Quotes of the Day:
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
- Plato (428 BC - 348 BC)
"The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant."
- Maximilien Robspierre
"Kind hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst … To introduce the principle of moderation into the theory of war itself would always lead to logical absurdity.”
- Clausewitz
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 21 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. Why is Lithuania risking Russia’s wrath over Kaliningrad?
3. Nobel sold for Ukrainian kids shatters record at $103.5 million
4. News agency: 1,000 dead, 1,500 injured in Afghan quake
5. Biden to call for 3-month suspension of gas and diesel taxes
6. Press group: Ukraine journalist, soldier 'coldly executed'
7. Cancel Russia's UN Contracts
8. Japan tracks eight Russian and Chinese warships near its territory
9. Putin’s forces have suffered ‘extraordinary’ losses in Ukraine, says UK
10. Biden reverses Trump-era policy on land mines with revived ban
11. UN Human Rights Council report aims to put Israelis behind bars
12. Westerners, too, are waging a ‘War on the West’
13. Opinion | How Russia’s vaunted cyber capabilities were frustrated in Ukraine
14. How to Stop Russia’s Plan for Global Food Chaos
15. 'Everything' in app popular with US troops is 'seen in China,' new report says
16. The Balance of Soft Power
17. America Shouldn’t Copy China’s Belt and Road Initiative
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 21 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 21
Mason Clark, Kateryna Stepanenko, George Barros, and Grace Mappes
June 21, 7:45 pm 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.
The Kremlin recently replaced the commander of the Russian Airborne (VDV) forces and may be in the process of radically reshuffling the command structure of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, indicating a possible purge of senior officers blamed for failures in Ukraine. Several Russian outlets confirmed that the current Chief of Staff of the Central Military District, Colonel-General Mikhail Teplinsky, will replace the current Commander of the Russian Airborne Forces, Colonel-General Andrey Serdyukov.[1] Ukrainian sources previously reported on June 17 that the Kremlin fired Serdyukov for poor performance during the invasion and high casualties among paratroopers, but ISW could not confirm this reporting at the time.[2] Several sources are additionally reporting contradictory claims about replacements for the current Southern Military District Commander—and overall commander of the Russian invasion of Ukraine–Army General Alexander Dvornikov:
- Russian reserve officer Oleg Marzoev claimed on June 21 that Russian military officials will soon appoint General of the Army Sergey Surovikin, the current commander of the Russian Aerospace Forces, as commander of the Southern Military District (SMD), effectively replacing current SMD Commander Alexander Dvornikov.[3]
- Investigative journalism group Bellingcat previously reported on June 17 that Russian President Vladimir Putin planned to replace Dvornikov as the commander of the invasion of Ukraine following Dvornikov’s excessive drinking and lack of trust among Russian forces.[4]
- Ukraine’s Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) reported on June 19 that Putin replaced Dvornikov as the commander of the Ukrainian operation with Colonel-General Gennady Zhidko, the head of the Military-Political Directorate of the Russian Armed Forces.[5]
- An unofficial but widely followed Russian Airborne Troops social media page claimed that Dvornikov has been promoted and that Serdyukov will take his position within the SMD. This claim is highly unlikely to be true given that pro-Kremlin sources announced Serdyukov’s retirement.[6]
ISW cannot independently verify these reports and will continue to monitor the situation for corroboration. However, if these varied reports are all accurate, former Aerospace Forces Commander Surovikin has replaced Dvornikov (who may have been forced to retire) as commander of the Southern Military District, but Zhidko has been appointed commander of Russian operations in Ukraine, despite not directly commanding Russian combat troops in his permanent role. Zhidko currently directs the body of the Russian Ministry of Defense responsible for maintaining morale and ideological control within the Russian military, rather than commanding a military district. As ISW previously reported, Southern Military District Commander Dvornikov was the natural choice to command Russia’s operations in Ukraine following Russia’s loss in the Battle of Kyiv, as the majority of Russian offensive operations are occurring within the Southern Military District’s area of responsibility. The appointment of a separate commander over the Southern Military District, and the replacement of the commander of the SMD in the middle of major combat operations, is a drastic step that would speak to severe crises within the Russian high command, and possibly a purge by the Kremlin. Such drastic rotations within the Russian military, if true, are not actions taken by a force on the verge of a major success and indicate ongoing dysfunction in the Kremlin’s conduct of the war.
Russian forces are successfully advancing toward Lysychansk from the south rather than making an opposed river crossing from Severodonetsk, threatening Ukrainian defenses in the area. ISW previously forecasted that Russian forces would seek to attack toward Lysychansk from the south to negate the defensive advantage that the Siverskyi Donets River would grant Ukrainian defenders opposing a direct assault from Severodonetsk. Russian forces appear to be securing such an advance and will likely attack the outskirts of Lysychansk within the coming week. This Russian advance is a clear setback for Ukrainian defenses in the Severodonetsk-Lysychansk area, but Russian forces will likely require further protracted battles with Ukrainian forces similar to the block-by-block fighting seen in Mariupol and Severodonetsk in order to capture Lysychansk.
The Kremlin is failing to deter the family members of sailors that survived the sinking of the Moskva from issuing an appeal against the deployment of surviving conscripts to the war in Ukraine as of June 20.[7] Russian opposition outlet Novaya Gazeta published an appeal from the parents of the surviving 49 conscript crewmembers of the Moskva, demanding that the Military Prosecutor’s Office in Sevastopol, the Committee of Soldier’s Mothers, and the Human Rights Commissioner immediately terminate the crewmembers’ deployment. The appeal states that Russian commanders did not send the surviving conscripts home from their deployment following the sinking of Moskva and that they will be recommitted to hostilities on June 30. The appeal noted that the survivors refuse to participate in further assignments due to psychological distress and are currently stationed on the old ship Ladnyi, which the appeal claims is unfit for combat. The Ukrainian Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) previously reported that Russian forces have threatened the families of Moskva sailors with criminal prosecution and nullification of any financial benefits to prevent them from speaking out against Russian operations.[8]
Russian forces continue to face force generation challenges and are committing unprepared contract servicemen to the invasion of Ukraine. The BBC’s Russian service reported on June 20 that new Russian recruits receive only 3 to 7 days of training before being sent to “the most active sectors of the front.”[9] The BBC also reported that volunteers within the conventional Russian military, Rosgvardia units, and Wagner Group mercenaries have become Russia’s main assault force, as opposed to full conventional military units. ISW has previously assessed that Russian units in eastern Ukraine are suffering from poor complements of infantry, slowing their ability to seize urban terrain. The Russian military is offering substantial financial incentives to secure additional recruits with increasing disregard for their age, health, criminal records, and other established service qualifications. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on June 21 that Russian Airborne (VDV) units are forced to recruit reserve officers for short-term three-month contracts due to significant officer losses, and the BBC reported that the Russian Ministry of Defense is offering to pay off the loans and debts of volunteers to entice recruits.[10]
Key Takeaways
- The Kremlin recently replaced the commander of the Russian Airborne (VDV) forces and may have fired the commander of the Southern Military District and appointed a new overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine, indicating ongoing dysfunction in the Kremlin’s conduct of the war.
- Russian forces conducted several successful advances in settlements southeast of Severodonetsk on June 21 and may be able to threaten Lysychansk in the coming days while avoiding a difficult opposed crossing of the Siverskyi Donets River.
- Russian forces continued to launch assaults on settlements along the T1302 Lysychansk-Bakhmut highway to interdict Ukrainian ground lines of communications (GLOCs).
- Russian operations along the Izyum-Slovyansk axis are increasingly stalled as Russian forces prioritize operations around Severodonetsk.
- Russian forces likely recaptured the eastern bank of the Inhulets River from the Ukrainian bridgehead situated near the Kherson-Mykolaiv Oblast border.
- Ukrainian forces reportedly struck Russian positions on Snake Island in the Black Sea, likely to destroy Russian fortifications and equipment on the island, but ISW cannot confirm competing Ukrainian and Russian claims of the results of the attack.
- Russian occupation authorities are continuing to face challenges recruiting local collaborators and are likely relying on Russian government personnel to consolidate their societal control of occupied Ukrainian territories.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
- Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and three supporting efforts);
- Subordinate Main Effort—Encirclement of Ukrainian troops in the cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts
- Supporting Effort 1—Kharkiv City;
- Supporting Effort 2—Southern Axis;
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces conducted several successful advances in settlements southeast of Severodonetsk on June 21 and may be able to threaten Lysychansk in the coming days while avoiding a difficult opposed crossing of the Siverskyi Donets River. The Ukrainian General Staff confirmed that Russian forces seized Pidlisne, Myrna Dolyna, and Ustynivka and stated they captured portions of Bila Hora, all towns situated on the western Siverskyi Donets Riverbank within 10 km of the southern outskirts of Lysychansk.[11] Geolocated footage from June 20 indicates Russian forces captured terrain in contested Toshkivka, just east of the T1303 Lysychansk-Hirske highway.[12] Russian forces also conducted a partially successful attack against Hirske, and will likely attempt to carry out a shallow encirclement around Zolote.[13] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults on Severodonetsk’s southeastern outskirts of Syrotyne and Voronove, likely to interdict Russian advances to the eastern bank of Siverskyi Donets River.[14] Ukrainian and Russian sources reported that fighting is still ongoing at the Azot Chemical Plant in Severodonetsk as of June 21.[15]
Russian forces continued to launch assaults on settlements along the T1302 Lysychansk-Bakhmut highway to interdict Ukrainian ground lines of communications (GLOCs). Russian forces attacked Mykolaivka and seized Vrubivka, both adjacent to the T1302 highway.[16] Russian forces also launched ground assaults against Vershina and Semyhirya, approximately 12 km and 17 km south of Bakhmut. Russian forces will still need to seize the T1302 to cut off Ukrainian GLOCs running through Siversk to disrupt Ukrainian GLOCs to Lysychansk. The Ukrainian General Staff also reported that Russian forces consolidated battalion tactical groups (BTGs) from the 5th Combined Arms Army and withdrew units of the 1st Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade of the 1st Army Corps (the armed forces of the Donetsk People‘s Republic) to restore their combat capabilities, indicating that Russian forces are experiencing significant losses in ongoing operations in Luhansk Oblast.[17]
Russian operations along the Izyum-Slovyansk axis are increasingly stalled as Russian forces prioritize operations around Severodonetsk. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces launched unsuccessful ground assaults against Bohorodychne and Dolyna (north of Slovyansk) and did not attempt to conduct offensive operations in the Lyman area.[18] Ukraine’s Strategic Communications Directorate reported that Russian forces are redeploying several army-level headquarters units from frontlines in the Izyum and Lyman areas to Svatove and Horoshe, just 30-40 km east of Severodonetsk and Popasna.[19] The redeployment of these headquarters units may further complicate Russian logistics routes and troop management in Izyum and Lyman and indicates that these units may be further shifting to the Severodonetsk axis. Satellite imagery from June 19 also showed that Russian forces constructed a pontoon bridge in Kupyansk, likely to improve supply routes to Svatove.[20] ISW previously reported on June 17 that Russian forces are deploying additional equipment via GLOCs in Svatove to support offensive operations in the Severodonetsk-Lysychansk area.[21]
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Withdraw forces to the north and defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum)
Russian forces continued to focus on hindering Ukrainian counteroffensives southeast and northeast of Kharkiv City. Russian forces reportedly continued to shell settlements around Kharkiv City to impede Ukrainian advances toward the Russian forces operating in Izyum and the international border.[22] Geolocated combat footage showed local fighting near Yuchenkove, approximately 61 km southeast of Kharkiv City, though neither Russian nor Ukrainian forces conducted any major attacks.[23]
Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces likely recaptured the eastern bank of the Inhulets River from the Ukrainian bridgehead situated near the Kherson-Mykolaiv Oblast border. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces fired on Ukrainian positions on the western bank of the Inhulets River, likely indicating that Ukrainian forces lost access to the bridgehead on the eastern riverbank, which they had occupied since May 28.[24] Geolocated footage of Ukrainian forces striking Russian forces in Andriivka (situated east of the Inhulets River) also indicates that Russian forces pushed Ukrainian forces west of the river.[25] Russian forces continued to build long-term firing positions, conduct air reconnaissance, and shell settlements on the Kherson-Mykolaiv and Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast borders on June 21.[26]
Ukrainian forces reportedly struck Russian positions on Snake Island in the Black Sea, likely to destroy Russian fortifications and equipment on the island. Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported that Ukrainian forces are conducting an ongoing concentrated attack on Snake Island and inflicted unspecified damage on the Russian garrison as of June 21.[27] The Russian Defense Ministry claimed that Russian air-defense systems repelled an attack against the island by more than 15 Ukrainian drones on June 20.[28] Russian officials also claimed that Ukrainian drones struck gas production platforms near Crimea after Russian forces defeated the Ukrainian attempt to capture Snake Island.[29] ISW is unable to independently confirm either claim and will continue to monitor the situation as it unfolds. The UK Defense Ministry also stated that Ukrainian attacks on Russian ships off Odesa shores have “neutralized” Russia’s ability to control the sea and derailed Russian plans to block Odesa Oblast from the Black Sea.[30]
Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)
Russian occupation authorities are continuing ad-hoc annexation policies in Donbas and southern Ukraine. The deputy head of the Russian Kherson Oblast Military-Civil Administration, Kirill Stremousov, made another announcement stating that Russian-occupied Kherson Oblast may conduct a referendum to join Russia in the fall of 2022.[31] Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Head Denis Pushilin previously claimed that the DNR will hold a referendum to unite with Russia after the end of the “special military operation” in Ukraine, which he hopes will end by winter 2022—another indicator that the Kremlin and its proxies expect the war to protract.[32] It is unclear when or if the Kremlin will pursue a full annexation of Donbas and occupied southern Ukrainian territories, but Russian occupation authorities continue to produce disjointed timeframes and preconditions for referendums. The DNR Territorial Defense Staff also reported that the DNR added Lomakyne, just east of Mariupol, to the “zone of DNR responsibility.” It remains unclear whether or not the DNR is responsible for all newly occupied settlements.[33]
Russian occupation authorities are continuing to face challenges recruiting local collaborators and are likely relying on Russian government personnel to consolidate their societal control. Enerhodar Mayor Dmytro Orlov noted that many young people are fleeing Enerhodar and are refusing to cooperate with Russian occupation forces.[34] Orlov reported that Russian forces have mistreated the remaining employees of the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant who stayed back in the city to minimize the risks of a nuclear emergency.[35] Ukrainian Telegram channel MariupolNow noted the arrival of a large convoy of Russian cars and busses near Mariupol, possibly carrying Russian non-military personnel.[36] Russian occupation authorities installed Russian television networks in Kherson Oblast and are continuing to restore railways in Mariupol despite being unable to consolidate societal control in newly occupied territories.[37]
[5] https://gordonuadot com/news/worldnews/vmesto-dvornikova-rukovodit-vs-rf-v-ukraine-naznachili-generala-zhidko-cit-i-bellingcat-1613521.html
[7] https://novayagazeta dot eu/articles/2022/06/20/vyzhivshie-na-zatonuvshem-kreisere-moskva-srochniki-rasskazali-chto-ikh-vnov-posylaiut-v-zonu-boevykh-deistvii-ikh-roditeli-potrebovali-prokuraturu-vmeshatsia-news
[29] https://novayagazeta dot eu/articles/2022/06/21/v-krymu-soobshchili-o-pozhare-na-platforme-chernomorneftegaza-posle-udara-ukrainskikh-voennykh-sem-chelovek-chisliatsia-propavshimi-bez-vesti-news
2. Why is Lithuania risking Russia’s wrath over Kaliningrad?
Geopolitics. Could there be conflict in Lithuania? Note the map at the link for those unfamiliar with the geography and the Suwalki Gap (this name is new to me but I do not have a Eurocentric background)
Why is Lithuania risking Russia’s wrath over Kaliningrad?
Jun 21, 04:06 PM
Suwalki Gap is the corridor between Belarus and Kaliningrad, Russia, following the Lithuania-Poland border.
Lithuania imposed a ground transit ban of EU sanctioned Russian goods through its territory on Saturday, cutting off the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast.
The governor of the oblast, Anton Alikhanov, said the ban will block half of all goods coming into the territory, the majority of which travel via railroad. The ban will also cut off Kaliningrad’s only oil pipeline from Russia.
The move comes on top of the EU flight ban of 21 Russian-certified airlines in April, preventing goods from being flown into Kaliningrad as well. The only uninterrupted method of transit left to the territory now is by way of the sea through international waters.
In response, Russia said Lithuania will face “serious,” unspecified consequences for the actions.
With Lithuania being a NATO member, any direct military action by Russia would trigger Article 5 of the treaty and the entirety of the alliance would at war with Russia. During the State of the Union Address, U.S. President Joe Biden vowed to defend “every inch” of NATO territory. In March, the U.S. bolstered its presence in Lithuania, bringing the number of soldiers stationed in the country to around 1,000.
Where is Kaliningrad?
Like a hollow in the mountains, the isolated port city of Kaliningrad and the territory to which it lends its name is nestled along the coast of the Baltic Sea between the countries of Poland to the South and Lithuania to the East and North.
Why is Kaliningrad part of Russia?
The Kaliningrad Oblast is a territory of Russia. As an exclave, it is separated from its mother country’s capital of Moscow by about 680 miles.
After the conclusion of World War II, the Soviet Union was given control of the Kaliningrad territory at the Potsdam Conference. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the territory remained part of the Russian Federation, surrounded by newly independent countries which over time developed close ties to the West. Eventually, Poland and Lithuania joined the NATO alliance.
Why is Kaliningrad important?
Kaliningrad is the only Russian port on the Baltic Sea that is ice-free year round and is an important launch point for the nation’s naval fleet. Its strategic location prevents ships from having to circumnavigate Scandinavia by way of a northern passage, traveling through the Arctic Ocean. This is the route ships have to take from the second port of the Baltic Fleet in St. Petersburg.
Kaliningrad’s location also means that Russia has naval vessels stationed behind NATO lines.
Along with its fleet, Russia also has nuclear weapons stationed in the territory, according to the Lithuania. In March, Russia ordered its nuclear forces on high alert in response to what it called mounting pressure from NATO countries making “aggressive statements about our country.”
Nuclear warheads attached to short or intermediate range ballistic misses stationed essentially inside NATO territory provide Russia with a more assured first strike due to the limited time it would take the missiles to reach their targets in Europe.
What has Russia’s response been?
Russia has expressed outrage at the move by Lithuania and has vowed to respond in a manner in which the citizens of Lithuania will feel pain, but has failed to specify how it will accomplish this.
Russia has called the transit ban a “blockade” and said the move is a violation of international law. Kaliningrad relies heavily on imports from Russia for goods and materials.
Lithuania defended the ban saying it is simply a step taken to comply with the EU sanctions which have been implemented on Russia since their invasion of Ukraine in late February.
“The transit of passengers and non-sanctioned goods to and from the Kaliningrad region through Lithuania continues uninterrupted,” the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “Lithuania has not imposed any unilateral, individual, or additional restrictions on the transit. Lithuania consistently implements EU sanctions, which have different transition periods and dates of entry into force.”
Ryan White is a reporting intern at Sightline Media. He is currently a senior at The University of Maryland, College Park studying journalism.
3. Nobel sold for Ukrainian kids shatters record at $103.5 million
Nobel sold for Ukrainian kids shatters record at $103.5 million
KEY POINTS
- The Nobel Peace Prize that Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov was auctioning off to raise money for Ukrainian child refugees sold Monday night for $103.5 million, shattering the old record for a Nobel.
- A spokesperson for Heritage Auctions, which handled the sale, could not confirm the identity of the buyer but said the winning bid was made by proxy.
- The $103.5 million sale translates to $100 million Swiss francs, hinting that the buyer is from overseas.
Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, poses for photos with his 2021 Nobel Peace Prize at The Times Center on June 20, 2022. The prize that Muratov was auctioning off to raise money for Ukrainian child refugees sold Monday night for $103.5 million, shattering the old record for a Nobel.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images News | Getty Images
The Nobel Peace Prize that Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov was auctioning off to raise money for Ukrainian child refugees sold Monday night for $103.5 million, shattering the old record for a Nobel.
A spokesperson for Heritage Auctions, which handled the sale, could not confirm the identity of the buyer but said the winning bid was made by proxy. The $103.5 million sale translates to $100 million Swiss francs, hinting that the buyer is from overseas.
The live auction happened on World Refugee Day. Previously, the most ever paid for a Nobel Prize medal was $4.76 million in 2014, when James Watson, whose co-discovery of the structure of DNA earned him a Nobel Prize in 1962, sold his.
Three years later, the family of his co-recipient, Francis Crick, received $2.27 million in bidding also run by Heritage Auctions.
Muratov, who was awarded the gold medal in October 2021, helped found the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and was the publication's editor-in-chief when it shut down in March amid the Kremlin's clampdown on journalists and public dissent in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
It was Muratov's idea to auction off his prize, having already announced he was donating the accompanying $500,000 cash award to charity. The idea of the donation, he said, "is to give the children refugees a chance for a future."
Muratov has said the proceeds will go directly to UNICEF in its efforts to help children displaced by the war in Ukraine.
Melted down, the 175 grams of 23-karat gold contained in Muratov's medal would be worth about $10,000.
VIDEO1:2101:21
Russians bomb theater in Mariupol that was being used to shelter children
In an interview with The Associated Press before the auction, Muratov said he was particularly concerned about children who have been orphaned because of the conflict in Ukraine.
"We want to return their future," he said.
He added that it's important international sanctions levied against Russia do not prevent humanitarian aid, such as medicine for rare diseases and bone marrow transplants, from reaching those in need.
"It has to become a beginning of a flash mob as an example to follow so people auction their valuable possessions to help Ukrainians," Muratov said in a video released by Heritage Auctions, which handled the sale but is not taking any share of the proceeds.
VIDEO3:2403:24
Sick and injured children fight for their lives in Kyiv hospital
Muratov has been highly critical of Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and the war launched in February that has caused nearly 5 million Ukrainians to flee to other countries for safety, creating the largest humanitarian crisis in Europe since World War II.
Independent journalists in Russia have come under scrutiny by the Kremlin, if not outright targets of the government. Since Putin came into power more than two decades ago, nearly two dozen journalists have been killed, including at least four who had worked for Muratov's newspaper.
Muratov left Russia for Western Europe on Thursday to begin his trip to New York City, where live bidding began Monday evening.
Online bids began June 1 to coincide with the International Children's Day observance.
Early Monday, the high bid had been only $550,000. The purchase price had been expected to spiral upward, but perhaps not over $100 million.
VIDEO2:1402:14
Ukrainian tour guide on what it feels like to flee home
"It's a very bespoke deal," said Joshua Benesh, the chief strategy officer for Heritage Auctions. "Not everyone in the world has a Nobel Prize to auction and not every day of the week that there's a Nobel Prize crossing the auction block."
Since its inception in 1901, there have been nearly 1,000 recipients of the Nobel Prizes honoring achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and the advancement of peace.
The ongoing war and international humanitarian efforts to alleviate the suffering of those affected in Ukraine are bound to stoke interest, Benesh said, adding it's hard to predict how much someone would be willing to pay for the medal.
"I think there's certainly going to be some excitement Monday," Benesh said. "It's it's such a unique item being sold under unique circumstances ... a significant act of generosity, and such a significant humanitarian crisis."
4. News agency: 1,000 dead, 1,500 injured in Afghan quake
More tragedy for the Afghan people.
It is going to be tough for the international community to come to their aid.
Excerpts:
In Kabul, Prime Minister Mohammad Hassan Akhund convened an emergency meeting at the presidential palace to coordinate the relief effort, and Bilal Karimi, a deputy spokesman for the Taliban government, wrote on Twitter to urge aid agencies to send teams to the area.
The “response is on its way,” the U.N. resident coordinator in Afghanistan, Ramiz Alakbarov, wrote on Twitter.
That may prove difficult given the situation landlocked Afghanistan finds itself in today. After the Taliban swept across the country in 2021, the U.S. military and its allies fell back to Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport and later withdrew completely. Many international humanitarian organizations followed suit because of concerns about security and the Taliban’s poor human rights record.
News agency: 1,000 dead, 1,500 injured in Afghan quake
AP · by FAZEL RAHMAN FAIZI · June 22, 2022
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan’s state-run news agency says an earthquake in the country’s east has killed 1,000 people and injured 1,500 others.
That latest figure came from the Bakhtar News Agency as officials tried to help those affected by Wednesday’s temblor.
Rescue efforts are likely to be complicated since many international aid agencies left Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover of the country last year and the chaotic withdrawal of the U.S. military from the longest war in its history.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A powerful earthquake struck a rural, mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan early Wednesday, killing at least 920 people and injuring hundreds more in the deadliest temblor in two decades, authorities said. Officials warned that the already grim toll would likely rise.
Information remained scarce on the magnitude 6.1 temblor near the Pakistani border, but quakes of that strength can cause severe damage in an area where homes and other buildings are poorly constructed and landslides are common. Experts put the depth at just 10 kilometers (6 miles) — another factor that could increase the impact.
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The disaster posed a major test for the Taliban-led government, which seized power last year as the U.S. planned to pull out from the country and end its longest war, two decades after toppling the same insurgents in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Rescuers rushed to the area by helicopter Wednesday, but the response is likely to be complicated since many international aid agencies left Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover.
Neighboring Pakistan’s Meteorological Department said the quake’s epicenter was in Afghanistan’s Paktika province, some 50 kilometers (31 miles) southwest of the city of Khost. Buildings were also damaged in Khost province, and tremors were felt as far away as the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.
Footage from Paktika showed men carrying people in blankets to waiting helicopters. Others were treated on the ground. One resident could be seen receiving IV fluids while sitting in a plastic chair outside the rubble of his home and still more were sprawled on gurneys. Some images showed residents picking through clay bricks and other rubble from destroyed stone houses, some of whose roofs or walls had caved in.
The death toll, given by Afghan emergency official Sharafuddin Muslim, made it the deadliest quake since 2002, when a 6.1 magnitude temblor killed about 1,000 people in northern Afghanistan immediately after the U.S.-led invasion overthrew the Taliban government. Muslim said 600 more people were injured.
In most places in the world, an earthquake of this magnitude wouldn’t inflict such extensive devastation, said Robert Sanders, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. But a quake’s death toll more often comes down to geography, building quality and population density.
“Because of the mountainous area, there are rockslides and landslides that we won’t know about until later reporting. Older buildings are likely to crumble and fail,” he said. “Due to how condensed the area is in that part of the world, we’ve seen in the past similar earthquakes deal significant damage.”
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Earlier, the director-general of state-run Bakhtar news agency, Abdul Wahid Rayan, wrote on Twitter that 90 houses have been destroyed in Paktika and dozens of people are believed trapped under the rubble. The Afghan Red Crescent Society had sent some 4,000 blankets, 800 tents and 800 kitchen kits to the affected area, he added.
In Kabul, Prime Minister Mohammad Hassan Akhund convened an emergency meeting at the presidential palace to coordinate the relief effort, and Bilal Karimi, a deputy spokesman for the Taliban government, wrote on Twitter to urge aid agencies to send teams to the area.
The “response is on its way,” the U.N. resident coordinator in Afghanistan, Ramiz Alakbarov, wrote on Twitter.
That may prove difficult given the situation landlocked Afghanistan finds itself in today. After the Taliban swept across the country in 2021, the U.S. military and its allies fell back to Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport and later withdrew completely. Many international humanitarian organizations followed suit because of concerns about security and the Taliban’s poor human rights record.
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In the time since, the Taliban has worked with Qatar, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates on restarting airport operations in Kabul and across the country — but nearly all international carriers still avoid the country, and reluctance on the part of aid organizations to put any money in the Taliban’s coffers could make it difficult to fly in supplies and equipment.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif in a statement offered his condolences over the earthquake, saying his nation will provide help. At the Vatican, Pope Francis offered prayers for all those killed and injured and for the “suffering of the dear Afghan population.”
In just one district of Khost province, the earthquake killed at least 25 people and injured over 95 others, local officials said.
Some remote areas of Pakistan saw reports of damage to homes near the Afghan border, but it wasn’t immediately clear if that was due to rain or the earthquake, said Taimoor Khan, a disaster management spokesperson in the area.
The European seismological agency, EMSC, said the earthquake’s tremors were felt over 500 kilometers (310 miles) by 119 million people across Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.
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Mountainous Afghanistan and the larger region of South Asia along the Hindu Kush mountains has long been vulnerable to devastating earthquakes.
In 2015, a major earthquake that struck the country’s northeast killed over 200 people in Afghanistan and neighboring northern Pakistan. In 1998, a 6.1 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tremors in Afghanistan’s remote northeast killed at least 4,500 people.
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Associated Press writers Rahim Faiez and Munir Ahmed in Islamabad and Jon Gambrell and Isabel DeBre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.
AP · by FAZEL RAHMAN FAIZI · June 22, 2022
5. Biden to call for 3-month suspension of gas and diesel taxes
How are we going to deal with the 18 cent price hike when the tax goes back into effect? What is the plan for re-implementing the tax? Can there be a gradual reimposition of say 3 cents a month over the next six months starting in September?
Biden to call for 3-month suspension of gas and diesel taxes
AP · by JOSH BOAK · June 22, 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Wednesday will call on Congress to suspend federal gasoline and diesel taxes for three months — a move meant to ease financial pressures at the pump that also reveals the political toxicity of high gas prices in an election year.
The Democratic president will also call on states to suspend their own gas taxes or provide similar relief, the White House said.
At issue is the 18.4 cents-a-gallon federal tax on gas and the 24.4 cents-a-gallon federal tax on diesel fuel. If the gas savings were fully passed along to consumers, people would save roughly 3.6% at the pump when prices are averaging about $5 a gallon nationwide.
But many economists and lawmakers from both parties view the idea of a gas tax holiday with skepticism.
Barack Obama, during the 2008 presidential campaign, called the idea a “gimmick” that allowed politicians to “say that they did something.” He also warned that oil companies could offset the tax relief by increasing their prices.
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High gas prices pose a fundamental threat to Biden’s electoral and policy ambitions. They’ve caused confidence in the economy to slump to lows that bode poorly for defending Democratic control of the House and the Senate in November.
Biden has acknowledged how gas prices have been a drain on public enthusiasm when he is trying to convince people that the U.S. can still pivot to a clean-energy future. In an interview with The Associated Press last week, Biden described a country already nursing some psychological scars from the coronavirus pandemic that is now worried about how to afford gas, food and other essentials.
“If you notice, until gas prices started going up,” Biden said, “things were much more, they were much more optimistic.”
The president can do remarkably little to fix prices that are set by global markets, profit-driven companies, consumer demand and aftershocks from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the embargoes that followed. The underlying problem is a shortage of oil and refineries that produce gas, a challenge a tax holiday cannot necessarily fix.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, estimated that the majority of the 8.6% inflation seen over the past 12 months in the U.S. comes from higher commodity prices due to Russia’s invasion and continued disruptions from the coronavirus.
“In the immediate near term, it is critical to stem the increase in oil prices,” Zandi said last week, suggesting that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and a nuclear deal with Iran could help to boost supplies and lower prices.
Republican lawmakers have tried to shift more blame to Biden, saying he created a hostile environment for domestic oil producers, causing their output to stay below pre-pandemic levels.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell mocked the idea of a gas tax holiday in a February floor speech. “They’ve spent an entire year waging a holy war on affordable American energy, and now they want to use a pile of taxpayers’ money to hide the consequences,” he said.
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Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has previously expressed doubts about the value of suspending the federal gas tax.
Administration officials said the $10 billion cost of the gas tax holiday would be paid for and the Highway Trust Fund kept whole, even though the gas taxes make up a substantial source of revenue for the fund. The officials did not specify any new revenue sources.
The president has also called on energy companies to accept lower profit margins to increase oil production and refining capacity for gasoline.
This has increased tensions with oil producers: Biden has judged the companies to be making “more money than God.” That kicked off a chain of events in which the head of Chevron, Michael Wirth, sent a letter to the White House saying that the administration “has largely sought to criticize, and at times vilify, our industry.”
Asked about the letter, Biden said of Wirth: “He’s mildly sensitive. I didn’t know they’d get their feelings hurt that quickly.”
Energy companies are scheduled to meet Thursday with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to discuss ways to increase supply.
AP · by JOSH BOAK · June 22, 2022
6. Press group: Ukraine journalist, soldier 'coldly executed'
Pure Putin evil.
Press group: Ukraine journalist, soldier 'coldly executed'
AP · by JOHN LEICESTER · June 22, 2022
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A Ukrainian photojournalist and a soldier accompanying him appear to have been “coldly executed” during the first weeks of the war in Ukraine as they searched in Russian-occupied woods for the photographer’s missing camera drone, Reporters Without Borders said Wednesday.
The press freedom group said it sent investigators back to the woods north of the capital, Kyiv, where the bodies of Maks Levin and serviceman Oleksiy Chernyshov were found April 1. The group said its team counted 14 bullet holes in the burned hulk of the pair’s car, which remained at the spot.
Citing the findings from its investigation into the deaths, the group said disused Russian positions, one of them still booby-trapped, were found close by. Also found were the remains of food rations, cigarette packs and other litter seemingly left by Russian soldiers.
Some of Levin and Chernyshov’s belongings, including the soldier’s ID papers and parts of his bulletproof vest and the photographer’s helmet, were also recovered, Reporters Without Borders said.
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A Ukrainian team with metal detectors also located a bullet buried in the soil where Levin’s body had been, it said. The group said that finding suggests “he was probably killed with one, perhaps two bullets fired at close range when he was already on the ground.”
A jerrycan for gasoline was also found close to where Chernyshov’s burned body was found, it added.
Reporters Without Borders said its findings “show that the two men were doubtless coldly executed.”
Levin and Chernyshov were last heard from on March 13. A GPS tracker in their vehicle gave their last position, in woods north of Kyiv, the group said.
The group speculated that Levin may have been hunting for his drone when he and Chernyshov were killed.
It said Levin lost his drone in the area on March 10 and had been unable to recover it because he’d come under Russian fire. Drones have become a common tool for photojournalists to get aerial photos and video.
Reporters Without Borders said Levin had on occasion shared information gleaned from his drone, including about Russian positions, with Ukrainian forces.
“But the use of his drone was first and foremost a journalistic endeavor, confirmed by his entourage and shown by the images sold to the media since the start of the Russian invasion,” it said.
The group said it turned over the evidence it collected and dozens of photos to Ukrainian investigators.
The group said it was unable to confirm whether autopsies were performed on the men’s bodies, a step it called essential for the investigation into their deaths.
It also appealed for Ukrainian defense and intelligence agencies to provide investigators with whatever information they have about Russian units that occupied the area during Moscow’s failed assault on Kyiv.
Separately, Russian officials said a drone strike caused a fire at an oil processing plant in southwestern Russia on Wednesday.
The blaze engulfed a piece of machinery at the Novoshakhtinsk plant in the Rostov-on-Don region. Authorities said that dozens of firefighters quickly contained the fire and no one was hurt.
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The plant said in a statement that the fire was caused by a strike carried out by two drones, describing it as a “terrorist” act. It didn’t give details, but state news agency Tass reported that two Ukrainian drones flew over the plant and one of them slammed into a heat exchanger, triggering the fire.
The regional governor, Vasily Golubev, said that fragments of two drones were found on the territory of the plant.
Ukrainian authorities have not confirmed the strike.
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AP · by JOHN LEICESTER · June 22, 2022
7. Cancel Russia's UN Contracts
Excerpts:
President Biden’s 2023 budget request includes $2.33 billion for the Contributions for International Peacekeeping Activities account, which funds U.S. assessed contributions to most U.N. peacekeeping operations. That’s a nearly $830 million increase over the enacted fiscal 2022 amount of $1.5 billion, which included funding up to the 25 percent cap on the U.S. share of peacekeeping costs which has been imposed by Congress (the UN’s assessment level for the U.S. is over 30 percent). More than $730 million of the funds requested for 2023 would pay for arrears accrued since 2017 as a result of the 25 percent cap.
Congress should insist that U.S. taxpayer dollars not fund UN procurement from Russia, including especially procurement from companies such as UTAir which are banned from the U.S. and EU for safety and other reasons. Furthermore, the U.S. should not pay arrears for UN peacekeeping operations unless the Secretary of State certifies that the UN has immediately suspended all non-essential procurement from Russian companies and submitted to the State Department all available identifying information for Russian nationals who are peacekeeping contractors.
Cancel Russia's UN Contracts
Congress should insist that U.S. dollars not fund United Nations procurement from Russian companies.
BY ORDE KITTRIE
SENIOR FELLOW, FOUNDATION FOR DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES
While Western governments are escalating their sanctions on Russia, the UN continues to spend tens of millions of dollars a year on Russian goods and services. This procurement, which principally involves Russian companies providing aircraft and pilots to UN peacekeeping missions, undermines U.S. and allied efforts to counter Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
From 2014, the year Russia annexed Crimea, through 2020 (the last year for which complete data is available), the UN spent more than $2.3 billion to procure Russian goods and services. Most of the helicopters currently being used by UN peacekeeping missions are reportedly supplied by Russian companies.
In April, former Ukrainian officials at the UN alleged that because UN aircraft supplied by Russian companies are often piloted by retired Russian military officers, “it is likely that soon the UN will be served by the same aircrews who leveled Aleppo and are now bombing Kharkiv and Mariupol.”
It is an embarrassment for the UN to be hiring Russian aircraft for peacekeeping operations when Russia and its aircraft are slaughtering civilians in Ukraine under the false pretext of conducting a “peacekeeping operation” there. In paying for these services, the UN also appears to be violating the spirit of Western sanctions cutting Russia off from the international financial system.
In March, Ukraine urged the UN Secretariat to “immediately suspend all non essential procurement cooperation of the UN with the Russian Federation.” UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters in response that “it’s no secret that a lot of our aviation procurement for peacekeeping and just logistics comes from the Russian Federation.” Dujarric also said that “[t]he rules are set by the General Assembly, and we follow those rules.”
The General Assembly has already taken other steps against Russia, including suspending it from the UN Human Rights Council. It should act now to minimize UN procurements from Russia.
The top provider of UN peacekeeping helicopters (currently at 30 of the roughly 130) has long been the Siberian-based UTAir Group. The UN procurement database lists tens of millions of dollars in open multi-year contracts with UTAir to provide helicopter services to UN peacekeepers and other personnel in Abyei (a disputed Sudanese territory), Afghanistan, Somalia, and South Sudan.
UTAir, the largest Russian provider, has one of the worst safety ratings of any airlines in the world. In April, the U.S. Commerce Department determined that UTAir had violated U.S. export regulations and banned it from receiving further U.S. exports. Also in April, UTAir was listed by the EU as having failed to meet international safety standards. As a result, UTAir is barred from operating to, in, and from the European Union, including overflight.
Meanwhile, in 2016 the two then-owners of Abakan Air – at least one of whom is reportedly still involved with the company — were described by the New York Times as having been the subject of an internal UN investigation in 2007 that “recommended no further dealings with them.”
The UN’s current procurement contracts with Russia raise particular concerns for U.S. taxpayers. Since the U.S. contributes 22 percent of the UN’s regular budget and 25 percent of its peacekeeping budget (far more than any other country), U.S. taxpayers effectively contributed around $60 million of the $270 million the UN spent on contracts with Russia during 2020 (the most recent year for which complete numbers are available).
President Biden’s 2023 budget request includes $2.33 billion for the Contributions for International Peacekeeping Activities account, which funds U.S. assessed contributions to most U.N. peacekeeping operations. That’s a nearly $830 million increase over the enacted fiscal 2022 amount of $1.5 billion, which included funding up to the 25 percent cap on the U.S. share of peacekeeping costs which has been imposed by Congress (the UN’s assessment level for the U.S. is over 30 percent). More than $730 million of the funds requested for 2023 would pay for arrears accrued since 2017 as a result of the 25 percent cap.
Congress should insist that U.S. taxpayer dollars not fund UN procurement from Russia, including especially procurement from companies such as UTAir which are banned from the U.S. and EU for safety and other reasons. Furthermore, the U.S. should not pay arrears for UN peacekeeping operations unless the Secretary of State certifies that the UN has immediately suspended all non-essential procurement from Russian companies and submitted to the State Department all available identifying information for Russian nationals who are peacekeeping contractors.
Orde Kittrie, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and law professor at Arizona State University, is a former U.S. State Department attorney.
8. Japan tracks eight Russian and Chinese warships near its territory
China and Russia are pivoting to Asia (or perhaps China is pirouetting)
Japan tracks eight Russian and Chinese warships near its territory
CNN · by Brad Lendon, CNN
Seoul, South Korea (CNN)At least eight Russian and Chinese warships have been spotted in the seas near Japan this week, another sign of the apparent pressure the two partners have been putting on Tokyo as relations deteriorate over Ukraine and Taiwan respectively.
Japan's Defense Ministry on Tuesday said its forces had observed five Russian warships led by an anti-submarine destroyer steaming through the Tsushima Strait, which separates Japan and South Korea.
The five-ship Russian flotilla has been near Japanese islands for a week, from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south, the ministry said in a news release.
Meanwhile, at least two Chinese warships and a supply ship were spotted Tuesday in the Izu Islands, about 500 kilometers (310 miles) south of the capital Tokyo. One of those ships appeared to be the Lhasa, a Type 55 guided-missile destroyer and one of China's most powerful surface ships.
The ministry said that group has been operating in waters near Japan since June 12.
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The Russian Navy destroyer Admiral Panteleyev is seen in this image released by Japan's Defense Ministry.
"This is an obvious show of force from both Russia and China," said James Brown, associate professor of political science at Temple University in Tokyo.
"These activities are a major worry for Japan. Not least, tracking the movements of both Russian and Chinese military forces are a strain on the resources of the Japan Self Defense Forces."
There was no claim from Tokyo that the Russian and Chinese naval groups were coordinating their actions, like they did last October when a total of 10 Russian and Chinese warships jointly participated in exercises in which they circumnavigated much of the Japanese archipelago.
More recently, as Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida hosted a summit of the leaders of the United States, Australia and India in Tokyo, the Chinese and Russian air forces conducted joint strategic air patrols over the Sea of Japan, the East China Sea and the western Pacific Ocean, in what the Chinese Defense Ministry called part of an annual military cooperation plan.
Brown said Kishida's hosting of that summit was just one reason Beijing would want to show its displeasure with Tokyo.
"Beijing has been angered by Japanese statements regarding the security of Taiwan, which the Chinese Communist Party considers a domestic matter," Brown said.
Taiwan and mainland China have been governed separately since the defeated Nationalists retreated to the island at the end of the Chinese civil war more than 70 years ago.
But China's ruling Chinese Communist Party views the self-ruled island as part of its territory -- despite having never controlled it.
Beijing has not ruled out military force to take Taiwan, and Japan sees conflict across the Taiwan Strait as a threat to its security.
"Russia therefore wishes to use its military power to intimidate Japan in the hope that this will deter Tokyo from imposing further such measures," Brown said.
Brown described the fact that this week's naval actions by Russia and China did not seem to be coordinated as a "silver lining" for Tokyo.
"Japan's strategic nightmare is a genuine alliance between Russia and China," he said.
CNN · by Brad Lendon, CNN
9. Putin’s forces have suffered ‘extraordinary’ losses in Ukraine, says UK
The UK seems to have a lot of good intelligence about Putin's War and is releasing it.
Putin’s forces have suffered ‘extraordinary’ losses in Ukraine, says UK
V
ladimir Putin’s forces have suffered “extraordinary” losses in Ukraine, British defence chiefs said on Wednesday as he was unleashing a fresh onslaught on the eastern city of Severodonetsk.
Both Russia and Ukraine’s regular armies have seen so many soldiers killed and wounded that “the ability to generate and deploy reserve units to the front is likely becoming increasingly critical to the outcome of the war,” they added.
They also highlighted that Moscow-backed separatists in part of the eastern Donbas region admitted that more than 2,000 of their troops had been killed this year and nearly 9,000 wounded.
In its latest intelligence update, the Ministry of Defence in London said: “Heavy shelling continues as Russia pushes to envelop the Severodonetsk area via Izium in the north and Popasna in the south.
“Russia is highly likely preparing to attempt to deploy a large number of reserve units to the Donbas.”
It added: “The Russian authorities have not released the overall number of military casualties in Ukraine since 25 March.
“However, the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) publishes casualty figures for DPR forces. As of 16 June, the DPR acknowledged 2128 military personnel killed in action, and 8897 wounded, since the start of 2022.
“The DPR casualty rate is equivalent to around 55 per cent of its original force, which highlights the extraordinary attrition Russian and pro-Russian forces are suffering in the Donbas.
“It is highly likely that DPR forces are equipped with outdated weapons and equipment. On both sides, the ability to generate and deploy reserve units to the front is likely becoming increasingly critical to the outcome of the war.”
Britain, the US and other allies are fighting an information war against the Kremlin so their briefings need to be treated with caution.
However, Moscow’s claims are often even less believable, partly as the Kremlin does not admit to Mr Putin having launched a war in Ukraine on February 24.
The UK estimates that the invasion has led to the death of 15,000 to 20,000 Russian military personnel.
It has not given a figure for Ukrainian military losses.
However, Kyiv has admitted that during intense battles between 200 to 500 of its soldiers are being killed daily.
Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of civilians have also been killed, often in indiscriminate Russian shelling.
Russian forces have seized more villages near the industrial city of Severodonetsk in the eastern Luhansk province, according to reports on Wednesday.
But Ukrainian soldiers were still holding out in underground tunnels in the Azot chemical factory where 500 civilians, including dozens of children, are sheltering.
Fighting in the four month long war has favoured Russia in recent weeks because of its huge edge in artillery firepower, a fact Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged in a late Tuesday address.
“Thanks to tactical manoeuvres the Ukrainian army is strengthening its defences in the Luhansk region,” he said. “That is really the toughest spot. The occupiers are also pressing strongly in the direction of Donetsk.”
Luhansk and Donetsk provinces combined are known as the Donbas, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.
“And just as actively as we are fighting for a positive decision by the European Union on Ukraine’s candidate status, we are also fighting every day for modern weaponry for our country. We don’t let up for a single day,” added Mr Zelensky, urging his country’s supporters to speed up arms deliveries.
The governor of Luhansk province, Serhiy Gaidai, said Russian troops were also advancing towards Lysychansk, attacking the buildings of police, state security and prosecutors, taking settlements and attacking the city with aircraft.
Some of the Russian offensive was reported to be from the south of the city, meaning its soldiers would not have to cross the Siverskyi Donets river.
Oleskiy Arestovych, an adviser to Mr Zelensky, said Russian forces could cut off Lysychansk, across the river Siverskyi Donets from Severodonetsk, from Ukrainian-held territory.
“The threat of a tactical Russian victory is there, but they haven’t done it yet,” he said in an online video.
Attacks have picked up in the Kharkiv region in the northeast, with at least 15 civilians killed by Russian shelling, civic chiefs said on Tuesday.
“Russian forces are now hitting the city of Kharkiv in the same way that they previously were hitting Mariupol - with the aim of terrorising the population,” Mr Arestovych said. “The idea is to create one big problem to distract us.”
The Ukrainian and Russian forces were entrenched in the eastern Ukrainian battlegrounds on Wednesday, a day of commemoration in both countries to mark the anniversary of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
June 22 is a significant date in Russia - the “Day of Remembrance and Sorrow” - marking when Hitler’s Nazi Germany forces invaded the Soviet Union in World War Two.
It is also commemorated in Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus, then part of the Soviet Union. The war there lasted 1,418 days from June 22, 1941, and historians estimate about 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians were killed.
Meanwhile, in a symbolic decision, Ukraine is set to become an official candidate for European Union membership on Thursday, EU diplomats said.
Russia's failure to make a major breakthrough since invading Ukraine means time is on the side of Ukrainians, according to some military analysts.
"It's a heavyweight boxing match....there has not yet been a knockout blow. It will come, as RU forces become more depleted," retired US Lieutenant General Mark Hertling, a former commander of US ground forces in Europe, wrote on Twitter.
10. Biden reverses Trump-era policy on land mines with revived ban
My comments, among others, below.
Biden reverses Trump-era policy on land mines with revived ban
Korea only place where anti-personnel land mines will be allowed under new Biden policy
The Biden administration announced Tuesday that the military will no longer develop, produce or export anti-personnel land mines and will restrict their use outside the Korean Peninsula. Any anti-personnel mines not earmarked for South Korea’s defense will be destroyed, administration officials said.
The move reverses a policy shift approved by President Trump in 2020. It also revived a debate on the role of land mines in modern warfare and whether the U.S. should unilaterally strip itself of the option to deploy them.
“President Biden is committed to continuing the United States’ role as the world’s leader in mitigating the harmful consequences of anti-personnel landmines worldwide,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement.
Except for the divided Korean Peninsula, where U.S. ally South Korea faces a nuclear-armed North Korea across a tense Demilitarized Zone, the Biden administration policy aligns it with the provisions of the 1997 Ottawa Treaty prohibiting the stockpiling and use of anti-personnel land mines. However, the U.S. isn’t a signatory to the treaty.
“We will continue to pursue material and operational solutions that would be compliant with and ultimately allow the United States to accede to the Ottawa Convention, while we at the same time ensure our ability to meet our alliance commitments,” said Stanley L. Brown, principal deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Political and Military Affairs in the State Department, told reporters Tuesday.
The U.S. International Campaign to Ban Landmines in a statement called Mr. Biden’s decision an “important first step,” but urged the administration to remove anti-personnel land mines in South Korea as well. “Landmines are indiscriminate weapons that devastate civilian communities during conflict and for decades after the conflict has ended,” the organization said.
Although human rights groups have pushed for the change for years, some say the land mine debate raises difficult questions for military planners.
Retired Army Col. David Maxwell has seen the scourge that land mines can cause. He often sent Special Forces troops to places like Laos and Cambodia to help clean up fields littered with still-active mines.
“I’m sensitive to how bad land mines are. They are a terrible weapon that inflicts terrible damage,” Mr. Maxwell, now a military analyst with the Foundation of Defense of Democracies think tank, said Tuesday in an interview with The Washington Times.
But, he acknowledged that land mines can still play an important role on the battlefield.
“There is military utility to using them,” Mr. Maxwell said, shortly after the White House announcement.
He noted Mr. Biden was announcing the near-total ban at a time when Russia is pressing its brutal invasion of Ukraine and the U.S. and its allies are rushing weapons and other defensive assets to Kyiv.
“There’s compelling evidence that Russian forces are using explosive munitions, including land mines, in an irresponsible manner which is causing extensive harm to civilians and damage to vital civilian infrastructure there,” Mr. Brown said.
U.S. officials said the Korean exception is unique, owing to specific defense treaty obligations. All minefields in Korea or along the DMZ between the North and the South are under the control of South Korea.
U.S. forces last used anti-personnel land mines during the Gulf War. The White House’s decision to unilaterally restrict their use will have no impact on what happens in Moscow or Beijing, Mr. Maxwell said.
“We should be under no illusion that this ban is going to make it safer for civilians or the U.S. military,” he said. “Malign actors like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea will still employ these capabilities and far worse capabilities.”
He noted that most battlefield deaths and injuries in recent years in Iraq and Afghanistan have been caused by improvised explosive devices, better known as IEDs, which are not covered by the land mine ban.
The U.S. is believed to have an active stockpile of about 3 million anti-personnel land mines. Mr. Brown said the administration intends to destroy all of that inventory save for what is needed in Korea.
Dozens of countries and international groups condemned Mr. Trump’s 2020 decision to allow the manufacturing and use of anti-personnel land mines. At the time, Pentagon officials said they played important roles in denying adversaries access to key parts of the battlefield.
“These systems help protect defending forces from both enemy armor and dismounted threats and ensure units are not outflanked or overrun when under attack,” former Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper wrote in a memo about the policy revision. “They obstruct and influence the enemy’s direction of movement, channeling enemy forces into zones in which U.S. forces can better concentrate overwhelming firepower.
There is no one-for-one substitute for anti-personnel land mines currently, but Mr. Brown at the State Department said: “it’s being worked on.”
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11. UN Human Rights Council report aims to put Israelis behind bars
Excerpts:
The authors also argue that Israel’s supposedly perpetual occupation has created inequalities (that a future report might determine amount to apartheid). But the different legal systems in place in the West Bank — a product of the Oslo agreements between Israel and the Palestinians — center around citizenship, not race, as permitted in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
The COI report does recognize that the Oslo Accords would have gradually transferred much of the West Bank and Gaza to Palestinian control, but it states that “these agreements have never been fully implemented.” The report does not mention that the Palestinians rejected or ignored multiple Israeli peace offers. “Israel has no intention of ending the occupation,” the report states, yet it overlooks Israel’s spurned offers to withdraw from most of the West Bank as part of a peace agreement.
This report is not just about putting Israel under scrutiny. It’s about putting Israelis behind bars. The COI seeks to end what it perceives as a “culture of impunity” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by submitting individual Israelis to prosecution, presumably at the International Criminal Court, for perceived crimes.
Budgetary restraints have hampered the COI’s operation and may have temporarily prevented some of the more incendiary allegations that Israel feared the UNHRC would make. The United States should seize the momentum, withhold further funds from the UNHRC, and prioritize defunding the COI in the end-of-year budget debates.
UN Human Rights Council report aims to put Israelis behind bars
The United Nations Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry on the May 2021 Israel-Hamas conflict released its highly anticipated report on Tuesday. The commission distorts history and erases Jerusalem’s security concerns to cast Israeli actions as the byproducts of racism.
The early days of May 2021 were a tense time for Israelis and Palestinians. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had just canceled the first national elections in 15 years. Palestinians were protesting an unfulfilled order to evict Palestinians from Jewish-owned homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem. And it was Ramadan, a perennially restive time in the Holy Land.
Seeking to assert its declared role as leader of the Palestinian cause, something it had hoped to prove through elections, Hamas seized on the tension and threatened to attack Israel. It fulfilled that promise on May 10, instigating an 11-day war that saw massive destruction, hundreds killed, and thousands of rockets launched indiscriminately at Israel.
The fighting ended on May 21, but the UNHRC waited only until May 27 of that year to launch an initial salvo against Israel, passing a resolution establishing the mandate for a COI to investigate the conflict. The resolution was remarkable in that it called for an “ongoing” COI to investigate “all underlying root causes” of the conflict, specifically including “systematic discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity.”
The COI’s permanent nature constitutes merely another U.N. mechanism to scrutinize Israel indefinitely and drain U.N. resources accordingly. The specific call to investigate “systematic discrimination” as a root cause of the conflict is nearly identical to the demand issued by Human Rights Watch in its April 2021 report, which concocts a new definition of apartheid and slaps it onto Israel.
Israel braced for this accusation to appear in the COI’s June 2022 report to the UNHRC. Though the term appears only in one footnote, the COI laid the groundwork for making this accusation in its report to the U.N. General Assembly in September 2022.
The COI report merely summarizes previous U.N. reports criticizing Israel, producing very little fresh information. The authors noted that a 25% budget reduction, approved in December 2021, hampered their work. It is unclear if the COI moderated its message to avoid further funding cuts or if it is holding its punches for the report.
Notably, the report itself admits that it is one-sided. The authors explain that the findings regarding the “underlying root causes” were overwhelmingly directed toward Israel because of “the reality of one State occupying the other.” Yet the conflict predates 1967, and Israel’s presence in the West Bank persists primarily as the result of Palestinian aggression against the Jewish state.
The report consistently ignores Israel’s security needs. In framing the outbreak of the May 2021 war, the authors overlook the Hamas-Fatah rivalry and Hamas’s saber-rattling that helped initiate the war, focusing instead on Israeli evictions that never occurred. The report also criticizes Israel’s construction of a West Bank “wall” without mentioning the Palestinian terrorism of the Second Intifada that led to its construction.
Similarly, the authors present the blockade of Gaza as an example of Israel pursuing “political objectives” rather than advancing legitimate security concerns. In this context, the COI report calls Israel’s efforts to prevent Hamas from amassing weapons for further attacks on Israeli civilians a “15-year economic and social blockade.”
The authors also argue that Israel’s supposedly perpetual occupation has created inequalities (that a future report might determine amount to apartheid). But the different legal systems in place in the West Bank — a product of the Oslo agreements between Israel and the Palestinians — center around citizenship, not race, as permitted in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
The COI report does recognize that the Oslo Accords would have gradually transferred much of the West Bank and Gaza to Palestinian control, but it states that “these agreements have never been fully implemented.” The report does not mention that the Palestinians rejected or ignored multiple Israeli peace offers. “Israel has no intention of ending the occupation,” the report states, yet it overlooks Israel’s spurned offers to withdraw from most of the West Bank as part of a peace agreement.
This report is not just about putting Israel under scrutiny. It’s about putting Israelis behind bars. The COI seeks to end what it perceives as a “culture of impunity” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by submitting individual Israelis to prosecution, presumably at the International Criminal Court, for perceived crimes.
Budgetary restraints have hampered the COI’s operation and may have temporarily prevented some of the more incendiary allegations that Israel feared the UNHRC would make. The United States should seize the momentum, withhold further funds from the UNHRC, and prioritize defunding the COI in the end-of-year budget debates.
David May is a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @DavidSamuelMay. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, non-partisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
12. Westerners, too, are waging a ‘War on the West’
Excerpts:
Western “self-hatred and self-distrust,” Mr. Murray observes, are being used by the West’s enemies “for their own ends.”
It is “enormously helpful to China today, as it was to the Soviets in the past, to encourage the perception of America as uniquely racist and China as uniquely virtuous,” he writes.
“It allows Beijing to get away with grotesque rights abuses of its own. It distracts Western attention. It suggests that the West has no moral legitimacy to act anywhere. And it runs off the claim that the West has not merely done things that every other civilization in history has done, but rather has always been worse than any other civilization, meaning that the West is uniquely unqualified to pass moral judgment today.”
In other words, denigrators of the West — and let’s not confuse denigration with serious criticism or research-based revisionism — are strategic partners of those seeking to diminish, defeat and perhaps destroy the West.
They constitute a formidable coalition. Those of us who believe that the West, for all its faults, is preferable to the available alternatives, have our work cut out for us.
Westerners, too, are waging a ‘War on the West’
OPINION:
Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Xi Jinping’s China. Ali Khamenei’s Iran. Al-Qaida. The Islamic State. These and other actors are waging a war on the West, a war against Western power and values. Some Westerners are mounting a vigorous defense. Others are arguing — vehemently and incessantly — that the West is morally inferior to the rest of the world and therefore indefensible.
Douglas Murray’s new book, “The War on the West,” looks at the Westerners who denigrate the West. No greater threat exists, he writes, “than that which comes from people inside the West intent on pulling apart the fabric of our societies piece by piece.”
It’s a topic that Mr. Murray, a rather dashing young Brit with an Eton and Oxford education, a posh accent and a switchblade-sharp tongue, has approached from other angles, provoking the predictable howls from the predictable quarters.
For example, a reviewer in The New York Times dismissed his “The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam” as “a handy digest of far-right cliches.” (On the other hand, a reviewer in The Sunday Times of London called that 2017 book “brilliant.”)
In “The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity,” he questioned the wisdom of valorizing select victim groups. The Guardian (U.K.) called that 2019 book “the bizarre fantasies of a rightwing provocateur, blind to oppression.” (By contrast, The Daily Telegraph (U.K.), praised Mr. Murray as “a superbly perceptive guide through the age of the social justice warrior.”)
Anti-Westernism has been taken up energetically on American and European campuses and in much of the elite media. Mr. Murray points out that it has become common for bien-pensant academics to dismiss such Enlightenment philosophers as John Locke and David Hume as racists based on scant evidence. At the same time, Karl Marx, whose racism was both virulent and consistent, gets a pass because he was, well … a Marxist.
The New York Times’ 1619 Project asserts that America’s “true founding” was not 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was adopted by decolonized Americans but the year a privateer ship brought slaves from a Portuguese colony in Africa to a British colony in Virginia.
This assertion is supported by neither reporting nor serious scholarship. It is intended, Mr. Murray writes, to establish that “the American story was rooted in a crime that could apparently never be alleviated.”
Anti-Westerners determinedly ignore progress. Mr. Murray notes that author Robin DiAngelo, coiner of the term “White Fragility,” maintains that “the younger generation” of Americans is no “less racist than the older ones.”
What’s more, she and many other commentators are either ignorant of or uninterested in racism elsewhere in the world. Mr. Murray writes about one exception, “a late colleague of mine, Clarissa Tan” who attempted to call attention to the prevalence of racial bias in Asia. She noted, for example, that people like her, ethnically Chinese but with Western values, are derided as “bananas,” that is to say, “yellow on the outside but white on the inside.”
In Asia, too, “Racism against black people remains ingrained and commonplace,” Mr. Murray writes. This has become especially egregious in the growing number of African countries now dominated by “new Chinese masters” ostensibly engaged in economic development but, in reality, draining the continent’s natural resources.
In much of the Arab Middle East today, Mr. Murray points out, “black people are referred to as Abid’ (plural Abeed’), which literally translates as ‘slave.’” That is likely a legacy of the 13 centuries during which there was a flourishing Arab slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa.
He adds: “There are estimated to be over forty million people living in slavery around the world today” — which is more than in the 19th century. Anti-Westerners don’t give a fig.
Another contention of the anti-Western crowd, Mr. Murray observes, is that “nobody in the world can do anything wrong unless the West has made them do it.”
I learned that as a newspaper correspondent in Africa years ago when several of my editors discouraged me from focusing on such issues as corruption, ethnic/tribal conflicts and the failure of the “socialist path to development.” Their preferred macro-narrative was that the new nations of Africa were doing just fine, and whatever problems remained were “the legacy of colonialism.”
Mr. Murray contends: “Although the age of empire lingers over” many countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, “in few does it remain the salient factor in whether a country has been able to succeed or fail.”
Western “self-hatred and self-distrust,” Mr. Murray observes, are being used by the West’s enemies “for their own ends.”
It is “enormously helpful to China today, as it was to the Soviets in the past, to encourage the perception of America as uniquely racist and China as uniquely virtuous,” he writes.
“It allows Beijing to get away with grotesque rights abuses of its own. It distracts Western attention. It suggests that the West has no moral legitimacy to act anywhere. And it runs off the claim that the West has not merely done things that every other civilization in history has done, but rather has always been worse than any other civilization, meaning that the West is uniquely unqualified to pass moral judgment today.”
In other words, denigrators of the West — and let’s not confuse denigration with serious criticism or research-based revisionism — are strategic partners of those seeking to diminish, defeat and perhaps destroy the West.
They constitute a formidable coalition. Those of us who believe that the West, for all its faults, is preferable to the available alternatives, have our work cut out for us.
• Clifford D. May is the founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a columnist for the Washington Times.
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13. Opinion | How Russia’s vaunted cyber capabilities were frustrated in Ukraine
Excerpts:
But Ukraine, working with private tech companies, Western intelligence and its own expert software engineers, has quickly fixed most of the damage. “The Ukrainians have gotten really good at repairing networks,” says Dmitri Alperovitch, a Russian-born cybersecurity expert who co-founded CrowdStrike. “When a network gets wiped, they rebuild it in several hours.”
The close partnerships that have emerged between U.S. technology companies and Western cybersecurity agencies is one of the unheralded stories of the war. The public-private rift in the tech world that followed Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 appears largely to be over — because of the backlash against Russia’s attacks on the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections and, now, its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
“Cyber responses must rely on greater public and private collaboration,” argues Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, in a new study to be published Wednesday on Microsoft’s “lessons learned” from cyber conflict in Ukraine.
Opinion | How Russia’s vaunted cyber capabilities were frustrated in Ukraine
A quiet partnership of the world’s biggest technology companies, U.S. and NATO intelligence agencies, and Ukraine’s own nimble army of hackers has pulled off one of the surprises of the war with Russia, largely foiling the Kremlin’s brazen internet hacking operations.
Russia’s cyber-reversals haven’t resulted from lack of trying. Microsoft counts nearly 40 Russian destructive attacks between Feb. 23 and April 8, and Rob Joyce, the National Security Agency’s cybersecurity director, said the Russians had attempted an “enormous” cyber offensive. The Russians sabotaged a satellite communications network called Viasat in the opening days of the war, for example, with the damage spilling over into other European countries.
But Ukraine, working with private tech companies, Western intelligence and its own expert software engineers, has quickly fixed most of the damage. “The Ukrainians have gotten really good at repairing networks,” says Dmitri Alperovitch, a Russian-born cybersecurity expert who co-founded CrowdStrike. “When a network gets wiped, they rebuild it in several hours.”
The close partnerships that have emerged between U.S. technology companies and Western cybersecurity agencies is one of the unheralded stories of the war. The public-private rift in the tech world that followed Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 appears largely to be over — because of the backlash against Russia’s attacks on the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections and, now, its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
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“Cyber responses must rely on greater public and private collaboration,” argues Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, in a new study to be published Wednesday on Microsoft’s “lessons learned” from cyber conflict in Ukraine.
A White House cyber official explains the new cooperative approach this way: “Where companies see destructive attacks, that has driven partnerships with the intelligence community and other government agencies to see how best we can share information to protect infrastructure around the world.”
The tech world’s sympathies lie with the underdog, Ukraine. That applies to giant firms such as Microsoft and Google. It even extends to a Ukrainian hacker insider the Russian ransomware gang known as “Conti,” who leaked a “massive” amount of source code and other malware information, according to the White House official.
Ukraine’s cybersecurity defense benefited from an early start. U.S. Cyber Command experts went to Ukraine months before the war started, according to its commander, Gen. Paul Nakasone. Microsoft and Google became involved even earlier.
Microsoft began monitoring Russian phishing attacks against Ukrainian military networks in early 2021, and through the rest of last year observed increasingly aggressive hacks by six different attackers linked to Russia’s three intelligence services, the GRU, SVR and FSB, according to a Microsoft report released in April. Microsoft has spent a total of $239 million on financial and technical assistance to Ukraine, a company official said.
“Microsoft security teams have worked closely with Ukrainian government officials … to identify and remediate threat activity against Ukrainian networks,” the April report noted, adding: “We have kept the U.S. government advised of relevant information and have established communications with NATO and E.U. cyber officials to communicate any evidence of threat actor activity spreading beyond Ukraine.”
An example of this cooperation came the night before Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion, according to the White House cyber official. Microsoft detected a Russian “wiper” software designed to destroy all data on government disks. It quickly developed a patch and also notified the U.S. government, so that the threat warning could be shared as quickly as possible, the official said.
Google, a part of Alphabet, has also helped Ukraine fend off threats. Back in 2014, prompted by Russia’s use of DDOS (“distributed denial-of-service”) malware in its seizure of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, Google began what it called “Project Shield.” Software protected news sites, human rights groups and election sites against crippling DDOS floods of junk internet messages. Today, Project Shield is used by 200 sites in Ukraine and 2,300 others in 140 countries around the world, according to Jared Cohen, the chief executive of Google’s Jigsaw unit.
Open communications channels are one of the most effective weapons against closed societies such as Russia, and here, again, private companies are playing a key role. Google is sharing software known as “Outline,” which allows Russians and others to create private cloud servers that provide the equivalent of virtual private networks. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has provided satellite internet connections to Ukraine via its “Starlink” network.
Ukraine’s own internet expertise might be the X-factor. The country was a notorious center for hackers two decades ago, with some of the early credit-card fraudsters (known as “carders”) operating there. That digital savvy has morphed into a powerful part of Ukraine’s defense against Russia. Ukraine also benefits, perversely, from the experience it has gained in eight years of war against Russia and its proxies.
Here’s a paradoxical benefit of this terrible war: Given Russia’s dependence on Western technology, even for its cyberattacks, Ukraine could backfire on the Kremlin in ways that persist for years. The longer the conflict lasts, the less effective Russia’s vaunted cyber capability will likely become.
14. How to Stop Russia’s Plan for Global Food Chaos
Economic (or food) warfare.
Excerpts:
With all this, Russia hopes to break the West’s will.
The obvious solution is to free up Ukrainian grain exports, relieving pressure on the global food supply and mitigating inflation. This would require an extensive demining and escort mission to create a corridor from Odessa to the eastern Mediterranean. It would demand a naval force large enough to deter Russian interruption.
An escort mission worked in similar circumstances during the Iran-Iraq war under Operation Earnest Will. Iran and Iraq, like Russia and Ukraine, had settled into a long-term fight. Iraq lost its port access after Iranian offensives. It turned to Kuwait to export Iraqi oil, but Iran attacked Kuwaiti ships. The U.S. responded by deploying a major naval task force to escort Kuwaiti oil tankers and conducting a handful of demonstrations of military power to deter continued Iranian pressure.
In the case of Ukraine, American deployment must be more aggressive. A nuclear-armed Russia, with clear incentives to deter greater U.S. participation in the war, may attack escorting warships. Washington can head off this possibility by employing an overwhelming naval task force consisting of small and large surface combatants with submarine and air support. Russia would be loath to intervene.
The U.S. shouldn’t conduct this mission through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. France, Italy and Germany likely would veto it. America should instead act with an ad hoc coalition—likely Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and possibly the Baltic States, Sweden and Finland—to mitigate NATO divisions.
How to Stop Russia’s Plan for Global Food Chaos
A naval coalition of the willing could ensure that Ukrainian grain is able to reach foreign ports.
By
Seth Cropsey
June 21, 2022 6:14 pm ET
Smoke rises in the sky after shelling near a winter wheat field in Bakhmut, Ukraine, June 18.
Photo: GLEB GARANICH/REUTERS
About 25 million tons of grain now sit in Ukrainian silos blockaded by Russian ships. By disrupting global food and energy supplies, the Kremlin seeks to spark multiple international crises, forcing the West to pressure Ukraine into negotiations. The U.S. should spoil Russia’s strategy by establishing a maritime corridor with a naval coalition of the willing to ensure Ukrainian grain can reach foreign ports. That would alleviate the global food crisis while undermining a key element of Russian leverage over Ukraine and its allies.
From his initial military buildup, Vladimir Putin has aimed to shock Kyiv and the West into submission without having to martial the forces necessary to conquer Ukraine outright. Moscow has pushed to achieve objectives that aren’t geostrategic in the usual sense of allowing Russian forces an easier military victory, but that instead could put pressure on Ukraine’s allies to back off and force President Volodymyr Zelensky to capitulate.
Mr. Putin’s yearlong force buildup was intended to convince the West that a quick Russian victory was inevitable. Russia’s initial offensive—a multi-axis push after a countrywide missile barrage—was supposed to convince the West that supporting Ukraine was fruitless. Russia’s Donbas offensive, now targeting a small pocket around Severodonetsk, is designed to convince the West of much the same—that Ukraine has no chance, even with greater military aid, and must negotiate or be devoured by the Russian bear.
The situation on the ground contradicts the Kremlin’s narrative. Both Ukraine and Russia have taken brutal losses, but the former now has 700,000 men under arms and aims to have one million soldiers by 2023. Ukraine requires equipment, but it has held its own even without significant heavy weapons, bloodying the Russian Donbas offensive, pushing back around Kharkiv, counterattacking near Kherson, and denying Moscow a decisive breakthrough. Over time, Russia will run short of men, shells and cannon.
The Kremlin has implied publicly that Russia is willing to fight a long war. But Russia lacks the combat power to conquer Ukraine or to interdict Western arms shipments. Instead, Mr. Putin is betting that the U.S. and Ukraine’s European allies will break before Russia has to. Given the scale and publicity of Western support, Ukrainian morale and combat performance are so deeply intertwined with their allies’ commitment that a shift in Western policy could destroy Kyiv’s will to resist.
The war’s disruption of the global economy has allowed Russia to apply additional pressure on the West and bring in new funds. Oil and gas price hikes have created a lucrative side market for the Kremlin’s petrochemicals in India and China, while Europe still grudgingly consumes Russian gas out of necessity.
Russian disruption of Ukrainian food exports does something similar. Ukraine is a leading producer of most traded foodstuffs, particularly wheat and vegetable oils. Russia has blocked virtually all Ukrainian exports by mining the Black Sea and deploying a significant naval force there, along with its occupation of the Ukrainian port cities Mariupol, Berdyansk and Kherson. Millions of tons of grain remain trapped in Odessa. Only a small proportion of Ukrainian foodstuffs are leaving the country, almost exclusively by rail, traveling to Romanian and Bulgarian ports. But Ukraine uses the Russian railway gauge, and those nations don’t, requiring either the modification of Ukrainian railcars or time-consuming unloading and reloading of goods.
Russia’s goal is partly to put economic pressure on the West. By driving up energy and food prices, the Kremlin can intensify inflation in Europe and North America. This could force Western governments to push Kyiv for concessions or strike a deal with Moscow that unlocks Ukrainian grain in return for sanctions relief.
The Kremlin’s aims go beyond price instability; the Russian blockade could also create foreign-policy crises for the U.S. and Europe across the world. Moscow learned the lesson of Covid-19: Global shocks can prompt extreme, unexpected political results. The pandemic derailed international supply chains and transformed economic and energy-consumption patterns. It still has an effect on commerce—China is imposing lockdowns well over two years into the pandemic and is unlikely to allow foreigners into the country until 2023.
By disrupting food and energy supplies, the Kremlin seeks to create global confusion and thereby provoke instability and crises. Sri Lanka is the proverbial canary in the coal mine: The country has defaulted on its debt, and unrest is widespread over inflation. Lebanon is in dire straits but unlikely to receive international financial support because of Hezbollah’s penetration of its government. The Middle East and Africa, even before Russia invaded Ukraine, were in an accelerating inflationary spiral. The Ukraine war has exacerbated this cycle. Food price hikes have begun in Latin America, and broader inflation and economic instability are likely.
A series of regional crises will increase pressure on the West to end the war. Significant African migrant flows, driven by dire economic conditions, will bolster the Russophilic European far right. A migrant wave in the Americas will divide the Biden administration’s focus. State collapse—say, in Lebanon—will trigger regional confrontation, diverting Western attention.
With all this, Russia hopes to break the West’s will.
The obvious solution is to free up Ukrainian grain exports, relieving pressure on the global food supply and mitigating inflation. This would require an extensive demining and escort mission to create a corridor from Odessa to the eastern Mediterranean. It would demand a naval force large enough to deter Russian interruption.
An escort mission worked in similar circumstances during the Iran-Iraq war under Operation Earnest Will. Iran and Iraq, like Russia and Ukraine, had settled into a long-term fight. Iraq lost its port access after Iranian offensives. It turned to Kuwait to export Iraqi oil, but Iran attacked Kuwaiti ships. The U.S. responded by deploying a major naval task force to escort Kuwaiti oil tankers and conducting a handful of demonstrations of military power to deter continued Iranian pressure.
In the case of Ukraine, American deployment must be more aggressive. A nuclear-armed Russia, with clear incentives to deter greater U.S. participation in the war, may attack escorting warships. Washington can head off this possibility by employing an overwhelming naval task force consisting of small and large surface combatants with submarine and air support. Russia would be loath to intervene.
The U.S. shouldn’t conduct this mission through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. France, Italy and Germany likely would veto it. America should instead act with an ad hoc coalition—likely Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and possibly the Baltic States, Sweden and Finland—to mitigate NATO divisions.
Turkey need not participate actively. But it must allow this coalition force to operate in the Black Sea. It is therefore imperative that the Biden administration gain Turkish consent. Ideally Washington would offer to allow Turkey’s participation in the F-35 program and purchase of F-16s, the greatest point of tension between the U.S. and Turkey and the best, low-cost way to ensure Turkish acquiescence.
It might seem safer not to intervene, but the widespread crises Moscow aims to provoke would be far more dangerous. American and allied warships can disrupt Moscow’s strategy without firing a shot.
Mr. Cropsey is founder and president of the Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and deputy undersecretary of the Navy and is the author of “Mayday” and “Seablindness.”
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Appeared in the June 22, 2022, print edition as 'How to Stop Russia’s Plan for Food Chaos.'
15. 'Everything' in app popular with US troops is 'seen in China,' new report says
Beware.
'Everything' in app popular with US troops is 'seen in China,' new report says
Data on TikTok “was accessed far more frequently and recently than previously reported,” according to leaked audio recordings.
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Records first reported by BuzzFeed News reveal more than a dozen statements from TikTok employees saying engineers in China “had access to U.S. data between September 2021 and January 2022, at the very least.” TikTok’s parent company is ByteDance, a Chinese company based in Beijing. And despite TikTok claiming that U.S. user data is safe, evidence collected by BuzzFeed News shows otherwise.
“Everything is seen in China,” one employee of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department said during September 2021 meeting, according to recordings obtained by BuzzFeed.
Falco Punch, musician and star of the internet platform TikTok, is standing in the living room of his parent’s house in a village in Schleswig-Holstein and is recording a video on his smartphone. (Gregor Fischer/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Data “was accessed far more frequently and recently than previously reported,” according to the BuzzFeed report, which suggests that TikTok may “have misled lawmakers, its users, and the public.”
TikTok did not respond to a request for comment from Task & Purpose, but company officials told BuzzFeed that they “aim to remove any doubt about the security of U.S. user data. That’s why we hire experts in their fields, continually work to validate our security standards and bring in reputable, independent third parties to test our defenses.”
Concerns about how TikTok stores data are nothing new, particularly in regards to national security and members of the military who use the app. In 2019, the Defense Information Systems Agency recommended that all employees of the Defense Department keep TikTok off their phones. The same year, the military banned service members from using the app on government-issued devices.
That ban still exists, but it hasn’t stopped troops from downloading TikTok on their personal devices. The app is hugely popular with young people, service members included. Young troops regularly use the app to post about both funny and serious moments in service. It’s also used by some senior service members as a way to mentor and encourage those younger than them.
Dyess Airmen use their smartphones to participate in an interactive web-based presentation during Dyess’ Leadership and Innovation Forum with the Abilene chief of police on June 16, 2015, at Dyess Air Force Base, Texas. (Senior Airman Kedesha Pennant/Released/U.S. Air Force)
The military hasn’t had a total change of heart with TikTok, though there have been some examples of the services warming to the idea. An Army press release last year, for example, identified one first sergeant on TikTok as the “future of Army leadership.” The Army also recently invited a dozen social media influencers to Washington, D.C., to engage in a conversation with service leaders about how to reach the younger generation they want to recruit. While the majority of people invited were from other social media platforms, at least one person is popular on both Instagram and TikTok.
TikTok is, of course, not the only app that tracks data. Nor would it be the first time U.S. citizens had their data exposed through their smartphones; as a New York Times investigation found in 2019, “dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones.”
And lest we forget that time it was discovered that troops’ fitness apps were exposing their locations at military bases around the world.
But critics fear that through TikTok’s connections to China, U.S. user data — which TikTok’s privacy policy says can include people’s payment information, contacts, location data, profile information, and email if the user allows it — could be accessed by the Chinese government if they forced ByteDance to turn it over. Some of that data could be protected through an effort known internally as Project Texas, BuzzFeed reported. Project Texas is an attempt by TikTok to protect some data by storing it at a data center managed by Oracle in Texas. An update on that effort was announced on Friday, which TikTok said will help to “better safeguard our app, systems, and the security of U.S. user data.”
Soldier with the 105 Engineer Battalion, relaxing and chatting with friends on social media prior to the mission to support the 59th Presidential Inauguration in Washington DC. (Sgt. Abraham Morlu 130 Maneuver Enhancement Brigade/Released/U.S. National Guard)
“100% of U.S. user data is being routed to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure” as of Friday, according to the announcement. But BuzzFeed reported that the data protected by Project Texas included birthdays or phone numbers — which the Chinese government “could simply buy from data brokers if it so chose” — while public data such as profiles and what users post don’t seem to be included, according to the recordings.
Ultimately it seems there is still room for TikTok to win over skeptics. Graham Webster, a research scholar at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center told BuzzFeed that if the social media app commits to being “transparent and high-integrity, and China-based employees won’t be able to access user data,” then it “should be possible to convince good-faith skeptics they have done enough.”
The question, however, is “whether the company will go far enough and whether skeptical authorities are truly open to being convinced,” Webster said.
The latest on Task & Purpose
Haley Britzky joined Task & Purpose as the Army reporter in January 2019. She previously worked at Axios covering breaking news. She reports on important developments within the service, from new uniforms to new policies; the realities of military life facing soldiers and their families; and broader cultural issues that expand outside of the Army, touching each of the military services. Contact the author here.
16. The Balance of Soft Power
Excerpts:
The United States also ties its own hands by limiting its investments in human capital through training and education opportunities. American diplomats often express interest in the idea of competing with China when it comes to scholarships and other means of attracting talent. But many also express a conviction that the best talent will find its way to the United States organically, a belief that creates inertia when it comes to fundamentally rethinking the conduct of public diplomacy.
Anything that might improve China’s image is considered an element of soft power—even Chinese hard power.
For its part, by relying on practical inducements rather than ideological visions, China invites scrutiny over the quality of its offerings and risks a wholly transactional reciprocity on the ground. China’s COVID-19 vaccine exports, for instance, were met with suspicion in many parts of the global South and were sidelined in favor of Western options when they became available; concerns about the effectiveness of the Chinese vaccines were later borne out. Similarly, in conversations I have had with students from a number of African countries, many have worried aloud about the quality of student-teacher interactions and the pedagogic approaches at some education programs in China. Studies of the impact of Chinese state media in Latin America and in Africa have noted limited public consumption, partly because people saw the content as unappealing. To bridge the quality gap, the CCP would have to shift its evaluation metrics from quantity to quality and allow for more creative freedom, especially in the media—two adjustments that appear unlikely to happen under Xi.
More broadly, China’s pragmatic soft-power approach risks collapsing into mere transactionalism, with any benefit to China contingent on others’ receiving material benefits. When I asked Ethiopian university officials what would happen to Confucius Institutes in the country if studying at them no longer led to jobs at Chinese companies, their response was clear and terse: “We would close them down.” It remains to be seen how China’s years of pandemic isolation, which have hindered people-to-people exchanges, will affect its image in the global South. In the absence of a larger ideational vision, however, China will need to keep doling out ever larger gifts—a task that will become harder if the Chinese economy continues to slow.
Officials in the United States have been thinking about, talking about, and consciously wielding soft power, although unevenly and often ambivalently, for decades. Their Chinese counterparts got a later start. This could be a disadvantage, but it could also work to China’s benefit. Contradictions, internal tensions, and even hypocrisy have become deeply woven into U.S. soft power. Managed properly, China’s less lofty vision of soft power might yet avoid that problem, so long as it can remain “soft” at all. Meanwhile, despite the belief in Washington and Beijing that the two countries are engaged in a soft-power competition, the reality looks more like soft-power coexistence. Their success in making themselves more attractive depends not so much on outmaneuvering each other as on overcoming their own internal frictions. As each country tries to refine its appeal and reduce the other’s, much of the world is becoming less interested in the question of whether the American model or the Chinese one is the most attractive overall and more interested in what each one has to offer.
The Balance of Soft Power
The American and Chinese Quests to Win Hearts and Minds
In the post–Cold War era, few concepts have more profoundly shaped discussions of U.S. foreign policy than the idea of “soft power.” The term was coined by the American political scientist Joseph Nye in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead, in which he defined it as “getting others to want what you want.” But Nye wasn’t just trying to illuminate an element of national power. He was also pushing back against arguments that the United States was facing an impending decline. To the contrary, Nye argued that alongside its military prowess and economic strength, the United States enjoyed a massive advantage over any potential rivals thanks to its abundant soft power, which rested on “intangible resources: culture, ideology, [and] the ability to use international institutions to determine the framework of debate.”
The idea of soft power gained traction in the 1990s but was tested in the United States in the years after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Following the disastrous U.S. war in Iraq and the steep rise in anti-American sentiment in the Middle East and beyond, Nye insisted that soft power was not merely complementary to hard power but indispensable to it. “When we discount the importance of our attractiveness to other countries, we pay the price,” he argued in his 2004 book, Soft Power, urging a more deliberate deployment of public diplomacy. Such arguments held little sway in the George W. Bush administration but were later embraced by the Obama administration; in 2013, an article in these pages described Obama’s first top diplomat, Hillary Clinton, as “the soft-power secretary of state.” The soft-power pendulum swung again under the more hawkish and less internationalist administration of President Donald Trump and once again when President Joe Biden took office, pledging to restore the country’s moral stature and to “lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example.”
Amid these swings in policy over the past two decades, the concept of soft power only grew in prominence, popularized by a legion of pundits who used it as a shorthand for describing the cultural contours of Pax Americana. “America’s soft power isn’t just pop and schlock; its cultural clout is both high and low,” the German commentator Josef Joffe wrote in a characteristic invocation of the idea in 2006. “It is grunge and Google, Madonna and MoMA, Hollywood and Harvard.”
The concept’s fluidity and the idea that soft power gave the United States a leg up in its path to hegemony have also made the notion enticing to thinkers and leaders in many other countries and regions. And among the places where the concept of soft power has been most enthusiastically embraced is in China. Beginning around 2007, under then President Hu Jintao’s leadership, top-level Chinese officials started incorporating soft power into their speeches and publications. That year, at the Chinese Communist Party’s 17th National Congress, Hu urged the party’s cadres “to stimulate the cultural creativity of the whole nation, and enhance culture as part of the soft power of our country.” In the years since, Chinese scholars have produced a rich corpus of writings on the topic, and the CCP has made massive investments in public diplomacy, including the global expansion of state-owned media outlets and the cultural and language centers known as Confucius Institutes and Classrooms, which it has established in 162 countries. Meanwhile, the party has sought to internationalize the Chinese higher education system by recruiting foreign students and scholars.
As in the United States, soft power has been treated as a hopeful idea in China: an important additive to the country’s rise, especially its economic expansion. In fact, Chinese experts and officials now embrace soft power with more urgency than do their American counterparts. There is an inherent understanding that China’s status in the international system is limited and overshadowed by the West, and that to truly rival the United States, China needs more recognition from and more influence over global public opinion. External legitimation and respect, for the Chinese party-state, is also linked to its domestic legitimacy. The Chinese understanding of soft power is connected to ideas of “cultural confidence” and “cultural security” that President Xi Jinping has promoted, terms that signify social cohesion around and pride in Chinese culture, values, and history.
As the contest between the United States and China accelerates, it would be natural to see soft power as just another vector of competition, with Washington and Beijing vying to make themselves and their political and economic models more attractive to the rest of the world. Leaders and elites in both countries clearly see things that way, and some worry about their potential vulnerabilities. In the United States, the erosion of democratic norms could harm the country’s image as a bastion of liberal values. In China, a slowing economy and a sense of isolation created by the country’s “zero-COVID” approach to the pandemic could dim its reputation for pragmatic, results-oriented governance.
But the image of straightforward contest does not quite capture the way events are playing out. For one thing, the two countries interpret soft power quite differently and operationalize the concept in distinct ways. Whereas Washington places democratic values and ideals at the heart of its soft-power promotion, China focuses more on practical matters, seeking to fuse its cultural and commercial appeals. That approach has reaped limited rewards in the West but has resonated in the “global South.” Even there, however, people often see the two forms of soft power as complementary rather than competitive. Simply put, people in many parts of the world are perfectly happy to have both the Americans and the Chinese try to seduce them with their respective visions and values. What Washington and Beijing see as zero-sum, much of the world often sees as win-win.
SOFT POWER IS HARD
The American conception of soft power has always had a distinctly ideological bent, as the United States presents itself as the chief defender of the liberal democratic order. Biden captured the essence of this view of American influence in his inaugural address. “We will lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example,” he declared, using a favorite formulation of his. In December 2021, the Biden administration hosted a virtual Summit for Democracy with the aim of democratic renewal and building alliances against authoritarian powers such as China and Russia. Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine has further elevated the goal of strengthening democratic solidarity against a shared authoritarian aggressor.
U.S. public diplomacy echoes these sentiments. On social media, American embassies celebrate gender, racial, and cultural diversity and hail examples of individual resilience and creativity, sometimes combining the two themes by publicizing the success stories of individual immigrants and inviting them to speak at events and forums. American soft power is also largely shaped by private-sector cultural exports, such as Hollywood films, hip-hop music and style, and such globally recognizable brands as Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. U.S. soft-power projection often brings the public and private sectors together. During the Cold War era, for instance, the State Department promoted American jazz musicians abroad, and the CIA covertly sponsored writers and publications. This tradition has persisted and expanded in the post–Cold War era, with the State Department sponsoring artists and musicians to act as something akin to cultural ambassadors.
In China, the understanding and practice of soft power focus more on pragmatism than on values. In engaging with Nye’s idea, some Chinese analysts have argued that the separation between hard and soft power is artificial, noting that much of the United States’ attractiveness depends on its military prowess and economic strength. As the scholar Zhao Kejin has pointed out, even one of the most celebrated symbols of American soft power, Coca-Cola, is not merely a cultural phenomenon but a commercial juggernaut. Reflecting this critique, the CCP’s soft-power strategy involves promoting Chinese culture and values but also touts China’s model of economic development, its governing competence, its technological advances, its growing military capabilities, and its ability to carry out political mobilization, as seen in its campaigns against poverty and corruption. Anything that might improve China’s image is considered an element of soft power—even Chinese hard power. Whereas Washington sometimes relies on soft power to distract from its hard power, Beijing sometimes draws attention to its hard power to buttress its soft power.
Chinese experts and officials now embrace soft power with more urgency than do their American counterparts.
China’s more pragmatic and less ideological approach to soft power comes through in Xi’s major international speeches, in which he tends to downplay ideology in favor of practical aspirations. “We should safeguard and improve people’s livelihoods and protect and promote human rights through development, and make sure that development is for the people and by the people, and that its fruits are shared among the people,” Xi proclaimed in an address at the UN in September 2021. Xi’s formulation subtly undercuts the connection between rights and liberal democratic values, redefining “human rights” as access to economic opportunities. In communicating with global audiences, China’s international media outlets, such as China Daily and CGTN, follow Xi’s lead and emphasize China’s economic breakthroughs. The CCP buttresses this kind of soft-power diplomacy with acts of material generosity. Earlier this year, for instance, Xi pledged $500 million to support development objectives in Central Asian countries, including improvements in agriculture and public health.
China also tries to bolster its soft power through education. State-sponsored training programs that China offers officials in countries in the global South present the CCP as an inspiration for fast-paced development, especially when it comes to beating poverty. “They lifted 700 million out of poverty!” exclaimed an Ethiopian official I met in Addis Ababa in 2019 who has attended several Chinese trainings. He then ticked off a list of facts and figures that he had learned on his trip to China, including the country’s GDP growth rate, the number of universities it hosts, and even its urbanization rate.
U.S. soft power benefits from an image of American educational institutions as elite and top tier; in contrast, Chinese universities use their relatively low tuition and the availability of state-funded scholarships as selling points when recruiting students from the global South. (Before the COVID-19 pandemic, about 80,000 students from Africa were studying in China, making it the second most popular destination for African students, after France.) China also pegs its international education programs directly to state-funded economic opportunities. In promoting Confucius Institutes, Beijing emphasizes not only the scholarships that students can obtain but also the potential for employment at Chinese companies that graduates enjoy. In Ethiopia, for instance, advertisements for Confucius Institutes list, among other practical benefits of studying Chinese, the possibility of getting a high-paying job at a Chinese company. (Enjoying Chinese culture appears near the bottom of the list.) My interviews with students and university officials in Ethiopia revealed that many institute graduates end up working as translators at Chinese enterprises, where they get paid double the average salary of an Ethiopian university professor.
From a Western perspective, China might appear to be making up for a lack of ideational power with material inducements. According to that view, China is not really exercising soft power at all but using its economic power to co-opt people. This critique misses the fact that although such economic inducements themselves are not exercises of soft power, they enhance China’s soft power by bolstering the country’s image as a bastion of generosity, opportunity, competence, and pragmatism. Economic engagement also has an affective dimension, encouraging an emotional connection to China, especially in places where other opportunities are scarce. What might look transactional to Western eyes in fact communicates a powerful message about what makes China attractive.
PRAGMATISM SELLS
In the United States and other Western industrialized democracies, Chinese soft power has had little impact, as evidenced by China’s declining favorability in such places in recent years. This is in part a byproduct of preexisting negative associations of China with communism and authoritarianism. These negative views are also connected to China’s increasingly assertive foreign policy under Xi, including the rise of what is known as “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy, which involves officials’ using antagonistic, even churlish rhetoric to attack China’s critics, especially in the West.
In the global South, however, including in Africa and in Latin America, China’s more pragmatic approach to soft power, layered on top of its expansive economic engagement, has had more success. The latest public opinion surveys in Africa found a largely positive sentiment toward China’s economic and political influence on the continent; almost two-thirds of Africans surveyed across 34 countries regarded China’s influence as “somewhat positive” or “very positive.” And in a survey that the Pew Research Center conducted in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico in 2019, about half of respondents reported having a favorable image of China; only about a quarter expressed negative views.
In my research on Chinese soft power in Ethiopia as well as in my interviews with African elites studying and attending professional trainings in Beijing, I found a general appreciation for Chinese soft-power tools, such as educational opportunities. In contrast to the small number of highly competitive fellowship programs sponsored by the U.S. State Department, China offers thousands of scholarships to cover the cost of degrees and training programs for African elites and young people. In Ethiopia, almost every official one meets has already been to China, or plans to go, or knows someone who has gone. These are ambitious people, hungry for firsthand experience in major centers of global power, and although China might not be their top-choice destination, it is often the only feasible one. As one Ethiopian media professional in Addis Ababa told me during my visit in 2019, “It is better to see China than to stay at home and see nothing.”
A Chinese-built railway in Sultan Hamud, Kenya, February 2019
Baz Ratner / Reuters
For the broader public in places such as Ethiopia, Chinese soft power tends to become visible through infrastructure projects, such as railways, bridges, and highways. Many of these projects are controversial because of onerous loans, disputes over labor, and concerns over quality and safety. Nevertheless, they elevate China’s standing. In Addis Ababa, ubiquitous construction sites funded by Chinese investment are covered with posters advertising Chinese companies. When I asked Ethiopians about the critiques from U.S. officials who warn of China’s malign influence on Ethiopian politics and society, the response I often heard was, “And where are the Americans?”
While acknowledging China’s relative appeal and advantages in the global South, it is important not to treat the U.S.-Chinese competition there, or elsewhere, as a zero-sum game. Many people find both China and the United States attractive and perceive their different models as complementary rather than as mutually exclusive. Even in regions such as Southeast Asia, where more overt suspicion and contestation of Chinese influence and soft power exist, surveys indicate a strong reluctance to side with either country.
In my interviews with Ethiopians in Addis Ababa and Beijing, I found that many embrace China’s story of economic success and the idea of a shared developmental trajectory while also voicing support for values they associate with the United States, such as human rights and democratic freedoms. Elites in places such as Ethiopia seek opportunities to interact with individuals and institutions in both countries and sometimes find themselves negotiating between the two. Ethiopian journalists who attended training programs in China, for example, often inquire about similar opportunities in the United States.
In Ethiopia and elsewhere, officials often use China’s engagement as a negotiating chip in getting the United States to contribute more. For instance, at a higher education workshop hosted by the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa in 2019, an Ethiopian education official highlighted China as an example of one of the countries that “take our students,” implying that the United States should grant similar opportunities. The American officials present politely ignored this comment and stuck to emphasizing U.S. offerings, such as prestigious fellowships and university-to-university partnerships. Privately, however, one embassy official acknowledged that China is competing “at scale” when it comes to educational access for Africans and that for many African students, China is the most likely destination.
NO CONTEST
Looking ahead, the United States and China will face distinctive challenges in soft-power promotion. Washington’s approach draws scrutiny because of the disconnect between the country’s emphasis on democratic values and its inconsistent adherence to them. Democratic erosion, pervasive racial discrimination, and attacks on reproductive rights at home detract from the United States’ image as an inspirational democracy. In workshops with U.S. State Department officials, I have sensed a growing awareness of the need to address these issues but also a sense of fear that doing so publicly would put the United States at a disadvantage vis-à-vis China. “Wouldn’t it make us look weak?” asked one official when I suggested that U.S. public diplomacy could convey more candor and humility about the challenges facing American democracy.
Abroad, Washington’s selective commitment to human rights encourages cynicism about its intentions. The failure of the United States and its allies to galvanize much of the global South, including major countries such as Brazil, India, and South Africa, in the confrontation with Russia reflects deep-seated distrust. In explaining their reluctance to condemn Russia, officials from such countries tend to accuse NATO of playing a role in creating the crisis in Ukraine and downplay Russia’s aggression by pointing to wars waged by the United States—rhetoric that precisely echoes that of Chinese diplomats and state media.
The United States also ties its own hands by limiting its investments in human capital through training and education opportunities. American diplomats often express interest in the idea of competing with China when it comes to scholarships and other means of attracting talent. But many also express a conviction that the best talent will find its way to the United States organically, a belief that creates inertia when it comes to fundamentally rethinking the conduct of public diplomacy.
Anything that might improve China’s image is considered an element of soft power—even Chinese hard power.
For its part, by relying on practical inducements rather than ideological visions, China invites scrutiny over the quality of its offerings and risks a wholly transactional reciprocity on the ground. China’s COVID-19 vaccine exports, for instance, were met with suspicion in many parts of the global South and were sidelined in favor of Western options when they became available; concerns about the effectiveness of the Chinese vaccines were later borne out. Similarly, in conversations I have had with students from a number of African countries, many have worried aloud about the quality of student-teacher interactions and the pedagogic approaches at some education programs in China. Studies of the impact of Chinese state media in Latin America and in Africa have noted limited public consumption, partly because people saw the content as unappealing. To bridge the quality gap, the CCP would have to shift its evaluation metrics from quantity to quality and allow for more creative freedom, especially in the media—two adjustments that appear unlikely to happen under Xi.
More broadly, China’s pragmatic soft-power approach risks collapsing into mere transactionalism, with any benefit to China contingent on others’ receiving material benefits. When I asked Ethiopian university officials what would happen to Confucius Institutes in the country if studying at them no longer led to jobs at Chinese companies, their response was clear and terse: “We would close them down.” It remains to be seen how China’s years of pandemic isolation, which have hindered people-to-people exchanges, will affect its image in the global South. In the absence of a larger ideational vision, however, China will need to keep doling out ever larger gifts—a task that will become harder if the Chinese economy continues to slow.
Officials in the United States have been thinking about, talking about, and consciously wielding soft power, although unevenly and often ambivalently, for decades. Their Chinese counterparts got a later start. This could be a disadvantage, but it could also work to China’s benefit. Contradictions, internal tensions, and even hypocrisy have become deeply woven into U.S. soft power. Managed properly, China’s less lofty vision of soft power might yet avoid that problem, so long as it can remain “soft” at all. Meanwhile, despite the belief in Washington and Beijing that the two countries are engaged in a soft-power competition, the reality looks more like soft-power coexistence. Their success in making themselves more attractive depends not so much on outmaneuvering each other as on overcoming their own internal frictions. As each country tries to refine its appeal and reduce the other’s, much of the world is becoming less interested in the question of whether the American model or the Chinese one is the most attractive overall and more interested in what each one has to offer.
17. America Shouldn’t Copy China’s Belt and Road Initiative
My thesis: China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions.
Excerpts:
If the administration really wants a bilateral global development competition with China, the United States should play to its strengths: not Amtrak but Ann Arbor, not Newark but Notre Dame. The higher education system in the United States is the envy of the world, one that has schooled business and political leaders from almost every country on the planet. China is trying to copy the model, but the United States still has a two-to-one lead in foreign student enrollees, including many students from China itself.
In recent years, of course, the U.S. government has neglected public research budgets and diminished the flow of foreign students into American schools. That process began under President Donald Trump, but President Biden hasn’t done enough to change course. This is a devastating error, but one that the Biden administration could address by cutting wait times for appointments to apply for a student visa, which can stretch a year or longer; supporting the Fulbright program, which provides scholarships and fellowships both for Americans to study and research abroad as well as for foreign scholars to come to the United States; and providing non-Americans access to federal student loan programs. To demonstrate support for international competition, the United States could also add to its financing for companies that provide loans to students from low- and middle-income countries to study abroad in the country of their choice. One such company, Prodigy Finance, is already backed by the U.S. Development Finance Corporation. The great advantage of strategic competition based on human capital is that it will benefit the United States: along with demonstrating openness and building a network of sympathetic global leaders, students who choose to come to the United States sometimes stay, becoming a vital part of the country’s research and entrepreneurial capacity.
Rather than trying to beat China at its own game, the United States needs to recommit to a vision of planetary prosperity through global cooperation, openness, transparency, and equal opportunity. When it comes to physical capital, the World Bank and regional development banks are best suited to accomplish those goals. When it comes to human capital, the United States can and should take the lead, reopening its doors to students and scholars. This agenda is truly values-driven in a way that B3W could only ever hope to be.
America Shouldn’t Copy China’s Belt and Road Initiative
Washington Must Invest in Multilateral Institutions, Not Infrastructure
June 22, 2022
For nearly a decade, U.S. policymakers have been wringing their hands about the Belt and Road Initiative, the massive infrastructure investment project through which China has financed and built bridges, ports, power plants, railways, tunnels, and 5G wireless networks around the world. The initiative has not only expanded China’s footprint but also indebted more global leaders to Beijing, in a literal sense: Chinese banks provide the finances to pay for this infrastructure. In June 2021, at the G-7 meeting held in the United Kingdom, U.S. President Joe Biden unveiled the West’s response to the program: the Build Back Better World initiative, also known as B3W. Biden promised that it would help “meet the enormous infrastructure needs of low- and middle-income countries,” with a particular focus on addressing climate, digital infrastructure, gender-equality, and health issues. The president offered few details about what exactly B3W would encompass, but the initiative was clearly pitched as a Western alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative.
Since then, however, B3W has languished. Even the name has been scrapped, a casualty of legislative demise of the Build Back Better bill, the U.S. domestic legislative proposal that encompassed priorities as varied as environmental protection, reducing prescription drug prices, and universal preschool. A rebrand to “Partnership for Global Infrastructure” is underway.
Still, some B3W projects were announced in the spring of 2022. The Digital Connectivity and Cybersecurity Partnership will provide $3.45 million this year in U.S. government funding for digital finance and Internet service providers; a $2.3 million set of grants has been made available to small solar energy providers; and the Biden administration will provide up to $50 million over five years to a World Bank trust fund trying to expand childcare—if Congress allocates the resources. Surely these are worthy expenditures, but what they mean is that about a year after Biden announced B3W, his administration’s commitments to the cause of global infrastructure renewal add up to a paltry $6 million. Even if Congress allocates the additional $50 million, that’s a far cry from the billions Biden promised in his original announcement.
This poor showing is no great loss, however, because B3W is the wrong approach to competing with China in the developing world. The United States is notoriously bad at investing in and maintaining its own physical infrastructure, so it never made sense for it to try to build infrastructure projects abroad. Those activities are best left to the multilateral economic institutions in which the United States plays a leading role, namely the World Bank and regional multilateral banks such as the African Development Bank. In a bilateral competition with China, Washington should play to its strengths, including leveraging its unparalleled system of higher education. The good news is that schooling the next generation of global leaders, rather than playing catch-up with Chinese construction firms, would be a win not just for the United States’ global standing but for the U.S. economy, as well.
Breaking Ground
When the Biden administration launched B3W, officials were careful not to describe it as a bid for a head-to-head matchup with China, no doubt worried that the showcase global initiative would be seen as a purely defensive move. Yet as one official put it at B3W’s unveiling in the United Kingdom, “Until now we have not offered a positive alternative that reflects our values, our standards and our way of doing business.” That alternative would stand in contrast to a Chinese model that advantages Chinese firms by linking loans to contracts.
The idea that the United States hasn’t offered a “positive alternative” in the past is odd. In the last decade alone, the United States has launched Power Africa, a program aimed at providing electricity to millions of households in the region; the Blue Dot Network, in which Australia, Japan, and the United States collaboratively promote global sustainable infrastructure development; and Enhancing Development and Growth Through Energy, an initiative that helps governments in the Indo-Pacific region expand energy access. These projects differed from Belt and Road in that the United States committed very little money, and most of the funds that were allocated were invested in private companies. Sadly, the current iteration of B3W wouldn’t change that dynamic at all.
It’s not just scale that places the United States at a comparative disadvantage in infrastructure construction. China is better at building, not just domestically but across the globe. Chinese firms dominate the competitive procurement of leading infrastructure lenders such as the World Bank. They won $2.3 billion worth of World Bank–financed infrastructure contracts outside China in 2020, compared to the United States’ $27 million worth of contracts. Of the 20 largest construction contractors, 14 are in China, six are in Europe, and none are in the United States. China owes its dominance partly to government subsidies, but on balance, that’s a good deal for developing countries who are effectively receiving handouts from Chinese taxpayers. U.S. policymakers may claim that Chinese subsidies are unfair, but those complaints will fall on deaf ears in the countries that benefit from China’s largess.
The Biden administration’s strategy for competing with China involves subsidies to American companies.
But the gravest flaw of B3W is that it appears to be based on the very model of self-dealing capitalism for which the U.S. government has condemned China. The main components of the Biden administration’s strategy for competing economically with China involve subsidies to American companies. USAID spends most of its resources buying goods and services from U.S. firms. The Bipartisan Innovation Act would also provide billions in industry subsidies to ramp up U.S. semiconductor production. Worse, the U.S. response is being copied by its ally the United Kingdom. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is redirecting aid spending toward programs that use “world-class British expertise,” as the British Foreign Office generously described the approach as part of its aid strategy this past May. Perhaps other G-7 members will follow in their wake: certainly the European Union is looking for ways to disburse billions in subsidies to European firms planning to invest in developing countries.
The situation recalls the beginning of the Cold War, when Soviet leader Joseph Stalin launched the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance as an answer to American-led economic programs such as the Marshall Plan, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. Sold as a way to foster economic cooperation among the countries of the Eastern bloc, Comecon actually reduced overall trade flows of member countries by putting up barriers to exports and imports with the rest of the world. This time around, in response to a far more robust version offered by China, it is the United States that is providing a Potemkin model of international cooperation. Adding to the irony, the institutions created at the Bretton Woods Conference that Stalin was attempting to counter are what make B3W’s infrastructure push unnecessary. The administration should work through those organizations to attempt to achieve its aims.
In Plain Sight
The obvious actor to lead on delivering sustainable infrastructure at scale in the developing world is not the White House but an entity that sits just three blocks away: the World Bank. The bank has long championed market-driven approaches to development and supports billions of dollars of infrastructure investments in low- and middle-income countries each year. It enforces procurement rules that encourage transparency and international competition (the so-called “level playing field”), and it leverages as much as $46 of private-sector-backed financing for each dollar of public funding supplied by governments. Instead of pursuing a bilateral infrastructure agenda deal by deal across the developing world, the Biden administration should focus on channeling more of its aid money through these multilateral institutions.
If the administration really wants a bilateral global development competition with China, the United States should play to its strengths: not Amtrak but Ann Arbor, not Newark but Notre Dame. The higher education system in the United States is the envy of the world, one that has schooled business and political leaders from almost every country on the planet. China is trying to copy the model, but the United States still has a two-to-one lead in foreign student enrollees, including many students from China itself.
In recent years, of course, the U.S. government has neglected public research budgets and diminished the flow of foreign students into American schools. That process began under President Donald Trump, but President Biden hasn’t done enough to change course. This is a devastating error, but one that the Biden administration could address by cutting wait times for appointments to apply for a student visa, which can stretch a year or longer; supporting the Fulbright program, which provides scholarships and fellowships both for Americans to study and research abroad as well as for foreign scholars to come to the United States; and providing non-Americans access to federal student loan programs. To demonstrate support for international competition, the United States could also add to its financing for companies that provide loans to students from low- and middle-income countries to study abroad in the country of their choice. One such company, Prodigy Finance, is already backed by the U.S. Development Finance Corporation. The great advantage of strategic competition based on human capital is that it will benefit the United States: along with demonstrating openness and building a network of sympathetic global leaders, students who choose to come to the United States sometimes stay, becoming a vital part of the country’s research and entrepreneurial capacity.
Rather than trying to beat China at its own game, the United States needs to recommit to a vision of planetary prosperity through global cooperation, openness, transparency, and equal opportunity. When it comes to physical capital, the World Bank and regional development banks are best suited to accomplish those goals. When it comes to human capital, the United States can and should take the lead, reopening its doors to students and scholars. This agenda is truly values-driven in a way that B3W could only ever hope to be.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
