnel in Ukraine — twice as many as when the invasion started.[29]

Key Takeaways

• Russia claimed that Ukraine conducted a series of drone strikes against Moscow on May 30 as Russia again targeted Ukraine with Iranian-made Shahed drones.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin attempted to downplay the drone attack on Moscow to avoid exposing the limited options he has to retaliate against Ukraine.
• The drone attack on Moscow generated varied responses from the Russian information space.
• The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is likely attempting to conceal the high Russian losses in Ukraine by artificially inflating Ukrainian casualties in the war.
• EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell stated that Russia will not enter negotiations while trying to win the war.
• Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks northeast of Kupyansk and northwest of Svatove, and Russian sources claimed that Russian forces conducted a ground attack south of Kreminna.
• The tempo of Russian and Ukrainian offensive operations in the Bakhmut direction remains low as of May 30.
• Russian forces made marginal advances amid continued ground attacks on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
• Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks along the southern axis.
• Russian officials are establishing domestic veteran support programs which likely aim to advertise the perks of military service in Russia.
• Russian occupation officials continue to deport Ukrainian children to Russia under the guise of providing pediatric healthcare.

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

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

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks northeast of Kupyansk and northwest of Svatove on May 30. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Masyutivka (13km northeast of Kupyansk), Krokhmalne (20km northwest of Svatove), and Novoselivske (15km northwest of Svatove).[30] Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Head Artem Lysohor reported that Russian forces conducted offensive actions near Stelmakhivka (15km northwest of Svatove).[31] A Russian news aggregator claimed that Russian forces are gradually advancing in Masyutivka.[32] ISW has still not observed visual confirmation of any Russian advances in or control over Masyutivka.

Russian sources claimed that Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks south of Kreminna on May 30. Russian sources claimed that Russian forces are storming Bilohorivka (10km south of Kreminna) and encircling the Ukrainian forces.[33] ISW has not seen visual confirmation supporting a Russian advance near Bilohorivka. Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty reported that Russian forces face difficulties in staffing regular units and instead use Chechen Akhmat forces, Cossacks, territorial defense units, BARS (Russian Combat Army Reserve) formations, and Storm-Z units.[34]

The Ukrainian General Staff reported that a Russian sabotage and reconnaissance group unsuccessfully attempted to cross the border between Ukraine and Russia near Zelene (34km northeast of Kharkiv City).[35]

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

Click here to read ISW’s retrospective analysis on the Battle for Bakhmut.

The tempo of Russian and Ukrainian offensive operations in the Bakhmut direction remains low as of May 30. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations in the Bakhmut direction on May 30.[36] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Russian forces are replacing and regrouping their forces in the Bakhmut direction, and that Ukrainian forces are focusing on other tasks and have not advanced in the northern and southern outskirts of Bakhmut for several days.[37] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty stated that Ukrainian forces obliterated Wagner Group’s offensive capabilities and that Ukrainian strikes against Russian forces inflict significant casualties – 80 killed and 119 injured as of May 30 – as Wagner forces conduct their relief in place.[38] Cherevaty stated that only two or three engagements occurred in the Bakhmut direction in recent days and no combat clashes occurred on May 30. Some Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted limited counterattacks, however. The Russian Southern Group of Forces Spokesperson Vadim Astafyev claimed that Russian forces repelled three Ukrainian ground attacks in the Soledar-Bakhmut direction, and a Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted counterattacks near Andriivka and Klishchiivka (both within 7km south of Bakhmut).[39] The milblogger also claimed that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful attacks near Ivanivske (6km west of Bakhmut) and Orikhovo-Vasylivka (11km northwest of Bakhmut).[40]

Russian forces made marginal advances amid continued ground attacks on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on May 30. Geolocated footage shows that Russian forces made marginal advances southwest of Vodyane (7km southwest of Avdiivka) near the E50 highway as of May 29.[41] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks near Sieverne (5km west of Avdiivka), Pobieda (5km southwest of Donetsk City), and Novomykhailivka (10km southwest of Donetsk City), and in the city of Marinka (on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City).[42] Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces conducted 12 ground attacks in the Avdiivka direction and 12 attacks in the Marinka direction in the past day.[43] Ukrainian Defense Forces Tavriisk Direction Spokesperson Valeriy Shershen stated that Russian “Storm” and “Storm-Z” units are mainly storming Marinka.[44]

A Russian source claimed that Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast on May 30. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces attempted to advance near Velyka Novosilka (32km northwest of Vuhledar) and fighting intensified near Vuhledar.[45] The milblogger also claimed that Ukrainian forces forced Russian forces to retreat from the southwestern dacha area of Mykilske (4km southwest of Vuhledar) across the Kashlahach River. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces did not conduct any offensive operations in western Donetsk Oblast.[46]

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

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks along the southern axis on May 30. The Ukrainian General Staff and Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Russian forces are conducting defensive operations in the southern operational direction in Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts.[47] Russian forces continued to conduct regular indirect fire against Ukrainian-held settlements across the southern frontline.[48]

Russian and Ukrainian sources reported that Ukrainian forces struck objects along the southern axis. Zaporizhia Oblast occupation official Vladimir Rogov claimed on May 30 that Ukrainian forces are striking roads and bridges in Russian-occupied Zaporizhia Oblast and struck the road connecting Russian-occupied Vasylivka and Dniprorudne.[49] Rogov also reported that Ukrainian forces struck Mykhailivka (about 45km north of Melitopol) on May 30.[50] Ukrainian Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov reported that Ukrainian forces struck Mykhailivka on May 29 and 30.[51] Geolocated images posted on May 29 reportedly show damage from a Ukrainian HIMARS strike against a parking lot with Russian cars in Mykhailivka.[52] Mariupol Mayoral Advisor Petro Andryushchenko reported that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian-occupied building in Yurivka (on the coast of the Sea of Azov, about 30km west of Mariupol).[53] Images that surfaced on May 30 reportedly show a destroyed Russian 55K6A command post vehicle for the S-400 air defense system which Ukrainian forces reportedly destroyed in an unspecified area in Kherson Oblast on May 20.[54]

Chechen elements are reportedly operating in the Orikhiv area in western Zaporizhia Oblast as of May 30. Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov posted footage on May 29 and 30 reportedly showing the Yug-Akhmat Battalion operating in the Orikhiv direction.[55]

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

Russian officials are establishing domestic veteran support programs, which likely aim to advertise the perks of military service in Russia. A Kremlin-affiliated source claimed that the first branches of the “Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation” will open on June 1 and over 3,000 coordinators will help veterans apply for social benefits.[56] The source claimed that the foundation was created on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin and that no similar foundations existed in Russia after World War II, Afghanistan, or the Chechen wars. The wife of the Kemerovo Oblast Governor, Anna Tsivileva, is the chairperson of the “Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation.” Russian opposition sources previously revealed that Tsivileva is Putin’s great niece.[57]

The Russian MoD is reportedly continuing to recruit prisoners from regional penitentiaries. A Russian independent outlet reported that Russian Penitentiary Service employees opened recruitment points in prisons and are recruiting prisoners who committed less serious crimes for contract service.[58] The penitentiary service employees reportedly recruit prisoners with alcoholism and drug problems.

Russian military spending has reportedly (and unsurprisingly) increased since the start of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The UK MoD cited research from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute that found that Russian military spending grew by 9.2 percent in 2022 to $86.4 billion – or an estimated 4.1 percent of Russian Gross Domestic Product (GDP).[59] The UK MoD assessed that Russian military spending is likely higher than stated because the Russian federal budget information lacks transparency.

The Wagner Group continues to weaponize social media to facilitate global recruitment campaigns. Politico, citing UK disinformation research group Logically, reported that Wagner is using Twitter and Facebook to recruit personnel.[60] The report showed that Wagner posted sixty recruitment posts in dozens of languages, including French, Vietnamese, and Spanish, advertising combat, medical, and IT jobs in the Wagner private military company (PMC). Wagner is also launching a new project called the “Second Front” aimed at mobilizing Russian society and the information space to resolve issues on the frontlines.[61] Wagner-affiliated sources claimed that the “Second Front” will bring attention to “subjective reality” on the frontlines and fight against fake information in the Russian information space.

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

Russian occupation officials continue to deport Ukrainian children to Russia under the guise of providing pediatric healthcare. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian occupation authorities continue to relocate children from occupied Ukraine to Russia for treatment and use prophylactic medical examinations to coerce children's parents and legal guardians to apply for Russian citizenship.[62] The Ukrainian Resistance Center also reported that Russian occupation authorities are forcing parents to submit Russian citizenship applications for their children under 14 years old seeking treatment under threat of terminating parental rights. The Kherson Oblast Occupation Ministry of Health claimed that Russian doctors have performed 15,287 examinations on children in occupied Kherson Oblast since November 2022, resulting in 81 children referred for treatment in federal medical facilities in Russia.[63] ISW has previously reported on Russian occupation authorities deporting Ukrainian children to Russia under the guise of needing more advanced healthcare.[64]

Russian sources claimed that Russian law enforcement arrested a Ukrainian woman in Moscow who attempted to retrieve her godchildren from Russian-occupied Kherson Oblast. Kremlin newswire RIA Novosti reported on May 30 that Russian law enforcement arrested a woman who claimed to be visiting Moscow to retrieve two Ukrainian children “without parental care” from Henichesk, occupied Kherson Oblast, on the instructions of the Save Ukraine Foundation, which helps return Ukrainian children from Russia and Russian occupied areas.[65] BBC’s Russia service reported that the woman was attempting to retrieve her godchildren and that Russian law enforcement released the woman but did not allow her to take her two godchildren with her.[66]

Russian authorities continue attempts to integrate Ukrainian children into Russian culture and society in Russian occupied areas of Ukraine. Kherson Oblast Occupation Ministry of Education and Science claimed that 29 child members of the Russian Movement of Children and Youth of Kherson Oblast attended the “Movement of the First” festival in Moscow.[67] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian occupation authorities plan to open branches of the Russian Volunteer Society for Assistance to the Army, Aviation, and Navy of Russia (DOSAAF) in Donetsk Oblast in an attempt to promote Kremlin ideology among youth and encourage them to obtain Russian passports.[68] ISW has previously reported on Russia’s efforts to Russify Ukrainian youth in occupied territories.[69]

The Kremlin is likely attempting to forcibly populate occupied Ukraine with Russian citizens while also bolstering the number of medical workers near the front. First Deputy Chairman of the Russian State Duma's Committee on International Affairs Leonid Slutsky reportedly stated that the Russian State Duma is discussing legislation that would distribute graduates of medical universities to occupied Ukraine.[70] The law would require graduates of medical universities to work for one and a half years in the Russian Far East and in Russian-occupied Ukraine.[71] ISW has previously reported that Russian officials reduced the training periods for Russian healthcare workers to compensate for a lack of medical workers among Russian forces in Ukraine.[72]

Significant activity in Belarus (ISW assesses that a Russian or Belarusian attack into northern Ukraine is extraordinarily unlikely).

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

Unspecified Belarusian missile force elements operating Russian-provided Iskander missiles – likely of Belarus 465th Missile Brigade – conducted a command-and-control training lesson for conducting missile strikes in an unspecified location in Belarus on May 30.[73] Belarus’ 465th Missile Brigade reportedly began operating Russian-provided Iskander systems as of February 1, 2023.[74]

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

2. Ukraine-Russia ‘demilitarised zone’ floated for peace deal

I am surprised to read this. Is this an accurate report?

Ukraine-Russia ‘demilitarised zone’ floated for peace deal

Al Jazeera English

A demilitarised zone between 100 and 120 kilometres wide (62 to 75 miles) should be established in Russian border territory with Ukraine as part of any post-war settlement, an adviser to Ukraine’s presidential office has said.

Mykhailo Podolyak, the adviser to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, said the demilitarised zone should cover the Russian regions of Belgorod, Bryansk, Kursk and Rostov in order to protect adjacent territories in Ukraine.

“To ensure real security for residents of Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk, and Donetsk regions and protect them from shelling, it will be necessary to introduce a demilitarisation zone of 100-120km,” Podolyak wrote in a tweet on Monday.

Such a zone, which cannot be used or occupied by military forces, would likely require “a mandatory international control contingent at the first stage”, Podolyak said.

A demilitarised zone should be a “key topic” of a post-war settlement, said the presidential adviser, who has 1.2 million Twitter followers, adding that such a buffer would “prevent the recurrence of aggression in the future”.

The key topic of the post-war settlement should be the establishment of safeguards to prevent a recurrence of aggression in the future. To ensure real security for residents of Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk, and Donetsk regions and protect them from shelling, it…

— Михайло Подоляк (@Podolyak_M) May 29, 2023

The International Committee of the Red Cross says there are detailed rules for the creation and recognition of demilitarised zones and the concept is not far removed from hospital zones and other areas deemed neutral during conflicts.

An aide to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also said on Monday that Ukraine had no interest in any ceasefire that locks in Russian territorial gains.

Chief diplomatic adviser Ihor Zhovkva also pushed back against international peace initiatives from China, Brazil, the Vatican and South Africa, saying that the time for mediation with Moscow had passed.

“In this period of open war, we don’t need any mediators. It’s too late for mediation,” he said. “There cannot be a Brazilian peace plan, a Chinese peace plan, a South African peace plan when you are talking about the war in Ukraine,” Zhovkva said in an interview with the Reuters news agency.

Russia has said it is open to peace talks with Kyiv, which stalled a few months into the invasion. But Moscow also insists that any talks be based on “new realities”, meaning recognition of the annexation of five Ukrainian provinces it fully or partly controls – a condition Kyiv will not accept.

China has touted a 12-point vision for peace, which calls for a ceasefire but does not condemn the invasion or oblige Russia to withdraw from occupied territories.

Beijing, which has close ties with Russia’s leadership, sent top envoy Li Hui to Kyiv and Moscow this month to encourage peace talks.

Zhovkva said the envoy was briefed in detail on the situation on the battlefield, at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, the power grid and the transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia, which Kyiv says is a Russian war crime.

“He listened very attentively. There was no immediate response … we will see. China is a wise country, which understands its role in international affairs,” Zhovkva said.

The Institute for the Study of War, a think tank based in Washington, DC, said on Monday that China’s foreign ministry had denied a report in the Wall Street Journal newspaper that China’s special representative on Eurasian affairs had urged European officials to attempt to end the war in Ukraine before it escalated or consider recognising Russian annexed territory in Ukraine.

China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning denied the report, adding that Ukraine was now at a “critical juncture” and China would continue to work with all parties to resolve the crisis, the institute reported.

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning denied a @WSJ report that #China's Special Representative for Eurasian Affairs Li Hui urged European officials to end the conflict in #Ukraine before it escalates. https://t.co/yvUY7gYFDU https://t.co/jClvvEglgo

— ISW (@TheStudyofWar) May 30, 2023

Al Jazeera English

3.Ukraine peace plan is only way to end Russia's war, says Zelenskiy aide

Ukraine peace plan is only way to end Russia's war, says Zelenskiy aide

msn.com · by Max Hunder 1 day ago

© Thomson Reuters Aftermath of a Russian drone attack in Donets region

By Max Hunder

KYIV (Reuters) - Kyiv's peace plan is the only way to end Russia's war in Ukraine and the time for mediation efforts has passed, a top aide to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.

Chief diplomatic adviser Ihor Zhovkva told Reuters that Ukraine had no interest in a ceasefire that locks in Russian territorial gains, and wanted the implementation of its peace plan, which envisages the full withdrawal of Russian troops.

He pushed back on a flurry of peace initiatives from China, Brazil, the Vatican and South Africa in recent months.

"There cannot be a Brazilian peace plan, a Chinese peace plan, a South African peace plan when you are talking about the war in Ukraine," Zhovkva said in an interview late on Friday.

Zelenskiy made a major push to court the Global South this month in response to peace moves from some of its members. He attended the Arab League summit in Saudi Arabia on May 19, holding talks with host Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Iraq and other delegations.

He then flew to Japan where he met the leaders of India and Indonesia - important voices in the Global South - on the sidelines of the Group of Seven summit of major economic powers in Hiroshima.

While Kyiv has staunch backing from the West in its struggle against the Kremlin, it has not won the same support from the Global South - a term denoting Latin America, Africa and much of Asia - where Russia has invested diplomatic energy for years.

Moscow has bolstered ties with Global South powers during the war in Ukraine, including by selling more of its energy to India and China.

In response to a Western embargo on seaborne Russian oil imports, Russia has been working to reroute supplies away from its traditional European markets to Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who was in Nairobi on Monday hoping to nail down a trade pact with Kenya, has repeatedly travelled to Africa during the war and St Petersburg is due to host a Russia-Africa summit this summer.

In a sign of how Ukraine is trying to challenge Russia's diplomatic sway, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba embarked on his second wartime tour of Africa last week.

Ukraine's Zhovkva said winning backing in the Global South was a top priority. While Ukraine focused on ties with Western partners at the invasion's start, securing peace was a matter of concern for all countries, he said.

He played down the prospects of calls for dialogue with Russia made by Pope Francis who described Ukraine's occupied territories as a "political problem".

"In this period of open war, we don't need any mediators. It's too late for mediation," he said.

'PEACE SUMMIT'

Zhovkva said the reaction to Ukraine's 10-point peace plan had been extremely positive at the G7 summit.

"Not a single formula (point) had any concerns from the (G7) countries," Zhovkva said.

Kyiv wanted G7 leaders to help bring as many Global South leaders as possible to a "Peace Summit" proposed by Kyiv this summer, he said, adding that the location was still being discussed.

Russia has said it is open to peace talks with Kyiv, which stalled a few months into the invasion. But it insists that any talks be based on "new realities", meaning its declared annexation of five Ukrainian provinces it fully or partly controls - a condition Kyiv will not accept.

China, the world's second-largest economy and Ukraine's top trade partner before the war, has touted a 12-point vision for peace which calls for a ceasefire but does not condemn the invasion or oblige Russia to withdraw from occupied territories.

Beijing, which has close ties with Russia's leadership, sent top envoy Li Hui to Kyiv and Moscow this month to encourage peace talks.

Zhovkva said the envoy was briefed in detail on the situation on the battlefield, at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, the power grid and the transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia, which Kyiv says is a Russian war crime.

"He listened very attentively. There was no immediate response … we will see. China is a wise country which understands its role in international affairs."

(Reporting by Max Hunder; Editing by Tom Balmforth and Jon Boyle)

msn.com · by Max Hunder 1 day ago

4. Putin and the Psychology of Nuclear Brinksmanship

Excerpts:

Neither heavy losses on the battlefield nor crippling economic sanctions have led Putin to waver. He appears singularly preoccupied with national security and with his own need for control. He certainly considers his attack on the Ukrainians to be virtuous, going as far as to claim that he is “denazifying” a state led by a Jewish president, a man whose grandfather fought the Nazis in World War II. All of this—the psychic numbing, the extreme prominence of security considerations, the purportedly virtuous violence—portends that he will not seek peace short of Ukrainian surrender.

Of course, it is impossible to precisely assess the odds that Putin will use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. But uncertainty and imprecision are not the same as ignorance. Psychological theory and evidence, backed by the history of warfare, point to a high enough risk that Western governments must plan ahead. They should weigh now their possible responses to an escalation that would come as a shock but should not come as a surprise. Unlike opinion surveys that posit a hypothetical risk to U.S. soldiers, Putin’s vulnerability is real and considerable. Russia’s losses have been staggering, far more than the 20,000-soldier threshold that many members of the American public would say warrants the use of nuclear weapons.

That Putin has not yet taken that step, even in the face of huge casualties, is cold comfort. He may wager that time is still on his side and that even a drawn-out, nonnuclear war of attrition will wear out the Ukrainian war machine and its backers. But his narcissistic focus, concentrated around maintaining his hold on power, could drastically shrink the time horizon. As his generals and mercenaries continue their infighting, he may take more risks to end the war sooner. He is a man whom humanity will wish it had kept away from its most dangerous weapons.

Putin and the Psychology of Nuclear Brinksmanship

The War in Ukraine Hinges on One Man’s Thoughts and Feelings

By Rose McDermott, Reid Pauly, and Paul Slovic

May 30, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Rose McDermott, Reid Pauly, and Paul Slovic · May 30, 2023

Shortly after the West rebuked Russia for its 2022 invasion of Ukraine and imposed financial sanctions of unprecedented scope, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he was putting his country’s nuclear forces on high alert. The Kremlin has issued many more nuclear threats, some oblique and some explicit, since then.

The mere possibility that Putin might make good on these threats raises great concern. Even before the war in Ukraine, Russia had reversed its longtime “no first use” policy, under which it claimed it would never go nuclear unless the enemy did so first. Some now believe Russia has switched to an approach known as “escalate to de-escalate,” which holds that nuclear escalation can defuse a crisis by proving one’s commitment to destruction and forcing the enemy to capitulate. In Ukraine, that could mean using a handful of tactical, low-yield nuclear weapons on the battlefield—which CIA Director William Burns and a number of high-ranking U.S. military leaders have warned is possible. Putin, for his part, has merely said that Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons if confronting an “existential” threat.

What constitutes an existential threat, however, is not clearly delineated in Russian strategic doctrine. It lies in the eye of the beholder—in this case, Putin, who retains full control of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, albeit subject to a supposed requirement that Russia’s defense minister and the chief of the general staff of the armed forces authenticate his launch orders. The answer, in other words, comes down to one of the most opaque aspects of the current crisis: the state of Putin’s mind and his outlook on the world.

Much of the debate around Putin’s psychological disposition has centered on whether the Russian president acts rationally. That discussion is an important one, but it has at times lacked nuance. A sounder approach may be to ask what common psychological biases and pathologies, based on behavioral theory and research, shape people’s perception of nuclear war—and how they may apply to the Russian leader. How far Putin will take his nuclear brinkmanship remains anybody’s guess. But a combination of known psychological and cognitive biases, combined with some psychological tendencies characteristic of Putin, could prove extraordinarily dangerous if he feels backed into a corner, with potentially massive implications as Ukraine begins its spring offensive.

SHIELD AND SWORD

A nuclear shadow has hung over the Ukraine conflict from the start. Although the war has been fought by conventional means, Putin would not have started it without his nuclear shield. And his repeated attempts at nuclear coercion have been a central element of his plan to achieve several war aims, although that strategy has met with decidedly mixed success.

For one thing, Putin has raised the specter of nuclear war to deter direct NATO intervention on the battlefield. This has undoubtedly worked, and it provides an ominous lesson to other countries—nuclear and nonnuclear alike—about the room for aggression below the nuclear threshold.

Putin also hoped that his threats would deter, or at least cap, the provision of Western military aid to Ukraine. The level of aid indeed appears to be limited by fears of nuclear escalation. But the success of Russia’s coercive efforts on this front is declining. A coalition of backers has slowly increased its level of support to Ukraine and has accepted at least some risk of nuclear escalation to do so. Its latest step—a joint allied program to train Ukrainian pilots on F-16 fighter jets—even opens the door to a future transfer of these highly coveted fighter aircraft.

Putin’s saber rattling has likewise failed to halt the expansion of NATO. Finland has already abandoned its long-standing neutrality and joined the alliance, adding another 800 miles to NATO’s border with Russia. Sweden is only awaiting Turkey’s approval to join next.

Last, and perhaps most important, is Putin’s desire to force Ukraine’s surrender. To support that goal, the Russian president may yet be tempted to engage in more overt nuclear brinkmanship. Overall, in a war that has gone very badly for him, nuclear weapons remain crucial to his plans and future moves.

BLIND SPOTS

In weighing nuclear use, Putin would confront difficult but inevitable tradeoffs between conflicting goals. Nuclear escalation might, in his mind, hasten victory in a grueling war, but he must weigh any potential short-term benefits against the assured harms, both immediate and long term. These include destruction, loss of life, and punishing retaliatory strikes beyond Ukraine’s borders, as the Biden administration and its allies have threatened, as well as irreversible damage—to survivors, to the environment, to the norms of domestic and international politics, to the very integrity of human civilization. This equation, if given due thought and effort, would not encourage nuclear escalation.

The trouble, according to both psychological research and historical evidence, is that people generally struggle to weigh conflicting risks and benefits—including those involving nuclear weapons. Faced with complexity, we simplify, narrowing our focus until a clear choice emerges. Rather than creating a common currency, so to speak, with which to weigh diverse values and objectives in a compensatory manner, we order our goals by priority and focus on achieving the one that is the highest. As the scholars Kenneth Hammond and Jeryl Mumpower have observed, when our values compete, we retreat into “singular emphasis on our favorite value.” This narrowing of attention is known as “the prominence effect.”

Like a spotlight, the prominence effect focuses our attention on what we perceive as the most inherently important attributes of a decision, causing those attributes to assume great and sometimes extreme priority, making a difficult choice appear much easier. In politics, this helps explain the phenomenon of single-issue voters who value a candidate’s position on, say, gun control, abortion, or immigration to the exclusion of any other factor.

The prominence effect has been shown to lead people to disregard humanitarian values, such as protecting human lives or the environment, in favor of more imminent and defensible security goals or salient personal objectives. (Single-issue voting, for example, is particularly common in matters of national security, especially under conditions of threat.) In decisions on the development and use of nuclear weapons, leaders must weigh short-term military and political benefits against vast but hard-to-assess human, social, cultural, and political consequences. The difficulty of doing so in any even-handed way may push long-term consequences, no matter how great their intrinsic importance, outside the spotlight of attention and thus lower the threshold for escalating conflict when under threat or in the face of losses.

THE DEADLY ARITHMETIC OF COMPASSION

Another cognitive bias tipping the scale is our difficulty in computing mass suffering. Most people are familiar with the aphorism that “the death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic,” even if not all of them realize that the saying is frequently attributed to the mass-murdering Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Like other dictums of the sort—“statistics are human beings with the tears dried off”—it captures well our flawed arithmetic of compassion. We care about individual lives, but the fates of nameless, faceless collectives leave us cold, and we become easily inured to large losses of life. This is known as “psychic numbing.”

A single life holds great importance, enough for some people to perform acts of heroism to save complete strangers. It is much harder to appreciate the humanity of groups or entire populations. This defect in our humanitarian accounting has been documented in numerous experiments on life-saving behavior, showing that our intuitive feelings, which we trust to guide us in making all manner of decisions, do not scale up. As the number of lives at risk increases, psychic numbing begins to desensitize us. In some cases, the more who die, the less we care.

Push the numbers high enough, and our feelings of compassion may fade or collapse entirely. A 2015 photograph of Aylan Kurdi, a two-year-old Syrian refugee whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey, generated far more outrage and concern around the world than statistics documenting the hundreds of thousands of deaths in the Syrian civil war up to that point. Larger and larger numbers of dead do not necessarily compound the sense of horror, much less the outrage against those who perpetrate war or genocide. Likewise, a leader willing to countenance nuclear war may not be swayed by the prospect of mass casualties. Past a very low threshold of sensitivity to individual suffering, these numbers may cease to affect decision-making.

FATAL TRADEOFFS AND CHOICES

Research into the prominence effect and psychic numbing suggests general psychological dynamics that could shape Putin’s decision-making. But what do psychologists know about how people think specifically about the use of nuclear weapons? Empirical evidence on this question is understandably difficult to come by. Many public opinion polls have measured Americans’ support for using nuclear weapons. Yet these polls usually fail to posit the tradeoffs that a leader might face in real life, such as the choice between risking the lives of U.S. soldiers and a nuclear strike that will kill large numbers of foreign noncombatants. This was the dilemma at the heart of U.S. President Harry Truman’s decision to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. And this impossible tradeoff is the kind of decision-making environment that allows the prominence effect and psychic numbing to go into overdrive.

In an illuminating 2017 survey experiment, the scholars Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino tried to approximate how Americans today would perceive tradeoffs like those Truman once faced. The survey introduced respondents to a hypothetical scenario involving a difficult ground war between the United States and Iran. Respondents were shown a news story that indicated that the war was not going well and estimated that 20,000 additional U.S. military personnel might die if it continued. They were then asked whether they approved of a nuclear strike on Iran’s second-largest city to bring an end to the war and protect the lives of American troops. Participants were told the strike might kill 100,000 Iranian civilians. In a second scenario, the projected death toll was raised to two million Iranian civilians.

The survey results were disturbing. More than half the respondents supported the nuclear option—and, consistent with the effects of psychic numbing, it made little difference whether the strike would kill 100,000 Iranians or two million. Respondents’ willingness to potentially kill millions of civilians to protect 20,000 American service members also points to the prominence they attribute to national security—and the nonprominence of enemy civilian lives.

A study co-authored by one of us (Slovic) replicated Sagan and Valentino’s but probed deeper into the participants’ worldviews. Views on abortion, the death penalty, gun control, and immigration were combined into a single quantitative measure of the degree to which a person generally supported punishing those they viewed as deserving of harsh treatment. The more someone supported punitive policies against others who offended or threatened them (e.g., banning abortion once a heartbeat is detected without exception for rape or incest), the more they supported dropping a nuclear bomb on enemy civilians.

A follow-up survey added questions about racial justice (including on racial disparities in prison sentencing, which often lead to Black people serving harsher sentences than other people who committed the same crimes) and belief in Hell—the ultimate punishment. Respondents who endorsed six or more out of eight ways to punish or restrict the rights of people were almost ten times as likely to approve a nuclear strike on Iranian civilians as those who rejected such punitive approaches. The survey findings have also demonstrated a sense of moral righteousness among supporters of nuclear escalation, who tended to believe that the Iranian victims deserved their fate and that bombing them was ethical. This is consistent with the notion that the perpetrators of harm almost always believe their violent acts to be virtuous. When violence toward the enemy appears not only justified but also virtuous, the threshold for withholding the use of force, or for avoiding escalation, diminishes greatly.

“MEAN, HUNGRY, FEROCIOUS”

It remains impossible to assign a precise probability to a potential nuclear escalation by Russia in Ukraine. It might be easier to predict, however, what one might observe if a Russian nuclear strike in Ukraine is imminent. The nuclear weapons expert Pavel Podvig, for instance, has cited four signs to watch for: more specific nuclear threats from the Kremlin, a rout of Russian forces for which Putin is personally blamed at home, the movement of tactical nuclear weapons from storage into the field, and intercepted Russian communications suggesting possible intent to use nuclear weapons.

But signs that Russia is gearing up for a strike could also be a bluff intended to frighten Ukraine’s allies into standing down. And such signals would only come late in intelligence gathering, meaning there would be little time left to properly evaluate their meaning. Insights from psychological research, however, could shed light on earlier stages of the decision-making process. Factors such as the prominence effect, psychic numbing, and the concept of purportedly “virtuous violence” can help reveal how a leader such as Putin assesses risk—and therefore offer a sense, earlier on, of the relative likelihood that he will go nuclear.

Judging by many of his past statements, Putin’s wish to securely maintain power and his ambition to lead a modern Russian empire into a new golden era are among his most prominent objectives. Both aims will be in jeopardy if the war in Ukraine continues to falter. Still aggrieved by the perceived humiliation of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Putin sees himself as occupying a unique place in Russian history. He is, to hear him tell it, a latter-day Peter the Great capable of winning back lost lands and restoring his country to its previous position as a major world power. Such narcissistic traits tend to amplify the power of psychic numbing and diminish one’s perception of the value of the lives of others—if those lives are even considered at all.

We care about individual lives, but the fates of nameless, faceless collectives leave us cold.

Putin’s cruelty is legendary and has served him well in acquiring and maintaining power. His vengefulness toward those who criticize him or stand in his way is well documented. He has a long record of imprisoning and assassinating political opponents and sanctioning war crimes in Chechnya and Ukraine. He portrays the war in Ukraine as a righteous fight against Nazis and dehumanizes those who dare criticize him, referring to opponents of his invasion as gnats who fly into one’s mouth and should be spit out on the pavement.

Biographers trace this disposition—the belief that brutality is a survival skill—to Putin’s youth. “Post-siege Leningrad,” the journalist Masha Gessen has written of the Russian president’s hometown, was “a mean, hungry, impoverished place that bred mean, hungry, ferocious children.” The young Putin was commensurately quick to anger. If anyone offended him, a friend of Putin’s told Gessen, he “would immediately jump on the guy, scratch him, bite him, rip his hair out by the clump—do anything at all never to allow anyone to humiliate him in any way.” In addition, Putin was heavily influenced by his experience as a young KGB officer in Dresden in 1989, around the time the Berlin Wall fell. He was shocked by the speed with which the power of the people caused East Germany to implode, and he felt betrayed by the lack of response from Moscow. His subsequent desire for control and wealth, as well as his enduring social network, can be traced back to this early experience of rapid social change.

As a leader, Putin has scaled up his siege mentality into what the journalist Michel Eltchaninoff has described as a perpetual sense of victimhood, a fixation on apparent humiliations and insults directed against Russia. He has developed, over the decades, a vision of the world that is paranoid but coherent. Russia, in his mind, has for centuries been the victim of attempts to contain and dismember it. And in Ukraine, Putin is taking it upon himself, once again, to fight back.

HOPE FOR THE BEST, PREPARE FOR THE WORST

Neither heavy losses on the battlefield nor crippling economic sanctions have led Putin to waver. He appears singularly preoccupied with national security and with his own need for control. He certainly considers his attack on the Ukrainians to be virtuous, going as far as to claim that he is “denazifying” a state led by a Jewish president, a man whose grandfather fought the Nazis in World War II. All of this—the psychic numbing, the extreme prominence of security considerations, the purportedly virtuous violence—portends that he will not seek peace short of Ukrainian surrender.

Of course, it is impossible to precisely assess the odds that Putin will use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. But uncertainty and imprecision are not the same as ignorance. Psychological theory and evidence, backed by the history of warfare, point to a high enough risk that Western governments must plan ahead. They should weigh now their possible responses to an escalation that would come as a shock but should not come as a surprise. Unlike opinion surveys that posit a hypothetical risk to U.S. soldiers, Putin’s vulnerability is real and considerable. Russia’s losses have been staggering, far more than the 20,000-soldier threshold that many members of the American public would say warrants the use of nuclear weapons.

That Putin has not yet taken that step, even in the face of huge casualties, is cold comfort. He may wager that time is still on his side and that even a drawn-out, nonnuclear war of attrition will wear out the Ukrainian war machine and its backers. But his narcissistic focus, concentrated around maintaining his hold on power, could drastically shrink the time horizon. As his generals and mercenaries continue their infighting, he may take more risks to end the war sooner. He is a man whom humanity will wish it had kept away from its most dangerous weapons.

• ROSE McDERMOTT is David and Mariana Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University.
• REID PAULY is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Dean’s Assistant Professor of Nuclear Security and Policy at Brown University.
• PAUL SLOVIC is Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon and President of Decision Research.

Foreign Affairs · by Rose McDermott, Reid Pauly, and Paul Slovic · May 30, 2023

5. China Is Flirting With AI Catastrophe

Excerpts:

The potential for AI tragedy is hardly unique to China. As with any powerful new technology, disasters could strike anywhere, and smaller-scale incidents from accidents and misuse are already occurring regularly around the world with self-driving car crashes, AI voice-cloning scams, and the misidentification of people by law enforcement agencies using facial recognition, to name a few. Given its leading role in pioneering new AI capabilities, the United States in particular confronts a high risk of costly failures. American companies and the government would be wise to bolster their own AI safety efforts, as many lawmakers are now realizing.

China ranks as the most optimistic country in the world when it comes to AI.

But from Chernobyl to COVID, history shows that the most acute risks of catastrophe stem from authoritarian states, which are far more prone to systemic missteps that exacerbate an initial mistake or accident. China’s blithe attitude toward technological risk, the government’s reckless ambition, and Beijing’s crisis mismanagement are all on a collision course with the escalating dangers of AI.

A variety of U.S. policy measures could help mitigate these risks. Industry and government could double down on restricting the commercial flow of easily weaponized AI research to China in recognition of the serious threat it poses, including through technology transfer tactics that leverage joint ventures and Chinese investments. American diplomacy could champion the establishment of global AI safety standards. The United States, in coordination with the international community, could also monitor potential safety concerns in advanced AI labs around the world with an eye toward crafting contingency plans in the case of failures with spillover effects. There is precedent for doing so: the United States has been known to monitor the risks of accidents from dangerous behavior in Chinese biolabs, nuclear reactors, and space operations.

But the first step is rightly prioritizing the threat. As in the Cold War, weapons races and technological competition may attract a great deal of attention, but safety risks are equally worthy of concern, especially in authoritarian states. And to avoid another Chernobyl-like calamity, addressing China’s risks of an AI catastrophe should be at the top of the agenda.

China Is Flirting With AI Catastrophe

Why Accidents Pose the Biggest Risk

By Bill Drexel and Hannah Kelley

May 30, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Bill Drexel and Hannah Kelley · May 30, 2023

Few early observers of the Cold War could have imagined that the worst nuclear catastrophe of the era would occur at an obscure power facility in Ukraine. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster was the result of a flawed nuclear reactor design and a series of mistakes made by the plant operators. The fact that the world’s superpowers were spiraling into an arms race of potentially world-ending magnitude tended to eclipse the less obvious dangers of what was, at the time, an experimental new technology. And yet despite hair-raising episodes such as the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, it was a failure of simple safety measures, exacerbated by authoritarian crisis bungling, that resulted in the uncontrolled release of 400 times the radiation emitted by the U.S. nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Estimates of the devastation from Chernobyl range from hundreds to tens of thousands of premature deaths from radiation—not to mention an “exclusion zone” that is twice the size of London and remains largely abandoned to this day.

As the world settles into a new era of rivalry­—this time between China and the United States—competition over another revolutionary technology, artificial intelligence, has sparked a flurry of military and ethical concerns parallel to those initiated by the nuclear race. Those concerns are well worth the attention they are receiving, and more: a world of autonomous weapons and machine-speed war could have devastating consequences for humanity. Beijing’s use of AI tools to help fuel its crimes against humanity against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang already amounts to a catastrophe.

But of equal concern should be the likelihood of AI engineers’ inadvertently causing accidents with tragic consequences. Although AI systems do not explode like nuclear reactors, their far-reaching potential for destruction includes everything from the development of deadly new pathogens to the hacking of critical systems such as electrical grids and oil pipelines. Due to Beijing’s lax approach toward technological hazards and its chronic mismanagement of crises, the danger of AI accidents is most severe in China. A clear-eyed assessment of these risks—and the potential for spillover well beyond China’s borders—should reshape how the AI sector considers the hazards of its work.

A DIFFERENT SENSE OF DANGER

Characterizing AI risk has been a matter of public debate in recent months, with some experts claiming that superhuman intelligence will someday pose an existential threat to humanity and others lambasting “AI doomers” for catastrophizing. But even putting aside the most extreme fears of an AI dystopia, previous incidents have provided plenty of reasons to worry about unintended large-scale calamities in the near term.

For instance, compounding machine-speed interactions between AI systems in finance could inadvertently crash markets, as algorithmic trading did in the 2010 “flash crash,” which temporarily wiped out a trillion dollars’ worth of stocks in minutes. When drug researchers used AI to develop 40,000 potential biochemical weapons in less than six hours last year, they demonstrated how relatively simple AI systems can be easily adjusted to devastating effect. Sophisticated AI-powered cyberattacks could likewise go haywire, indiscriminately derailing critical systems that societies depend on, not unlike the infamous NotPetya attack, which Russia launched against Ukraine in 2017 but eventually infected computers across the globe. Despite these warning signs, AI technology continues to advance at breakneck speed, causing the safety risks to multiply faster than solutions can be created.

Most Americans may not be well versed in the specifics of these risks but nonetheless recognize the dangers of building powerful new technologies into complex, consequential systems. According to an Ipsos survey published in 2022, only 35 percent of Americans believe that AI’s benefits outweigh its risks, making the United States among the most pessimistic countries in the world about the technology’s promise. Surveys of engineers in American AI labs suggest that they may be, if anything, more safety-conscious than the broader public. Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “godfather of AI,” and until recently a vice president at Google, has quit the industry to advocate that scientists refrain from scaling up AI technology “until they have understood whether they can control it.”

China, by contrast, ranks as the most optimistic country in the world when it comes to AI, with nearly four out of five Chinese nationals professing faith in its benefits over its risks. Whereas the United States government and Silicon Valley are many years into a backlash against a “move fast and break things” mentality, China’s tech companies and government still pride themselves on embracing that ethos. Chinese technology leaders are enthusiastic about their government’s willingness to live with AI risks that, in the words of veteran AI expert and Chinese technology executive Kai-Fu Lee, would “scare away risk-sensitive American politicians.”

DISASTER AMNESIA

The disparity between Chinese and American perceptions of the hazards of AI—and their respective tech sectors’ willingness to take risks—is no accident. It is a result of Chinese policies that systematically suppress citizens’ experience of disasters to protect the government from public criticism.

In the United States, disasters tend to prompt an elevated public consciousness and enhanced safety measures as their heart-rending consequences ripple through the media and society—in machinery-intensive industries such as oil drilling, everyday food and drug production, and the processing of dangerous chemicals. Even now, legislators in Ohio are making progress on new safety regulations in the wake of a fiery train derailment in February that shot a plume of toxic chemicals above the town of East Palestine.

But in China, these types of accidents rarely reverberate through the media as the state maintains a chokehold on information to promote a constant atmosphere of stability. The Chinese Communist Party smothers information when disaster responses are mismanaged and routinely falsifies death tolls. The government sometimes refuses to acknowledge, let alone report on, vast tragedies such as the mass radiation poisoning that resulted from at least 40 nuclear tests conducted between 1964 and 1996, which led to the premature deaths of nearly 200,000 citizens.

The danger of AI accidents is most severe in China.

The result is a culture of disaster amnesia in which it is often impossible for the public to demand change or for the government to be forced to learn from costly accidents. Little accountability for mistakes means that business owners tend to play fast and loose with safety, as evidenced by China’s grisly history of industrial accidents. Even the rare instances in which mishaps are publicly exposed lack the staying power that might result in serious reform. For example, the public outcry about mass-produced toxic toothpaste in 2007, poisoned infant milk formula in 2008, and the collision of high-speed trains near Wenzhou in 2011 prompted well-publicized displays of scapegoating and loudly proclaimed government reform plans but had limited impacts on public safety. The Chinese government often projects a facade of responsiveness but then buries information about the events, quite literally in the case of the now-underground remains of the Wenzhou train wreckage. Given that China has a far more restrictive media ecosystem under Xi Jinping than it did when these incidents occurred, public exposure is even less likely today.

With the worst run-ins with emerging technologies routinely excised from public consciousness, Chinese society exhibits a seemingly boundless sense of techno-optimism, especially toward new technologies such as AI. Given that China’s historic ascent from poverty went hand in hand with high-speed technological advancement, accelerated scientific research is practically synonymous with national progress in the Chinese zeitgeist—viewed as having few, if any, downsides.

To see this full-steam-ahead approach in action, look no further than He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who shocked the world in 2018 by genetically modifying human embryos in secret to produce the world's first gene-edited babies. The doctor expected, and initially received, high praise in China for his feat, but the government clumsily pulled an about-face in response to international outrage over his unilateral decision to push humanity into uncharted territory. Unsurprisingly, further examination showed that He irreversibly botched his experiment, in what one geneticist called "a graphic demonstration of attempted gene editing gone awry.” He not only likely failed to make the modified babies (and their potential offspring) HIV-resistant as intended, but also potentially increased their susceptibility to influenza, cancer, and other diseases. After a stint in prison, He was released and continues his research, alongside new Chinese legislation providing loopholes for similar ethically fraught and potentially lucrative genetic experimentation.

UNBRIDLED AMBITION

Not only are experimental technologies seen as largely risk-free in China, but the country has also committed itself to a feverish sprint to become “the world’s premier artificial intelligence innovation center” by 2030.

China’s efforts to overtake the United States in AI have been a priority for the Communist Party since at least 2015, when Xi announced his “Made in China 2025” strategy. This emphasis on AI has since been reiterated in various national documents and speeches. AI has become a linchpin of China’s military modernization strategy and is increasingly integral to the country’s system of state surveillance, repression, and control. With so much at stake, it is no surprise that China’s government has been investing tens of billions of dollars annually into its AI sector and leveraging its vast espionage network to try to steal foreign corporate technology secrets.

China’s AI frenzy is paying off. The country produces more top-tier AI engineers than any other country—around 45 percent more than the United States, its closest competitor. It has also overtaken the United States in publishing high-quality AI research, accounting for nearly 30 percent of citations in AI journals globally in 2021, compared with 15 percent for the United States. This year, China is projected to overtake the United States in its share of the top one percent of the world’s most-cited AI papers. As the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence warned, “China possesses the might, talent, and ambition to surpass the United States as the world’s leader in AI in the next decade if current trends do not change.”

Theorists have long worried that AI competition might initiate a race to the bottom on safety. But in competitions between major powers, established incumbents and ambitious challengers usually have vastly different levels of risk aversion, with the latter often demonstrating far more appetite for risk in a quest to rebalance perceived asymmetries.

Today’s AI sprint would not be the first time Beijing’s desire to hasten progress invited disaster. The Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s attempt to collectivize farms, melt down agricultural tools to feed industrial development, and turbocharge steel production in his so-called Great Leap Forward plunged China into the worst famine in human history, with an estimated 30 million people starving to death between 1959 and 1961. Later, China’s attempt to slam the brakes on population growth through its 1979 one-child policy—adjusted to a two-child policy only in 2015—led to widespread forced abortions and infanticide, a population imbalance of roughly 33 million more males than females, and a severe demographic aging crisis across the country.

Less encompassing acceleration efforts, such as China’s 1990s rush to cash in on the commercial satellite launch industry, also catalyzed tragedy when a rocket blasted into a Chinese town in 1996, killing an unknown number of victims. Today, according to investigative reporting by The Wall Street Journal, hydroelectric plants, social housing complexes, and schools built around the world as part of China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative are literally falling apart, imposing vast costs on already impoverished countries.

A TRAGIC TRACK RECORD

China’s drive to outdo the United States in AI capabilities has not yet produced any crises. But history suggests that if one occurred, Beijing’s response would be calamitous. Authoritarian states routinely mismanage emergencies, turning accidents into full-blown tragedies. Averting the worst outcomes depends on recognizing anomalies early on, especially those that might suggest bad news. But autocracies struggle to do that. There is no reason to expect anything different as the perils linked to AI take shape.

When worrisome developments arise in China, party officials are incentivized to suppress troubling information rather than risk their positions by reporting bad news to their superiors, beginning a vicious cycle that tends toward catastrophe. The famine caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward is a case in point. If farm collectivization and melting down tools set the stage for a crisis, it was the official cover-up of the early signs of danger that ultimately snowballed a bad harvest to mass starvation.

The same pattern recurs in contemporary China with unnerving frequency. Consider, for example, the layers of government obfuscation that led at least one million Chinese men, women, and children to contract HIV by selling blood or receiving transfusions of contaminated blood in the 1990s. Despite regular early reports of the budding disaster, local officials aggressively suppressed evidence for years to protect their careers. Many of them were promoted even after the suppression and its effects were known.

The highly lethal 2002 SARS outbreak in China was likewise covered up by the Chinese government for about four months, even as the deadly virus infected more than 8,000 people around the world and killed 774. And despite investing $850 million in public health mechanisms specifically designed to ensure that a SARS-like cover-up did not happen again, the government followed a similar path in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Critical weeks elapsed between the first recorded COVID case in Wuhan in December 2019 and China’s acknowledgment of the risk of human-to-human transmission on January 20, 2020. By that time, seven million individuals had freely traveled from Wuhan to other locales, spreading the virus across the country and beyond.

During and after the COVID-19 outbreak, the Chinese government harassed and detained doctors and journalists who tried to bring life-saving information about the virus to light. At the same time, it lied to the World Health Organization, causing the WHO to fatally misadvise the rest of the world on the risks of COVID in the early weeks of the pandemic. To this day, the Chinese government refuses to offer the transparency needed to determine the origins of the virus, which may well have been the result of yet another Chinese high-tech accident.

BE AWARE, TAKE CARE

Those skeptical of the risks of a Chinese AI catastrophe might point to the government’s comparative willingness to regulate AI, or the fact that China still lags behind the United States in building the most sophisticated and therefore risky capabilities. But as with the rules governing the Chinese Internet, much of Beijing’s AI legislation aims only to ensure that companies remain subservient to the government and able to compete with their Western counterparts. These laws are also designed to suppress any information that threatens the regime.

And although it may be true that the United States leads in cutting-edge AI technology, it is also clear that clever tinkering with others’ systems can bring out some of their most dangerous and unanticipated capabilities, such as combining models for enhanced capacity to plan and execute chemical experiments. It is all too easy to steal, copy, or clone advanced AI models and tweak them, potentially stripping them of safety features. And if China’s technology sector is good at anything, it is quickly adapting others’ creations for maximum impact, a strategy that has been the engine of its growth for decades.

The potential for AI tragedy is hardly unique to China. As with any powerful new technology, disasters could strike anywhere, and smaller-scale incidents from accidents and misuse are already occurring regularly around the world with self-driving car crashes, AI voice-cloning scams, and the misidentification of people by law enforcement agencies using facial recognition, to name a few. Given its leading role in pioneering new AI capabilities, the United States in particular confronts a high risk of costly failures. American companies and the government would be wise to bolster their own AI safety efforts, as many lawmakers are now realizing.

China ranks as the most optimistic country in the world when it comes to AI.

But from Chernobyl to COVID, history shows that the most acute risks of catastrophe stem from authoritarian states, which are far more prone to systemic missteps that exacerbate an initial mistake or accident. China’s blithe attitude toward technological risk, the government’s reckless ambition, and Beijing’s crisis mismanagement are all on a collision course with the escalating dangers of AI.

A variety of U.S. policy measures could help mitigate these risks. Industry and government could double down on restricting the commercial flow of easily weaponized AI research to China in recognition of the serious threat it poses, including through technology transfer tactics that leverage joint ventures and Chinese investments. American diplomacy could champion the establishment of global AI safety standards. The United States, in coordination with the international community, could also monitor potential safety concerns in advanced AI labs around the world with an eye toward crafting contingency plans in the case of failures with spillover effects. There is precedent for doing so: the United States has been known to monitor the risks of accidents from dangerous behavior in Chinese biolabs, nuclear reactors, and space operations.

But the first step is rightly prioritizing the threat. As in the Cold War, weapons races and technological competition may attract a great deal of attention, but safety risks are equally worthy of concern, especially in authoritarian states. And to avoid another Chernobyl-like calamity, addressing China’s risks of an AI catastrophe should be at the top of the agenda.

• BILL DREXEL is an Associate Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), where he researches artificial intelligence, technology competition, and national security.
• HANNAH KELLEY is a Research Assistant at CNAS, where she studies U.S. technology strategy and international technology cooperation.
• MORE BY BILL DREXELMORE BY HANNAH KELLEY

Foreign Affairs · by Bill Drexel and Hannah Kelley · May 30, 2023

6. ​Japan, China to Resume Military Exchanges in July After 4 Years

Perhaps this is where we can benefit from our alliances.

​Japan, China to Resume Military Exchanges in July After 4 Years

The Sasakawa Peace Foundation will resume arranging JSDF and PLA exchanges in July, the latest development in 20 years of on-again/off-again visits.

thediplomat.com · by Takahashi Kosuke · May 31, 2023

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A delegation from the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) will visit China in July, while members of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will travel to Japan in September, Sasakawa Yohei, honorary chairman of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, a Japanese non-profit group that has organized the exchange, announced on May 30.

The military exchanges come amid strained bilateral relations over Taiwan and the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, which are administered by Japan but claimed by China.

Meeting in Hiroshima, Japan, for their annual summit on May 19-21, leaders from the Group of Seven (G-7) nations took a firmer stance on China’s assertive behavior in the East and South China Seas, with their communique declaring, “We strongly oppose any unilateral attempts to change the status quo by force or coercion.” China staunchly opposed the statement.

When asked about the timing of resumed military exchanges amid rising tensions in East Asia and elsewhere, Sasakawa said, “The situation between governments and the private sector is different. At times like this, it is effective for the private sector to create a window for mutual understanding. It’s very important to hobnob together and have informal conversations. This military exchange is unique even in the world.”

So far, Japan has dispatched 152 JSDF personnel to China on 13 different trips, while China has sent 228 PLA personnel to Japan on 12 trips, according to the program’s organizer. PLA members have deepened exchanges through visits to Japanese companies and farming villages, as well as visits to the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, the Japan Air Self-Defense Force, and the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force for about a week each time.

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Officer-level bilateral military exchanges began in 2001 but were canceled in 2010 following the arrest of a Chinese trawler captain whose vessel had repeatedly rammed two Japanese Coast Guard vessels off the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea.

The two nations resumed the military exchange in October 2011 when 20 PLA officers visited Japan, with JSDF officers reciprocating with a trip to China in February 2012.

But the PLA canceled its military exchange program with the JSDF in 2012, again amid escalating tensions over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands following their nationalization by Japan.

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However, the Central Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party agreed to resume the military exchange with the JSDF in February 2018, when Sasakawa visited Beijing.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic that started at the end of 2019 in China, the program was again interrupted, and the two militaries have been unable to conduct face-to-face exchanges for the past four years.

At the official level of bilateral defense relations, Japanese Defense Minister Hamada Yasukazu and Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Li Shangfu on May 16 held the first call using a dedicated “hotline.” They confirmed that this communication system plays an important role in building confidence between the two countries and avoiding unforeseen circumstances. They will reportedly meet in Singapore on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue on June 2-4.

China appears to attach great importance to Sino-Japanese exchanges in order to attract the Japanese side as the China-U.S. confrontation intensifies.

On the Japanese side, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio has stressed that Tokyo will build constructive and stable relations with Beijing, which was also mentioned in the G-7 joint statement.

CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR

Takahashi Kosuke

Takahashi Kosuke is Tokyo Correspondent for The Diplomat.

thediplomat.com · by Takahashi Kosuke · May 31, 2023

7. Estonia Will Ask For a Clearer Path for Ukraine to Join NATO

Excerpts:

The NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe’s “office or the secretary itself has to have the authority to engage the preliminary actions, because otherwise we will be too slow, otherwise we have to sit somewhere in Brussels, 32 countries—when Sweden will join soon—and make a decision: do we engage Article Five or not. Then, by that time—sorry to say—the Russian army will be already halfway to [Estonia’s capital] Tallinn and we don't have the time. We don't have the strategic depth.”

“This is why we need to have forces in place where they are also used. We need pre-positioned ammunition and we need authorization for…the sector to engage if necessary, and then we can say that we have critical deterrence… regional plans that work and actually deter Russia.”

Estonia Will Ask For a Clearer Path for Ukraine to Join NATO

In Europe, defense ministers and military experts worry that the world is not learning the lessons from Ukraine quickly enough.

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia—When NATO leaders meet for their annual summit in July, Estonia will ask them to consider a “roadmap” for Ukraine to join the alliance, Estonia’s minister of defense said Monday.

“What we have to push in Vilnius is that there has to be a clear understanding [of] what are the next steps for Ukraine,” Hanno Pevkur said at the annual GLOBSEC conference here.

That doesn’t necessarily mean bringing Ukraine into NATO immediately. Pevkur pointed out that even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that winning the war against Russia must come first. But, the Estonian said, it’s time for the alliance to be more direct about its plans.

Pevkur said that’s because Russia’s Vladimir Putin still aims to conquer Ukraine, even if he has reduced his immediate objectives to consolidating his limited territorial gains. But changing politics in Europe and the United States also add urgency.

After July’s meeting in Lithuania’s capital, “the next summit in Washington will be just before the U.S. elections in 2024. So this will be a huge challenge for all of us…What will be the message coming out from Washington? So, I would like to see that we will have a clear roadmap.”

France has similarly pushed for a roadmap for Ukraine’s ascension into NATO to be on the agenda this summer.

NATO deterrence

At GLOBSEC, concern is rising among European military officials and military experts that Western governments aren’t fully prepared for the worst-case scenario: that they will become party to the war. That could happen if Ukraine fails to expel Russians from its territory, said Richard Sherriff, a retired U.K. general who served as Britain's top NATO commander.

“Let's hope that they will be able with one counteroffensive to achieve their military objectives, but we shouldn't assume that,” Sherriff said. “We probably need to expect to see a series of major counteroffensives over a period of maybe a couple of years.

“If [the Ukrainians] fail to achieve their military objectives,” he said, “we in NATO need to be prepared for the worst case, which means we might have to intervene.”

NATO, a defensive alliance, has no mechanism for intervening unless a member country is attacked. Pevkur argued that failure in Ukraine would increase the chance that Russia will mount such an attack.

“When you look at the map of Ukraine, it seems that it's a small part of Ukraine which has been occupied at the moment. In reality, this is the size of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania,” he said.

Pevkur also said NATO moves too slowly to deter attack, in part because the commanders closest to the likely Russian invasion don’t have the necessary authorities to act in their own defense.

The NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe’s “office or the secretary itself has to have the authority to engage the preliminary actions, because otherwise we will be too slow, otherwise we have to sit somewhere in Brussels, 32 countries—when Sweden will join soon—and make a decision: do we engage Article Five or not. Then, by that time—sorry to say—the Russian army will be already halfway to [Estonia’s capital] Tallinn and we don't have the time. We don't have the strategic depth.”

“This is why we need to have forces in place where they are also used. We need pre-positioned ammunition and we need authorization for…the sector to engage if necessary, and then we can say that we have critical deterrence… regional plans that work and actually deter Russia.”

Joint procurement

On the procurement side, Pevkur said that NATO must increase weapons standardization, in part by encouraging joint acquisitions by alliance members. Many weapons fire 155mm ammunition, he noted, but not all can use the same 155mm shells.

“At the end of the day, what we need to have inside of NATO is the standardization,” he said. “First, standardization; secondly, [more] joint procurements; and thirdly, strong recommendations from the NATO headquarters to do at least regionally joint procurements,” he said.

Camille Grand, a distinguished policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, agreed.

“At the end of the day what is unacceptable is not that we have different guns. It’s the fact that the artillery shells that we're using cannot be put in each of these guns because we didn't do the homework of making them standard enough, not only not by caliber but so that every artillery shell…should be used on any NATO gun that is available and that should be an absolute requirement,” Grand said.

For Sherriff, the key procurement lesson coming out of Ukraine is simply this: procure faster, like the Ukrainians themselves. He recounted his visit to Ukraine’s new Brave1 innovation and procurement cell.

“It brings together inventors operating out of their workshops and garages, innovators. It brings together investors, the ministers of digital transformation, economy and defense. It brings in the General Staff. And when I said [to Brave1’s director Nataliia Kushnerska], ‘How long do you reckon it's going to take you to [to build a prototype], and what's your aim in terms of getting stuff into service from idea, inception to battlefield?’ She said, ‘I think we're pushing it two months.’ Yeah. Well, don't tell that to the British [Ministry of Defense]. They’re years, light years away.”

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

8. Taking War Seriously (Ukraine)

Excerpts:

But as the war lumbers into its second year the self-styled defenders of the liberal, rules-based world are slouching toward inertia. The war goes on, Ukrainians die, and the country is pounded into dust; yet growing populations are asking, “Why do we care if this war goes on? Why is this my war? Why should we spend so much on Ukraine?” Even national leaders ask, “Would it be so bad if Russia won?”

It would be very bad. It would be Putin’s reward for armed aggression against a sovereign neighbor and a signal that armed force is the arbiter of sovereignty. This war neither began, nor will it end in Ukraine because it is not about territory or resources, but about the permissible uses of power in the world. A Russian victory won through unprovoked armed aggression should remind us of the Baltics in 1940, Eastern Europe in 1945, Hungary 1956, Prague 1968, and Afghanistan 1979. Permitting Russia to “win” by rewarding it territory seized from Ukraine tells the world that armed aggression is not only permissible behavior but effective statecraft.

...

What is “total” or “comprehensive” defense? It is a concept developed most notably in Sweden during the Cold War according to which national security is the shared responsibility of every Swedish person, company, agency, or other entity. Each has an assigned and practiced role in repelling an attack on the homeland or in resistance if occupied by an adversary. The Finnish version—Comprehensive defense—envisions a whole-of-society defense of the homeland, and includes universal military conscription, national security education in secondary schools, and annual national security symposia bringing together leaders from all social sectors, led by the military.

Since re-gaining their independence in 1991 the three small Baltic states have been the most prescient in recognizing the Russian menace. They are the most vocal and uncompromising in their reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine arguing forcefully and often against European complacency and hesitation that Russia is an existential enemy of the democratic world and must be not only resisted but defeated. Vulnerable to a fait accompli of Russian armed occupation due to their proximity and overmatched armed forces they have persuaded NATO that the line against autocracy must be held at their eastern borders, not giving up a single inch of NATO territory. With decades of experience and keen understanding of Russia’s influence campaigns they have developed powerful antibodies to resist insidious Russian attacks in the gray zone of information warfare.

Collectively the states of the Baltic Sea region have tremendously solidified NATOs northern flank which will be further strengthened when Sweden enters the Alliance. They have infused a lethargic alliance with a renewed sense of urgency. By embracing the total or comprehensive defense concept they are inculcating within their respective populations the commitment and understanding that national security is everyone’s duty and that everyone has a role and responsibilities. They are leading the way showing that the best way to secure peace is to prepare for war.

Taking War Seriously

By Michael Miklaucic

May 31, 2023

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/05/31/taking_war_seriously_902610.html

220905-N-TP544-1001 BALTIC SEA (Sep. 4, 2022) U.S. Navy and Marine Corps aircraft fly over the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), during a maneuvering exercise with partner and allied ships in the Baltic Sea, Sep. 4, 2022. The Kearsarge Amphibious Ready Group and embarked 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, under the command and control of Task Force 61/2, is on a scheduled deployment in the U.S. Naval Forces Europe area of operations, employed by U.S. Sixth Fleet to defend U.S., allied and partner interests. (U.S. Navy photo by MC3 Taylor Parker)

When Russian infantry divisions charged into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, with armor and air support, the countries of the Transatlantic Alliance were shocked, dismayed, and utterly unprepared. Well, not all of them; the cold north including Finland and the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been warning all along of the existential threat seething in the east. To this day the states of the Baltic Sea region are the ones that are taking the threat of war with Russia seriously.

Just a decade ago few could foresee a major land war on the European continent. Most European nations had dismantled their Cold War security architecture in search of the ever-elusive peace dividend. With very few exceptions armed forces had atrophied. Russia’s 2007 cyberattack against Estonia and 2008 war with the Republic of Georgia confirmed the suspicions of Finland and the Baltic states but did not really upset the cocktail-circuit elite at defense-Davos in Munich let alone at Davos itself. While Russia’s 2014 occupation and annexation of Crimea sent shock waves throughout Europe defense budgets barely budged. Only Russia’s unprovoked and brutal invasion of Ukraine last year seemed to shock leaders out of their complacency.

But as the war lumbers into its second year the self-styled defenders of the liberal, rules-based world are slouching toward inertia. The war goes on, Ukrainians die, and the country is pounded into dust; yet growing populations are asking, “Why do we care if this war goes on? Why is this my war? Why should we spend so much on Ukraine?” Even national leaders ask, “Would it be so bad if Russia won?”

It would be very bad. It would be Putin’s reward for armed aggression against a sovereign neighbor and a signal that armed force is the arbiter of sovereignty. This war neither began, nor will it end in Ukraine because it is not about territory or resources, but about the permissible uses of power in the world. A Russian victory won through unprovoked armed aggression should remind us of the Baltics in 1940, Eastern Europe in 1945, Hungary 1956, Prague 1968, and Afghanistan 1979. Permitting Russia to “win” by rewarding it territory seized from Ukraine tells the world that armed aggression is not only permissible behavior but effective statecraft.

Finland never fell under the spell of the peace dividend. Its long history and long border with Russia inform a brutally realistic appreciation of the Russian menace and insight into Putin’s motivations. The same is true of the small Baltic states that endured generations of Russian, then Nazi, then Soviet oppression. Finland never demobilized and today can raise a ready and trained fighting force of nearly 300,000. To further bolster its defense against Russia it recently joined the NATO alliance after 70 years of non-alignment. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are among the seven NATO countries that met NATOs 2 percent of GDP defense spending target in 2022, and all three have embraced the concept of “total” or “comprehensive” defense. Even Sweden—the “moral superpower”—has abandonned over 200 years of non-alignment to apply for membership in NATO, has reinstated mandatory military conscription, and established a Psychological Defense Agency to counter Russian information warfare.

What is “total” or “comprehensive” defense? It is a concept developed most notably in Sweden during the Cold War according to which national security is the shared responsibility of every Swedish person, company, agency, or other entity. Each has an assigned and practiced role in repelling an attack on the homeland or in resistance if occupied by an adversary. The Finnish version—Comprehensive defense—envisions a whole-of-society defense of the homeland, and includes universal military conscription, national security education in secondary schools, and annual national security symposia bringing together leaders from all social sectors, led by the military.

Since re-gaining their independence in 1991 the three small Baltic states have been the most prescient in recognizing the Russian menace. They are the most vocal and uncompromising in their reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine arguing forcefully and often against European complacency and hesitation that Russia is an existential enemy of the democratic world and must be not only resisted but defeated. Vulnerable to a fait accompli of Russian armed occupation due to their proximity and overmatched armed forces they have persuaded NATO that the line against autocracy must be held at their eastern borders, not giving up a single inch of NATO territory. With decades of experience and keen understanding of Russia’s influence campaigns they have developed powerful antibodies to resist insidious Russian attacks in the gray zone of information warfare.

Collectively the states of the Baltic Sea region have tremendously solidified NATOs northern flank which will be further strengthened when Sweden enters the Alliance. They have infused a lethargic alliance with a renewed sense of urgency. By embracing the total or comprehensive defense concept they are inculcating within their respective populations the commitment and understanding that national security is everyone’s duty and that everyone has a role and responsibilities. They are leading the way showing that the best way to secure peace is to prepare for war.

Michael Miklaucic is a Senior Fellow at National Defense University and the Editor-in-Chief of the PRISM journal. The opinions expressed in this article are his and are not official statements of policy or opinion National Defense University or the Department of Defense.

9. New US aid package for Ukraine will total about $300 million

New US aid package for Ukraine will total about $300 million

militarytimes.com · by Lolita Baldor · May 31, 2023

A U.S. military aid package for Ukraine that is expected to be announced this week will total up to $300 million and will include additional munitions for drones, U.S. officials said Tuesday. The drone ammunition comes after new attacks by unmanned aircraft targeted Moscow.

There has been no suggestion that U.S.-made drones or munitions were used in the recent attacks on Moscow, and U.S. officials have repeatedly said that Ukraine has agreed not to use any American-provided weapons for attacks on Russian soil. The Kremlin blamed Kyiv for Tuesday’s attack, but Ukrainian officials had no direct comment.

RELATED

Russia launched ‘largest drone attack’ on Ukrainian capital

The attack lasted more than five hours, with air defense reportedly shooting down more than 40 drones.

By Susie Blann

But the new aid package comes at a tense moment in the war. The latest drone attack on Moscow follows Russia’s seizure of the eastern Ukrainian city Bakhmut after a nine-month battle that killed tens of thousands of people. Ukraine is also showing signs that its long-awaited spring counteroffensive may already be underway.

The Russian Defense Ministry said five drones were shot down in Moscow and the systems of three others were jammed, causing them to veer off course. President Vladimir Putin called it a “terrorist” act by Kyiv.

A U.S. defense official said the drone strikes would not affect the weapons aid packages the U.S. is providing Ukraine, to include drone ammunition. The official said the U.S. has committed to supporting Ukraine in its effort to defend the country and Ukraine had committed to not using the systems inside Russia, so the aid would likely continue unchanged.

All of the U.S. officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the latest aid package has not yet been publicly announced.

U.S. officials did not provide details on the drone munitions in the new aid package or specify which unmanned aircraft would use them. The Defense Department has given Ukraine a variety of unmanned aircraft over the last year, for both surveillance and attacks, including at least two versions of the Switchblade, a so-called kamikaze drone that can loiter in the air and then explode into a target.

Other more sophisticated drones can drop munitions, but the U.S. has been reluctant to publicly share details about those.

Also included in the newest package will be munitions for Patriot missile batteries and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), Stinger missiles for the Avenger system, mine-clearing equipment, anti-armor rounds, unguided Zuni aircraft rockets, night vision goggles, and about 30 million rounds of small arms ammunition, said the U.S. officials.

RELATED

US Abrams tanks for training Ukrainian forces arrive in Germany early

Abrams tanks needed for training Ukrainian forces have arrived in Germany slightly ahead of schedule, already on their way to the Grafenwoehr Army base.

The aid greatly resembles other recent U.S. packages, which have focused on providing Ukraine more ammunition for the weapons systems it has and helping it prepare for a counteroffensive to push back against Russian gains over the past year. Ukrainian officials have not formally announced the launch of their much-anticipated counteroffensive, although some say it has already begun and the pace of attacks suggests that it’s underway.

Including the latest aid, the U.S. has committed more than $37.6 billion in weapons and other equipment to Ukraine since Russia attacked on Feb. 24, 2022. This latest package will be done under presidential drawdown authority, which allows the Pentagon to take weapons from its own stocks and quickly ship them to Ukraine, officials said.

Officials said the U.S. is expected to announce the aid as soon as Wednesday.

Tuesday’s strikes on Moscow were the second drone strikes on the city since May 3, when Russian officials said two drones targeted the Kremlin in what they portrayed as an attempt on Putin’s life. Ukraine denied it was behind that attack.

U.S. intelligence officials were still trying to ascertain if Ukraine had any involvement in or prior knowledge of Tuesday’s drone attack in Moscow, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Last week, the Russian border region of Belgorod was the target of one of the most serious cross-border raids since the war began, with two far-right pro-Ukrainian paramilitary groups claiming responsibility.

The U.S. conveyed after that incident that American-made weaponry must not be used inside Russia, according to a U.S. official familiar with the sensitive communications. The message was “very clearly understood,” according to the official.

Officials in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, near annexed Crimea, said two drones struck there on Friday, damaging residential buildings. Other drones have reportedly flown deep into Russia multiple times.

Ukrainian military analysts, though unable to confirm Kyiv had launched the drones against Moscow, said the attack may have involved UJ-22 drones, which are produced in Ukraine and have a maximum range of about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles).

U.S. officials struck a delicate balance in responding to the drone strikes, reiterating support for Ukraine while stressing that the U.S. opposes Ukrainians using American weapons in Russia. They noted that Russia’s bombardment of Kyiv on Tuesday was the 17th round of attacks this month, “many of which have devastated civilian areas.”

Lee reported from Oslo. Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani and Tara Copp contributed to this report.

10. Video shows Chinese fighter jet flying close to US aircraft

Video at the link: https://www.militarytimes.com/flashpoints/china/2023/05/30/video-shows-chinese-fighter-jet-flying-close-to-us-aircraft/?utm

​Deja vu all over again?

​

Video shows Chinese fighter jet flying close to US aircraft

militarytimes.com · by Lolita Baldor · May 30, 2023

The U.S. military said Tuesday that a Chinese fighter jet flew aggressively close to a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft over the South China Sea, forcing the American pilot to fly through the turbulent wake.

The Chinese J-16 fighter pilot “flew directly in front of the nose of the RC-135,” which was conducting routine operations in international airspace last Friday, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said in a statement. It called the Chinese move an " unnecessarily aggressive maneuver.”

U.S. defense leaders have complained that China’s military has become significantly more aggressive over the past five years, intercepting U.S. aircraft and ships in the region. And tensions with China have only grown in recent months over Washington’s military support and sales of defensive weapons to self-governing Taiwan, China’s assertions of sovereignty to the contested South China Sea and its flying of a suspected spy balloon over the U.S.

In this image from video provided by the U.S. Navy, a Chinese J-16 fighter flies aggressively close to a U.S. RC-135 aircraft flying in international airspace over the South China Sea on Friday, May 26, 2023. (U.S. Navy via AP)

In a further sign of the tensions, China said its defense chief will not meet with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin when the two men attend a security conference in Singapore this coming weekend. Austin is scheduled to address the Shangri-La Dialogue on Saturday, while Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Li Shangfu will speak at the gathering on Sunday.

Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said China informed the U.S. that it was declining Austin’s invitation to meet while they were at the conference. He said Beijing’s “concerning unwillingness to engage in meaningful military-to-military discussions” will not diminish the Defense Department’s commitment to seeking open lines of communication with the Chinese army.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning on Tuesday blamed the U.S., saying Washington should “earnestly respect China’s sovereignty and security interests and concerns, immediately correct the wrongdoing, show sincerity, and create the necessary atmosphere and conditions for dialogue and communication between the two militaries.”

In a visit to the Indo-Pacific last summer, U.S. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the number of intercepts by Chinese aircraft and ships in the Pacific region with U.S. and other partner forces has increased significantly over that time, and the number of unsafe interactions has risen by similar proportions.

China frequently challenges military aircraft from the U.S. and its allies, especially over the strategically vital South China Sea, which China claims in its entirety. Such behavior led to a 2001 in-air collision in which a Chinese plane was lost and pilot killed. Beijing deeply resents the presence of U.S. military assets in that region, and regularly demands that American ships and planes leave the area.

In the statement Tuesday, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said America will continue to “fly, sail, and operate — safely and responsibly — wherever international law allows,” and expects all other countries to do the same.

11. USINDOPACOM Statement on Unprofessional Intercept of U.S. Aircraft over South China Sea

Video at this link: https://www.pacom.mil/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/3410337/usindopacom-statement-on-unprofessional-intercept-of-us-aircraft-over-south-chi/

This is the video the media is using in their reporting.

NEWS | May 30, 2023

USINDOPACOM Statement on Unprofessional Intercept of U.S. Aircraft over South China Sea

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Public Affairs

SOUTH CHINA SEA  –  

A People's Republic of China J-16 fighter pilot performed an unnecessarily aggressive maneuver during the intercept of a U.S. Air Force RC-135 aircraft, May 26, 2023. The PRC pilot flew directly in front of the nose of the RC-135, forcing the U.S. aircraft to fly through its wake turbulence. The RC-135 was conducting safe and routine operations over the South China Sea in international airspace, in accordance with international law.

The United States will continue to fly, sail, and operate – safely and responsibly – wherever international law allows, and the U.S. Indo-Pacific Joint Force will continue to fly in international airspace with due regard for the safety of all vessels and aircraft under international law. We expect all countries in the Indo-Pacific region to use international airspace safely and in accordance with international law.

View video here:

12. Treasury Sanctions China- and Mexico-Based Enablers of Counterfeit, Fentanyl-Laced Pill Production

It seems to me that if you are creating counterfeit medications nad lacing the counterfeit drug with fentanyl if can be for only one main purpose - to cause harm. (and then to undermine confidence in medication). It seems to me that if you were interested in profit then you would not want your counterfeit medication killing people. The result of these actions should be to make people cautious and use only verified medications from pharmacies and not buy counterfeit drugs. That would seem to hurt the bottom line for the counterfeiters and counterintuitively help legitimate drug manufacturers. 

Treasury Sanctions China- and Mexico-Based Enablers of Counterfeit, Fentanyl-Laced Pill Production

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1507?utm

May 30, 2023

Action Taken in Coordination with U.S. Law Enforcement and the Government of Mexico

WASHINGTON — Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned 17 individuals and entities involved in the international proliferation of equipment used to produce illicit drugs. These targets are directly or indirectly involved in the sale of pill press machines, die molds, and other equipment used to impress counterfeit trade markings of legitimate pharmaceuticals onto illicitly produced pills, often laced with fentanyl, frequently destined for U.S. markets.

“Treasury’s sanctions target every stage of the deadly supply chain fueling the surge in fentanyl poisonings and deaths across the country,” said Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian E. Nelson. “Counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl constitute a leading cause of these deaths, devastating thousands of American families each year. We remain committed to using all authorities against enablers of illicit drug production to disrupt this deadly global production and counter the threat posed by these drugs.”

These designations, which target seven entities and six individuals based in China and one entity and three individuals based in Mexico, would not have been possible without the cooperation, support and ongoing collaboration among OFAC; the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), including the Special Operations Division; Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and its El Paso Field Office; and the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency. These partnerships highlight the Biden-Harris Administration’s strengthened whole-of-government offensive to save lives by disrupting illicit fentanyl supply chains around the globe. Pertaining to Mexico-based persons sanctioned today, this action was also coordinated closely with the Government of Mexico, including the Unidad de Inteligencia Financiera (Mexico’s Financial Intelligence Unit).

PILL PRESS AND COUNTERFEIT PILL TYPOLOGY

Examples of pill presses used in the production of illcit drugs laced with fentanyl.

A pill press — also called a tablet press or a tableting machine — is a mechanical device that compresses powdered substances into tablets of uniform size and weight. The U.S. government regulates pill press machine importation. These machines vary in size and capacity, each of which can produce thousands of pills daily. The lack of controls and safeguards in illicit pill production often results in inconsistent and lethal dosages.

Illicit drugs in pill form, including those laced with fentanyl, may be blank or bear custom impressions. They may also be counterfeits of scheduled drugs, bearing trademarked wordmarks without authorization, such as “M30” for schedule II oxycodone products or “Xanax” for schedule IV alprazolam products.

Manufacturing illicit drugs in pill form requires a pill press machine, a controlled substance, and die molds — metallic pill press components bearing impressions that are punched onto pills. A die is fixed to a pill press machine in order to punch repeated impressions during pill mass-production. If the impressions on a die and on the pills it punches mimic trademarked pharmaceuticals, the die and impressed pills are counterfeit.

Facilitation of equipment importation by bad actors is sometimes attempted in a manner designed to evade law enforcement scrutiny, which can include the mislabeling of shipments, the use of circuitous shipment routes, and the shipment of equipment parts in piecemeal fashion.

DISRUPTING FACILITATORS OF COUNTERFEIT PILL PRODUCTION

Today, OFAC designated Chinese pill press supplier Youli Technology Development Co., Ltd. (尤里科技发展有限公司) (Youli) along with three Youli-affiliated Chinese nationals, Guo Chunyan (郭春艳), Guo Yunnian (郭运年), and Guo Ruiguang (郭瑞光), all located in Huizhou, China. Youli has shipped pill press machinery to individuals in the United States involved in the manufacture of counterfeit pills. Youli ships the machinery using techniques intended to evade law enforcement scrutiny. In addition, Youli has shipped scheduled pharmaceuticals to the United States for counterfeit pill manufacturing. Guo Chunyan and Guo Yunnian have supplied pill presses and dies to drug traffickers operating in the United States, including those involved with fentanyl-laced pills production.

OFAC designated Youli, Guo Chunyan, and Guo Yunnian pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 14059 for having engaged in, or attempted to engage in, activities or transactions that have materially contributed to, or pose a significant risk of materially contributing to, the international proliferation of illicit drugs or their means of production. OFAC designated Guo Ruiguang pursuant to E.O. 14059 for having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, Youli.

OFAC also designated Shenzhen, China-located Yason General Machinery Co., Ltd. (亚新通用机械有限公司) (Yason), Hong Kong-registered but Shenzhen, China-based Yason Electronics Technology Co., Limited (亞新電子科技有限公司) (Yason Electronics), and Nanchang, China-located Shenzhen Yason General Machinery Co., Ltd. Nanchang Branch (深圳市亚新通⽤机械有限公司南昌分公司) (Yason Nanchang), interrelated Chinese companies implicated in the supply of press equipment internationally. OFAC additionally designated Yason and Yason Electronics company official Fei Yiren (费亿人) (Fei), a Chinese national.

Yason sells pill press-related equipment and has worked with a Mexico-based pill equipment supplier and contact who previously provided equipment to a Sinaloa Cartel-linked individual. This individual used the machines to create superlabs in Mexico with the capacity to produce millions of fentanyl-laced pills weekly. In 2017, Yason Electronics sent a pill press machine — in multiple packages and via the United States — to the contact in Mexico, the intended buyer of the equipment.

OFAC designated Yason and Yason Electronics pursuant to E.O. 14059 for having engaged in, or attempted to engage in, activities or transactions that have materially contributed to, or pose a significant risk of materially contributing to, the international proliferation of illicit drugs or their means of production. OFAC designated Fei pursuant to E.O. 14059 for being or having been a leader or official of Yason and of Yason Electronics. OFAC designated Yason Nanchang pursuant to E.O. 14059 for being owned, controlled, or directed by, or having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, Fei.

Today’s designations also include Mexpacking Solutions (Mexpacking), a Chihuahua, Mexico-based business that sells pill presses and other equipment and is controlled by a Sinaloa Cartel pill press supplier. The business has been used as cover for an individual involved with making fentanyl-laced pills and with assisting Mexico-based cartel members with pill press operations. Goods from Mexpacking were shipped to another pill press equipment supplier involved with coordinating shipments of pill press machines and parts to drug trafficking organizations, including the Sinaloa Cartel.

Along with Mexpacking, OFAC designated three related individuals, all Mexican nationals: Mario Ernesto Martinez Trevizo (Martinez), Cinthia Adriana Rodriguez Almeida (Rodriguez), and Ernesto Alonso Macias Trevizo (Macias). Martinez, a sales representative with Mexpacking, as of late 2022, was responsible for managing activities of a pill press supply network in Mexico, the head of which supplied pill press equipment the Sinaloa Cartel used. In this role, Martinez maintained business communications with China-based supplier Yason Electronics, which between 2019 and 2022 provided the network with numerous pill press machines and “M30” die molds. Rodriguez, as of late 2022, had a senior role in the pill press equipment supply network, which likewise necessitates coordination with Chinese supplier Yason Electronics. Between 2015 and 2021 Rodriguez also assisted with illicit drug production, including illicit drugs in pill form. Macias is a sales associate for Mexpacking.

OFAC designated Mexpacking, Martinez, and Rodriguez pursuant to E.O. 14059 for having engaged in, or attempting to engage in, activities or transactions that have materially contributed to, or pose a significant risk of materially contributing to, the international proliferation of illicit drugs or their means of production. OFAC designated Macias pursuant to E.O. 14059 for having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, Mexpacking.

Lastly, OFAC designated online business Tdpmolds, an entity established and controlled by Zhao Dongdong (赵冬冬) (Zhao), a Chinese national located in Yantai, China. In addition to Tdpmolds, OFAC designated Chinese nationals and entities Zhao, Pan Hao (潘昊) (Pan), Yantai Yixun International Trade Co., Ltd. (烟台易迅国际贸易有限公司) (Yantai Yixun), and Yantai Mei Xun Trade Co., Ltd. (烟台美讯商贸有限公司) (Yantai Mei Xun).

Counterfeit “Xanax” dies for schedule IV alprazolam products, sold online by Tdpmolds.

Tdpmolds offers a range of pill press machines and dies for sale, and as recently as 2020, Tdpmolds shipped to the United States several pill press die molds, including ones used to produce counterfeit schedule II oxycodone and amphetamine pill products. As of 2019, “Xanax” dies used in support of U.S.-based pill press operations and sourced from Tdpmolds were seized by U.S. authorities. In that same year, Tdpmolds was also the source of other dies, including a counterfeit “M30” die, also used in U.S.-based criminal pill press operations. In 2019 and 2020, Zhao sold pill presses and die sets to individuals in the United States who used the equipment to produce pills with scheduled substances, including counterfeit pills marked with “M30” and “Xanax.” In 2019 and 2020, Pan facilitated the sale from Tdpmolds to the United States of dies used to manufacture counterfeit pills. As of 2019, Yantai Yixun was the source of equipment used by a U.S.-based drug trafficker involved with an illicit pill manufacturing business using dies to counterfeit scheduled drugs.

OFAC designated Tdpmolds, Zhao, Pan, and Yantai Yixun pursuant to E.O. 14059 for having engaged in, or attempted to engage in, activities or transactions that have materially contributed to, or pose a significant risk of materially contributing to, the international proliferation of illicit drugs or their means of production. OFAC additionally designated Yantai Yixun for being owned, controlled, or directed by, or having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, Zhao. OFAC designated Yantai Mei Xun pursuant to E.O. 14059 for being owned, controlled, or directed by, or having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, Pan.

RP 10 & RP 30 Oxycodone Hydrochloride (schedule II) Dies Sold online by Tdpmolds.

COUNTERFEIT PILL-RELATED RESOURCES

In 2021, the DEA issued a Public Safety Alert to warn the American public about the dangers of fake prescription pills containing fentanyl. DEA updated its “One Pill Can Kill” media campaign information in 2022 to indicate a dramatic increase in the potency and lethality of fentanyl pills. Laboratory testing revealed that six out of ten fentanyl-laced counterfeit pills analyzed in 2022 contained lethal doses of the drug, which represented an increase from 2021 figures. The announcement, which links to an accompanying DEA “One Pill Can Kill” social media campaign, and urges all Americans to take only medications prescribed by medical professionals and dispensed by licensed pharmacists, can be found here.

SANCTIONS IMPLICATIONS

As a result of today’s action, all property and interests in property of the designated persons described above that are in the United States or in the possession or control of U.S. persons are blocked and must be reported to OFAC. In addition, any entities that are owned, directly or indirectly, individually or in the aggregate, 50 percent or more by one or more blocked persons are also blocked. Unless authorized by a general or specific license issued by OFAC, or exempt, OFAC’s regulations generally prohibit all transactions by U.S. persons or within (or transiting) the United States that involve any property or interests in property of designated or otherwise blocked persons. U.S. persons may face civil or criminal penalties for violations of E.O. 14059.

Today’s action is part of a whole-of-government effort to counter the global threat posed by the trafficking of illicit drugs into the United States that is causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans annually, as well as countless more non-fatal overdoses. OFAC, in coordination with its U.S. Government and foreign partners, will continue to target and pursue accountability for foreign illicit drug actors.

The power and integrity of OFAC sanctions derive not only from OFAC’s ability to designate and add persons to the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN List), but also from its willingness to remove persons from the SDN List consistent with the law. The ultimate goal of sanctions is not to punish, but to bring about a positive change in behavior. For information concerning the process for seeking removal from an OFAC list, including the SDN List, please refer to OFAC’s Frequently Asked Question 897 here. For detailed information on the process to submit a request for removal from an OFAC sanctions list, please click here.

For more information on the individuals and entities designated today, click here.

13. Poland Hardens Its Defenses Against Russia

Note South Korea is a key partner along with the UK and US. And Poland has really stepped up as a key NATO partner.

Excerpt:

As the Kremlin reaches westward in Ukraine and Belarus, Poland aims to strengthen its deterrence and defense. Last year lawmakers passed a bill mandating a minimum of 3% of gross domestic product for defense spending. This year military spending will be closer to 4%, at around 98 billion zloty, or more than $23 billion, plus up to some $11 billion more this year from a separate Armed Forces Support Fund. Poland has been buying tens of billions of dollars of military equipment from the U.S., the U.K. and South Korea.

Poland Hardens Its Defenses Against Russia

But leaders in Warsaw worry about Western European weakness and U.S. staying power.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/poland-hardens-its-defenses-against-russia-nato-national-security-spending-belarus-ukraine-invasion-e06c1c5?

By Jillian Kay MelchiorFollow

May 30, 2023 3:38 pm ET

Polish troops participate in a training exercise in Latvia, March 29. PHOTO: TOMS KALNINS/SHUTTERSTOCK

Warsaw

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine left Poland more vulnerable. Most of the country’s northern and eastern borders—some 730 miles—is adjacent to Ukraine, Belarus (a client of Moscow) or Russia itself (the exclave of Kaliningrad). Warsaw has steeply increased defense spending to strengthen its military.

But leaders here worry whether the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is up to the task. “We need to adjust our security policy toward this challenge,” Radoslaw Fogiel, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the lower house of Poland’s Parliament, says of the alliance. He and his colleagues express concern about Western Europe’s military weakness and America’s staying power.

Since 1994 Alexander Lukashenko has ruled Belarus, but demonstrations erupted after the rigged presidential election in 2020. Mr. Lukashenko needed Mr. Putin’s help to quell the protests, and Russia’s president hasn’t let him forget the favor. Mr. Lukashenko is like an ocean swimmer fighting a deadly undertow; he’s frantically paddling, but Mr. Fogiel wonders “if he didn’t cross the point of no return already.”

In April Mr. Putin said a 28-point plan for integrating Russia and Belarus is 74% complete and “we will certainly continue this effort without slowing down.” He touted the two countries’ collaborations on energy and electricity, cultural issues, economics, security and defense.

That last item has Poland particularly alarmed. This month Moscow and Minsk signed an agreement to deploy tactical nuclear weapons to a storage facility in Belarus. Last month Belarus’s Defense Ministry reported that the country’s troops had finished training to use tactical nukes. Mr. Putin has moved S-400 surface-to-air and Iskander short-range missile systems to Belarus and stationed thousands of Russian troops there under the guise of training. Mr. Lukashenko hasn’t dispatched Belarusian troops to Ukraine, but Russian tanks rolled from Belarus toward Kyiv in February 2022, and the Russians have fired missiles at Ukraine from Belarusian soil.

As the Kremlin reaches westward in Ukraine and Belarus, Poland aims to strengthen its deterrence and defense. Last year lawmakers passed a bill mandating a minimum of 3% of gross domestic product for defense spending. This year military spending will be closer to 4%, at around 98 billion zloty, or more than $23 billion, plus up to some $11 billion more this year from a separate Armed Forces Support Fund. Poland has been buying tens of billions of dollars of military equipment from the U.S., the U.K. and South Korea.

Contrast Poland’s hardening of its defenses with Western Europe. Germany and France were among the countries that failed last year to reach NATO’s benchmark of spending at least 2% of GDP on defense, according to the alliance’s recent estimates. Popular Mechanics defense reporter Kyle Mizokami forecasts that Poland is now on track to have “more tanks than the U.K., Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy combined” by 2030. Wladyslaw Teofil Bartoszewski, deputy chairman of the lower house’s Foreign Affairs Committee, says Poland would like to buy more German Leopard tanks, but Berlin couldn’t deliver them before 2027: “They do not have the industrial capacity.”

Europe’s defense companies won’t ramp up manufacturing unless they’re confident of long-term increases in military spending. A commitment now may prove a bargain. “If we are losing Ukraine, which is absolutely out of my imagination, can you imagine our investments when the Russian army will be, you know, in Belarus and Brest and Lviv?” Gen. Rajmund T. Andrzejczak, Poland’s highest-ranking officer, said at a foreign-policy and defense conference in Warsaw in May. (Brest, Belarus, and Lviv, Ukraine, are near the Polish border.)

Warsaw is uneasy about America’s long-term commitment to the region. Mr. Bartoszewski criticizes the Western European attitude that “we don’t have to spend the money because [America] will defend us. . . . Imagine a President DeSantis comes and says: ‘No. I won’t.’ ”

Bogdan Klich, a former defense minister who is now chairman of the Polish Senate’s Committee on Foreign Affairs and the European Union, says that despite Ukraine’s bipartisan support in the U.S., “everything depends on who is the president.” He fears a second Trump administration would undermine NATO’s political and military unity.

Mr. Bartoszewski suggests that the Biden administration’s “disgraceful evacuation of the American soldiers from Afghanistan” helped convince Mr. Putin that he could invade Ukraine without serious consequences. Had the U.S. failed to support Ukraine, China might have concluded that the Americans wouldn’t defend Taiwan either. “America, by showing strength in Europe, helps American interests in the Pacific,” he says.

“If the U.S. wants Europe to be united in whatever happens in the struggle with China we cannot afford ourselves to have a threat in our backyard,” says Mr. Fogiel. The war in Ukraine is “a real opportunity to contain, to defeat Russia, for a very small percent of our defense budget, with no American presence on the ground.” For the U.S., in short, it’s “a bargain.” For Poland, it’s an urgent necessity.

Ms. Melchior is a London-based member of the Journal editorial board.

Appeared in the May 31, 2023, print edition as 'Poland Hardens Its Defenses Against Russia'.

14. Congress Must Save the Marine Corps by Newt Gingrich

Congress Must Save the Marine Corps

americanmilitarynews.com · by Newt Gingrich · May 30, 2023

All opinion articles are the opinion of the author and not necessarily of American Military News. If you are interested in submitting an Op-Ed, please email [email protected]

_______

I was completely unaware of the crisis building in the United States Marine Corps until I received an article from Bing West “Marine Corps No More?”

West is a distinguished military historian who served in the Marines and wrote an extraordinary book, “The Village,” about a year spent reclaiming a Vietnamese village from the communists.

West has written a dozen books about modern war and is an astute and often critical observer of the modern military. He also served as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.

Bing wrote:

“[T]he current Commandant, General David H. Berger, has radically transformed the image and the mission of the Marine Corps.” He went on to assert “The primary focus now is upon developing missile units intended to sink Chinese warships. To fund those units, General Berger did away with 21% of the personnel in infantry battalions, 100% of the tanks, 67% of the cannon artillery batteries, 33% of the assault amphibious companies, nearly 30% of Marine aviation, and almost all assault breaching equipment. The desired number of large amphibious ships was reduced from 38 to 31. Due to these cuts, Marines are less capable to fight as a combined arms force. The Marine Corps cannot seize a city from an entrenched enemy, as it did Fallujah in 2004.”

West condemned the current commandant:

“General Berger concocted his concept in secret, not consulting the retired four-star community that, appalled by his extensive cuts, has united in opposition.” He went on to assert that “Marine resources and organizational cohesion have been severely damaged. General Berger’s injudicious change of direction will adversely affect Marine war-fighting capabilities, internal morale, and recruiting for years to come.”

All of this has been done for a stunningly stupid investment in a land based anti-ship mission against China that will not work. It is competitive rather than complementary with the Navy and Air Force, and it is a scandalous misallocation of Marine resources. Inserting by sea three or four small Marine units, with no support, on atolls in the South China Sea invites capture and defeat.

The Marine Corps has a long and proud history of being America’s immediate response force in a crisis. The Marine Hymn captures this sense of universal duty to protect America.

“From the Halls of Montezuma

“To the shores of Tripoli;

“We fight our country’s battles

“In the air, on land, and sea;

“First to fight for right and freedom”

When the Marines were sent to France in World War I and fought ferociously in the battle for Belleair Woods, they so impressed their German opponents they were called “devil dogs.”

When the Marine First Division found itself surrounded by at least four times as many Chinese Communist troops at the frozen Chosin Reservoir in North Korea, it reversed from attacking north toward the Yalu to attacking south to reach allied forces on the coast. In one of the most heroic battles of modern times (Nov. 27-Dec. 13) the First Marines maintained their unit cohesion and fought aggressively inflicting huge and unsustainable casualties on the Chinese.

Again and again, the Marines have done the job when called.

In this process, they have developed a combined arms battle doctrine and an intense commitment to unit cohesion and effectiveness in battle that are extraordinary achievements.

It is astonishing that a Marine Corps Commandant would abandon this history and its capacity for a China-centered anti-ship strategy. That plan may be useful in the Navy or the Air Force, but it is indefensible as a reason for destroying the Marine Corps’ combined arms capabilities.

It is little wonder that Politico reported on April 1, 2022, that two dozen retired generals were trying to stop this incredibly stupid overhaul.

Congress should demand in depth hearings and a thorough review of this strategy, which is almost certainly going to fail its stated intent of offsetting Communist China at sea. Shifting resources away from a combined arms Marine Corps to a technologically advanced but combat weak force is the wrong move.

For those who believe somehow drones and computers have replaced ground combat and heavy equipment, it is worth looking at the volume of equipment and ammunition being sent to Ukraine. Ukraine is begging for tanks as the Marine Corps is mothballing them.

This is a dangerous development for American security and safety.

_______

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is Chairman of the multimedia production and consulting company Gingrich 360. He is a Fox News contributor, podcast host and syndicated columnist, and has also written 41 books, including including 18 fiction and nonfiction New York Times bestsellers.

americanmilitarynews.com · by Newt Gingrich · May 30, 2023

15. A Closer Look at Preventing Veteran Suicide

Excerpts:

That sense of community, Carmichael explained, became the foundation of his broader peer-to-peer suicide prevention effort — a method of which a growing body of research supports.

In fact, a 2015 study published in Oxford University Press revealed the benefits of peer-supported programs in mitigating the effects of veteran suicide, including “social support, purpose and meaning, normalization of symptoms and hope, and therapeutic benefits.”

The report also found that veterans recognized ways in which “peer support could complement psychotherapy for PTSD by increasing initiation and adherence to treatment and supporting continued use of skills after termination.”

“It’s got to be locally-based,” noted former Secretary Miller. “It’s got to be community-based. Not some top-down [approach].”

A Closer Look at Preventing Veteran Suicide

thecipherbrief.com · by David Ariosto · May 29, 2023

CIPHER BRIEF REPORTING — On September 17th, 1945, just weeks after the Japanese surrender that marked the end of the Second World War, a Connecticut Congresswoman gave a speech that seemed to capture the sentiment of a war-weary nation. Every lawmaker, said Rep. Clare Boothe Luce, has been “under constant and terrific pressure from servicemen and their families” to bring the troops home.

Millions of American men and women, dispersed across four continents, had survived the deadliest conflict in human history. Now, it was time for most of them to return to civilian life.

But the process would not be a quick one, carried out mostly by ship, which could take weeks, or even months, depending upon the location of deployment. And yet during those voyages, in which there was often little to do but play cards and perhaps reflect on the years (and traumas) of war, occasionally something interesting also happened.

“They might have had 30 days in the troop ship where they were surrounded by each other and they got to work through their issues together,” explained former acting U.S. Defense Secretary Chris Miller. “They realized, ‘oh, maybe I’m not the only one that’s experienced that.’”

Today, that gradual reintroduction into civilian life, which began aboard those ships amidst a community of peers – and coincided with an era when military suicide levels were at all-time lows – has dramatically sped up by way of modern advances in transportation.

“Talk about cognitive dissonance,” added Miller, who took part in combat operations in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, as well as several follow-on deployments. “I leave [the battlefield] on July the third, [and] I am sitting in my home for fireworks 12 hours later,” he explained. “You’re fighting for your lives,” and then, “here I am with my family at home.”

“I couldn’t help but imagine if I didn’t have the support structure … where I got to do after action reviews, debriefings, and talk to people about it,” he added.

Veterans are generally at higher risk for suicide than the general population, with an average of 17 suicide deaths per day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They, according to a recent Department of Veterans Affairs report, confront a more than 57% greater suicide rate than non-veteran adults. And over the past two decades, the issue has become particularly pronounced.

Between 2001 and 2019, the rate of suicide among veterans swelled by nearly 36%, compared to an increase of 30% in the general population. Taken collectively, U.S. military deaths by suicide are far higher than the number of Americans killed on the battlefields of Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan combined.

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A complex and often multifaceted phenomenon, combat exposure and the resulting onset of post-traumatic stress are often thought to be prime suicide culprits among veterans populations. And yet in a wide-ranging study that analyzed Army records from the 1840s to 2017, published in JAMA Network Open and widely considered among the most extensive accounts of veterans’ suicide in the nation’s history, researchers uncovered that suicides were not always directly correlated with combat. A subsequent write-up published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Psychiatry found that suicide attempts in fact peaked around “a time of return home and changing anticipation of deployment length.”

Subsequent reviews revealed that among those struggling upon returning home, medical attention is often in short supply, depending on location, while firearm access is often readily available among veterans more generally.

A separate 2023 JAMA study of nearly 40,000 service members found that more than 1 in 3 service members who participated in TRICARE (the military’s health care program) lived in regions that had no, or very few, military or civilian psychiatrists. “Beneficiaries in low-income communities with high income inequality and rural communities,” the study noted, “had the highest likelihood of experiencing a shortage of psychiatrists.”

Simultaneously, veterans, especially in rural communities, anecdotally cite social isolation, loss of mission, and a lack of peer networks as among root causes of mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression.

Those factors apparently applied to Michael Carmichael, CW4 Special Forces (retired), who deployed on multiple tours to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and other locales, before retiring from the 5th Special Forces Group (A) in December of 2015.

“I really had anxiety,” he said in an interview with The Cipher Brief. “When my phone would ring, I didn’t even want to look to see who it was, because I didn’t want to answer it.”

The Montana native was living on a military pension on a houseboat in Kentucky. And yet following his last deployment, he described himself as drawing inward.

“You lose your identity,” he said. “You lose your sense of purpose, and … you’re no longer part of a team.”

“Eventually my neighbors took notice,” added Carmichael, now founder and president of the non-profit Check A Vet program — an organization of which former Defense Secretary Miller is on the board — meant to establish peer-to-peer support groups for veterans, employing sponsor models akin to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).

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“I wasn’t there in the [community] circle anymore,” he added.

Ultimately, a few neighbors stopped by his home.

“When’s the last time you showered?” one asked, Carmichael recalled. “You stink. Are you going to clean this place up?”

“That was the tough love,” he explained. “But then there was also love, love. And they would take me out on the lake, and we’d go cruise on the pontoon boat somewhere for lunch. And that was great. That was a meaningful and routine relationship.”

That sense of community, Carmichael explained, became the foundation of his broader peer-to-peer suicide prevention effort — a method of which a growing body of research supports.

In fact, a 2015 study published in Oxford University Press revealed the benefits of peer-supported programs in mitigating the effects of veteran suicide, including “social support, purpose and meaning, normalization of symptoms and hope, and therapeutic benefits.”

The report also found that veterans recognized ways in which “peer support could complement psychotherapy for PTSD by increasing initiation and adherence to treatment and supporting continued use of skills after termination.”

“It’s got to be locally-based,” noted former Secretary Miller. “It’s got to be community-based. Not some top-down [approach].”

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741.

Read more expert-driven national security news, analysis and opinion in The Cipher Brief because National Security is Everyone’s Business

thecipherbrief.com · by David Ariosto · May 29, 2023

16. Ukrainian shelling kills five, drone sparks fire at refinery - Russian officials

While the drone strike on MOscow may be a false flag operation these actions seem like it could be Ukraine. Will this cause Russia to escalate? Can it escalate (without using nuclear weapons)?

Ukrainian shelling kills five, drone sparks fire at refinery - Russian officials

Reuters · by Reuters

• Summary
• Five killed in Luhansk village - Moscow-backed official says
• Four injured by Ukrainian shelling of border town - governor
• Refinery fire the latest attack on Russian infrastructure
• Russia says U.S. backing "terrorists" after Moscow drone strike

MOSCOW/KYIV, May 31 (Reuters) - Ukrainian shelling killed five people in a village in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine, Moscow-installed officials said on Wednesday, while a drone attack caused a fire at an oil refinery in southern Russia.

Ukrainian artillery also hit a Russian town close to the border for the third time in a week, damaging buildings and vehicles and injuring four people, Russian officials said.

A day after the Kremlin accused Kyiv of sending drones to attack buildings in Moscow, Russian-installed officials in Luhansk said five people were killed and 19 wounded when Ukrainian forces used U.S.-made HIMARS rocket launchers to attack a farm in Karpaty village overnight.

Russian forces control nearly all of the Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine.

Ukrainian artillery also struck the Russian town of Shebekino about 7 km (4.5 miles) north of the border with Ukraine's Kharkiv region, regional Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on the Telegram messaging app.

Two people were hospitalised and shells smashed windows and damaged roofs of an eight-storey apartment building, four homes, a school, he said.

Reuters was not able to independently verify the reports. There was no immediate response from Ukraine and both sides deny targeting civilians.

The governor of Russia's southern Krasnodar region said a drone was the likely cause of a fire that broke out at the Afipsky oil refinery.

The fire was put out and there were no casualties, Governor Veniamin Kondratyev said on Telegram. The Afipsky refinery is not far from the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk, near another refinery that has been attacked several times this month.

There was no immediate information on who launched the drone but Moscow has accused Kyiv of increased attacks inside Russia in recent weeks, while Russia has repeatedly pounded Ukrainian cities with drones and missiles.

The skies over Ukraine were relatively quiet on Tuesday night, with no major air raids reported after waves of attacks over the previous 24 hours. Russian drone strikes killed one person and wounded four in Kyiv on Tuesday, according to Ukrainian officials.

The attacks in Russia come as Ukraine prepares a counter-offensive in the hope of driving Russian forces out of territory they have occupied since their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Ukraine almost never publicly claims responsibility for attacks in Russia or on Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine.

DRONE WAR

Ukrainian drones struck wealthy districts of Moscow on Tuesday, Russia said, in what one politician called the most dangerous attack on the capital since World War Two. Kyiv was also hit from the air for the third time in 24 hours.

Air attacks by both sides have intensified as a stalemate endures on the ground with Russian forces entrenched along an extended line in Ukraine's east and south.

The Russian defence ministry said eight drones sent to Moscow by Ukraine and targeting civilians were shot down or diverted with electronic jammers, though Baza, a Telegram channel with links to the security services, said there were more than 25.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential aide, denied Kyiv was directly involved but said "we are pleased to watch events" and forecast more such strikes.

Two people were injured while some apartment blocks were briefly evacuated, according to Moscow's mayor. Residents said they heard loud bangs followed by the smell of petrol. Some filmed a drone being shot down and a plume of smoke.

The drones targeted some of Moscow's most prestigious districts including where Russian President Vladimir Putin and other members of the elite have homes.

Putin said Ukraine's biggest drone strike on Moscow was an attempt to frighten and provoke Russia, and that air defences around the capital would be strengthened.

Civilian targets in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities have since the earliest days of the war been struck repeatedly by Russian drones and missiles.

But Tuesday marked only the second time Moscow had come under direct fire.

The White House said it was gathering information on the reports of drone strikes in Moscow.

"We do not support attacks inside of Russia. That's it. Period," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a briefing.

Washington is a major supplier of weaponry to Ukraine on the condition it uses it to defend itself and to retake Ukrainian territory occupied by Russian forces.

Russia's ambassador to the United States accused Washington of encouraging "terrorists" in Kyiv by publicly ignoring the drone attack.

One of the southern places Russian forces have controlled since just after they invaded is the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, and on Tuesday the chief of the U.N. nuclear watchdog asked Ukraine and Russia to respect five principles to safeguard it.

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said there should be no attack on or from Europe's biggest nuclear power plant and it should not be used as a base for heavy weapons and other military equipment.

Reporting by David Ljunggren, Guy Faulconbridge, Max Hunder, Olena Harmash, Pavel Polityuk, Valentyn Ogirenko, Gleb Garanich, Lidia Kelly, Trevor Hunnicutt and Steve Holland; Writing by Stephen Coates; Editing by Robert Birsel

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Reuters

17. North to Hokkaido: The Case for a Permanent US Army Presence on Japan’s Northern Frontier

Excerpts:

In looking to permanently station Army forces in Hokkaido it is important for both Tokyo and Washington to keep in mind and promote the benefits of a bilateral Army-JGSDF presence to not only Japan as a nation, but also Hokkaido itself, its constituent communities, and its citizens. The economic benefits an increased Army presence could bring to more rural areas of Hokkaido are considerable and offer an alternative to increasingly pervasive and pernicious China-connected investment. If properly managed by the US-Japan alliance through a bilateral whole-of-government approach, at a grassroots level the cultural cross-pollination from increased interaction between Americans and Japanese in Hokkaido could have a positive cascading effect to both industry and educational institutions. The potential benefits to the US-Japan alliance, the US Army, and Hokkaido itself exist at all levels—from the rural neighborhood to the strategic theater.

In the coming decade and beyond Hokkaido is possibly the only location bilateral Army/JGSDF basing in the Pacific theater can realistically happen. Fortuitously, Hokkaido is also the ideal place that it should. Washington and Tokyo would be well served to broaden their horizons and look to north to Hokkaido as the future of the US Army in the Pacific.

North to Hokkaido: The Case for a Permanent US Army Presence on Japan’s Northern Frontier - Modern War Institute

mwi.usma.edu · by Alec Rice · May 31, 2023

The commanding general of US Army Japan recently persuasively argued that as part of the joint force’s “contact layer” on the frontier of the Pacific in the first island chain, Japan is the ideal location to station a US Army multidomain task force.

Japan’s geographic location as the backbone of the first and second island chains indeed makes it a critical strategic location. Pending Army innovations such as the multidomain task forces and long-range precision fires could provide tremendous contributions toward regional deterrence of neighborhood great power adversaries and rapid response should that fail.

Certainly, there is room for US Army growth in Japan. Although home to approximately twenty thousand US Navy sailors, twelve thousand US Air Force airmen, and nineteen thousand Marines, the Army casts a faint shadow in Japan. There are only 2,600 US Army soldiers stationed in all of Japan—fewer than in one standard brigade. This is a gross imbalance with the roughly 140,000 troops of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (JGSDF), which represent nearly two-thirds of Japan Self-Defense Forces personnel.

This spring, Chief of Staff of the Army General James McConville said he would like three of the service’s planned five multidomain task forces to be located in the Pacific region. Basing one of these in Japan would be a meaningful sign of US Army commitment and would contribute to regional deterrence of China, Russia, and North Korea, as well as deepening bilateral integration with the JGSDF. The absence of any significant Army combat arms unit permanently stationed in Japan means that unlike units stationed in South Korea, for example, operational integration between the Army and Japan’s ground forces is comparatively undeveloped and familiarity with and experience in Japan is desperately wanting.

Given that Japan is an ideal archipelagic staging area in the western Pacific and that further US Army–JGSDF integration is imperative, this begs the question: Where precisely in Japan could, and should, the US Army footprint expand?

Contrary to what one might expect, the most strategically effective and geopolitically ideal location for increased US Army presence is not in Japan’s south. It is on its northernmost island, Hokkaido.

The Most Strategically Important Location the Army Has Never Thought About

The immediate geopolitical concern regarding a potential US military response to a Taiwan contingency lead to an obvious focus on Okinawa and the Ryukyu Island chain as a desirable military staging area for the US Army. Being obvious does not make it strategically prescient, however. It is less than ideal for the US Army to try to base assets in a small, concentrated land area already hosting over twenty-five thousand active duty troops (primarily Marines and airmen) and approximately 70 percent of all US military bases in Japan. This is especially true given the Japanese government has worked to reduce the existing US military footprint in Okinawa, which has dropped by 35 percent over the past forty years.

Rather than attempting to wedge itself into the vicinity of Okinawa the Army should instead expand its geographic horizon and look north to Hokkaido. The advantages for the US-Japan military alliance are as bountiful as they are unrecognized. For instance, Hokkaido has ample open space, low population density, and dispersed JGSDF bases that could be jointly used by the US military.

Hokkaido is the northernmost of what are considered Japan’s four primary islands. With a land area of eighty-three thousand square kilometers, it is the twenty-first largest island in the world and roughly the size of the entirety of Ireland. Hokkaido’s population of 5.26 million residents approximates that of the state of South Carolina However, it is not only its size but more importantly its geographic location that is strategically consequential when considering the current global atmosphere of renewed great power competition.

Hokkaido is bordered by the Sea of Japan to the west, the Sea of Okhotsk to the northeast, and the Pacific Ocean to the southeast. Toward its south it is separated from the Japanese island of Honshu by the Tsugaru Strait, while the Russian island of Sakhalin is only forty-three kilometers away across the Soya Strait to the north.

Both the Soya and Tsugaru Straits are vital for Russian and Chinese military and commercial shipping access through the Sea of Japan to the Pacific. Since forcibly taking the Japanese territories of southern Sakhalin (known in Japanese as Minami Karafuto) and the Kuril Islands at the close of World War II, the Soviet Union—and, since its collapse, Russia—has maintained military forces there as a protective gateway for Pacific access from its Far East port of Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan, home of the Russian Pacific Fleet. Russian presence in the Hokkaido vicinity also serves to deny US military access to the Sea of Okhotsk.

China’s ambitions are multipronged, and it is not monomaniacally strategically focused on Taiwan. In its increasing cooperation with its Russian “no limits” partner China has characteristically maneuvered into an advantageous strategic position. It is well known that China is eagerly eyeing the Arctic both for the plentiful resources there as well as shipping access through the Northern Sea Route. Deepening cooperation with Russia is a means to this Arctic access. Both commercially and militarily traversing the seas around northern Japan is part and parcel of this future Sino-Russian Arctic expansion.

As the Ukraine War continues, it appears Russia will be increasingly dependent, both economically and militarily, upon China. While expending minimal resources and ensuring ample access to Russian fuel products, China is positioned to leverage this dependence and influence and control a weakened and addicted Russia, offering support in exchange for Arctic tradeoffs. In fact, this Chinese expansion is well underway. For example, Russia has recently agreed to grant China commercial shipping access to Vladivostok. This is the first time Russia has granted China such access since obtaining this territory from the Qing Dynasty under one of what China refers to as the “unequal treaties” 163 years ago.

This is a looming great power conundrum the US Army could address by providing a forward-based permanent military presence, logistical support, and US-Japan alliance coordination in Hokkaido. Not only would such a presence deter North Korea’s ongoing bellicosity and Russian and Chinese expansion in the northern Pacific’s path to the Arctic, but permanent basing west of the international date line would allow for much more rapid deployment to support a Taiwan contingency than basing alternatives in locations such as Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, or even Guam.

Hokkaido’s Historical Military Connection

Of concern to the government and citizens of Japan, the population of Hokkaido has been both rapidly declining and significantly aging in recent years. The demographic change to Hokkaido has had a predictably deleterious effect on local economies, particularly in smaller towns and rural areas. This situation has made areas of Hokkaido particularly vulnerable to predatory investment from China-connected entities.

Although this Chinese economic incursion is concerning, it also highlights an opportunity for Tokyo and Washington to proactively present an increased US Army presence in Hokkaido as an economic stimulant to local communities and an alternative to depressed communities being forced to take Chinese investment funds.

Moreover, due to its history of frontier development, and a corresponding culture supportive of the JGSDF, communities in Hokkaido are more likely to be open to an increased US military presence than any other area of the country. In sharp contrast to Okinawa and areas of Honshu, Hokkaido itself is Japan’s lone colonized frontier and Japan’s modern military was integral to its settlement and development in the nineteenth century.

In ancient Japan Hokkaido (then known as Ezo) was at the distant northern outskirts of the realm. By the early nineteenth century, the increasing encroachment of the West and Russia sounded an alarm within then-shuttered Japan of the necessity to secure its northern border. With the fall of the shogunate in the 1860s and the advent of the Meiji Restoration, organized settlement of Hokkaido and beyond began in earnest in conjunction with Japan’s rapid industrial modernization.

A core endeavor of the settlement of Hokkaido was the tondenhei, or “colonial troops,” system. In 1874 the new government of imperial Japan instituted a homesteading/military program in which former families of the now-disbanded samurai class were provisioned, housed, and received land in exchange for emigration to Hokkaido from other areas of Japan. For the government, the benefits were multifold, as these tondenhei not only helped settle Japan’s undeveloped northern frontier, but also served as a military bulwark against Russian encroachment from the north.

Thus, since its beginnings, the military in Hokkaido has been at the nucleus of the foundation of many local communities. At the close of World War II, Imperial Japanese Army forces in Hokkaido were instrumental in defending against the Soviet invasion and occupation of southern Sakhalin and the Kurils, in violation of the Soviet-Japan neutrality pact. Little known in the West, the bitter fighting between Japanese forces against this Soviet invasion in Japan’s north continued after Japan had already surrendered to the Allies on August 15, 1945

As part of Cold War strategy against the Soviet Union following World War II, the JGSDF grew into the primary role of defending against a Soviet ground invasion from the north. With the Soviet collapse, Russia was no longer viewed as a military threat. Consequently, with the military rise of China and the perceived threat to its south, the JGSDF has focused on pivoting to deploy units to its southern Nansei Islands in the event of a contingency.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its increasing chumminess with China have called into question this post–Cold War southern focus, however. Japan has in effect been lowering its hands to guard against a gut punch in the south. This shift, combined with a nearly total absence of US military presence in Hokkaido, is increasingly exposing a vulnerable northern Pacific glass jaw.

Viewed through the lens of history Japan faces military threats not only from the south, but also from its north in what is essentially a massive pincer. Recognizing this geopolitical situation, the US Army is in a unique position to bolster this vulnerability of Japan while simultaneously preventing the creeping autocratic hegemony of China in the Pacific.

The Modern JGSDF in Hokkaido

From its colonial beginnings, Hokkaido has evolved to become the traditional home of the JGSDF. The northern island of Japan hosts thirty-eight different decentralized JGSDF bases of varying sizes. As part of the JGSDF Northern Army two JGSDF divisions, two brigades, and three surface-to-ship missile regiments are based in Hokkaido in addition to numerous smaller units of various types and roughly one-quarter of JGSDF personnel.

Despite this, US military presence in Hokkaido is virtually nil. There are no permanently stationed US units of any service based in Hokkaido, even though under the US-Japan status of forces agreements combined JGSDF–US Army basing can be executed provided the US and Japanese governments agree to do so. US forces already have temporary use rights at many Hokkaido facilities and areas that allow for combined training with the JGSDF for exercises, such as Yama Sakura and Orient Shield. This provides a logical stepping stone to permanent US basing in Hokkaido.

The Japanese government has recently undertaken historic steps to modernize its military and increase its defense budget. In December 2022 the government promulgated its revised National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, and Defense Buildup Program. These documents evidence a revolutionary change in Japan’s attitude toward its own defense. Notably, Japan has committed to doubling its defense spending to 2 percent of GDP within five years, which will result in it having the third largest defense budget in the world behind only the United States and China.

Furthermore, Japan has also committed to developing and fielding standoff missile counterstrike capability with ranges to reach targets in other nations. The cornerstone of this capability will involve upgrading the Type 12 surface-to-ship missile to provide extended range to one thousand kilometers followed by development and fielding of a Hyper Velocity Gliding Projectile.

This development provides a great opportunity for US Army–JGSDF collaboration in the coming years. Japan’s counterstrike capability development closely mirrors the Army’s development of long-range precision fires, and its commitment to cross-domain operations echoes the Army’s multidomain operations doctrine. For its part, the JGSDF could greatly benefit from Army expertise in kinetic targeting processes and technology, while the Army could learn about surface-to-ship fires from the JGSDF.

The expanses of Hokkaido would be an ideal place to bring the allies and these capabilities together. Not only decentralized from Tokyo and home to the largest training areas in Japan, long-range fires based in Hokkaido would be an impactful deterrent. From dispersed and mobile locations in Hokkaido long-range missiles could conceivably range Beijing, Shanghai, Vladivostok, the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Sea of Okhotsk, and the entirety of North Korea.

As China has emerged as the United States’ pacing challenge, Japan is now the United States’ “pacing ally.” The long-term vision for both Japan and the United States should be to increase coordination between the JGSDF, US Army Japan and US Army Alaska, as an effective deterrent force against China, Russia, and North Korea while simultaneously covering the northern Pacific in overlapping concentric fields of fire functioning as an indomitable northern Pacific bastion.

Remember the North

No Pacific contingency the United States would conceivably become militarily involved in can be reasonably expected to have a successful outcome without its alliance with Japan. This is true be that conflict in the South China Sea, in the East China Sea, on the Korean peninsula, in the Sea of Japan, or in the Subarctic Pacific Ocean.

Although the relationship between the US Army and JGSDF has historically been overlooked, current geopolitical conditions present a historical opportunity to strengthen the relationship between these ground forces. The geographic fulcrum of Hokkaido has the potential to be a matchless location for future Army-JGSDF cooperation and effective and integrated deterrence in East Asia at the strategic and grand strategic levels.

From a joint perspective, DoD should continue to promote the Marine Corps be the lead force in the southern first island chain. Simultaneously, Washington, US Indo-Pacific Command, the Department of the Army, US Army Pacific, and US Army Japan should expend diplomatic and political capital to establish an ironclad bilateral relationship between the Army and JGSDF in Hokkaido and the northern first island chain. The Japanese archipelago is large enough, and the regional large-scale threats numerous and serious enough, for there to be ample strategic room for both the Marine Corps and the Army to have fighting forces based in different areas of Japan in complementary roles.

Since its incorporation into Japan, Hokkaido has been intimately connected with the defense of the nation. Its history and geography at the frontier of Japan are the foundation of its local culture, and its residents have always been necessarily keenly sensitive to threats from abroad. The historical connection between the JGSDF and Hokkaido, where the force serves as the backbone for multiple local communities, has fostered a local attitude comparatively supportive of the military. The Army should take the opportunity to build on and be part of this foundational relationship, starting with stationing a multidomain task force or other brigade-sized force in Hokkaido alongside the JGSDF.

In looking to permanently station Army forces in Hokkaido it is important for both Tokyo and Washington to keep in mind and promote the benefits of a bilateral Army-JGSDF presence to not only Japan as a nation, but also Hokkaido itself, its constituent communities, and its citizens. The economic benefits an increased Army presence could bring to more rural areas of Hokkaido are considerable and offer an alternative to increasingly pervasive and pernicious China-connected investment. If properly managed by the US-Japan alliance through a bilateral whole-of-government approach, at a grassroots level the cultural cross-pollination from increased interaction between Americans and Japanese in Hokkaido could have a positive cascading effect to both industry and educational institutions. The potential benefits to the US-Japan alliance, the US Army, and Hokkaido itself exist at all levels—from the rural neighborhood to the strategic theater.

In the coming decade and beyond Hokkaido is possibly the only location bilateral Army/JGSDF basing in the Pacific theater can realistically happen. Fortuitously, Hokkaido is also the ideal place that it should. Washington and Tokyo would be well served to broaden their horizons and look to north to Hokkaido as the future of the US Army in the Pacific.

Major Alec Rice is an active duty US Army JAG Corps attorney currently assigned to the National Security Law Division, Office of the Judge Advocate General. He is a former chief of national security law for US Forces Japan and a graduate of the 66th Japan Ground Self-Defense Force Command and General Staff Course.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Sgt. 1st Class Justin A. Naylor, US Army

mwi.usma.edu · by Alec Rice · May 31, 2023

18. Divided by a Common Language: How Europe Views Irregular Warfare

Perfect is the enemy of good enough. Note that everyone has their rice bowl and it revolves around the definition of irregular warfare.

We are spending a lot of intellectual capital on defining a term rather than investing in strategic and operational education. We are worried about a name or a term and a definition rather than the deep intellectual understanding of the phenomenon that we face in the gray zone of strategic competition.

My fundamental requirement for the IW definition: Will it help us to campaign to win in strategic competition of the gray zone?

Divided by a Common Language: How Europe Views Irregular Warfare - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Sandor Fabian, Gabrielle Kennedy · May 31, 2023

With the return of strategic competition, Irregular Warfare (IW) has become the focus of attention in defense circles around the world. Some argue that mastery in this field will decide who emerges victorious in such competition. However, IW is an elusive concept across the US government and among US allies and partners. In March 2021, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III contended that “our success will depend on how closely we work with our friends around the world.” The first step towards successful cooperation is to speak the same—or at least a similar—language. To help the development of such a shared language, it is helpful to compare IW concepts from the United States, allies, and partners around the world. The Irregular Warfare Center (IWC) recently completed a study (the first in a series of regionally focused studies) of how European institutions conceptualize irregular warfare. The results show that irregular warfare means many different things across Europe—and some countries do not even recognize the term.

How the Pentagon Views Irregular Warfare

The United States itself does not have a consistent understanding of irregular warfare. Consider these definitions from key US documents:

• US DOD Directive 3000.07: A violent struggle among state and nonstate actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant population(s)
• The 2020 Irregular Warfare Annex to the 2018 National Defense Strategy: A struggle among state and nonstate actors to influence populations and affect legitimacy. IW favors indirect and asymmetric approaches, though it may employ the full range of military and other capabilities, in order to erode an adversary’s power, influence, and will.
• US Army Field Manual 3-0: The overt, clandestine, and covert employment of military and nonmilitary capabilities across multiple domains by state and nonstate actors through methods other than military domination of an adversary, either as the primary approach or in concert with conventional warfare.

As these examples demonstrate, the US defense community has yet to iron out some important differences. Both analysts and policymakers argue that the lack of shared conceptualization hinders the US government’s ability to address strategic competitors effectively. This limitation is the impetus behind a recent push from the Joint Staff to develop a single, unified definition across the department. Indeed, competency in the irregular warfare space requires a more robust and complete understanding of the concept, a goal that can be achieved by exploring how allies and partners approach the topic.

A Lack of Shared Understanding

To understand how the United States’ European allies understand irregular warfare, the IWC conducted surveys, interviews, and a workshop with representatives from the Netherlands Defense Academy, the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, the Swedish Defense University, the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, and the Military Academy of Lithuania. Survey questions addressed each institution’s conceptualization of irregular warfare; which irregular threats the institution considers and prioritizes; how the institution teaches concepts related to irregular warfare; whether the institution publishes on the topic; the level of the institution’s connection to a broader community focused on irregular warfare; and who makes up the institution’s faculty, courses, and target audience.

A major conclusion from the project was that European institutions lack a shared understanding of irregular warfare. There is no universally accepted definition of irregular warfare across the surveyed institutions, even on a foundational level. For some respondents, like the Military Academy of Lithuania, the lack of a concrete definition of irregular warfare stems from varying definitions across the state as a whole. One consistent assertion throughout many of the survey responses is the idea that irregular warfare exists below the threshold of conventional warfare, implying that warfare exists on a sort of continuum. The tone of this assertion, however, varies from institution to institution. Some look at irregular warfare as part of the conflict/competition spectrum, while others look at irregular warfare as activities unique to special operations forces. In addition, institutions differ in their views on what constitutes irregular activity. For example, the Military Academy of Lithuania says that hybrid activities exist below the threshold of conventional warfare and blur the lines between war and peace, making hybrid/irregular warfare a more active choice for the threat actor. In contrast, the Swedish Defense University says that threats can be characterized as irregular when conventional forces are unable or unprepared to counter the threat posed, making the target country’s response determinative in whether a threat is irregular.

Different Threat Perceptions

There is also no unified irregular threat landscape across European institutions. Instead, the irregular threats given the most attention are driven by the individual institutions’ perceptions of their strategic environments. Furthermore, no institution studied has a prioritized list of irregular threats and threat actors, whether by design or by practicality due to the ever-changing threat environment. While many of the respondents referenced specific threat actors and relevant threats, the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (FFI) has adopted the DIME (diplomatic, informational, military, and economic) acronym to describe the types of threats that meet the criteria for irregular qualification. Although FFI does not assess the severity of threats through this specific lens, the respondent did use the DIME acronym to explain how Russian malign activities meet the threshold for irregular warfare.

Russian aggression or subversion was mentioned in nearly all of the responses, signaling that this is a common interest despite institutional hesitation to name specific prioritized threats. While this is true, some institutions are more concerned with Russian hybrid activities than others, a fact often determined by the institution’s proximity to Russia. This is illustrated by the Military Academy of Lithuania’s sole focus on Russian malign activity and the institutional use of the term “hybrid warfare” instead of “irregular warfare” by many institutions near Russia. On the other hand, institutions in countries farther away from Russia tend to use the US conceptualization of irregular warfare and associated threats. No matter the threat specified, irregular and hybrid warfare seems reactive and exclusively focused on countering malign activities.

Absent from Education

Another shortcoming in the European irregular warfare community is a lack of institutionalized education. Irregular warfare education takes a variety of different forms, from stand-alone IW lessons within existing conventional military education programs to IW-focused courses in graduate-level education. One institution, FFI, does not teach irregular warfare concepts at all. While most of the surveyed institutions teach irregular warfare-related concepts at the theoretical level, one institution, the Swedish Defense University, mentioned teaching irregular warfare concepts through a special operations lens with a heavier focus on the practical level. While there is no real cohesion in irregular warfare education across the institutions studied, it is clear that there is a linkage between special operations forces and the study of irregular warfare concepts, as many of the institutions studied have ties to special operations forces or teach students linked to that area of defense. In more outward-facing action, the institutions do publish on irregular warfare-related topics, like cyber warfare, influence campaigns, and threats to critical infrastructure, for example. However, the relevant publications primarily focus on individual topics subordinate to irregular warfare, rather than dedicate themselves to the study of irregular warfare as a whole. Publications from the surveyed institutions are not always available to the public. Some institutions publish for policymakers, while others speak more to academia or cater almost exclusively to the special operations community.

European IW: The Way Forward

In the long term, a common way to conceptualize irregular warfare is a necessary step toward solid international cooperation. In the short term, understanding the shortcomings in irregular warfare conceptualization, threat perception, and professional military education is key to making the first step. Beyond this, understanding the nuances involved in irregular warfare will help foster efficient communication and effective international cooperation. A major part of gaining this understanding is not only international cooperation but also connecting the academic community with military thinkers serving at institutions like those studied in this first report. Such integration will not only facilitate a more cohesive idea of what irregular warfare is and what related threats look like, but it will also create a more informed and interoperable international community of practitioners. Irregular warfare mastery will not come from rushing to define irregular warfare, but it will come from the type of cooperation necessary to conceptualize the topic fully.

Dr. Sandor Fabian is the Chair of the Engagement Department at the Irregular Warfare Center, a nonresident fellow at the Irregular Warfare Initiative, and a faculty member at the NATO Special Operations School. Dr. Fabian is a former Hungarian Special Forces officer who served in tactical, operational, and strategic national assignments as well as at NATO Special Operations Headquarters.

Gabrielle Kennedy is an analyst at the Irregular Warfare Center and a senior analyst at Exiger Government Solutions.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Photo credit: Jonathan Alpeyrie

19. NATO intel chief: Russia’s war on Ukraine and a hybrid war aimed at us

NATO intel chief: Russia’s war on Ukraine and a hybrid war aimed at us

militarytimes.com · by Kimberly Dozier · May 30, 2023

Military Times’ Senior Managing Editor Kimberly Dozier sat down with David Cattler, NATO’s assistant secretary general for intelligence and security, on the sidelines of the 2023 Lennart Meri Conference in Tallinn, Estonia, earlier this month. Cattler started as a naval surface warfare officer, patrolling the Pacific and taking part in Operation Southern Watch, aimed at keeping Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein from harming U.S. Iraqi Shiite allies in the south of his country.

Cattler now wrangles some 80 intelligence organizations from 31 NATO members, organizing their efforts somewhat like the director of national intelligence provides guidance to U.S. intelligence agencies. His main focus right now? Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine and its hybrid war against Ukraine and NATO, as well as the rest of Europe. This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: What does the hybrid fight look like right now?

A: Let’s start with the NATO definition of hybrid threats: Combining military and nonmilitary means to take covert and even overt action that involves everything from disinformation and cyber attacks, economic pressure, energy, coercion, irregular armed groups and even use of regular military forces.

These hybrid methods are used to blur the lines between war and peace, and to attempt to sow doubt in the minds of target populations, really with an aim to destabilize and undermine societies. And what we’ve observed is that the speed, scale and intensity of these hybrid activities has increased in recent years.

Ukraine has been victim to hybrid attacks … since even before 2014 when Crimea was illegally annexed. In some ways, the beginnings of the Russian deployment for the annexation was also a bit of a hybrid operation, in that there were “little green men” there. They didn’t wear identifying badges on their uniforms, clearly intended to create some confusion or to sow some doubt, to cause [Western] decision-making to be a bit delayed, hopefully, to deny consensus, and so on … that could prevent the outcome, this illegal annexation of Crimea.

And then in the years in between, you’ve seen everything from sustained cyber attacks of varying scales, denial of service data, exfiltration and so on, and then attempts to really undermine the Ukrainian people’s confidence in the government, undermine elections, try to steer the government in a direction against a Euro Atlantic alignment, whether for the EU or for NATO.

Q: And the Russian message now?

A: What they’re saying is that external support to Ukraine, if not illegal, prevented under international law, is actually against peace, which is really hard to comprehend when you’ve initiated an illegal war of aggression. Asking the country that you’ve illegally invaded to lay down their arms as a humanitarian gesture is a bit of a stretch, and then also to say to nations — that have the right under international law to come to Ukraine’s defense and assistance — that they may not provide that aid, because it extends the war and increases the human cost? Certainly, we don’t agree with it. But this is the voice in this so far from Moscow.

Q: What of their attempts to message that the Western alliance is experiencing war fatigue?

A: I think war fatigue is a real thing. … You have it in Russia. You see it now, with people refusing to be mobilized and called up. You see it in feedback from soldiers that have been mobilized against their will, or that had been promised one thing, like being in the rear providing rear security or logistics, and then wind up in Bakhmut with little to no training and very poor equipment.

I think there’s a potential that you could see war fatigue elsewhere. In Ukraine, they have been subjected to very, very substantial, not just hybrid attack, but also direct physical attack, with many, many allegations of Russian war crimes and crimes against humanity. And that all does weigh on the society.

Ambassador Ariadne Petridis, permanent representative of Belgium to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and David Cattler, NATO's assistant secretary general for intelligence and security, hold the alliance's flag on NATO Day in Brussels April 4. (NATO)

Q: But the message that the West is getting tired of war?

A: Look … we need to make clear that we will stand by Ukraine for as long as it takes, that we understand that it’s not just about protecting ourselves with stronger resilience, but it’s very important in a hybrid sense. Meaning that we’ve got the capability to withstand disinformation and propaganda, but also an understanding that there are costs that we feel due to higher inflation, energy prices, and so on.

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But it’s the right thing to do, not just to help Ukraine, but also to help ourselves when we look at the longer term security implications of the war, because Russia has made clear … in January of 2022, at least, that what they actually wish to see is a revision of the international security order and, especially on their border, to roll back NATO to make changes in the security environment that are not, in fact, in line with international law and the sovereign rights of states.

Now, Ukraine feels it directly because they’ve now suffered this expanded invasion. But I think this is also a key reason why so many nations have stepped up and have made the political statement of resolve and also have acted on that statement by providing this assistance now for more than 444 days.

Q: U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have been told to prepare for war with China. Why should they be paying attention to what Russian troops are doing in Ukraine?

A: I think we can and should be able to handle and think about more than one thing at a time. The resolution of the war in Ukraine, I mean, just from the legal aspect of it alone, has bearing on other potential disputes around the world, even potentially including China and Taiwan. You could think of Russia and Georgia, and also, Moldova and Transnistria (an unrecognised breakaway state that is internationally recognized as a part of Moldova). There are a few other frozen conflicts around the world where these sorts of resolutions really matter.

And I think there’s been a good argument made in a lot of really strong public analysis that if Ukraine prevails, and the international order is preserved, that also helps maintain an international legal system and peace and stability … so these are very important.

Please remember that we … have a set of very important values. The idea that people have an inherent right to be free, that nations have a right to be sovereign, independent and make their own decisions, and that human rights are preserved on an individual level are things that I know we hold very dear.

And so I think this war in Ukraine is important to us whether we are Ukrainian or not. The war matters because of the things that are happening that we wish to stop and what the war means in the longer term for Ukraine, for Euro Atlantic security and also for international security.

Q: Has this war also been important for learning how Russia fights?

A: Yes, I think it is pretty clear in the way the Russians fight that a lot of the military way of thinking seems to be very Soviet in its mindset, in terms of command and control … in the operational art, the way they organize, the way they choose to fight and the way that they employ weapons.

Look at the use of artillery, for example. It’s very high volume with less precision, but then at huge cost in terms of the ammunition expenditure and also the damage on the ground. These are things that are not usually associated with modern warfare. They’re more commonly associated with World War II and even, in some cases, World War I. So they continue to do more and more poorly on the battlefield.

Q: Does the U.S. risk seeing Russia as too weak, whereas before they saw Russian troops as sort of 10 feet tall? Have we gone in the other direction after seeing their performance in Ukraine?

A: I think most of us did not think the Russians were 10 feet tall. … But they had credible capabilities … both strategic and conventional. ….

Some make a mistake when they say that because Russia has been unable to translate the military activity into the strategic political effect, that means that they’re not doing anything. Completely false. They’ve done a tremendous amount of damage. And that damage is devastating on a practical human level. And that’s why I say I think it’s a mistake to lose sight of that.

And then further, they still retain great nuclear capability. They have the largest nuclear inventory in the world. And that does represent an existential threat, potentially, that needs to be really closely monitored and understood. That’s still retained. And this is a force that in some ways, is larger.

Just because an army is less capable doesn’t mean that it can’t cause significant damage, as this one has done and continues to do so.

Q: And you’ve been having to warn American and international companies about another threat from Russia: critical infrastructure threats.

A: To be clear, I’m not attributing the Nord Stream I or II attacks to Russia. But I’m just pointing out that you see that … the investigation has already preliminarily, to the extent it can, confirmed that it was sabotage and not a naturally caused outage in the two pipelines.

And we’re increasingly mindful that the way our societies have evolved, whether for information technology, communications, financial transfers, or for energy, now natural gas and oil transfers, but increasingly in the future, offshore windmills and solar panel arrays and so on, that we need to pay attention to the potential that Russia could choose to attack that infrastructure.

We already see them mapping undersea infrastructure. We know that they have capabilities that they’ve sought to preserve and expand over time to do the sorts of activities whether for intelligence, or for more hostile activities, more hostile actions against that infrastructure. And we have to look for it because, as I said in the definition, economic … leverage and energy leverage are two tools that we would consider to be in the hybrid toolkit.

Part of our public outreach has, in fact, been to the private sector — to the energy industry, to telecommunications industry, to IT service providers, network operators, and so on — to try to explain the potential of these threats because they have a large stake in the risk.

They do own some of it, and they also have some capabilities on their own to help us monitor, to provide that situational awareness and to see some anomalies, potentially to detect problems in the system. And I think, in some cases, they’re likely to be first, in fact, to see these things. …

I think it was the open ocean that they used to consider was the protection — that they had to provide armor for a telecommunications cable close to the beach so an anchor couldn’t drag across it and cut it. … Or maybe put a bigger fence or have some physical standoff around a landing station, so a terrorist attack would be less effective. Or there can’t be a break in, because I’ve got guards, and I’ve got cameras and things.

And what we’re saying to them now is: You have to potentially worry about a state capability that could reach out and touch your infrastructure.

Q: You’re essentially asking them to armor every foot of those undersea cables and put some sort of sensor on them to detect interference?

A: I wouldn’t quite go that far. … That’s reasonably unreasonable, because the cost would be phenomenal. … But that’s where you have to really then think through what do I do for surveillance? What do I do for monitoring? Maybe I use AI for anomaly detection or to look for patterns of surface ships, aircraft hovering around key nodes and that sort of thing. How do I use my network monitoring? If I’m on Google or … Deutsche Telekom, British Telecom, maybe there are things I could do other than just monitoring my network. I think there needs to be a good healthy discussion between the public and private sector about … ways to mitigate it that are feasible and affordable.

About Kimberly Dozier

Kim Dozier is Senior Managing Editor of Military Times and a CNN Global Affairs Analyst. A Peabody-Award-winning journalist with a track record of breaking national security stories, she’s also edited news, analysis, and opinion pieces, and managed team news coverage in Washington, D.C., London, Jerusalem and Baghdad.

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David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

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