Quotes of the Day:

“The overlap between the civilian and military spheres may be very evident at times of peace, when there will be arguments about long-term planning, budgetary allocations, personnel policy and weapons procurement. It is also evident at times of war, despite assumptions about an ‘operational level of war’ where military decisions must be taken free from political interference. 20 The purposes set by the government should infuse all operational decisions, while the problems and opportunities encountered in the field should be fed back into the development of national strategy. When it comes to implementing policy, civilians may accept that they have no special competence. They expect their military colleagues to know how to address logistical, intelligence, equipment and tactical issues. But they will still have questions about the smooth functioning of the command system, the causes of any reverses, the likelihood of casualties and the prospects for success. And they will still be held accountable if things go wrong.”

- Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine by Lawrence Freedman

“Book banners, after all, insist that the entire community should see things their way, and only their way. When a book is banned, a whole set of thoughts is locked behind the assertion that there is only one valid set of values, one valid set of beliefs, one valid perception of the world. It's a scary idea, especially in a society which has been built on the ideas of free choice and free thought.” 

- Stephen King

"Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm, but the harm [that they cause] does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

~ TS Eliot

1. Pentagon opens sweeping review of clandestine psychological operations

2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 18 (Putin's War)

3. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (18.09.22) CDS comments on key events4.

4. Biden on ‘60 Minutes’ doubles down on promise to defend Taiwan

5. Putin's new Ukraine problem: Even the war's biggest supporters are growing dissatisfied

6. China sanctions Raytheon, Boeing Defense CEOs over Taiwan

7.  Ukraine will win the war (transcript of David Petraeus’s interview with CNN’s Jim Sciutto.)

8. The Importance of Terrorist Founders and the Role of Safe Havens

9. Mold Is Consuming Fort Stewart’s Barracks as a Pattern Emerges Across the Army

10. Some Assembly Required: Why the UN’s Broadest Forum Matters More Than Ever

11. Long, slow decline of the US military's all-volunteer force puts America in danger by Dr. Mark T. Esper

12. Putting Ukrainian battle successes into cold, hard perspective - Responsible Statecraft

13. China’s Changing Disinformation and Propaganda Targeting Taiwan

14.  Time to Get Tough on the Taliban

15. Is China Breaking With Russia Over Ukraine?

1. Pentagon opens sweeping review of clandestine psychological operations

So the White House and civilian leaders relooking to throw the uniformed military under the bus. This confirms it is easier to get permission to put a hellfire missile on the forehead of a terrorist than it is to get permission to put an idea between his ears.

But before we have a clandestine or covert PSYOP effort we need a strong coherent well orchestrated OVERT influence strategy and campaign. Before we get into these types of actions (and their efficacy can be rightly questioned) we need to ask the WHite House and the civilian leaders where is the national level OVERT influence program?

It will be interesting to see the entire reaction to this (or what will be an overreaction). But no matter how it turns out this portends an even more difficult future for PSYOP.

A key issue for senior policymakers now is determining whether the military’s execution of clandestine influence operations is delivering results. “Is the juice worth the squeeze? Does our approach really have the potential for the return on investment we hoped or is it just causing more challenges?” one person familiar with the debate said.

I will argue strongly that an OVERT influence program is far more important than these alleged clandestine activities. But this is the right question:

But this is the key statement for our our overt information and influence activities strategy should be structured:

One diplomat put it this way: “Generally speaking, we shouldn’t be employing the same kind of tactics that our adversaries are using because the bottom line is we have the moral high ground. We are a society that is built on a certain set of values. We promote those values around the world and when we use tactics like those, it just undermines our argument about who we are.”

Pentagon opens sweeping review of clandestine psychological operations

The Washington Post · by Ellen Nakashima · September 19, 2022

The Pentagon has ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare after major social media companies identified and took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms’ rules.

Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, last week instructed the military commands that engage in psychological operations online to provide a full accounting of their activities by next month after the White House and some federal agencies expressed mounting concerns over the Defense Department’s attempted manipulation of audiences overseas, according to several defense and administration officials familiar with the matter.

The takedowns in recent years by Twitter and Facebook of more than 150 bogus personas and media sites created in the United States was disclosed last month by internet researchers Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory. While the researchers did not attribute the sham accounts to the U.S. military, two officials familiar with the matter said that U.S. Central Command is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny. Like others interviewed for this report, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations.

The researchers did not specify when the takedowns occurred, but those familiar with the matter said they were within the past two or three years. Some were recent, they said, and involved posts from the summer that advanced anti-Russia narratives citing the Kremlin’s “imperialist” war in Ukraine and warning of the conflict’s direct impact on Central Asian countries. Significantly, they found that the pretend personas — employing tactics used by countries such as Russia and China — did not gain much traction, and that overt accounts actually attracted more followers.

Centcom, headquartered in Tampa, has purview over military operations across 21 countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Central and South Asia. A spokesman declined to comment.

Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement that the military’s information operations “support our national security priorities” and must be conducted in compliance with relevant laws and policies. “We are committed to enforcing those safeguards,” he said.

Spokespersons for Facebook and Twitter declined to comment.

According to the researchers’ report, the accounts taken down included a made-up Persian-language media site that shared content reposted from the U.S.-funded Voice of America Farsi and Radio Free Europe. Another, it said, was linked to a Twitter handle that in the past had claimed to operate on behalf of Centcom.

One fake account posted an inflammatory tweet claiming that relatives of deceased Afghan refugees had reported bodies being returned from Iran with missing organs, according to the report. The tweet linked to a video that was part of an article posted on a U.S.-military affiliated website.

Centcom has not commented on whether these accounts were created by its personnel or contractors. If the organ-harvesting tweet is shown to be Centcom’s, one defense official said, it would “absolutely be a violation of doctrine and training practices.”

Independent of the report, The Washington Post has learned that in 2020 Facebook disabled fictitious personas created by Centcom to counter disinformation spread by China suggesting the coronavirus responsible for covid-19 was created at a U.S. Army lab in Fort Detrick, Md., according to officials familiar with the matter. The pseudo profiles — active in Facebook groups that conversed in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu, the officials said — were used to amplify truthful information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the virus’s origination in China.

The U.S. government’s use of ersatz social media accounts, though authorized by law and policy, has stirred controversy inside the Biden administration, with the White House pressing the Pentagon to clarify and justify its policies. The White House, agencies such as the State Department and even some officials within the Defense Department have been concerned that the policies are too broad, allowing leeway for tactics that even if used to spread truthful information, risk eroding U.S. credibility, several U.S. officials said.

“Our adversaries are absolutely operating in the information domain,” said a second senior defense official. “There are some who think we shouldn’t do anything clandestine in that space. Ceding an entire domain to an adversary would be unwise. But we need stronger policy guardrails.”

A spokeswoman for the National Security Council, which is part of the White House, declined to comment.

Kahl disclosed his review at a virtual meeting convened by the National Security Council on Tuesday, saying he wants to know what types of operations have been carried out, who they’re targeting, what tools are being used and why military commanders have chosen those tactics, and how effective they have been, several officials said.

The message was essentially, “You have to justify to me why you’re doing these types of things,” the first defense official said.

Pentagon policy and doctrine discourage the military from peddling falsehoods, but there are no specific rules mandating the use of truthful information for psychological operations. For instance, the military sometimes employs fiction and satire for persuasion purposes, but generally the messages are supposed to stick to facts, officials said.

In 2020, officers at Facebook and Twitter contacted the Pentagon to raise concerns about the phony accounts they were having to remove, suspicious they were associated with the military. That summer, David Agranovich, Facebook’s director for global threat disruption, spoke to Christopher C. Miller, then assistant director for Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict, which oversees influence operations policy, warning him that if Facebook could sniff them out, so could U.S. adversaries, several people familiar with the conversation said.

“His point‚” one person said, “was ‘Guys, you got caught. That’s a problem.’ ”

Before Miller could take action, he was tapped to head a different agency — the National Counterterrorism Center. Then the November election happened and time ran out for the Trump administration to address the matter, although Miller did spend the last few weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency serving as acting defense secretary.

With the rise of Russia and China as strategic competitors, military commanders have wanted to fight back, including online. And Congress supported that. Frustrated with perceived legal obstacles to the Defense Department’s ability to conduct clandestine activities in cyberspace, Congress in late 2019 passed a law affirming that the military could conduct operations in the “information environment” to defend the United States and to push back against foreign disinformation aimed at undermining its interests. The measure, known as Section 1631, allows the military to carry out clandestine psychologic operations without crossing what the CIA has claimed as its covert authority, alleviating some of the friction that had hindered such operations previously.

“Combatant commanders got really excited,” recalled the first defense official. “They were very eager to utilize these new authorities. The defense contractors were equally eager to land lucrative classified contracts to enable clandestine influence operations.”

At the same time, the official said, military leaders were not trained to oversee “technically complex operations conducted by contractors” or coordinate such activities with other stakeholders elsewhere in the U.S. government.

Last year, with a new administration in place, Facebook’s Agranovich tried again. This time he took his complaint to President Biden’s deputy national security adviser for cyber, Anne Neuberger. Agranovich, who had worked at the NSC under Trump, told Neuberger that Facebook was taking down fake accounts because they violated the company’s terms of service, according to people familiar with the exchange.

The accounts were easily detected by Facebook, which since Russia’s campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election has enhanced its ability to identify mock personas and sites. In some cases, the company had removed profiles, which appeared to be associated with the military, that promoted information deemed by fact-checkers to be false, said a person familiar with the matter.

Agranovich also spoke to officials at the Pentagon. His message was: “We know what DOD is doing. It violates our policies. We will enforce our policies” and so “DOD should knock it off,” said a U.S. official briefed on the matter.

In response to White House concerns, Kahl ordered a review of Military Information Support Operations, or MISO, the Pentagon’s moniker for psychological operations. A draft concluded that policies, training and oversight all needed tightening, and that coordination with other agencies, such as the State Department and the CIA, needed strengthening, according to officials.

The review also found that while there were cases in which fictitious information was pushed by the military, they were the result of inadequate oversight of contractors and personnel training — not systemic problems, officials said.

Pentagon leadership did little with the review, two officials said, before Graphika and Stanford published their report on Aug. 24, which elicited a flurry of news coverage and questions for the military.

The State Department and CIA have been perturbed by the military’s use of clandestine tactics. Officers at State have admonished the Defense Department, “Hey don’t amplify our policies using fake personas, because we don’t want to be seen as creating false grass roots efforts,” the first defense official said.

One diplomat put it this way: “Generally speaking, we shouldn’t be employing the same kind of tactics that our adversaries are using because the bottom line is we have the moral high ground. We are a society that is built on a certain set of values. We promote those values around the world and when we use tactics like those, it just undermines our argument about who we are.”

Psychological operations to promote U.S. narratives overseas is nothing new in the military, but the popularity of western social media across the globe has led to an expansion of tactics, including the use of artificial personas and images — sometimes called “deep fakes.” The logic is that views expressed by what appears to be, say, an Afghan woman or an Iranian student might be more persuasive than if they were openly pushed by the U.S. government.

The majority of the military’s influence operations are overt, promoting U.S. policies in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere under its own name, officials said. And there are valid reasons to use clandestine tactics, such as trying to infiltrate a closed terrorist chat group, they said.

A key issue for senior policymakers now is determining whether the military’s execution of clandestine influence operations is delivering results. “Is the juice worth the squeeze? Does our approach really have the potential for the return on investment we hoped or is it just causing more challenges?” one person familiar with the debate said.

The report by Graphika and Stanford suggests that the clandestine activity did not have much impact. It noted that the “vast majority of posts and tweets” reviewed received “no more than a handful of likes or retweets,” and only 19 percent of the concocted accounts had more than 1,000 followers. “Tellingly,” the report stated, “the two most-followed assets in the data provided by Twitter were overt accounts that publicly declared a connection to the U.S. military.”

Clandestine influence operations have a role in support of military operations, but it should be a narrow one with “intrusive oversight” by military and civilian leadership, said Michael Lumpkin, a former senior Pentagon official handling information operations policy and a former head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. “Otherwise, we risk making more enemies than friends.”

Alice Crites contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Ellen Nakashima · September 19, 2022

2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 18 (Putin's War)

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-18

Key Takeaways

• Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be increasingly relying on irregular, poorly trained ad-hoc volunteer and proxy units rather than attempting to rebuild damaged or destroyed conventional Russian ground forces units.
• Ukrainian forces continue to consolidate positions on the east bank of the Oskil River in Kharkiv Oblast despite Russian efforts to contain them.
• Russian forces in western Kherson Oblast may be attempting to fall back to more defensible positions in a controlled withdrawal to avoid the chaotic retreat that characterized the collapse of Russian defenses in Kharkiv earlier in September.
• Russian forces suffered devastating losses of manpower and equipment in their fight for eastern Ukraine and especially during the Ukrainian Kharkiv counter-offensive. Multiple Russian armored and mechanized units have likely been effectively destroyed according to assessments released on September 18.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 18

Sep 18, 2022 - Press ISW

understandingwar.org

Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, and Frederick W. Kagan

September 18, 9:35 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.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is increasingly relying on irregular volunteer and proxy forces rather than conventional units and formations of the Russian Federation Armed Forces. ISW has previously reported that Putin has been bypassing the Russian higher military command and Ministry of Defense leadership throughout the summer and especially following the defeat around Kharkiv Oblast.[1] Putin’s souring relationship with the military command and the Russian (MoD) may explain in part the Kremlin’s increasing focus on recruiting ill-prepared volunteers into ad-hoc irregular units rather than attempting to draw them into reserve or replacement pools for regular Russian combat units.

A prominent Russian milblogger reported that Russian forces have “already began the process of forming and staffing the 4th Army Corps, at least on a documentation level.”[2] The report may be true given the recent Russia-wide push for the formation of more regional volunteer units among the Kremlin representatives following the Russian defeat around Kharkiv Oblast.[3] Russian federal subjects had previously begun advertising for contract service in volunteer units around the time of the formation of the 3rd Army Corps.[4] Russian forces are also increasingly recruiting prisoners, involving Cossack units, deploying elements of Russian security services such as the Russian Federal Security Service and Rosgvardia, and covertly mobilizing men from occupied Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. The continued focus on the formation of irregular units is receiving some criticism from retired Russian officers who are calling for proper conventional divisions rather than volunteer battalions.[5]

The formation of such ad-hoc units will lead to further tensions, inequality, and an overall lack of cohesiveness between forces. Ukrainian and Russian sources have reported instances of Russian Armed Forces refusing to pay veteran benefits, one-time enlistment bonuses, or provide medical treatment to BARS (Russian Combat Army Reserve) servicemen.[6] Some military formations offer financial incentives for every kilometer that the serviceman’s unit advances, an incentive that few soldiers will likely benefit from considering that Russian forces are on the defensive almost everywhere apart from the areas around Bakhmut and Donetsk City, where gains have been slow and very limited.[7] Russian opposition publication Insider reported instances of ethnic discrimination within Chechen units, noting that the Chechen leadership deploys non-Chechens to the frontlines before committing Chechens to the battle.[8] Professional military staff are likely to confront behavioral issues among recruited prisoners, especially considering the likely prevalence of prisoners convicted of violent crimes, narcotics, and rape. The Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics (LNR and DNR) have both previously refused to fight for each other’s territory.[9] All these groups have different levels of military training, decentralized command structures, and different perceptions of the war and motivations to fight, which makes conflict and poor unit coordination more probable. The one thing they have in common is wholly inadequate training and preparation for combat.

The formation of irregular, hastily-trained units adds little effective combat power to Russian forces fighting in Ukraine. Forbes noted that the 3rd Army Corps rushed in to defend Russian positions around Kharkiv Oblast during the counteroffensive but failed to make any difference and “melted away.”[10] The reported arrival of increasing numbers of irregular Russian forces on the battlefield has had little to no impact on Russian operations.

Russian forces are likely attempting to conduct a more deliberate and controlled withdrawal in western Kherson Oblast to avoid the chaotic flight that characterized the collapse of Russian defensive positions in Kharkiv Oblast earlier this month. The Russians have heavily reinforced western Kherson Oblast over the past several months including with airborne units and at least some elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army.[11] These ostensibly more professional and well-trained and equipped units are concentrated in a small area in Kherson Oblast and were prepared for the expected counteroffensive. They appear to be performing significantly better than Russian forces in Kharkiv Oblast. The Ukrainians destroyed a number of units of the 1st Guards Tank Army in Kharkiv Oblast, putting them to flight and capturing large amounts of high-quality equipment. The worse performance of professional Russian soldiers in Kharkiv Oblast compared with those in Kherson Oblast may be due to the thinner concentration of Russian forces in Kharkiv Oblast as well as the fact that the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv Oblast appeared to surprise the Russian defenders.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson Oblast is nevertheless making progress, and Russian forces appear to be attempting to slow it and fall back to more defensible positions rather than stop it cold or reverse it. Continuous Ukrainian attacks on Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) across the Dnipro River to western Kherson Oblast appear to be having increasing effects on Russian supplies on the right bank—recent reports indicate shortages of food and water in Russian-occupied Kherson City and at least a temporary slackening of Russian artillery fire. Poor-quality proxy units have collapsed in some sectors of the Russian front lines, moreover, allowing Ukrainian advances. Ukrainian forces remain likely to regain much if not all of western Kherson Oblast in the coming weeks if they continue to interdict Russian GLOCs and press their advance. Ukrainian gains may continue to be slow if the Russian troops can retain their coherence but could also accelerate significantly if Russian forces begin to break.

A prominent Russian milblogger also claimed that the Russian command issued a “no retreat” order last week for all units serving in Donbas, requiring that Russian forces operating on the axis hold their positions regardless of the unfolding situation in front of them.[12] This order would be noteworthy in two ways if the report is accurate. First, Donetsk Oblast is the only area in Ukraine in which Russian forces are still attempting offensive operations. There have been sporadic reports of limited Ukrainian counterattacks, but no evidence that Ukraine is preparing a large-scale counteroffensive operation in this area.[13] The order suggests that the Russian military may fear a Ukrainian counteroffensive into the teeth of their last offensive efforts, however. Second, it shows deep mistrust of the combat capabilities of the units receiving the order in contrast with the apparently higher confidence Russian commanders have in the units in western Kherson Oblast, where sensible efforts to conduct a controlled withdrawal appear to prevail.

Key Takeaways

• Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be increasingly relying on irregular, poorly trained ad-hoc volunteer and proxy units rather than attempting to rebuild damaged or destroyed conventional Russian ground forces units.
• Ukrainian forces continue to consolidate positions on the east bank of the Oskil River in Kharkiv Oblast despite Russian efforts to contain them.
• Russian forces in western Kherson Oblast may be attempting to fall back to more defensible positions in a controlled withdrawal to avoid the chaotic retreat that characterized the collapse of Russian defenses in Kharkiv earlier in September.
• Russian forces suffered devastating losses of manpower and equipment in their fight for eastern Ukraine and especially during the Ukrainian Kharkiv counter-offensive. Multiple Russian armored and mechanized units have likely been effectively destroyed according to assessments released on September 18.

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.

• Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Southern and Eastern Ukraine
• Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts);
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)

Eastern Ukraine: (Vovchansk-Kupyansk-Izyum-Lyman Line)

Ukrainian forces are continuing to establish positions on the east bank of the Oskil River. A Russian source reported that fighting is ongoing in eastern Kupyansk, indicating that Ukrainian forces are consolidating prior gains.[14] The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian ground assault on Kupyansk.[15] Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai posted footage of Ukrainian personnel driving a tank over a pontoon bridge at an unspecified location and claimed that Ukrainian forces control an unspecified location on the east bank of the river.[16] Footage posted on September 17 shows Ukrainian forces operating on the Oskil River in a boat and receiving Russian artillery fire before advancing to the east bank.[17]

A Ukrainian official stated that Ukrainian forces are waiting for the fall of Lyman before beginning ground operations to retake Luhansk Oblast.[18] Ukrainian forces reportedly struck the Russian logistics node at Svatove, Luhansk Oblast on September 18. The Luhansk People’s Republic Interior Ministry claimed that Ukrainian forces struck a hotel and bus stop with two HIMARS rounds.[19] Ukrainian forces have likely previously struck Russian military targets in Svatove, likely impeding the Russian ability to defend Svatove and other areas in the rear if Ukrainian forces choose to advance.[20] Svatove has served as a hub on the Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Severodonetsk. Haidai noted that Russian forces are establishing fortifications in areas close to the front lines, including Svatove, Troitske, Rubizhne, and Popasna.[21] Ukrainian strikes on Russian rear areas undermine these efforts and will degrade Russian forces’ ability to defend these areas if Ukraine advances. These positions are not close to one another, moreover, and Russian forces in this area may be challenged to form coherent defensive lines across such a wide area.

Russian forces continued to strike border areas along the Kharkiv-Belgorod Oblast border and conducted a limited ground assault north of Kharkiv City.[22] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian ground assault on Hoptivka, less than two kilometers from the international border.[23]

Southern Ukraine: (Kherson Oblast)

Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces are “conceding” and losing tactically significant positions in unspecified areas in Kherson Oblast.[24] The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command added that Russian forces have decreased the intensity of their artillery fire over some unspecified segments along the line of contact.[25] The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command noted that platoon-sized Russian elements still unsuccessfully attempt to assault Ukrainian positions in unspecified areas, however.[26] The Ukrainian General Staff also reported that Russian forces are coercing civilians to fortify Russian positions in Chonhar on the eastern Kherson Oblast-Crimean border, which may indicate that Russian forces are setting up defenses in anticipation of Ukrainian counteroffensives south of the Dnipro River.[27] Ukrainian military officials added that Russian forces continued to evict civilians from their homes west of Kherson City and in northern Kherson Oblast and are increasingly searching for deserters in the region.[28]

Ukrainian military officials and local reports note that Ukrainian forces are continuing their interdiction campaign in Kherson Oblast. The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command reported that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian barge that was delivering military equipment and ammunition, resulting in the deaths of 62 Russian servicemen and destruction of at least five armored vehicles according to preliminary information.[29] The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command added that Ukrainian strikes undermined Russian efforts to repair the Antonivsky Railway Bridge.[30] Ukrainian military officials also reported the destruction of a Russian ammunition depot in Blahodatne, although it is unclear if they referred to the Blahodatne settlement in Mykolaiv Oblast or Kherson Oblast.[31] Social media users also reported that Russian air defenses activated in Nova Kakhovka at least 10 minutes after a missile struck an unspecified target in Nova Kakhovka.[32] Residents published footage of plumes of smoke in Yubileyne, Oleshky Raion (about 51km southeast of Kherson City), and the Ukrainian Southern Operational Spokesperson Nataliya Humenyuk noted explosions in Oleshky but did not specify their cause.[33] Local Telegram channels also published footage from around Beryslav in northern Kherson Oblast, noting that Russian forces have been extinguishing the fire for more than two hours.[34]

Ukrainian officials denied the involvement of Ukrainian forces in a street shooting in downtown Kherson City on the night of September 17 and September 18.[35] The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command claimed that the shooting was a Russian provocation.[36] Humenyuk noted that Ukrainian security services have previously warned civilians of possible Russian provocations in populated areas between September 17 and September 20 and claimed that the shooting in Kherson City is a Russian attempt to discredit Ukrainian forces.[37] Advisor to the head of the Ukrainian President’s Office Mykhailo Podolyak noted that Russian street fights indicate that there are boiling tensions between the personnel of private military companies, Russian Armed Forces, Chechen units, and elements of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) amidst the pressure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.[38] Advisor to the Kherson Oblast Military Administration Serhiy Khlan suggested that the incident was “a cheap spectacle,” and noted that Russian occupation authorities are seeking to create a propaganda narrative that Russian forces are able to maintain control of the city.[39] Russian proxy authorities denied the involvement of Ukrainian sabotage groups and did not provide any additional details.[40] The initial Russian proxy denial makes the assessment that that incident was part of an information operation to discredit Ukrainian forces less likely. The incident may instead indicate that Russian forces are struggling to retain control of the city, possibly because of the infighting Podolyak suggests is prevalent.

Ukrainian and Russian sources identified three areas of kinetic activity on September 18: northwest of Kherson City, near the Ukrainian bridgehead over the Inhulets River, and south of the Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border near Vysokopillya. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults on Pravdyne (about 30km northwest of Kherson City), and geolocated footage showed Ukrainian artillery striking Russian forces near the settlement.[41] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian and Russian troops continued to fight in Bezimenne (approximately 12km southeast of the bridgehead), and increasingly commented on the effects of the flood caused by Russian damage to dams on the Inhulets River on Ukrainian logistics.[42] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces fired artillery at Ukrainka and launched airstrikes at Bilyaivka, both southeast of Vysokopillya within Russian assessed territory.[43] The Russian Defense Ministry claimed striking Ukrainian positions in Veremiivka, just north of Ukrainka and Bilyaivka.[44]

Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces continued limited ground attacks around Bakhmut and Avdiivka and continued routine artillery fire along the Donetsk Oblast front line on September 18.[45] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces suffered significant losses when attempting an assault in the Avdiivka direction and that medical facilities admit more than 30 Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) 1st Army Corps servicemen daily.[46] Russian forces shelled the Slovyansk Thermal Power Plant again on September 18, severely damaging an administrative building.[47] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Ukrainian forces withdrew from Zaitseve in the direction of Chasiv Yar to the west.[48]

A kinetic event reportedly killed one Ukrainian POW and wounded five others in the Russian-occupied Olenivka penal colony, Donetsk Oblast, on September 18. The Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) accused Ukrainian forces of shelling the penal colony on September 18.[49] A Russian source claimed that Ukrainian forces struck the penal colony with Uragan multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS).[50] Ukrainian Parliamentary Representative for Human Rights Dmytro Lyubinets did not confirm whether the kinetic event occurred but stated that there is no information on casualties and that it is unclear why Russia would shell Olenivka.[51] Western outlets assessed that Russian forces had likely conducted a previous strike on the Olenivka penal colony that killed at least 53 Ukrainian POWs and injured dozens more on July 29.[52] Russian authorities may use an additional attack on the Olenivka penal colony to justify delaying the UN fact-finding mission tasked with investigating the July 29 attack.[53]

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

Russian forces did not conduct any ground attacks in Zaporizhia Oblast and continued routine fire along the front lines in Zaporizhia and Mykolaiv Oblasts on September 18.[54] Russian forces heavily shelled Ochakiv, less than 10km from the Kinburn Spit in Kherson Oblast, overnight on September 17-18 and during the morning on September 18.[55] Russian forces continued routine fire against areas on the north bank of the Kakhovka Reservoir opposite Enerhodar.[56]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces struck Russian rear areas in Zaporizhia Oblast. Zaporizhia Oblast occupation official Vladimir Rogov claimed that Ukrainian forces struck Kamyanka (roughly 25km east of Tokmak) with HIMARS.[57] Rogov also claimed that Ukrainian forces struck Bilmak (roughly 70km north of Berdyansk) and posted footage of a severely damaged hangar.[58] A Russian source reported many explosions in Melitopol but did not specify the cause or number.[59]

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

Emerging details about the extent of losses by professional Russian combat units reveal devastating losses rendering elite brigades and regiments combat-ineffective or nearly non-existent. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on September 18 that the Russian 64th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade (MRB) of the Eastern Military District has suffered 90% losses between its fighting around Kyiv and its subsequent operations in eastern Ukraine.[60] The 64th Separate MRB was complicit in war crimes around Bucha and was reportedly sent immediately back into the fight following the Russian withdrawal from around Kyiv to ensure that its personnel would be unable to answer questions about their atrocities.[61] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that the Russian MoD had transferred the unit’s remaining equipment to the FSB and was preparing to disband the brigade.[62] The General Staff also reported that the 11th Army Corps of the Baltic Fleet has suffered 50% casualties.[63] An independent Western analyst assessed that the 4th Tank Division of the 1st Guards Tank Army lost a regiment’s worth of advanced T-80 tanks during the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv Oblast, observing that that division only had two regiments to begin with.[64] The Ukrainian General Staff noted that Ukrainian forces had overrun a Russian repair facility in Balaklia during the counteroffensive around Izyum and had seized over 200 modern and in some cases advanced armored vehicles.[65] These losses to some of the Russian Army’s premier conventional armored and motorized rifle units will be impossible to replace in the short term.

The Kremlin appears to be prioritizing recruitment into irregular volunteer units rather than attempting to reconstitute badly damaged or destroyed conventional units, however. The Moscow City OMON special internal forces announced a recruitment drive on September 18, offering 75,000-80,000 rubles, and an apartment in Moscow to volunteers aged below 35 with prior military service.[66] The Ukrainian General Staff reported a similar recruitment drive for the proxy Interior Ministry.[67] Russia is also attempting to mislead more men into signing military contracts to support the recently announced “self-mobilization” drive. Kursk Oblast is claiming to recruit men into logistics units that will instead serve as combat forces, the Ukrainian General Staff said, while Nizhny Novogorod Oblast is reportedly covertly recruiting staff of the “Atomoborona” organization under the guise of defending critical sites for service in Ukraine.[68]

Russian forces continue to redeploy air defense systems from sensitive locations likely to support operations in Ukraine. A Finnish news outlet reported on September 18 that its study of publicly available satellite imagery shows that air defense bases in the Zelenogorsk area northwest of St. Petersburg have been partially or fully stripped of their air defense systems over the course of the summer.[69] The outlet noted that most of the systems transferred were older and that their movement was thus unlikely to affect Russia’s ability to defend the area around St. Petersburg materially. This report, combined with earlier reports that Russia had withdrawn S-300 air defense systems from Syria, suggests that the Russian Federation is struggling to sustain air defense operations over Ukraine.[70] Whatever the age or obsolescence of the systems removed from St. Petersburg, their departure at a time when Russian President Vladimir Putin is constantly warning of the threat NATO poses to Russia (to say nothing of Finland’s imminent accession to the alliance) casts doubt on the seriousness with which Putin takes his own claims of the NATO threat.

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 to forcibly mobilize civilians in occupied Ukraine. Ukrainian Mariupol Mayor Petro Andryushchenko reported on September 17 that occupation authorities detained men in occupied Manhush near Mariupol to forcibly mobilize them, and that occupation authorities in the area will conduct another phase of detention for mobilization in early October.[71] Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai reported that Russian forces are continuing to track and mobilize men in occupied Luhansk Oblast and prevent them from leaving Luhansk Oblast for Russia, likely to further bolster mobilization efforts.[72]

Occupation authorities are struggling to compensate collaborators with promised payments. Ukraine’s Resistance Center reported that Russian occupation authorities are continuing to bribe locals, but that parents in occupied Melitopol who sent their children to Russian schools did not receive their promised 10,000-ruble (roughly 165 USD) payment.[73] Ukraine’s Resistance Center noted that occupation officials demand significant personal documentation to receive the payments, which the Center stated occupation authorities need to accelerate passportization efforts.[74]

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

[5] https://focus dot ua/voennye-novosti/529761-samomobilizaciya-v-rf-na-dalnem-vostoke-sozdayut-batalon-tayfun-dlya-voyny-v-ukraine; https://bastyon dot com/index?v=52bed666de09a6d25980642ecfd4e0b1d2c37c5f04c4c25efb78a1b88af47704&video=1&ref=PQUj7dS2QpamP9vapARCYaJaSqjXpcZk8p

[6] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign... https://gur dot gov.ua/content/viiskovi-shpytali-rf-vidmovliaiutsia-likuvaty-tak-zvanykh-dobrovoltsiv-iakykh-poranyly-v-ukraini.html; https://t.me/obshina_ru/5000; https://t.me/m0sc0wcalling/11509; https://rostov dot tsargrad.tv/articles/a-chto-vy-tam-delali-chinovniki-vojujut-s-dobrovolcami-specoperacii_621824

[8] https://theins dot ru/politika/254329

[29] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKrg7lUaS2A; https://suspilne dot media/282874-eksgumacia-v-izumi-kativna-u-kozacij-lopani-zaes-pidklucili-do-energomerezi-207-j-den-vijni-onlajn/; https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=626506255532323; https://t.me/kherson...

[33] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKrg7lUaS2A; https://suspilne dot media/282874-eksgumacia-v-izumi-kativna-u-kozacij-lopani-zaes-pidklucili-do-energomerezi-207-j-den-vijni-onlajn/; https://t.me/hueviyherson/26108

[37] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKrg7lUaS2A; https://suspilne dot media/282874-eksgumacia-v-izumi-kativna-u-kozacij-lopani-zaes-pidklucili-do-energomerezi-207-j-den-vijni-onlajn/; https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass...

[51] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/09/18/ombudsmen-ukrayiny-pro-chergovyj-obstril-koloniyi-v-olenivczi/

[58] https://t.me/vrogov/4957; https://t.me/readovkanews/41950; https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1571395716337274881; https://www.tiktok.com/@roman_.967/video/7143917467717389573

[65] https://gur dot gov.ua/content/viiskovi-shpytali-rf-vidmovliaiutsia-likuvaty-tak-zvanykh-dobrovoltsiv-iakykh-poranyly-v-ukraini.html

[69] https://yle dot fi/news/3-12626182

[73] https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2022/09/18/okupanty-ne-vyplachuyut-obiczyanu-soczdopomogu-v-melitopoli/

[74] https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2022/09/18/okupanty-ne-vyplachuyut-obiczyanu-soczdopomogu-v-melitopoli/

understandingwar.org

3. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (18.09.22) CDS comments on key events

CDS Daily brief (18.09.22) CDS comments on key events

Humanitarian aspect:

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the Russian Federation has committed 34,441 crimes of aggression and war crimes against Ukraine, the Office of the Prosecutor General informed. Of them, 33,162 are related to violations of the laws and customs of war; 73 relate to planning, preparation or initiation and waging of aggressive war; 30 concern war propaganda; 1,176 belong to other categories.

About 82,000 Ukrainians, primarily women, children, and the elderly, have been evacuated from Donetsk Oblast and other dangerous areas to safe regions, the Ministry of Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories of Ukraine reported.

On the night of September 18, the Russian forces shelled the Nikopol district of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast with Grad MLRS and heavy artillery. Nikopol itself was fired upon twice. Around midnight, almost 30 Russian shells were shot. Three people were injured, Valentyn Reznichenko, the head of Oblast Administration, said. In the afternoon of September 18, the Russian military again fired 60 shells on three communities in the Nikopol district. Two men died, and another two men and a woman were wounded. Damages are being assessed, the head of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Military Administration said.

As of 21:30 on Sunday, the Russian forces opened fire on Sumy Oblast twice; a total of 52 hits were recorded, Dmytro Zhyvytskyi, head of the Sumy Oblast Military Administration, said. A man was killed in the village of Volfine, Bilopillya Community. A local farm was also affected; about 100 pigs and a horse died.

The Russian forces started massive shelling while doctors tried to evacuate patients from a psychiatric hospital in the village of Strelecha, the head of the Kharkiv Oblast Military Administration Oleh Synegubov said. They managed to evacuate 30 patients, but there are more than 600 in the institution. At least four medical workers died, and two patients were injured. In the same village, the Russian forces fired a tank at a civilian car, killing two women.

On the night of September 18, the Russian forces fired a missile at downtown Kramatorsk, Donetsk Oblast. A hotel was damaged, and a woman was injured.

The city of Mykolayiv also got shelled at night. A local hospital and a garage cooperative were damaged. No victims were reported, the city mayor Oleksandr Senkevich said.

The Kharkiv Oblast National police reported that since the liberation from the occupation, it had documented 241 war crimes committed by the Russian military in the Oblast.

Mayor of recently liberated Izyum, Kharkiv Oblast, Valery Marchenko, said that the exhumation of the bodies from the mass grave continues and will last for at least another two weeks. According to him, the authorities were informed about additional mass burials that still need to be found. The mayor said that 13,000-15,000 people currently live in Izyum, but many people are returning.

Ukraine launched a 24/7 hotline for the Russian soldiers who want to surrender and their families. Those who do are promised that they will be kept per the norms of the Geneva convention.

Occupied territories

It is impossible to provide heat to the cities of the occupied Luhansk Oblast, specifically where active hostilities took place, like Rubizhne, Lysychansk, or Sievierodonetsk, head of Luhansk Oblast Military Administration Serhiy Haidai said. According to him, even the surviving buildings in the cities will be "killed by winter". After exposure to low temperatures, it will be impossible to restore them, and they will have to be dismantled. Therefore, Haidai believes that most city residents will try to move to the countryside and spend the winter in abandoned houses because it will be almost impossible to survive in the cities.

The occupying authorities in Donetsk Oblast report that around 9:00 a.m. on September 18, the colony in Olenivka, where Ukrainian POWs, including those evacuated from Azovstal plant in Mariupol, are held, was again shelled. Reportedly, one Ukrainian prisoner was killed, and five were wounded. No Russians were wounded. The occupying authorities blame Ukraine for the shelling. According to the Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine has not been able to obtain the victims' names, although it sent requests to the Russian Ombudsperson Moskalkova and asked the UN and ICRC to mediate.

Operational situation

It is the 207th day of the strategic air-ground offensive operation of the Russian Armed Forces against Ukraine (in the official terminology of the Russian Federation – "operation to protect Donbas"). The enemy continues to concentrate its efforts on establishing full control over the territory of Donetsk Oblast, organizing defense and maintaining control over the captured territories, and disrupting intensive actions of the Ukrainian troops in certain directions.

The enemy fired at the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces along the contact line. Russian military takes measures to regroup troops in different directions, deploys reserves and conducts aerial reconnaissance.

In total, 105 Russian BTGs are involved in hostilities on the territory of Ukraine. Additionally, there are 37 and 15 BTGs in the reserve of the I and II stage, respectively. The grouping has up to 156,400 military personnel, up to 1,070 tanks, up to 2,490 BBMs, up to 1,510 artillery systems, up to 630 MLRS, and 58 Operational-tactical missile systems (OTRK).

The Russian military continues to shell civilian infrastructure, violating the norms of International Humanitarian Law and laws and customs of war.

Over the past 24 hours, the Russian forces have launched 6 missile and 28 air strikes and fired more than 90 rocket-propelled grenades at military and civilian targets on the territory of Ukraine.

The infrastructure of more than 30 Ukrainian towns and villages sustained damage, particularly Kharkiv, Dvorichna, Kamianka, Krasnohorivka, Novomykhailivka, Neskuchne, Uspenivka, Myrolyubivka, Bilyaivka, Vysokopillya, and Mykolaiv. The Russian artillery hit civilian objects on the outskirts of Zaporizhzhya (Zaporizhzhya Oblast), and in the cities of Chuhuyiv (Kharkiv Oblast) and Kramatorsk (Donetsk Oblast), killing and injuring civilians. The threat of air and missile strikes throughout the territory of Ukraine persists.

During the day, Ukrainian aviation struck 13 areas of the Russian manpower and equipment concentration and 3 positions of anti-aircraft missile systems. In addition, Ukrainian air defense units shot down five Russian UAVs and one Ka-52 helicopter.

Ukrainian rocket troops and artillery damaged over two hundred enemy targets, including 12 control points, ammunition depots, fuel and lubricant warehouses, artillery positions, and personnel and military equipment concentration areas.

To keep the troops ready for deployment, the deadline for checking the combat readiness of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Belarus has been extended (until September 24).

The morale and psychological state of the personnel of the invasion forces remain low. Kharkiv direction

• Zolochiv-Balakleya section: approximate length of combat line - 147 km, number of BTGs of the

RF Armed Forces - 10-12, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 13.3 km;

• Deployed enemy BTGs: 26th, 153rd and 197th tank regiments, 245th motorized rifle regiment of the 47th tank division, 6th and 239th tank regiments, 228th motorized rifle regiment of the 90th tank division, 1st motorized rifle regiment, 1st tank regiment of the 2nd motorized rifle division, 25th and 138th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 6th Combined Arms Army, 27th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Tank Army, 275th and 280th motorized rifle regiments, 11th tank regiment of the 18th motorized rifle division of the 11 Army Corps, 7th motorized rifle regiment of the 11th Army Corps, 80th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 14th Army Corps, 2nd and 45th separate SOF brigades of the Airborne Forces, 1st Army Corps of so-called DPR, PMCs.

The Russian forces shelled the areas around Kozacha Lopan, Hoptivka, Strelecha, Vysoka Yaruga, Vovchansk, Hatyshche, Budarky, Dvorichna, Kupyansk, Kamianka with tanks, mortars and various types of artillery. The shelling was also carried out from the territory of the Russian Federation.

During the Russian retreat from Kharkiv Oblast, military units of the 11th Army Corps from the Baltic Fleet of the Russian Armed Forces lost more than 50% of their personnel and more than 200 pieces of military equipment.

In addition, the 64th separate motorized rifle brigade of the Eastern Military District lost more than 90% of its personnel killed, wounded, deserted, and dismissed due to refusal to participate in hostilities. The brigade's equipment is handed over to FSB border service units of the Russian Federation, and the military unit is being prepared for disbandment.

In the border areas of Belgorod Oblast, the Russian military deployed eight BTGs in the reserve of the 1st line from the 6th combined arms army, 11th Army Corps of the Baltic Fleet of the Western Military District and Northern Fleet (61st separate marines brigade, 25th and 138th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 6th combined arms army; 200th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 14th Army Corps of the Northern Fleet; 11th tank regiment of the 3rd motorized rifle division, 9th motorized rifle regiment of the 18th motorized rifle division; 7th separate motorized rifle regiment of the 11th Army Corps), 101st rifle regiment of mobilization reserve of the 1st Army Corps and the "BARS" detachment.

The enemy is building up an air defense system to cover areas where troops are concentrated and launch missile strikes on targets in Kharkiv Oblast. Eight S-400 air defense systems are concentrated in the Arkadiyevka area (Belgorod region, 32 km from the Ukrainian state border).

Kramatorsk direction

● Balakleya - Siversk section: approximate length of the combat line - 184 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 17-20, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 9.6 km;

●  252nd and 752nd motorized rifle regiments of the 3rd motorized rifle division, 1st, 13th and 12th tank regiments, 423rd motorized rifle regiment of the 4th tank division, 201st military base, 15th, 21st, 30th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 2nd Combined Arms Army, 35th, 55th and 74th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 41st Combined Arms Army, 3rd and 14th separate SOF brigades, 2nd and 4th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 2nd Army Corps, 7th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Army Corps, PMCs.

The Russian forces shelled the Ukrainian Defense Forces in the areas of Raihorodok, Ozerne, Piskunivka, Kryva Luka, Siversk, Mykolaivka, Verkhnokamyanske, Spirne, and Vesele.

As a result of the Russian regrouping following the retreat from the Kharkiv and Sloviansk directions, part of the troops of the Central Military District (up to 12 BTGs) are concentrated in Luhansk Oblast as an operational reserve.

The Russian forces led offensive actions, probably by units of the 15th motorized rifle regiment of the 2nd motorized rifle division of the 1st tank army in the direction of Petropavlivka, Kupyansk (Kharkiv Oblast). They had no success.

Donetsk direction

● Siversk - Maryinka section: approximate length of the combat line - 235 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 13-15, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 17 km;

●  Deployed BTGs: 68th and 163rd tank regiments, 102nd and 103rd motorized rifle regiments of the 150 motorized rifle division, 80th tank regiment of the 90th tank division, 35th, 55th and 74th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 41st Combined Arms Army, 31st separate airborne assault brigade, 61st separate marines brigade of the Joint Strategic Command "Northern Fleet", 336th separate marines brigade, 24th separate SOF brigade, 1st, 3rd, 5th, 15th, and 100th separate motorized rifle brigades, 9th and 11th separate motorized rifle regiment of the 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR, 6th motorized rifle regiment of the 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LPR, PMCs.

The Russian military fired at the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces near Rozdolivka, Bilohorivka, Yakovlivka, Soledar, Bakhmutske, Bakhmut, Vesela Dolyna, Zaitseve, Odradivka, Mykolaivka Druga, Mayorsk, New York, Kamianka, Avdiivka, Vodyane, Opytne, and Krasnohorivka.

The Russian forces suffered significant losses when they attempted to storm the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces in the Avdiyivka direction: more than 30 people from the 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR are admitted to medical facilities every day. The occupying forces are trying to restore the combat capability of units that have suffered losses.

Over the past day, the Ukrainian Defense Forces repelled enemy attacks in the areas of Mykhailivka Druga, Vesela Dolyna, Odradivka, Maryinka, Novomykhailivka and Pravdyne.

The Russian military attacked with the forces of the "League" PMC in the directions of Pokrovske, Bakhmut; Zaitseve (lower), Mykolaivka Druga; Vershyna, Zaitseve; Kodema, Zaitseve, but could not break through and withdrew. In the directions of Klynove, Vesela Dolyna and Kodema, Odradivka, the Russian forces managed to penetrate the defenses of the Ukrainian units. Fighting continues.

The enemy 100th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Army Corps attacked in the direction of Pisky, Pervomaiske, and the 39th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 68th Army Corps of the Eastern Military District attacked in the direction of Pisky and Novomykhailivka. The Russian military was stopped and pushed back.

Zaporizhzhya direction

●  Maryinka – Vasylivka section: approximate length of the line of combat - 200 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 17, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 11.7 km;

●  Deployed BTGs: 36th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 29th Combined Arms Army, 38th and 64th separate motorized rifle brigades, 69th separate cover brigade of the 35th Combined Arms Army, 5th separate tank brigade, 37 separate motorized rifle brigade of the 36th Combined Arms Army, 135th, 429th, 503rd and 693rd motorized rifle regiments of the 19th motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 70th, 71st and 291st motorized rifle regiments of the 42nd motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 136th separate motorized rifle

brigade of the 58 Combined Arms Army, 46th and 49th machine gun artillery regiments of the 18th machine gun artillery division of the 68th Army Corps, 39th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 68th Army Corps, 83th separate airborne assault brigade, 40th and 155th separate marines brigades, 22nd separate SOF brigade, 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR, and 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LPR, PMCs.

The Russian forces did not take active actions.

The Russian military fired at the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces in the areas around Kamianske, Stepove, Orihiv, Hulyaipilske, Bilohirya, Olhivske, Temyrivka Novosilka, Velyka Novosilka, Neskuchne, Prechystivka and Vuhledar.

A BTG of the 15th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 2nd Combined Arms Army of the Central Military District was transferred to the Polohy district from the reserve of the 1st line.

Kherson direction

● Vasylivka–Nova Zburyivka and Stanislav section: approximate length of the battle line - 252 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 27, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 9.3 km;

●  Deployed BTGs: 114th, 143rd and 394th motorized rifle regiments, 218th tank regiment of the 127th motorized rifle division of the 5th Combined Arms Army, 57th and 60th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 5th Combined Arms Army, 135th, 503rd and 693rd motorized rifle regiments of the 19th motorized rifle division, 70th, 71st and 291st motorized rifle regiments of the 42nd motorized rifle division, 51st and 137th parachute airborne regiments of the 106th parachute airborne division, 7th military base of the 49th Combined Arms Army, 16th and 346th separate SOF brigades.

In the temporarily captured territory of Kherson Oblast, the Russian forces continued illegal actions against the civilian population. Thus, there is information regarding the mass eviction of residents from their private homes in Pryozerne and Tryfonivka. In the area around Chonhar, servicemen of the occupying forces force the local population to fortify their positions under threats of death.

BTG of the 37th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 36 Combined Arms Army was moved from the Orihiv direction to the Kryvy Rih direction in the Preobrazhenka district.

The Russian military is strengthening its troop groupings in the Mykolaiv and Kryvy Rih directions; in particular, it has moved the 57th motorized rifle regiment of the 6th motorized rifle division of the 3rd Army Corps (three motorized rifle brigades and a tank brigade) from the Kuzminsky training ground to Kherson and a company tactical group (150 servicemen, 10 ICVs, 10 cannons) to Tryfonivka.

To ensure uninterrupted logistics support for the grouping of troops in the Mykolaiv- Kryvy Rih direction, the Russian military made crossings through the lock of the Kakhovska HPP with the use of MTU-90 tank bridge-layers.

Kherson-Berislav bridgehead

●  Velyka Lepetikha – Oleksandrivka section: approximate length of the battle line – 250 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces – 22, the average width of the combat area of one BTG –

11.8 km;

● Deployed BTGs: 108th Air assault regiment, 171st separate airborne assault brigade of the 7th Air assault division, 4th military base of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 429th motorized rifle regiment of the 19th motorized rifle division, 33rd and 255th motorized rifle regiments of the 20th motorized rifle division, 34th and 205th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 49th Combined Arms Army, 224th, 237th and 239th Air assault regiments of the 76th Air assault division, 217th and 331 Air assault regiments of the 98th Air assault division, 126th separate coastal defense brigade, 127th separate ranger brigade, 11th separate airborne assault brigade, 10th separate SOF brigade, PMC.

More than 20 villages were affected by the Russian fire, particularly Trudolyubivka, Petrivka, Bila Krynytsia, Lozove, Blahodativka, Shyroke, Partyzanske, Ternovi Pody, Lymany, Myrne and Tavriyske.

In the Mykolaiv direction, the enemy 56th air assault regiment of the 7th air assault division is advancing in the direction of Myrne, Pravdyne. The battle continues.

Azov-Black Sea Maritime Operational Area:

The forces of the Russian Black Sea Fleet continue to project force on the coast and the continental part of Ukraine and control the northwestern part of the Black Sea. The ultimate goal is to deprive Ukraine of access to the sea and connect unrecognized Transnistria with the Russian Federation by land through the coast of the Black and Azov seas.

The number of ships at sea has significantly decreased in the Black Sea. Currently, six enemy warships are at sea, providing reconnaissance and blocking shipping in the Azov-Black Sea waters. Among them is one cruise missile carrier, a small missile ship of project 21631 "Buyan-M" and three large amphibious ships of project 775 located along the peninsula's southwestern coast. Up to 8 Kalibr missiles can be ready for a salvo.

Russian missile and artillery attacks on Mykolaiv, Ochakiv and 16 villages of the Oblast have resumed. The Russian military uses cruise missiles, S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, MLRS, and artillery.

Russian aviation continues to fly from the Crimean airfields of Belbek and Hvardiyske over the northwestern part of the Black Sea. Over the past day, 9 Su-27, Su-30, and Su-24 aircraft from Belbek and Saki airfields were involved.

9 amphibious ships are in the ports of Novorossiysk and Sevastopol for replenishment and scheduled maintenance. There are no signs of preparation for an amphibious assault on the southern coast of Ukraine.

3 submarines of project 636.3 are in the port of Novorossiysk; one is in Sevastopol.

The movement of enemy military equipment by road and rail transport through the temporarily occupied Autonomous Republic of Crimea in the direction of Kherson Oblast remains intensive.

On September 18, 10 ships with 169.3 thousand tons of agricultural products left the ports of "Odesa", "Chornomorsk", and "Pivdenny" for the countries of Africa, Asia and Europe.

Since the departure of the first ship with Ukrainian food on August 1, 3.7 million tons of agricultural products have been exported. A total of 165 ships have left Ukrainian ports with agricultural products for countries in Asia, Europe and Africa.

Russian operational losses from 24.02 to 18.09

Personnel - almost 54,480 people (+230);

Tanks – 2,210 (+8);

Armored combat vehicles – 4,718 (+17);

Artillery systems – 1,309 (+3);

Multiple rocket launchers (MLRS) - 312 (0); Anti-aircraft warfare systems - 168 (0); Vehicles and fuel tanks – 3,578 (+7); Aircraft - 251 (0);

Helicopters – 217 (+1);

UAV operational and tactical level - 918 (+7); Intercepted cruise missiles - 238 (+2);

Boats / ships - 15 (0).

International diplomatic aspect

"Reports of a mass grave with 440 men, women, and children in Izyum, Ukraine are heartbreaking and should galvanize our support to the brave Ukrainians seeking to liberate their homeland," twitted the US Secretary of State. "Canada condemns these abhorrent atrocities. We'll keep working with partners to hold the perpetrators to account," stated Canada's Prime Minister. The UN Secretary-General expressed his hope that the International Criminal Court (ICC) would be able to investigate the alleged massacre in the eastern Ukrainian city of Izyum. The EU presidency has called for an international tribunal over Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "Izyum is the most destroyed and devastated town compared to Bucha, Borodyanka, Irpen, Hostomel; there are simply residential buildings lying in ruins," said Adviser to the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Anton Gerashchenko. So far, 460 bodies have been exhumed. "Among the bodies that were exhumed today, 99 percent showed signs of violent death," Oleh Synegubov, head of Kharkiv regional administration, said.

A torture chamber was discovered in Kozacha Lopan, a village whose edge lies less than two kilometers from the Russian border. Ukrainian Prosecutor general's office said Russian forces had set up a local police force that ran the prison, adding that documents confirming the functioning of the police department and implements of torture had been seized. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said more than ten such "torture chambers" have been discovered in the region since the hasty withdrawal of the Russian troops last week. Russia conducts atrocities on a scale of magnitude. Those actions constitute the crime of genocide.

Germany has announced its largest financial reparations packages for the world's remaining Jewish Holocaust survivors, worth $1.2 billion, including a $12 million emergency fund for some 8,500 survivors who remain in Ukraine.

The EU executive will recommend suspending up to 70% of €22.5 billion worth of cohesion funds earmarked for Hungary from the EU's 2021-27 budget over corruption and democracy concerns. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said the European Parliament's call to cut funds to Hungary over democratic backsliding was a "boring joke." It's reported that Budapest would try to block the extension of the Russian sanctions. In the meantime, Fidesz [Hungarian Civic Alliance, a right-wing national-conservative political party led by Viktor Orban] should be able to govern until 2060, Viktor Orban reportedly said in a closed-door meeting of the country's ruling elite. He believes that the Eurozone and the EU could fall apart by 2030. However, the Visegrad four (an alliance of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia) will be a strong power center by then. Therefore, it is necessary to think about the meaning of EU membership. The Hungarian Prime minister believes that the Russo-Ukrainian war will last until 2030, and Ukraine could lose significant territories.

Former Romanian Foreign Minister Andrei Marga said during a conference in Alba Iulia, that Ukraine has "unnatural borders" and must cede territories to Russia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. "These statements are in flagrant contradiction to Romania's official position towards Russia's illegal, unjustified and unprovoked aggression against Ukraine, as well as with the fundamental principles of international law that govern international relations today," the Romanian Foreign Ministry reacted to the words of its former minister. Romanian membership in the EU ruled out any territorial claims against its neighbors. After the International Court of Justice ruled on the territorial limits of the continental shelf around Snake Island in 2009, the last bilateral "territorial" issue was resolved.

Russia, relevant news

Satellite images show that Russia is moving a large number of anti-aircraft missiles from St. Petersburg in the direction of Ukraine, the Finnish media resource Yle reported. If one compares the footage taken earlier and at the end of summer – the beginning of autumn, mobile fire platforms and missiles have disappeared from the base in the Zelenogorsk region on the Karelian Isthmus. The publication notes that St. Petersburg, one of the most critical areas for Russian air defense, is surrounded by a protective ring of 14 anti-aircraft missile bases. Now several of them are empty.

Six members of the Council under the President of the Russian Federation for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights appealed to the Prosecutor General of Russia with a demand to investigate the legality of the recruitment of prisoners to participate in the invasion of Ukraine as part of the Wagner PMC.Petersburg in the direction of Ukraine, the Finnish media resource Yle reported. If one compares the footage taken earlier and at the end of summer – the beginning of autumn, it can be seen that, in particular, mobile fire platforms and missiles have disappeared from the base in the Zelenogorsk region on the Karelian Isthmus. The publication notes that St. Petersburg, one of the most important areas for Russian air defense, is surrounded by a protective ring of 14 anti-aircraft missile bases. Now several of them are empty.

Six members of the Council under the President of the Russian Federation for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights appealed to the Prosecutor General of Russia with a demand to investigate the legality of the recruitment of prisoners to participate in the invasion of Ukraine as part of the Wagner PMC.

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4.Biden on ‘60 Minutes’ doubles down on promise to defend Taiwan

Does this deter China? Will the staffers in the administration try to walk this back?

Biden on ‘60 Minutes’ doubles down on promise to defend Taiwan

Stars and Stripes · by Alex Wilson · September 19, 2022

President Joe Biden prepares to board Air Force One at Yokota Air Base, Japan, May 24, 2022. (Kelly Agee/Stars and Stripes)

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President Joe Biden on Sunday for the second time this year said U.S. troops would help defend Taiwan in case of a Chinese invasion, further casting doubt on the United States’ policy of “strategic ambiguity” regarding the island democracy.

Biden in an interview broadcast on CBS’ “60 Minutes” said the U.S. remains committed to the “One China” policy that acknowledges Beijing’s claim over Taiwan but considers the island’s status unresolved.

However, in the case of an “unprecedented attack,” U.S. troops would intervene, the president said.

An unnamed White House spokesman later said official U.S. policy toward China and Taiwan has not changed, CNBC reported Monday.

Biden’s statement mirrored a similar one he made during his first presidential visit to Japan in May, when he told a reporter that the U.S. would militarily defend Taiwan. A White House official at the time also said that official policy toward the island had not changed.

Beijing considers Taiwan, which split from China in 1949, a breakaway province that must be reunified with the mainland. Chinese officials, in a white paper released in August, said they would not “renounce the use of force” to reclaim Taiwan and that the option of using “all necessary measures” is reserved.

Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded Monday to Biden’s comments and thanked the U.S. government for its “rock-solid security commitment to Taiwan.” China had not responded to the Biden interview as of Monday afternoon.

His remarks come just over a month after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Aug. 3 became the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Taiwan in a quarter century, a visit that prompted Beijing to launch a weeklong series of military drills that effectively encircled the island.

Tensions have remained high between China and Taiwan since then, with near-daily incursions by Chinese aircraft and ships into the waters and airspace near Taiwan, according to reports from the island's Ministry of National Defense.

Biden’s recent comments may indicate a “steady shift” from the strategic ambiguity policy that’s meant to deter China and Taiwan from escalating the conflict by leaving the possibility of U.S. intervention uncertain, according to James Brown, an international affairs expert at Temple University’s Japan campus.

“The U.S. leadership has decided that greater clarity is needed to deter an attack by [China] on Taiwan,” Brown wrote Monday in an email to Stars and Stripes. “Yet, at the same time, Washington wants to minimize criticism that it is itself proving a crisis.”

Conversely, Biden’s statements in May and on Sunday could be an attempt to reinforce ambiguity, according to Jeff Kingston, a professor of history and Asian studies at Temple.

“America’s position on Taiwan has always been ‘strategic ambiguity,’ and the White House seems to be going this one step further to clarifying but then re-blurring [its position],” he told Stars and Stripes in an email Monday.

Kingston compared Biden’s statements to China’s practice of entering the territorial waters of disputed island chains in the South China Sea, which he said are attempts to “normalize” that particular action.

“In a way, you can say that Biden and his counterparts in Japan have made similar efforts to make it clear that Taiwan is a red line,” he said, referring to former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s comments in December that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could prompt a military response from Japan.

Stars and Stripes · by Alex Wilson · September 19, 2022

5. Putin's new Ukraine problem: Even the war's biggest supporters are growing dissatisfied

Would this or could this influence Putn to end his war? Or will we see more people falling from hospital room windows?

Putin's new Ukraine problem: Even the war's biggest supporters are growing dissatisfied

The scale of the military and political setbacks has become too vast for even state media and pro-war activists to ignore, experts and insiders say.

NBC News · by Matthew Bodner · September 18, 2022

LONDON — Russian President Vladimir Putin has a problem.

For more than two decades now, Putin’s expanding grip on power has been predicated on his portrayed strength and justified as essential to Russia’s existence. Over time, as the political opposition and the independent media were gradually whittled away, Kremlin propagandists fostered a sense of inevitability underpinning his continued stewardship.

“Russian society, just as the Russian army, is decaying and falling apart because of corruption.”

RUSSIAN SOLIDER PAVEL FILATYEV

From the start, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been presented to the Russian public — and the country’s political elite — in very similar terms: This war was necessary to secure Russia’s future existence, it was well-planned and executed, and it will be won. And with near-total control over the information space at home, there has been very little chance for these narratives to be challenged.

All of that has changed over the past week.

Ukraine has conducted twin counteroffensives to retake territories occupied by Russia — and achieved success that appeared to stun outside observers as well as the Kremlin.

The scale of the Russian military’s and political leadership’s setbacks in Ukraine have become too vast for even state media and pro-war activists to ignore.

“The special military operation has completely failed,” Igor Girkin, who gained notoriety as one of the main leaders of Russia’s initial efforts in eastern Ukraine back in 2014, said in a video this week. “Since March, we have had a full-fledged war. But until now, Russian authorities, the defense ministry, and general staff have behaved as if there’s no war.”

Igor Strelkov, who is also known as Igor Girkin, the top military commander of the self-proclaimed "Donetsk People's Republic," has thrived on the Telegram messaging service since the start of the war.Bulent Kilic / AFP via Getty Images file

Last week, he declared the war “already lost,” and warned his audience of nearly half a million viewers that the war would continue until Russia’s total defeat.

Girkin is himself a controversial figure among the marginal but increasingly vocal group of right-wing pro-war bloggers and activists who have thrived on the Telegram messaging service since the start of the war. Their views have traditionally run parallel to official state media messaging but are not firmly under the Kremlin’s control. With Russian forces on the retreat, more and more they are accusing the leadership of betraying the troops.

“The Kremlin is worried about this panic sentiment,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The pro-war activists are seen as allies, they are part of the broad pro-Putin consensus in Russia, the disagreement is just about tactics. So, the Kremlin actually has limited means to deal with this camp. They can’t turn against them and suppress them the same way they did the liberal opposition.”

Even soldiers who have fought in what the Kremlin insists on calling its “special operation” are returning home, refusing to go back to the front, and challenging the official narrative surrounding the war. As Ukraine retakes territory, videos are appearing online appearing to show massive amounts of equipment abandoned by retreating Russian soldiers.

A Ukrainian soldier standing atop an abandoned Russian tank near a village on the outskirts of Izyum on Sept. 11.Juan Barreto / AFP - Getty Images

While the television has told the public that they’ve been fighting a good, clean war, soldiers are telling their friends, families and fellow citizens stories of a chaotic, unclear and troubled operation.

“Russian society, just as the Russian army, is decaying and falling apart because of corruption,” Pavel Filatyev, a Russian soldier who has published a scathing memoir of the first two months of the war, told NBC News. “So the Russian army often is not acting carefully, they are acting unprofessionally, and a lot of mistakes are being made.”

He fled Russia last month after publishing his 141-page account of the war on the Russian social media network VKontakte. NBC News interviewed him in Paris, where he is now seeking asylum. He said that he was stationed in Crimea on exercises before the start of the war Feb. 24, and his unit was sent into the southern Kherson region without sufficient supplies and ammunition.

“Everyone steals as much as they can at each and every level,” Filatyev said when asked about the reason for equipment shortages. “On paper, everything is amazing. Our soldiers should be well-fed and happy. But in practice, somewhere along the line the extra food was stolen and sold, same with boots and even bulletproof vests.”

Putin says Russia has not ‘lost anything’ over war in Ukraine

Sept. 7, 202201:35

His account of the war paints a picture of a military that was left in the dark about Putin’s intentions before the war began, and under-equipped and mismanaged after troops were ordered into Ukraine. Ultimately, according to Filatyev, the blame falls solely on Putin.

“If you go to Avito and type in bulletproof vest, where do you think those are coming from?” he said, referring to a Craigslist-style service in Russia. “Soldiers are stealing and selling them. Obviously, higher ranked people can sell more, such as ammunition. And at the top, it’s obvious that corruption is through the roof … because Putin just can’t seem to effectively govern the nation.”

Accounts such as Filatyev’s cast doubt on the Kremlin’s ability to do one thing that many in Russia now seem to agree is necessary to win the war: mobilization of some form.

Over the past few days, this sentiment has started spilling over from marginal radical Telegram channels into the official sanctioned discourse on Russian television. One noteworthy incident took place on a Sunday talk show in which guests openly criticized the war and its goals, with some panelists claiming that Russia will now lose the war unless Putin calls for a full mobilization of the Russian military, which is made up of a mix of paid soldiers and conscripts.

But the Kremlin understands this would be an unpopular decision among the pacified and apathetic Russian public.

It said this week that mobilization was not yet in the cards and openly warned those who are seen as patriotic dissenters from crossing the line.

A woman walks amid the destruction on the streets of Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, on April 3.Rodrigo Abd / AP file

Destroyed buildings after shelling in Borodianka on Apr. 8.Metin Aktas / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images file

“Critical points of view can be considered pluralism so long as they remain within the bounds of the law,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday in response to questions about the growing public criticism of the way the war is going. “But the line is very, very thin, one must be careful here.”

‘A private mercenary group that Western military analysts say has been fighting in Ukraine on behalf of the Kremlin seems to be taking a more central role, even appearing to recruit prisoners to join the war in exchange for going free. NBC News has contacted the Kremlin for comment on the issue.

The head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, meanwhile called for regional governors across the country to begin a kind of regional mobilization — an apparent effort to spare the Kremlin the political trouble of a large and loud general mobilization.

Radical right-wing bloggers calling for Putin to take the gloves off in Ukraine are not a direct threat to the regime, Stanovaya said. But their presence in the discourse sends a message to the political elite that backs Putin, undermining their confidence in the leader as the only figure capable of providing stability — the currency of post-Soviet Russian politics, she says.

“Putin’s biggest threat is himself,” she said. “The problem is his leadership. The Russian elite is used to seeing Putin as a strong man, someone who deals with challenges and always knows where he’s taking the country. Now he appears hesitant, he is not convincing at all and he is unclear about Russia’s goals and plans,” she added. “How is Russia going to win this war?”

It’s a question more in Moscow are asking.

NBC News · by Matthew Bodner · September 18, 2022

6. China sanctions Raytheon, Boeing Defense CEOs over Taiwan

China sanctions Raytheon, Boeing Defense CEOs over Taiwan

Defense News · by The Associated Press · September 16, 2022

BEIJING — China announced sanctions on Friday against the chief executives of American defense contractors Raytheon and Boeing Defense over a major U.S. arms sale to rival Taiwan.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning did not specify what the sanctions would be against Gregory Hayes, chairman and CEO of Raytheon Technologies, and Ted Colbert, president and CEO of Boeing Defense, Space and Security.

It wasn’t immediately clear what impact they would have on the executives or their companies, but such sanctions are often mainly symbolic in nature.

The U.S. announced a $1.09 billion arms sale to Taiwan last week, including $355 million for Boeing’s Harpoon missiles and $85 million for Raytheon’s Sidewinder missiles.

“We once again urge the U.S. government and relevant parties to ... stop arms sales to Taiwan and military contact with Taiwan, and stop creating new factors that could lead to tensions in the Taiwan Strait,” Mao said at a daily briefing.

China claims Taiwan, a self-governing island of 23 million people off its east coast, as its territory and says it must eventually come under its control. Taiwan and China split in 1949 during a civil war that brought the Communist Party to power in Beijing.

The U.S. does not formally recognize Taiwan under its one-China policy but is the island’s main supplier of military equipment and is bound by its own laws to ensure Taiwan can defend itself.

Mao also expressed China’s opposition to an upcoming Taiwan trip by Czech lawmakers. A 14-member delegation is to arrive Sunday for a six-day visit, according to Taiwan media reports.

“China is firmly opposed to any form of official contact between Taiwan and countries having diplomatic relations with China,” Mao said.

She called on the Czech lawmakers “to refrain from sending the wrong signals to the separatist forces of Taiwan independence and to stop undermining ... bilateral relations.”

In February, China announced sanctions on Raytheon and Lockheed Martin over a $100 million deal for maintenance of Taiwan’s missile defense systems by the two companies.

China also protested a bill that was approved by a U.S. Senate committee this week that could significantly increase American military support for Taiwan.

7. Ukraine will win the war (transcript of David Petraeus’s interview with CNN’s Jim Sciutto.)

Ukraine will win the war | The Spectator

The Spectator · by David Petraeus

The below is an edited transcript of David Petraeus’s interview with CNN’s Jim Sciutto.

On the war’s momentum: It has fundamentally shifted, and I'm normally fairly guarded and cautious about this, but the tide clearly has turned because the success of this offensive, as important as it is itself on the ground, is that it reflects a hugely important development: Ukraine has been incomparably better than Russia in recruiting, training, equipping, organising and employing additional forces. Russia has been struggling to do just that, literally running out of soldiers, ammunition tanks, fighting vehicles and so forth. Ukraine is supported superbly by the US and Nato, whereas Russia, even if it declared mobilisation today, could not reverse this fundamental reality. So the implications are stark. They're very, very clear. Ukraine will over time experience tough fighting, more casualties, more punishing Russian strikes on civilian infrastructure. But Ukraine will over time, I think, retake the territory that Russia has seized since 24 February. And it's even conceivable now that they could retake Crimea and the Donbas. And oh, by the way, with what's going on in the front lines, there is insurgent activity now picking up in the Russian rear areas carried out by Ukrainians there as well. So again, this is going to take time. There will be tough fighting, all of that. But this is a disastrous situation for Russia now.

And I'm not sure that everyone recognises just how does it worse than Afghanistan. This is going to be a terrible, painful retreat for them. I don't think in doubt any more: Ukraine will prevail unless there's some unforeseen development and as long as we continue to provide the weapons. I'm confident we will continue to do everything that they need to help them build on the momentum that they have now achieved and carry this all the way through to victory, frankly.

On Putin’s next move: Well, again, full mobilisation is too late. And beyond that, they've stripped their training base. They don't have the replacement vehicles. The export sanctions on microchips to Russia have crushed their industrial base and so forth. So that's too late.

The consideration of tactical nuclear weapons, yes, you could have a tactically very disastrous situation, but it doesn't change the fundamental realities which are that Russia just cannot generate the forces, much less employ them capably and competently. Their morale is rock bottom. They're not even sure what they're fighting for other than the paycheck or perhaps to stay out of jail. The morale on the Ukrainian side is sky high. They're winning there. So the question at first is: can the Russians find new defensive lines or do they have to fall all the way back in the East, for example, to the original lines of the Donbas, where there are very considerable, almost world war one-like defences? And then how do they hang on in these other locations? Yes, they'll find places where there are urban settings that they can use effectively and fight hard again. There will be tough fighting, tough casualties, a lot more damage. But Russia is in, again, a truly disastrous situation at this point in time.

And crossing the nuclear threshold would be so profound and the benefit of that, it would not be as profound. So I think, again, Putin is in a very difficult position. What he's going to do now is try to change the narrative and blame others and all the rest of this and find some way to explain why the special operation has failed.

On Putin’s position: He still clearly has a very, very solid grip on power in Russia. But this does obviously call that into question somewhat. And somewhere there are going to be individuals who are going to be raising serious questions. There have been officials, of course, from St Petersburg that suggested he should resign. They ended up in jail. But then there were others from Moscow. So again, he's in a precarious situation, I think, although it's so difficult to predict when someone who has been an autocrat, obviously: what is that moment that pushes them off the throne. And of course, he's a kleptocrat on top of everything else and everyone is empowered by him. But he set out to make Russia great again. What he's really done is make Nato great again. And by the way, what could change this dynamic? I think with respect to European and US reluctance to say that Ukraine should be able to join Nato, given what Russia has done, there has to be a security guarantee at the end of this. The only credible guarantee is Nato membership. And we can then say, look, you brought this on yourself. We were very sensitive to your feelings before. We did not want to needlessly provoke you. You have needlessly carried out an unprovoked invasion of your neighbour and this is the price that you're going to pay as a result of that.

The Spectator · by David Petraeus

8.  The Importance of Terrorist Founders and the Role of Safe Havens

Conclusion:

In the cases studied here, it is clear that the degree of counterterrorism pressure affects the length of a founder’s tenure. The provision of safe haven has allowed Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Hafiz Saeed and Jaish-e-Mohammed’s Masood Azhar to lead their groups across decades. Similarly, it is difficult to overstate how deeply al-Qaeda and its founder bin Laden benefited from its safe haven in Afghanistan, where it used the relative protection provided by the Afghan Taliban to plot the complex terror plot of 9/11. It is critical to examine now how Saeed and Azhar crafted their how and why to understand how the loss of these leaders would affect their groups and what kind of leaders might succeed them.

The Importance of Terrorist Founders and the Role of Safe Havens

By Tricia Bacon, Elizabeth Grimm Sunday, September 18, 2022, 10:01 AM

lawfareblog.com · · September 18, 2022

Editor’s Note: Many terrorist groups are small, and their initial leaders exert outsized influence on their future direction. Drawing on their recent book, Tricia Bacon of American University and Elizabeth Grimm of Georgetown University examine the different ways founding leaders matter. They argue that a safe haven is particularly important, enabling leaders to avoid counterterrorism pressure and, in so doing, more deeply imprint their ideas on the groups they lead.

Daniel Byman

***

Although the killing of al-Qaeda’s former leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, highlights the constant threat many al-Qaeda leaders face, some of the other terrorist leaders in South Asia reside in areas that “over the horizon” counterterror capabilities cannot reach. These groups benefit from the continued survival of their founding leaders, who endure due to the protection afforded them by their safe havens.

In our recent book, “Terror in Transition,” we argue that founders of terrorist organizations establish the framework from which all subsequent leaders operate. We outline the critical role that terrorist founders play, using the cases of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed to illustrate our points. As a result of the extended tenure of their founders, Lashkar and Jaish have well-established frameworks for both the how (the tactics and resource mobilization of the group) and the why (the framing of various actions) of their organizations, which have been developed over the course of decades—nearly 40 years for Lashkar and more than 20 for Jaish. Their founders’ long tenure has been enabled by the safe haven they enjoy under the Pakistani security establishment.

What Does a Founder Do?

Founders create the how and the why of a terrorist organization. The founder’s role in establishing the base of the organization, the framework from which all successors will position themselves, cannot be overestimated.

Every enduring terrorist group needs a convincing answer to the question why. Why fight? What is worth dying to achieve? Without answers to those questions, the terrorist organization will struggle to thrive or even survive. The why is what the group declares it wants to achieve. In the case of Jaish, for example, founder Masood Azhar formed the group as a splinter from Harakat ul-Mujahedeen with the same primary motivating purpose: the unification of Indian-administered Kashmir with Pakistan.

The how of a terrorist group refers to the means they choose to achieve the why. How will groups mobilize resources to achieve their mission? What tactics will they use, both operational and non-operational? Violence is an important tactic for terrorist groups: Why engage in violence, and when is it appropriate to effect change?

We argue that the how comprises two elements: tactics and resource mobilization. With regards to tactics, the founder establishes tactics based on the group’s political opportunity structure for the time and context in which they are operating. For example, some groups will use terrorism and later abandon it, sometimes swearing off violence altogether. With regards to resource mobilization, these processes are needed to secure followers and manage revenue. As many terrorist organizations do not survive their initial years, the ability to develop and embed processes through which a group garners resources is a critical facet of the how that founders are charged with establishing.

It is critical to note that the how and the why are not static, even under a founder. Sometimes the founder himself can upend the how and the why that he initially established, especially if he is at the helm of a group for an extended period of time.

And just as a business organization’s adaptive capacity can be constrained by the entrepreneur who created it, a terrorist organization can be constrained in its adaptation by the contours created by its founder. The founder can set the parameters of how much the group can change and still be acceptable to the core membership. Any change created by a successor can take two forms: incremental or discontinuous. Incremental change refers to changes that do not alter a group’s fundamental nature. This type of change does not challenge or upend the existing how and why of the group, with any changes falling within the natural evolution of the group. In contrast, discontinuous change refers to the introduction of a change that would transform the group. Discontinuous change radically upends either the how, the why, or both.

In addition, the amount of counterterrorism pressure faced by the group impacts the leader by shaping the operational environment. In spaces where counterterrorism pressure is high, the group faces targeted and/or widespread kinetic attacks against their members, bases, and supporters; law enforcement entities are committed to the arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment of terrorist members and supporters; authorities restrict freedom of movement through border security; and limitations are imposed on the ability to use financial institutions. In contrast, groups facing low counterterrorism pressure have the freedom to undertake core activities—such as fundraising, training, communications, and recruitment—with minimal fear of counterterrorism action against them. And nothing defines low counterterrorism pressure like a safe haven.

Who Still Has a Founding Leader?

In the Sunni jihadist movement, few well-established organizations still have their founding leaders. From al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden to al-Shabaab’s Ahmed Abdi Godane to Abu Sayyaf’s Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, counterterrorism actions around the world have successfully removed many powerful founders.

But there are two notable exceptions to this norm, Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Hafiz Saeed and Jaish-e-Mohammed’s Masood Azhar. The longevity of these leaders is attributable to the safe haven they receive from the Pakistani security establishment. In addition to being client groups of the Pakistani security establishment, both organizations and their founders are based in Pakistan’s most politically influential province, Punjab. And they enjoy a sanctuary that even the U.S. “over the horizon” capability does not penetrate.

That Lashkar-e-Taiba still has its founder is particularly noteworthy. It is the only group with a surviving founder among the panoply of Sunni jihadist organizations that emerged out of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Since that time, Hafiz Saeed has developed a multifaceted why for his organization—which, as an Ahl-e-Hadith group, a South Asian variant of Salafism, is an anomaly in Pakistan, which is dominated by Deobandi militant groups. Lashkar under Saeed has two primary goals. First, Lashkar seeks to wrest Kashmir from Indian control and unify it with Pakistan. Second, the group seeks to establish its interpretation of an Islamic state in Pakistan. The group has been involved in other activities, most notably the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan, but Saeed has established these as the group’s top priorities.

Under Saeed’s leadership, the group’s approach toward these two missions, its how, has been dramatically different according to the theater in which it is operating. To achieve its aims in Kashmir, the group has relied on violence, particularly its infamous fedayeen attacks in which operatives are sent on operations with little chance of survival but do not deliberately commit suicide. Its violence has extended beyond Kashmir, most notably its attack on Mumbai in 2008. In a shooting rampage that lasted almost four days, 10 operatives targeted soft targets across the city, including a café, hotels, a Jewish center, and a train station, resulting in 166 deaths.

In stark contrast, Lashkar has abstained from violence in Pakistan entirely. It operates primarily as a social service and proselytization organization. Its headquarters in Muridke is a sprawling complex with educational, religious, and health facilities. In 2017, Saeed added a political party, the Milli Muslim League, to the group’s how, despite his long-standing opposition to democracy. Lashkar’s abstention from violence in Pakistan reflects the group’s intense loyalty to the Pakistani state, which at times has constrained its activity in Kashmir. When Lashkar’s two missions conflict, Saeed has opted to adhere to the Pakistani security establishment’s wishes.

To pursue this mission, Saeed’s group has recruited heavily, though not exclusively, from Punjab. It once relied on the Pakistani security establishment for funds but has become more financially self-sufficient over time by exploiting its sanctuary in Pakistan to generate donations from within Pakistan and expand by soliciting donors in the Gulf.

The other major Sunni jihadist organization with its founding leader is Jaish-e-Mohammed. Jaish was formed in the wake of a hijacking in 1999 that secured Azhar’s release from prison in India. He then quickly formed his own group, breaking away from Harakat ul-Mujahedeen. Jaish soon became the dominant Deobandi militant group in Pakistan. Azhar shares Saeed’s why in Kashmir, namely seeking to coerce its unification with Pakistan. It also shares the goal of an Islamic state, albeit under its own interpretation of Islam.

Jaish’s how also includes violence in Kashmir and social service provision in Pakistan. But in addition to their ideological differences, Jaish has a strong sectarian streak that has included involvement in violence in Pakistan. It is also more tightly interconnected with other Deobandi militant groups in the region, which has included some of its members cooperating with anti-state Deobandi groups, especially in the years after 9/11. Some Jaish members even turned against the Pakistani state after then-President Pervez Musharraf capitulated to U.S. pressure to support the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Perhaps most famously, disaffected Jaish members were involved in a subsequent plot to assassinate Musharraf. But in the past decade, the Pakistani security establishment has regained its grip on the organization, in part by relying on Azhar’s leadership.

Both groups have benefited from safe haven in Pakistan for decades. One reflection of the benefits of that relationship is the survival of their founding leaders. These founders’ why and how have been inextricably shaped by their relationship with the Pakistani security establishment. However, with these long-standing founders, neither group has weathered the challenge of succession, and the lines of succession for Saeed and Azhar are unclear, creating the potential for infighting and competition when succession finally occurs.

The Founder’s Legacy

The founder’s background, his training, his social ties with his religious or social community, and his organizing ability all serve as factors that help him mobilize the resources necessary to engage in violence and the ideational pull necessary to attract followers.

Sometimes the founder’s personality and values become interwoven with the group’s how and why; as time passes, the founder and the group become virtually indistinguishable, as was the case with Shoko Asahara and the group he founded, Aum Shinrikyo, and to some degree with the two Pakistani militant groups examined here. Other founders adhere to the idea of mission centrality, rather than identity centrality, precisely to ensure that the how and why of their groups do not die with them, as was seen with bin Laden’s leadership of al-Qaeda. Wherever founders fall on this spectrum, there has been a tendency in policymaking circles to write an obituary for a group when its founder’s tenure has ended. However, groups’ ability to transition to successors provides tremendous insight into the ability of the founders to create a durable how and why for the group, a legacy that outlives them.

In the cases studied here, it is clear that the degree of counterterrorism pressure affects the length of a founder’s tenure. The provision of safe haven has allowed Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Hafiz Saeed and Jaish-e-Mohammed’s Masood Azhar to lead their groups across decades. Similarly, it is difficult to overstate how deeply al-Qaeda and its founder bin Laden benefited from its safe haven in Afghanistan, where it used the relative protection provided by the Afghan Taliban to plot the complex terror plot of 9/11. It is critical to examine now how Saeed and Azhar crafted their how and why to understand how the loss of these leaders would affect their groups and what kind of leaders might succeed them.

lawfareblog.com · by ProfLizGrimm · September 18, 2022

9. Mold Is Consuming Fort Stewart’s Barracks as a Pattern Emerges Across the Army

I am sensitive to this as our daughter's apartment in Charlottesville is being treated for mold and she had to move into temporary quarters.

But this is a very troubling pattern that obviously has to be fixed immediately. 

Mold Is Consuming Fort Stewart’s Barracks as a Pattern Emerges Across the Army

military.com · by Steve Beynon · September 19, 2022

After a long mission in Europe, a soldier returned to his Fort Stewart barracks only to discover mold had completely consumed his room. The infestation wasn't only on the walls; his bags and bed turned black and green, encrusted in mold. Most of his belongings were ruined.

Broken air conditioners in the sweltering, humid Georgia heat; poor ventilation; and little to no barracks maintenance have created a decades-long breeding ground for mold, which soldiers repeatedly try to clean to no avail.

"This is the reason a lot of us are getting out," the soldier who found his room blanketed in mold and who is leaving the Army in a few months told Military.com. "We can't live like this. … It's up to junior soldiers to get this stuff out to [the press] or on social media, and that's the only way senior leaders are going to know they failed."

Photo of mold on the ceiling of a barracks shared by a Fort Stewart, Georgia, soldier. (Courtesy photo)

The barracks' halls and doors will suddenly appear painted black with mold. In soldiers' rooms, the mold spreads quickly onto mattresses and gear if they must leave for extended periods of time and don't constantly combat the crud.

Military.com spoke with more than 20 soldiers, mostly junior enlisted troops but also commanders and senior noncommissioned officers.

All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity, because they were not authorized to speak to the press. In every interview, troops described disgusting conditions that would get an apartment or restaurant in the civilian world condemned.

They painted a picture of senior leaders blasting platoon-level NCOs for not being harder on their soldiers to clean; young soldiers being told to buy their own cleaning and protective supplies to scrub mold, stretching their already thin paychecks; and the service's arm in charge of maintaining facilities on post almost never responding to problematic living conditions.

Photo of mold on the ceiling and walls of a barracks shared by a Fort Stewart, Georgia, soldier. (Courtesy photo)

Officials at Fort Stewart have no plans to relocate soldiers living in moldy barracks -- an issue that has plagued the Army as a whole for years -- and units will have to wait more than a decade for new dorms that are less likely to become a breeding ground for mold to be built, long after all soldiers currently stationed at the base have retired or moved.

Exposure to mold leads to a wide range of health issues, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including stuffy noses, headaches, fatigue, wheezing, itching, and fungal and respiratory infections in more extreme cases. A World Health Organization study in 2009 found a link between mold exposure and memory loss, lethargy and the development of asthma in children. Mold can also make someone susceptible to more severe allergic reactions related to other allergies.

Army officials declined to make any senior service leaders available to discuss the mold issues reported by soldiers at Fort Stewart. The issues at the base come after press coverage of mold issues, first detailed by Military.com, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where Army press officials struggled to answer basic questions about what the service would do to address the problem.

A week after Military.com contacted Army press officials with details of accounts from soldiers about the pervasive mold problem, Fort Stewart held a so-called "stand down day" to teach NCOs how to tackle mold issues and issued a press release after being told Military.com planned to publish this story. That statement had few details on how the garrison is combating mold. Even soldiers on leave were encouraged to attend mold remediation training virtually, and leaders opened every barracks room for a sudden inspection, according to multiple text messages reviewed by Military.com. Commanders at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, also had widespread barracks inspections this week after Military.com interviewed soldiers stationed there about moldy conditions.

'Operation Eradicate Mold'

After Military.com began asking questions, garrison leaders at Fort Stewart launched "Operation Eradicate Mold," which tasks soldiers to clean mold every other day from 11 a.m. to noon, according to an internal memo and text messages reviewed by Military.com. Platoon-level NCOs are then expected to inspect all rooms. Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston and Army Secretary Christine Wormuth inspected barracks at Fort Benning, Georgia, on Tuesday.

"We can clean all day, but this [mold] is going to grow back," one staff sergeant at Fort Stewart told Military.com. "This isn't because my guys left a pizza box out too long. This is an actual infrastructure issue."

Mold issues are nothing new to the service and frequently draw scrutiny from Congress and lengthy complaints from junior troops online, but it is rare that garrison leaders publicly advocate for additional resources or otherwise acknowledge problems.

Photo shared by a Fort Stewart, Georgia, soldier of mold on a bed in the barracks. (Courtesy photo)

"Soldiers often need to file complaints with Congress, the Army secretary or the press," said Katherine Kuzminski, director of the military, veterans and society program at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

"The cultural part of the military is hardship breeds character," she added, noting that complaints from junior enlisted soldiers are rarely taken seriously, and that troops often fall under leaders who lived in similarly bad conditions and have either forgotten about the experience, or believe others should live in the same conditions they did.

Behind many of the mold issues that are springing up across the service are the old barracks known as VOLAR buildings, constructed under the Army's Project Volunteer Army program in the 1970s. That effort aimed to construct barracks with high-quality living quarters, giving soldiers amenities like kitchen appliances and more privacy. They were a major upgrade from World War II-style barracks in which entire platoons would share an open room, a design the Army relied on during most of the 20th century.

"Base location decisions were largely made when large swathes of land were for an affordable price," Kuzminski said. "But these locations are more susceptible to increasing temperatures. The more modern barracks are approaching the age [where] they need regular upkeep. It's gotten to the point where it's beyond updating the HVAC system."

But that move for better barracks after the service transitioned to an all-volunteer force would go on to haunt the Army. Many service leaders believe the barracks' shoddy construction and aging air conditioning units are the underlying cause of the mold issues.

In August, Fort Bragg started evacuating some 1,200 soldiers from similar barracks amid serious mold issues. The 12 Smoke Bomb Hill barracks there that were deemed to be unlivable are set to be demolished next year, with new barracks replacing them five years ahead of schedule.

However, that move was made only after the issue drew the ire of lawmakers, concerns from Wormuth, and media scrutiny. Army bases do not have excess barracks in most cases, so relocating soldiers is a difficult move for garrison leaders. Fort Bragg officials are giving soldiers housing allowances and letting them live in on-post hotels free of charge.

But Fort Stewart leadership is not considering such a move. Fort Bragg's relocation effort is the most dramatic action any base has taken. The move will put strains on the base for most of the rest of the decade, making it unlikely to become a precedent for other garrisons. Senior leaders there have to find space where they can place troops, which is expected to take months. And simply giving all displaced soldiers a housing allowance would stretch an already limited real estate market in surrounding Fayetteville, North Carolina.

At Fort Stewart, officials say there is no need to relocate any troops.

"The team was able to go into that battle rhythm and get the rooms cleaned. We haven't gotten any requests or identified [a need] for that," Command Sgt. Maj. Quentin Fenderson, the 3rd Infantry Division's top enlisted leader, told Military.com in an interview Thursday about moving soldiers out of the infested barracks.

There are 535 VOLAR barracks in the Army's inventory, 30 of which are at Fort Stewart. However, mold issues are not exclusive to those old living quarters, or even barracks. Military housing across the country had long suffered from poor conditions, including at Fort Belvoir, Virginia ,where at least a dozen families have been displaced due to subpar housing conditions, including mold and rodent and roach infestations, according to reporting from Task & Purpose.

Fenderson said the rooms are being cleaned, yet Military.com has reviewed dozens of photos and videos from soldiers and FaceTimed with other sources at Fort Stewart since early September, showing that the mold persists.

Fenderson partly blamed the humid conditions of Georgia. However, Military.com found little evidence of systemic mold issues in other industries in the South, including housing for college students, hotels and gyms. He also pointed to the standard revolving door of leadership on base, including platoon-level NCOs, who move on and then the next person must be brought up to speed on the mold issue. Perceived blame against lower-level NCOs is something that has drawn the ire of the rank and file at Fort Stewart.

"The problem is we get a change of leadership that comes into the formation," Fenderson said. "We need to make sure all leaders are trained."

But training on mold mitigation and cleaning has been virtually nonexistent. Fort Stewart officials pointed to a civilian certification program for soldiers to learn how to combat mold, but could not answer questions on how many troops have been certified. In interviews, no soldiers, including a commander on the base, had ever heard of such a training program. Mitigation is often rudimentary, such as issuing dehumidifiers, which can only slow down the rate of mold growth. The CDC says humidity levels indoors need to be below 50%. Two soldiers said their dehumidifiers read their rooms at around 70% humidity.

Painted with Mold

Most Fort Stewart soldiers interviewed said that their company-level leadership is often sympathetic. But commanders on that level have relatively little influence over living conditions. In some cases, junior soldiers told Militay.com that their commanders or NCOs would buy gallons of bleach, gloves and other cleaning supplies because getting it from the Directorate of Public Works, or DPW, which oversees facilities, is too difficult -- effectively creating a situation in which soldiers are using their own income to subsidize DPW's work.

One noncommissioned officer detailed the barracks their soldiers live in as looking like it's painted with mold, with the walls and doors almost completely covered.

"When I first moved here originally, I noticed the mold. It [kept] growing, I kept cleaning it, and it kept coming back. It got worse and worse, to the point where it is today," the NCO told Military.com. "All we get told is to put in work orders."

Photo shared by a Fort Stewart, Georgia, soldier of mold on a barracks door. (Courtesy photo)

Those work orders go to DPW, which has about a 10-person staff who are in charge of maintaining facilities at Fort Stewart. But the NCO, and all other soldiers interviewed, could not think of a single anecdote in which DPW performed mold mitigation, which sometimes can include removing parts of ceilings and walls. In virtually all cases, soldiers were told their mold issue was not categorized as a priority in DPW's internal system and that they needed to clean it themselves.

"A DPW [worker] came into [the] room with basically a hazmat suit on, respirator … the whole white getup," one junior infantry soldier told Military.com, describing a mold issue being inspected. "They're like, 'Yeah that's pretty bad, you should clean this up,' and left."

Soldiers are often told to clean with bleach they should buy themselves. Yet the Occupational Safety Health Administration, or OSHA, and the Environmental Protection Agency both say bleach shouldn't be used to routinely treat mold. While bleach can scrub away mold, the spores still exist in many cases and will just grow back. In some instances, bleach can make a mold problem worse due to the water in it eventually evaporating after use. Troops interviewed also said they are not given proper protection gear such as gloves, goggles or respirators, as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

DPW officials at Fort Stewart told Military.com that they have done plenty of mold mitigation and cleanup, which includes the use of hydrogen peroxide. Fort Stewart Director of Public Works, Jamie Heidle, described efforts in several buildings. However, none of those buildings was among the eight barracks from which Military.com reviewed photos or interviewed soldiers who were residents. Officials also refuted claims soldiers aren't properly equipped with all the supplies they need to do their own cleanup.

"Every soldier is provided the equipment they need to clean up," Fenderson said. "Sometimes, you have leaders that don't do the right thing. Some will identify a problem, but because they have [something else] they see as a higher priority, it doesn't [get fixed]."

The Army as a whole allocates roughly $1 billion per year on barracks construction, maintenance and renovation. Fort Stewart's 30 VOLAR barracks are all set for major renovations, costing about $15 million per building. The base has also been approved for the construction of new barracks consisting of 372 rooms, but it's unclear how many buildings that will end up being. All that new construction and renovation won't be completed until at least 2035.

But that might not be enough money to keep maintaining old barracks while building enough new ones. On Tuesday, Wormuth told Stars and Stripes that the Army has underinvested in housing.

"With everything that we were doing in the last 20 years, where the focus was so much downrange, you know, we probably were not paying as close attention to our own infrastructure, as we are right now," she said.

Army officials with direct knowledge of construction efforts blamed federal bureaucracy and tangling with Congress. One Army official said a single barracks takes, on average, at least five years to complete. For comparison, the Pentagon was built in 16 months during World War II.

As for Fort Stewart, Fenderson, who is effectively in charge of soldier welfare for the 3rd Infantry Division, says the base doesn't need more resources and felt satisfied with the decade-long timetable for barracks construction and renovations.

"The Army has a plan in terms of how things are budgeted, and it's working out," he said. "We have a responsibility to make sure soldiers have everything we need, and I think we're getting after it."

-- Steve Beynon can be reached at Steve.Beynon@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @StevenBeynon.

military.com · by Steve Beynon · September 19, 2022

10. Some Assembly Required: Why the UN’s Broadest Forum Matters More Than Ever

Excerpts:

As with virtually everything that happens at the UN, the world body’s ability to project strength in a post-pandemic world will depend mostly on the tenor struck by its individual member states. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, delivered a speech on September 8 in which she outlined six new U.S. commitments aimed at fortifying the world body. The General Assembly will signal whether these undertakings—which included a stricter adherence to the UN Charter, a pledge to minimize use of the veto, and a commitment to procedural reforms at the Security Council—echo throughout the membership. If the United States has done its diplomatic homework and can demonstrate that it is leading a broad coalition behind concrete measures to drive the UN forward, that could foretell consequential change. The congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has demonstrated how a tradition-bound institution can innovate its methods to engage a wider public. Part of the test of this year’s General Assembly is how the proceedings manifest on television, Twitter, and TikTok.

With Europe fast weaning itself off Russian energy and the West trying to wall itself off from intrusive Chinese technologies, the bright promise of global interdependence has dimmed into a hard-headed, selective, and wary approach to international engagement. And yet, pandemics, climate shocks, and economic tremors cross borders with abandon, thwarting efforts at retreat and isolation. In a world increasingly devoid of agreed rules, it is notable that the United States, Russia, and China all profess deference to the UN and claim to want to see the UN system triumph. That in itself represents an essential opportunity to surmount competition and sustain cooperation.

That the UN can be seen as both the seat of the liberal internationalist order or, in Putin’s conception, as a set of universal rules operating to constrain Western prerogatives, is a reminder of the scale of the challenge. Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the UN, used to say that if the UN did not exist, the world would have to invent it. The UN does exist, but both the institution and the world it serves demand reinvention. This year’s General Assembly meeting has the opportunity to distinguish itself as the moment when that transformation began in earnest.

Some Assembly Required

Why the UN’s Broadest Forum Matters More Than Ever

By Suzanne Nossel and Leslie Vinjamuri

September 19, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Suzanne Nossel and Leslie Vinjamuri · September 19, 2022

The 77th High Level session of the UN General Assembly is the first time the gathering of global leaders has been fully in person since the pandemic began. In the intervening period, the world seems to have slid backward. Global fault lines have deepened. Mistrust between the United States and China has grown as a result of disputes about the origins of COVID-19, China’s crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, and tensions over Taiwan and the South China Sea. China’s decision to indulge Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal and illegal invasion of Ukraine has solidified the sense of a world divided into two camps, with NATO and the West on one side and Russia and China and their acolytes on the other. Meanwhile, middle powers are weighing their alternatives, with some playing both sides.

The last three years have also shredded an already fragile net of global humanitarian support. The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare drastic deficiencies and inequalities in the world’s preparedness for unpredictable public health crises. The consequences of climate change—flooded cities, deadly heat waves, wildfires, and superstorms—are mounting. The pandemic, the climate crisis, and the Ukraine war have conspired create an unparalleled global food crisis plunging 345 million people into acute food insecurity and 50 million to the edge of famine, according to the World Food Programme. Forty nations are now at risk of defaulting on their sovereign debt. Longer-term plans to remedy global inequities and deprivations have also been thrown off course. It is now clear that the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals—the 17 benchmarks on everything from ending poverty to gender equality that were established in 2015 and supposed to be met by 2030—will not be achieved.

Against this global backdrop, the UN General Assembly High-Level meeting, the week when world leaders travel to New York, musters with its own idiosyncrasies and limitations. This year’s proceeding will be consequential in at least three ways: as an opportunity to see where member states stand on the war in Ukraine; as a catalyst to galvanize faltering humanitarian energies and vision; and as a test of whether the world’s most universal organization can sustain its relevance in a diverse, digitized, and divided world.

GLOBAL TEMPERATURE CHECK

The timing of this year’s General Assembly, just a week after the world absorbed news of Ukraine’s startling battlefield gains, renders the event a live litmus test of global opinion about Putin’s war and the bold authoritarian power play that it represents. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has filed a special petition to provide pre-recorded remarks at the UN General Assembly, arguing that he cannot leave his war-torn nation. The petition, a rare exception to rules requiring heads of state to appear in person or designate a substitute, won support from 101 nations, with 19 abstentions (including China) and just seven countries opposed. With Zelensky absent, Western heads of state will take the lead rallying others to assist Ukraine in its war with Russia. The UN General Assembly offers a chance for the United States and its partners to demonstrate momentum in terms of persuading the globe’s middle powers to get behind a liberal, rights-based agenda. Putin tried to parade what had been seen as a rising authoritarian alliance at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit in Uzbekistan, alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping and other leaders, last week. But this alliance is showing its fissures. The question now is whether the West and its allies can do better in demonstrating a broad and united front.

During a headline-grabbing press conference where he admitted that Beijing had expressed misgivings over the Ukraine war, Putin excoriated the West for seeking to impose its own rules on others. He urged a return to a world in which the UN and its broad multilateral treaties reigned supreme. Putin’s lip-service to the UN system, with its founding precepts, treaties, and institutions is an opening the West should seize. As Washington and its friends try to manage an ascendant China and a revanchist Russia, international law and norms have the potential to be potent constraints that draw a line between legitimate and illegitimate action. That is, provided the United States and its partners demonstrate that the weight of world opinion trusts them to respect these international principles and rejects Putin’s cynical perversions thereof.

Russia’s actions in Ukraine have both deepened divisions and catalyzed new coalitions across the globe. Since Putin invaded in February, countries have been forced to take a stance on this flagrant violation of the core obligation of the UN Charter, which requires members not to use “force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” In March, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution that affirmed Ukrainian sovereignty and called on Russia to withdraw its troops from the invaded territory. The final tally had 141 states supporting the resolution and just five opposing it, with 35 abstentions. In April, the General Assembly adopted a resolution to suspend Russia’s membership on the UN Human Rights Council with 93 voting in favor, 24 against, and 58 abstentions. In a world divided by power and ideology, and one where human rights have been politicized and contested, these resolutions signaled broad agreement. The ability of the United States and its allies to amass strong global majorities, however, masked the ambivalence of many leading middle powers, including South Africa and India, which abstained on both resolutions, and Indonesia and Brazil, which likewise chose the middle ground on the Human Rights Council suspension.

Until last week, Xi’s loyalty to Putin seemed unshakeable.

A Security Council session on Ukraine is planned for September 22. The council provides an important floodlit stage for international shaming, but the veto-beholden body has been deadlocked on any action pertaining to the war. The council thus functions as perhaps the world’s most watched focus group, with choices of phrase and points of emphasis carefully parsed. To date, Beijing’s decision to remain aligned with Russia and the reluctance of leading Latin American, Asian, and African nations to take active sides in the war has helped Putin sustain popular support inside Russia for his costly military campaign. The prominence of the war in speeches made by heads of state, reactions to Zelensky’s on-screen remarks, and the reception afforded to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will all be markers of whether the world is turning more widely against Putin’s war.

Until last week, Xi’s loyalty to Putin seemed unshakeable. The Chinese president made his first trip abroad since the pandemic began more than two years ago to attend the summit in Uzbekistan. His meeting with Putin indicated tides may be shifting and Chinese support may not be absolute. Putin confessed that Xi has “questions and concerns” about the war. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also used this same summit to state publicly, for the first time, that “today’s era is not one of war” and to urge Putin to move toward a “path to peace.” The tenor of the General Assembly meeting will be a closely watched indicator of whether Beijing’s support for Russia’s war is still on solid ground.

As the Russian military loses territory in Ukraine, concerns raised at the UN General Assembly could contribute to a tipping point in global attitudes toward the war and reverberate back in Moscow. Russia’s resort to punitive and highly risky tactics, including enforced blackouts in eastern Kharkiv and Donetsk and shelling near Ukraine’s teetering Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, represent the kind of conscience-shocking measures that could spur a broader moral consensus that would weigh on Beijing and Moscow. While neither leader is beholden to a democratic constituency, each depends on the support of elites and bureaucrats. If those in positions of influence in Moscow and Beijing continue to sour on the war, the consequences both on the battleground and within the Kremlin could be grave for Putin.

While this session of the UN General Assembly will serve as a timely political test, it also has the potential to reaffirm and even accelerate a tentative pattern whereby the world body has begun to step into the void created by the Security Council’s perpetual gridlock on matters of international peace and security. In April, the General Assembly passed a resolution requiring its president to open a debate within ten working days of any use of the veto by a permanent member of the Security Council. This is intended to create accountability for those who wield the veto, forcing them to justify their action before an assembly of 193 states that are adept at pointing fingers. The prospect of a public, televised spectacle in which countries that block Security Council action are put under a global microscope has the potential to serve as a powerful disincentive for using the veto. It remains to be seen whether the net result will be to foster greater Security Council consensus or simply to keep hot button issues away from the council. But the experiment itself will be significant. That measure, coupled with the General Assembly’s resolutions on Ukraine and its ongoing investigation into war crimes in Syria, evince an increasingly restive global polity, unwilling to defer to an often paralyzed Security Council. The tenor of the debate this week has the potential to accelerate this trend, slowly shifting power away from an ossified and unreformed Council.

UP TO THE TASK?

The work of the General Assembly reflects the evolution of the UN: Its most tangible accomplishments are now less Rose Garden-style diplomatic breakthroughs than the plodding work of tackling chronic problems that affect lives and well-being around the world. Meetings this week will focus on education, climate change, the Sustainable Development Goals, and progress in vanquishing COVID-19. Refugee crises, climate disasters, democratic fissures, and now rising food and energy prices have rendered the last several years an inward-looking period in capitals around the world, with resources and leaders tied up with domestic populations and problems.

Development aid has been diverted to the war in Ukraine, leaving humanitarian crises in Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, Yemen, and elsewhere to fester amid soaring food prices and collapsing services. Conflict, climate change, and the effects of the pandemic have catapulted food insecurity to the top of the global agenda. The rate of progress on ending world hunger and ensuring access to clean water would need to accelerate fivefold in order for those two goals to be met on time, according to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

This session of the General Assembly provides an opportunity for a global reset, but it must also reenergize collective action around a response to the food, fuel, and debt crises and the radically unequal domestic vulnerabilities that have ensued. For this to happen, persuasion alone will be insufficient. The United States especially will need to demonstrate commitment and leadership and work with developing countries to deliver solutions to the global food and energy crisis. To this end, the United States is convening a summit on food security with the African Union and the EU. The test of these efforts will lie in the firmness of commitments voiced and the size of dollar amounts pledged. They will also represent a key measure of UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s ability to galvanize action in the wake of a series of pleas he has made about the fast-deteriorating state of global humanitarian well-being.

Like all high-profile events that are returning live after a pandemic hiatus, this year’s General Assembly will raise the inevitable question of whether the proceedings come across as relevant, urgent, and up-to-the-minute for a world that has evolved in unimagined ways. The queen’s funeral, taking place on the first scheduled day of high-level meetings, is a vivid reminder of a world in transition and one in which trusted institutions—including the U.S. government—seem shakier than they did even just a few short years ago. The timing of the funeral and the wall-to-wall global media coverage it will command also adds a layer of complexity for those in New York who are charged with ensuring that what happens at the UN this week breaks through to reach a global public and avoids being overshadowed. The fact that the UN’s made-in-1948 structures, systems, and processes have long struggled to evolve, often frozen in place by the imperatives of elusive international consensus, does not help.

Conflict, climate change, and the effects of the pandemic have catapulted food insecurity to the top of the global agenda.

As with virtually everything that happens at the UN, the world body’s ability to project strength in a post-pandemic world will depend mostly on the tenor struck by its individual member states. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, delivered a speech on September 8 in which she outlined six new U.S. commitments aimed at fortifying the world body. The General Assembly will signal whether these undertakings—which included a stricter adherence to the UN Charter, a pledge to minimize use of the veto, and a commitment to procedural reforms at the Security Council—echo throughout the membership. If the United States has done its diplomatic homework and can demonstrate that it is leading a broad coalition behind concrete measures to drive the UN forward, that could foretell consequential change. The congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has demonstrated how a tradition-bound institution can innovate its methods to engage a wider public. Part of the test of this year’s General Assembly is how the proceedings manifest on television, Twitter, and TikTok.

With Europe fast weaning itself off Russian energy and the West trying to wall itself off from intrusive Chinese technologies, the bright promise of global interdependence has dimmed into a hard-headed, selective, and wary approach to international engagement. And yet, pandemics, climate shocks, and economic tremors cross borders with abandon, thwarting efforts at retreat and isolation. In a world increasingly devoid of agreed rules, it is notable that the United States, Russia, and China all profess deference to the UN and claim to want to see the UN system triumph. That in itself represents an essential opportunity to surmount competition and sustain cooperation.

That the UN can be seen as both the seat of the liberal internationalist order or, in Putin’s conception, as a set of universal rules operating to constrain Western prerogatives, is a reminder of the scale of the challenge. Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the UN, used to say that if the UN did not exist, the world would have to invent it. The UN does exist, but both the institution and the world it serves demand reinvention. This year’s General Assembly meeting has the opportunity to distinguish itself as the moment when that transformation began in earnest.

• SUZANNE NOSSEL is former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations and currently serves as CEO of PEN America.
• LESLIE VINJAMURI is Director of the U.S. and the Americas Program at Chatham House and Associate Professor of International Relations at SOAS University of London.

Foreign Affairs · by Suzanne Nossel and Leslie Vinjamuri · September 19, 2022

11. Long, slow decline of the US military's all-volunteer force puts America in danger by Dr. Mark T. Esper

Conclusion:

With the threats from China and elsewhere growing, we cannot risk our future by ignoring these issues. Most solutions will take years to bear fruit, and a return to conscription is not the answer. But if we are to deter war, be victorious if it comes, and win the 21st century, we will need to maintain a sizable, high-quality force of volunteers. That means today’s leaders must act now to educate and inspire the next great American generation to serve.

Long, slow decline of the US military's all-volunteer force puts America in danger

Obesity, drug use, health problems, crime and academic issues jeopardize US military recruitment

foxnews.com · by Dr. Mark T. Esper | Fox News

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U.S. Army kicking out 1,500 soldiers over vaccine status is ‘absurd’: Brett Velicovich

Former U.S. Army Special Operations veteran Brett Velicovich discusses the negative impact the COVID-19 vaccine mandate has had on the United States military on ‘Fox & Friends Weekend.’

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The U.S. military’s all-volunteer force (AVF) is slowly dying. In the five decades since conscription ended, the AVF produced the high-quality force it promised. In conflict after conflict, the more-experienced, better-motivated, and professional U.S. troops dominated the battlefield.

Today, however, the armed services are struggling to meet their recruiting goals like rarely before. The Army is the most affected, projected to fall short by up to 15,000 soldiers, with a larger deficit expected next year. Experts point to a variety of reasons, such as insufficient pay and benefits, a difficult work-life environment, "culture war" issues, COVID-19, and a strong job market. Even if each were "fixed," the core issues driving the AVF’s decline still won’t be reversed.

The fact is the pool of Americans aged 17-24 who are qualified and interested in serving continues to shrink. When I was secretary of the Army in 2018, 71% of these 34 million young people could not meet the military’s entry requirements due mostly to obesity, drug use, physical and mental health problems, and criminal misconduct. Four years later, that number is even higher. Further, of the 23% eligible to serve today, another 10% don’t meet the military’s academic standards. Worse, of the 3.5 million young Americans remaining, only 9% (~320,000) have a proclivity to serve. A nation of 332 million people should do better than that.

The numbers are all heading in the wrong direction, driven by broader cultural and lifestyle trends and a population unfamiliar with the less than 1% of the U.S. population in uniform that protects them. When the draft ended in 1973, most young people had a family connection to the armed forces who could explain military life and encourage service to country; today that number is far lower. Major reductions in the size of the U.S. military and in the number of bases across the country after the Cold War’s end contributed to this problem. A "knowledge gap" has grown over time due to civilians’ lack of interaction with those in uniform. This has led to an "identity gap" that inhibits many from considering a stint in the armed forces. It’s no mystery why a military caste has developed in America, with nearly 80% of today’s service members having a family member that served. All of this affects a broader set of civil-military relations with which the nation is wrestling.

Pentagon officials are struggling to find recruits. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)

The scope and scale of these trends are beyond the ability of the Pentagon to remedy. There are actions the services can and are taking, but these only address the problem at the margins. Because the ability of the military to defend the country depends directly on a sizable force of top-notch volunteers, this is a national challenge that must be addressed at the highest levels.

This means the White House and Congress must work together to reverse the underlying trends. They could begin by standing up a bipartisan commission of esteemed leaders, much like President Richard Nixon did in 1969 when he decided to end conscription. This time, rather than creating the AVF, the new panel’s mission would be to save it. As such, commissioners must focus on the key issues: increasing the pool of young people qualified to serve and raising their interest in doing so.

For reasons that also extend beyond the military’s needs, the commission should look at ways to improve the health and fitness of America’s youth, review and update eligibility requirements, expand JROTC nationally, create new ways for civilians to interact with their military brethren, eliminate misconceptions about military life, and ensure recruiters unfettered access to high schools across America. Meanwhile, the Pentagon must steer away from lowering standards, reducing the size of the military, or creating hollow combat formations. We must field the force we need to win our nation’s wars, not take shortcuts.

The president and lawmakers, working with governors as appropriate, must also educate and inspire our youth by addressing their concerns, extolling the virtues of military service, and discussing the benefits and opportunities that come with answering the call to duty. They should also seek the assistance of sports figures, entertainers, and others who are influential with America’s youth. A message along the lines of "be healthy, keep fit, avoid trouble, and consider serving your country in uniform" would be a solid start.

With the threats from China and elsewhere growing, we cannot risk our future by ignoring these issues. Most solutions will take years to bear fruit, and a return to conscription is not the answer. But if we are to deter war, be victorious if it comes, and win the 21st century, we will need to maintain a sizable, high-quality force of volunteers. That means today’s leaders must act now to educate and inspire the next great American generation to serve.

Dr. Mark T. Esper was the 27th Secretary of Defense, and author of the New York Times best-selling memoir, "A Sacred Oath."

foxnews.com · by Dr. Mark T. Esper | Fox News

12. Putting Ukrainian battle successes into cold, hard perspective - Responsible Statecraft

How many think the US is "a past its prime superpower" like Russia? This author does.

Excerpts:

Warlords, gangsters, jihadists, mercenaries, slave traders, arms dealers, drug traffickers, paramilitaries, and spies flowed into the power vacuum. In Syria, which is partially occupied by U.S. forces to this day, Russia also intervened, resulting in a split with two-thirds of the country governed by a Russian-backed coalition, and the remainder controlled by American proxy forces and special operations soldiers.

That’s been the status quo in Syria for the better part of a decade; and at this juncture, the Kharkiv counteroffensive notwithstanding, it seems to be the most likely future for Ukraine, too: a war that never ends, in an unlucky country caught between two past-their-prime superpowers, neither of which has the ability to win outright, nor the humanity to negotiate a compromise, with the result that many thousands die in vain.

Putting Ukrainian battle successes into cold, hard perspective - Responsible Statecraft

responsiblestatecraft.org · by Seth Harp · September 19, 2022

Putting Ukrainian battle successes into cold, hard perspective

Last week’s offensive to liberate the countryside east of Kharkiv was an impressive win for the Ukrainian military and government, as well as its sponsors and managers in the Pentagon, State Department, CIA, and other U.S. intelligence agencies.

Ukraine’s seizure of the Izium rail station was especially key, as Russian forces rely heavily on trains for transport and supplies. Not since the successful defense of Kyiv has the Zelensky government scored such an important battlefield victory. But triumphalist reports in the U.S. media portraying the counteroffensive as a major shift in the direction of the war overstate the significance of these developments.

Russia had already lost the war in the north. After the collapse of their assault on Kyiv in March, Russian soldiers abandoned the Chernihiv and Sumy oblasts, and never came close to full control over Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. Their continued occupation of the countryside north and east of Kharkiv was a leftover vestige of that failed first phase of the invasion, which could explain why it was so lightly defended, and why Russian forces, caught off guard, were so quick to retreat.

Western press reports have portrayed Ukraine’s “lightning offensive,” as it’s invariably called, as a major turning point in the war. Nearly all of them use the word “humiliating” to describe Russia’s loss of the area. Russian defenses “collapsed” and they “fled in panic,” we’re told. This was widely attributed to the supposed “exhaustion” and “low morale” of Russian troops. As a result, the battle lines have been “redrawn,” the war’s contours “reshaped.” Putin is said to be “livid and “isolated.” In the maximalist language of the Atlantic Council, the “Ukrainian victory shatter[ed] Russia’s reputation as a military superpower.”

There’s a fair amount of wishful thinking in all of this rhetoric. Since April, it has been clear that Putin, after failing to take Kyiv and Kharkiv, pivoted to a downsized Plan B of securing a land bridge to Crimea in the south. Not only can this be gleaned from a glance at a map of troop movements, but Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said so explicitly in July.

Going forward, the success or failure of that strategic gambit is how the regime in Moscow will define victory or defeat. And Ukraine’s retaking of the Kharkiv countryside will have little significant effect on Russia’s ability to hold critical southern port cities like Kherson, Melitopol, Mariupol, and Berdyansk. At this point, Kharkiv is not nearly as important an objective as Mykolaiv or Odesa. The Russians can easily make do without the Izium railway.

The Ukrainian army and reserve militia showed extraordinary bravery and endurance in their defense of Kyiv — awe-inspiring courage, really — and punched well above their weight again in last week’s drive to push the Russians east of the Oskil River. But to win the war outright — which would be a miraculous underdog victory — they would need to break through to the Sea of Azov, or retake a major hub like the cities of Donetsk or Luhansk.

Under current conditions, that’s unlikely to happen. A Ukrainian offensive against occupied Kherson, launched in tandem with the blitz east of Kharkiv, has produced no appreciable gains. The battle lines around Mykolaiv and Zaporizhzhia have changed very little since March. Even if Ukrainian forces in the northeast conserve their momentum and continue to press the counteroffensive east of the Oskil, they could retake all of the Luhansk oblast north of the Donets River and still not seriously imperil Russian control of the coast and Crimea.

War is unpredictable, and it’s always possible that an unexpected concatenation of Russian losses really could precipitate a total collapse of Moscow’s expeditionary force, and a complete retreat from the Donbas. There’s a scary unanswered question of how the Putin regime would respond in that eventuality, because they have held certain highly destructive munitions in reserve, but it’s probably premature to go there unless and until Ukraine racks up additional territorial gains.

The coming winter weather, which can be brutally cold and icy in Ukraine, is likely to slow troop movements, and perhaps bring them to a near halt (as would happen in Afghanistan every winter). In a more metaphorical sense, the conflict might already be frozen. Since about May, this has increasingly seemed to be the cold, hard reality, loathe as propagandists on both sides are to admit it.

A “frozen conflict” is a term for a war whose battle lines have hardened and congealed, but without any truce or treaty to formally cede conquered territory to the aggressor, resulting in a kind of gray zone on the map of the globe — dead spots in the international order. Examples include ex-Soviet territories like Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia, which legally belong to Moldova in the case of Transnistria and Georgia in the case of the other two, but which have been occupied by Russia for years.

Russia’s puppet states in the Donbas are only the most recent addition to this curtilage of quasi-sovereign vassalages in countries that used to belong to the U.S.S.R. It will be very difficult for Ukraine to win back the swath of coastal land from Luhansk to Kherson, in part because the people there are culturally, ethnically, and linguistically inclined towards Russia. That is why Putin targeted them in the first place.

“Frozen conflict” can also describe fractured, balkanized states like Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Mali, and other sites of U.S. and NATO intervention. In these countries, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, often acting through proxies, successfully ousted or badly destabilized the existing government, but failed to fully install a replacement regime that was both subservient to Washington and able to govern effectively.

Warlords, gangsters, jihadists, mercenaries, slave traders, arms dealers, drug traffickers, paramilitaries, and spies flowed into the power vacuum. In Syria, which is partially occupied by U.S. forces to this day, Russia also intervened, resulting in a split with two-thirds of the country governed by a Russian-backed coalition, and the remainder controlled by American proxy forces and special operations soldiers.

That’s been the status quo in Syria for the better part of a decade; and at this juncture, the Kharkiv counteroffensive notwithstanding, it seems to be the most likely future for Ukraine, too: a war that never ends, in an unlucky country caught between two past-their-prime superpowers, neither of which has the ability to win outright, nor the humanity to negotiate a compromise, with the result that many thousands die in vain.

responsiblestatecraft.org · by Seth Harp · September 19, 2022

13.  China’s Changing Disinformation and Propaganda Targeting Taiwan

Compare this to the WAPOST article on the alleged US military's "clandestine PSYOP activities." Just saying.

Excerpts;

While the CCP’s attempt to build greater digital resiliency into its disinformation campaigns is worth further examining, these recent activities also raise questions over the coherency and feasibility of this strategy. The first question involves the objectives of these campaigns. If the goal is to instill fear into the Taiwanese population over a Chinese invasion, then the video of Chen’s essay may have been more effective if it had been voiced in Mandarin, Taiwan’s lingua franca, rather than Southern Min.

Second, if the target audience of this latest disinformation campaign is indeed the Taiwanese population, as it appears, using Reddit as a distribution mechanism would likely have minimal effect. Most Reddit users neither read Mandarin nor understand Southern Min, and Reddit is not as popular as other discussion forums among Taiwanese people.

Furthermore, some of the fake Reddit accounts within this disinformation campaign have also posted the video in forums that appear to have no relevance whatsoever – such as this post, which appeared on a subreddit for pet adoption. It is therefore no surprise that such posts are deemed irrelevant to those subreddits and deleted by auto-filters. In response, the fake accounts resort to posting on their own Reddit profile pages, which is unlikely to gain much digital traction.

All these developments point to either an incoherent digital disinformation strategy, or an attempt to utilize YouTube and Reddit as testing grounds to further improve and refine future CCP-led digital disinformation campaigns. For policymakers, researchers, and the people of Taiwan, this is certainly a development worth our careful attention over the coming weeks and months. By examining the CCP’s attempts to innovate its disinformation and propaganda tactics toward Taiwan, we can better understand and identify similar activities unfolding in other countries and regions.

China’s Changing Disinformation and Propaganda Targeting Taiwan

Since early August, evidence has emerged of a new type of CCP influence operation that sharply diverges away from traditional messaging and tactics.

thediplomat.com · by Kenddrick Chan · September 19, 2022

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The fallout from U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in early August has raised several questions over the state of cross-strait relations. Following announcements from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of military action in the Taiwan Strait as well as fiery rhetoric from Chinese officials, many wondered whether there would be another Taiwan Strait missile crisis, or indeed whether a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is likely to occur in the near future.

However, amid the controversy stirred by Pelosi’s trip to the island, few have picked up on a more subtle development in China’s strategy toward Taiwan: a shift in its disinformation and propaganda approach. Taiwan has long been inundated with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) pro-unification rhetoric and flooded with fake news. These activities are part of the CCP’s decades-long campaign to persuade Taiwanese people to support unification with China and a key aspect of “United Front work” – a strategy of propaganda alliance-building, which aims to influence civil societies overseas in ways that support the CCP’s central foreign policy goals.

In recent weeks, there are fresh indicators the CCP is actively gearing up for a new series of United Front activities toward Taiwan. Due to its Chinese-speaking population as well as its cultural similarities, shared history, and people-to-people exchanges with China, the island has long been treated by party officials as a testing site for various Chinese-language influence operations. These have often manifested in the form of disinformation campaigns, which seek to weaken the Taiwanese public’s trust in the government and or promote more China friendly candidates in local elections. The suicide of Taiwanese diplomat Su Chii-cherng in 2018 due to public backlash roused by fake news reports circulated by Chinese sources and the election of Kaohsiung mayoral candidate Han Kuo-yu are prime examples of the potential impact of these campaigns.

Similarly, during COVID-19 CCP disinformation sought to undermine trust in the current administration through rumors that the government was deliberately allowing an outbreak to occur and concealing the true number of COVID-related deaths from the public. Such activities have often been accompanied by pro-unification rhetoric referring to Taiwanese people as “compatriots,” urging “both sides of the Taiwan Strait to come together,” and claiming that people of Taiwan and China are part of “one family.”

Since early August, evidence has emerged of a new type of CCP influence operation, one that 1) sharply diverges away from traditional messaging, 2) seeks to remain resilient against single points of failures, and 3) utilizes new types of digital platforms such as news aggregation and discussion platforms like Reddit. This remains an ongoing campaign and the findings outlined in this article are preliminary. Nevertheless, these developments raise questions over the effectiveness and feasibility of the CCP’s disinformation and propaganda campaigns – all of which warrant further attention to such events as they unfold in the coming weeks and months.

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A Shift in Tone

On the heels of Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, a Chinese-language essay titled “Urging Tsai Ing-wen and her military and political leaders to surrender” (敦促蔡英文及其军政首脑投降书) was published on the internet. Authored by ex-deputy director of the PLA Daily Chen Xianyi, the essay is seemingly addressed to Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and Taiwanese political and military leaders and stresses the ushering in of a “new stage” in cross-strait relations.

The essay opens with vivid descriptions of wartime scenarios where “the deafening sounds of artillery fire surrounds you on all sides” and “the PLA’s modern fighter jets have surrounded all of Taiwan like an iron barrel.” Chen also declares that the median line between China and Taiwan no longer exists and threatens to enforce a blockade, the duration of which remains at the whim of the CCP and the Chinese people. Compared to the previous pro-unification rhetoric from Chinese officials, such as “Chinese people do not fight Chinese people,” this marks a dramatic shift in tone in the CCP’s messaging toward the Taiwanese public.

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The sharp shift in tone has been accompanied by perhaps more alarming developments: the emergence of a new digital disinformation campaign accompanied by distribution methods that deviate from the previous, well-established mold. Chen’s essay was turned into a video with traditional Chinese subtitles, narrated in Southern Min (Minnan hua), a dialect spoken within Taiwan but not as widely as Mandarin. The video also features a montage of PLA military footage.

Based on the CCP’s past propaganda and disinformation campaigns, one would expect this content to be shared, circulated, and promoted on platforms like Twitter by prominent Chinese officials, so-called “wolf warriors.” A key goal of this campaign style is public opinion management, as previous research indicates.

However, following Pelosi’s visit, it appears the CCP is evolving this strategy. Back in the summer of 2020, Twitter removed over 23,000 accounts for being part of a CCP disinformation campaign, and a further 150,000 accounts that sought to boost the tweet traction of the former group. However, the CCP’s new approach to circulating disinformation and propaganda builds in a degree of resiliency to avoid quick detection and removal.

The new campaign style appears to adopt a two-stage process, the first of which involves uploading video content onto Google-owned platforms such as YouTube through fake accounts with generic or gibberish names. For example, the video of Chen’s essay has been uploaded through YouTube accounts under the names of Araceli Kihn, Analisa Stradley, Eliseo Aimee, bshdh snbdg, and so on.

Here is the list of accounts that we have uncovered, along with their channel creation date (note that some might have already been taken down):

• Araceli Kihn – August 14, 2022
• Analisa Stradley – August 15, 2022
• bshdh snbdg – August 15, 2022
• Mina Mecham – August 15, 2022
• Eliseo Aimee – September 6, 2022

The second stage of this process involves circulating links to these YouTube videos on non-Google platforms such as Reddit – a news aggregation and discussion website consisting of subreddits, communities that revolve around a particular topic or theme. Fake Reddit accounts are then created to serve as a distribution mechanism by referencing (via hyperlink) the videos posted on the fake YouTube channels. Below are some of the fake Reddit accounts that we detected, along with their account creation date:

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• Old-Pass5790 – August 3, 2022
• Able-Statistician929 – September 4, 2022
• Practical_Dog4399 – August 17, 2022
• Feisty_Confusion_391 – August 10, 2022
• Chenerlish869 – August 15, 2022

Building Resiliency Into Digital Disinformation Campaigns

The use of these separate digital platforms in conjunction (Google owned and non-Google owned) appears to demonstrate the CCP’s desire to strengthen the resilience and longevity of its digital disinformation framework. By contrast, previous disinformation and propaganda campaigns tended to rely on a single platform such as Twitter for both content hosting and content distribution. However, this method risked having a “single point of failure,” as the mass removal of a CCP-affiliated Twitter accounts in 2020 highlights. Platform administrators were too easily able to uncover a web of fake accounts that constituted a link in the broader disinformation network by simply tracing the digital activity and footprint of a single fake account (i.e., whom it follows, retweets, or engages with).

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In this new style of disinformation and propaganda distribution, using sites like YouTube for content hosting and platforms like Reddit for content distribution ensures some resilience by avoiding breakage between the links. Under this set-up, removing CCP-affiliated accounts would require two successful reports: one from the hosting site and another from the distribution site. If one account is taken down by administrators, it would only partially disrupt the overall chain of disinformation. For example, if one of the aforementioned YouTube channels was removed the Reddit account would likely remain untouched, and the latter would simply reference another campaign-affiliated YouTube channel and vice versa.

Unlike previous Chinese disinformation and propaganda campaigns which featured a great deal of mutual interaction by different accounts, these YouTube channels also notably do not engage in any form of platform interaction (for example, commenting on other videos), suggesting they are intended to be as low-lying and inconspicuous as possible. As long as these accounts maintain “interaction silence,” it is possible for the content they host to continue slipping under the radar. The possibility of these channels being discovered is minimized as their existence can only be detected if they are referenced by the content distribution site (in this case, Reddit). By avoiding interacting with each other on these platforms, the accounts avoid generating a footprint of digital activity that would easily identify them as part a wider disinformation network – thus greatly reducing their likelihood of being identified and removed by platform administrators. This again appears to signify an important shift in Beijing’s approach to digital disinformation and propaganda circulation, which could apply to other cases beyond Taiwan.

An Incoherent or Evolving Digital Disinformation Strategy?

While the CCP’s attempt to build greater digital resiliency into its disinformation campaigns is worth further examining, these recent activities also raise questions over the coherency and feasibility of this strategy. The first question involves the objectives of these campaigns. If the goal is to instill fear into the Taiwanese population over a Chinese invasion, then the video of Chen’s essay may have been more effective if it had been voiced in Mandarin, Taiwan’s lingua franca, rather than Southern Min.

Second, if the target audience of this latest disinformation campaign is indeed the Taiwanese population, as it appears, using Reddit as a distribution mechanism would likely have minimal effect. Most Reddit users neither read Mandarin nor understand Southern Min, and Reddit is not as popular as other discussion forums among Taiwanese people.

Furthermore, some of the fake Reddit accounts within this disinformation campaign have also posted the video in forums that appear to have no relevance whatsoever – such as this post, which appeared on a subreddit for pet adoption. It is therefore no surprise that such posts are deemed irrelevant to those subreddits and deleted by auto-filters. In response, the fake accounts resort to posting on their own Reddit profile pages, which is unlikely to gain much digital traction.

All these developments point to either an incoherent digital disinformation strategy, or an attempt to utilize YouTube and Reddit as testing grounds to further improve and refine future CCP-led digital disinformation campaigns. For policymakers, researchers, and the people of Taiwan, this is certainly a development worth our careful attention over the coming weeks and months. By examining the CCP’s attempts to innovate its disinformation and propaganda tactics toward Taiwan, we can better understand and identify similar activities unfolding in other countries and regions.

Mariah Thornton

Mariah Thornton is a MPhil/PhD student at the Department of International Relations and a researcher at LSE IDEAS. Her research focuses on China's foreign policy and strategy toward Taiwan, cross-strait relations, as well as Taiwan in digital IR.

thediplomat.com · by Kenddrick Chan · September 19, 2022

14. Time to Get Tough on the Taliban

Excerpts:

As Washington reduces its diplomatic engagement with the Taliban, it should also focus on finding creative ways to support Afghan civil society, such as providing resources to local Afghan groups that monitor human rights abuses and promote women’s rights and media freedoms and inviting them to speak at international gatherings. Washington could also allocate more resources to the UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan to enhance its focus on preventing human rights abuses and working more closely with Afghan civil society. It is also essential that the international community maintain its informal consensus against recognizing the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government, at least until the group meets basic standards on governance and human rights and takes steps to break ties with terrorists.

It has been over five months since the Taliban broke their promise to reopen girls’ secondary schools. After spending hundreds of millions of dollars over the past 20 years supporting organizations that promote women’s rights in Afghanistan, the United States has a moral obligation to Afghan women and girls. The very women and girls that Washington helped empower are now losing their rights to education and employment, and many now fear for their lives. The UN and international human rights organizations have documented numerous human rights abuses in addition to those against women and girls, including extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detentions, forced displacement, persecution of minorities, torture, and a clampdown on journalists and freedom of expression over the last year. The Taliban’s actions are unacceptable, and U.S. policy must reflect this by adopting a far tougher approach to the Taliban until the group upholds its previous promises to respect the rights of all Afghans.

Time to Get Tough on the Taliban

Pressure, Not Engagement, Is the Best Way to Help Afghans

By Lisa Curtis and Nader Nadery

September 19, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Lisa Curtis and Nader Nadery · September 19, 2022

One year after the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, it is clear that the extremist group has changed little since it first seized control of the country in 1996. In March 2022, the Taliban decided not to reopen girls’ secondary schools throughout the country—as it had vowed to do just two days earlier—putting an end to any hopes that the group would rule the country differently this time around. And, in the weeks since a CIA drone strike killed al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri in a leafy Kabul enclave, it has become even more clear that the Taliban continues to harbor terrorist groups.

It is time for the United States and its partners to acknowledge these facts and to adopt an approach to the Taliban that appropriately addresses their actions instead of encouraging them to continue making empty promises and offering excuses for their outrageous behavior. Getting tougher on the Taliban would not mean interfering with humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people. It would mean working closely with the United Nations and like-minded countries to impose consequences on the Taliban for their unacceptable behavior and withholding high-level engagement with the group until its leadership pursues more moderate policies.

NO CHANGE IN BEHAVIOR

Before the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, many observers hoped that the Taliban’s desire for international assistance and legitimacy would help moderate their behavior once they were in power. On August 17, 2021, just two days after the Taliban seized Kabul and took control of Afghanistan’s government, longtime Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid addressed journalists gathered for the Taliban’s first official news conference, assuring them that Afghanistan’s new Taliban-led government would allow women to work, study, and otherwise participate in society “within the bounds of Islamic law.”

In today’s Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, women and girls over the age of 12 are officially prohibited from attending school and have few options for earning wages or working outside the home. They face strict dress code requirements, new restrictions on leaving their homes without a close male relative, and increasing rates of child marriage and domestic abuse.

The Taliban has disbanded the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, banned political activities, and arrested and interrogated the leaders of civil society organizations. They have systematically silenced human rights activists, women’s advocates, and others working to build an open and inclusive Afghan civil society. In February, the Taliban arrested more than 20 women activists in a single day.

The Taliban has silenced human rights activists and others working to build an inclusive Afghan civil society.

In May, UN Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan Richard Bennett warned that the Taliban are creating a society ruled by fear. For many Afghans who worked in the previous government or its national security forces, the Taliban’s disregard for basic human rights has proved deadly. Since last August, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan has documented over 237 extrajudicial killings carried out by members of the Taliban. The victims have included 160 members of the former Afghan government and security forces. During the same period, new restrictions on media have constrained journalists’ ability to report freely and forced at least one-third of Afghan news outlets to shut down—which means that the number of killings is likely far higher.

Some courageous Afghan activists are fighting back. PenPath, an Afghan organization working to reopen schools, continues to campaign for girls’ education in some of the most remote parts of the country. Female civil servants with the Advocacy for Change Movement continue to call on the Taliban-led government to respect women’s rights. These organizations, and others like them, deserve international attention and support.

As part of the 2020 Doha agreement that the Taliban made with the United States, the group pledged to prevent al Qaeda from using Afghan soil to threaten the security of the United States and its allies. But any illusion that the Taliban intended to make good on that promise was shattered in late July when it became clear that Zawahiri, the al Qaeda leader, had been living in a Kabul neighborhood at the home of an associate of acting Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani.

To some extent, the elimination of Zawahiri vindicates U.S. President Joe Biden’s argument that “over the horizon” operations are an effective way to deal with terrorist threats. But it also demonstrates that the Taliban retains close links with al Qaeda and that the terrorist group is taking advantage of the Taliban’s return to power to rebuild its base in Afghanistan. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that the Taliban’s sheltering of Zawahiri was a breach of the Doha agreement. But the vaguely worded agreement, which was negotiated by the Trump administration, does not explicitly require the Taliban to expel al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations from Afghan territory.

ENGAGEMENT HAS PROVED FUTILE

Some security experts argue that if the United States does not continue high-level engagement with the Taliban, Afghanistan will likely descend into civil war and chaos and become an even bigger headache for the West than it already is. Others argue that the immediate need to work with the Taliban regime to ensure that humanitarian assistance reaches desperate Afghans should take precedence over human rights concerns. Both arguments miss the mark.

Agreeing to engage with the Taliban regardless of their human rights record will not encourage stability over the long run. How the Taliban governs its own people is a better determinant of the country’s political stability than whether the United States or any other country sits down for talks with the Taliban. If the Taliban regime continues its repressive approach, the Afghan people will increasingly resist violations of their rights and freedoms and may even gravitate toward further violent resistance—regardless of whether U.S. officials are talking to the regime. Pashtana Durrani, the executive director of the Afghan education nonprofit LEARN, recently told an interviewer that “the most important thing I would want the international community to understand is the fact that meeting Taliban doesn’t help.”

In late August, the UN warned that 24 million Afghans still require humanitarian relief, and that more than $700 million is needed to help Afghans get through the coming winter. But Washington should limit its engagement with the Taliban to agreeing on a set of principles for delivering aid, including Taliban noninterference in the work of the organizations carrying out aid programs. There is a growing concern that Taliban leaders are trying to manipulate humanitarian aid by selecting which communities receive it and by directing aid organizations to recruit workers from lists they provide.

Engaging with the Taliban regardless of their human rights record will not encourage stability over the long run.

Last month, the U.S. Department of State announced that $3.5 billion in frozen Afghan assets would not be released to Afghanistan’s Taliban-controlled central bank. This was welcome news. On September 14, the Biden administration announced that the money would instead be distributed to the Afghan people through an international fund managed by Swiss government officials and Afghan experts. The new Afghan Fund will itself disburse that $3.5 billion to benefit the Afghan people and ensure that it remains inaccessible to the Taliban.

But the most significant step the United States can take to show the Taliban that it won’t be business as usual is to back the reinstatement of the UN travel ban for all Taliban leaders, which had been waived since 2019. The waiver expired in late August, when the UN Security Council failed to reach agreement on whether to extend it, but Russia and China are likely to seek more travel exemptions for the Taliban in the future. If the international community continues to allow Taliban officials to travel abroad, it will send the signal that it is acceptable for them to continue repressing women and girls. In the past year, the Taliban used the waiver on the travel ban to try to establish international legitimacy by attending international conferences in Norway in January and in Uzbekistan in July. Back home, meanwhile, the regime continued violating women’s rights and intensified its crackdown on Afghan civil society.

As Washington reduces its diplomatic engagement with the Taliban, it should also focus on finding creative ways to support Afghan civil society, such as providing resources to local Afghan groups that monitor human rights abuses and promote women’s rights and media freedoms and inviting them to speak at international gatherings. Washington could also allocate more resources to the UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan to enhance its focus on preventing human rights abuses and working more closely with Afghan civil society. It is also essential that the international community maintain its informal consensus against recognizing the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government, at least until the group meets basic standards on governance and human rights and takes steps to break ties with terrorists.

It has been over five months since the Taliban broke their promise to reopen girls’ secondary schools. After spending hundreds of millions of dollars over the past 20 years supporting organizations that promote women’s rights in Afghanistan, the United States has a moral obligation to Afghan women and girls. The very women and girls that Washington helped empower are now losing their rights to education and employment, and many now fear for their lives. The UN and international human rights organizations have documented numerous human rights abuses in addition to those against women and girls, including extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detentions, forced displacement, persecution of minorities, torture, and a clampdown on journalists and freedom of expression over the last year. The Taliban’s actions are unacceptable, and U.S. policy must reflect this by adopting a far tougher approach to the Taliban until the group upholds its previous promises to respect the rights of all Afghans.

• LISA CURTIS is Director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. She previously served as Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Council Senior Director for South and Central Asia.
• NADER NADERY is Honorary Senior Fellow at the Asser Institute in the Netherlands and former Peace Negotiator for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

Foreign Affairs · by Lisa Curtis and Nader Nadery · September 19, 2022

15. Is China Breaking With Russia Over Ukraine?

Excerpts:

It’s clear from the fact that China did not mention Ukraine at all in its readout that Beijing would rather not highlight this aspect of Li’s visit. Moscow, however, did so eagerly, desperate to show support from a major global power. But that explicitness may have angered China, which very much does not want to be seen as fully in Moscow’s quarter.

In that light, Putin’s reference to China’s “questions and concerns” about Ukraine may be a sort of mea culpa. Russia went too far in broadcasting China’s support after Li’s meeting; the penalty is having to underline China’s reservations after the Putin-Xi summit.

Importantly, though, we should not read the change in language as signaling an imminent break with Russia over the Ukraine issue. Whatever doubts China may have about the war, they were not enough to dissuade Beijing from sealing an “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership” with Belarus, Russia’s partner in the Ukraine war, the day after Xi’s meeting with Putin.

Ultimately, Russia is simply too important to China as an ally against the U.S. for Beijing to offer even tepid criticism. Instead, China is trying – to very limited success – to erect a firewall between its relationship with Russia and Putin’s war in Ukraine.

To quote Putin from his meeting with Xi: “[T]he world is undergoing multiple changes, yet the only thing that remains unchanged is the friendship and mutual trust between Russia and China. The Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination is as stable as mountains.” Xi gave no indication that we should doubt that assessment.

Is China Breaking With Russia Over Ukraine?

China’s position has subtly shifted since the Russian invasion began, but the partnership with Russia is too important for Beijing to truly abandon its ally.

thediplomat.com · by Shannon Tiezzi · September 17, 2022

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During Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first trip abroad since January 2020, the most closely watched development was not his interactions with officials from his host countries, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Rather, the world’s attention was on his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Samarkand – the first in-person meeting between the two since Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine began on February 24.

The last time Xi and Putin shook hands was on February 4 in Beijing, where Putin was attending the Opening Ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games. Back then, their joint statement famously declared that “friendship between the two States has no limits.”

Much has changed since the first week of February. Most notably, Russia is actively at war with Ukraine after sending masses of troops across the border just three weeks after the Putin-Xi meeting in Beijing – and the war is going badly for Moscow. Meanwhile, Russia is under unprecedented sanctions from the U.S., European Union, Japan, Australia, and others, and China’s perceived support for Putin is taking a steep toll on Beijing’s image in Europe.

Given that, how has Xi’s rhetoric in his meetings with Putin shifted?

One thing has not changed: Xi and Putin are still positioning their countries as close partners. “In the face of changes of the world, of our times and of history, China will work with Russia to fulfill their responsibilities as major countries and play a leading role in injecting stability into a world of change and disorder,” Xi told Putin, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry readout. As my colleague Catherine Putz noted, Xi and Putin are aligned in seeking to replace the U.S.-led world order with a new, more “democratic” and “just” one. This basic interest has not changed, and there is no explicit indication of Chinese displeasure with Russia in the Chinese summary of the meeting.

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That said, what is not said is instructive. Gone are the explicit mentions of Russia and China working together to reshape the current international system – cooperation on “the development of the international order and global governance towards a more just and reasonable direction,” as Xi put it in his June 15 phone call with Putin. China still undoubtedly wishes to redirect the evolution of the global order, but has decided not to trumpet that it is working with Russia to do so (at least for now).

In that context, returning to Xi’s quote from above, we can read it as a subtle critique: When Xi said “China will work with Russia to fulfill their responsibilities as major countries and play a leading role in injecting stability into a world of change and disorder,” he may be implying that Russia is not currently fulfilling its responsibility as a major country or contributing to global stability. That’s debatable, of course, but it is notable that this time around Xi refrained from explicitly mentioning Beijing and Moscow’s joint efforts to reshape the world order to their liking.

In the same vein, the September 15 meeting is largely quiet on strategic cooperation between China and Russia. While Xi acknowledges “effective strategic communication” between the two, that is a qualitative shift from his promise back in June that “China is willing to work with Russia to continue… deepening their strategic coordination.” Instead, in this week’s meeting Xi pointedly emphasized more anodyne fields of cooperation, like sports exchanges and people-to-people relations. The only fields where he specifically said China is seeking to “deepen practice cooperation” are “trade, agriculture, connectivity, and other areas,” with “other areas” left to the imagination.

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Compare the deep silence on strategic cooperation to this quote from their February 4 meeting: “China and Russia have stayed committed to deepening strategic coordination of mutual support… The two countries have never and will never waver in this choice.”

Xi did emphasize that “China will work with Russia to extend strong mutual support on issues concerning each other’s core interests,” which could be read as a reference to Ukraine. But the only “core interest” that is explicitly named is Taiwan and the One China principle, with Russia restating it is “firmly committed to the One China principle and condemns the provocative moves by individual countries on issues concerning China’s core interests,” an obvious reference to U.S. engagement with Taiwan in recent weeks. There is no corresponding statement of support from China on Ukraine, not even oblique references to “Russia’s legitimate security concerns” that featured in previous conversations.

To the contrary, the Russian readout of the Putin-Xi meeting referenced China’s “balanced position in connection with the Ukraine crisis.” Tellingly, according to the Kremlin transcript, Putin then told Xi, “We understand your questions and your concerns in this regard.”

The admission from Putin that China has raised “questions and concerns” regarding the war in Ukraine is telling. But equally notable is that China did not mention those concerns itself. Instead, China prefers to pretend the war is not happening – Ukraine was not mentioned at all in the official readout from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In the readout of the June 15 Putin-Xi call, by contrast, China’s Foreign Ministry noted that “The two heads of state also exchanged views on the Ukraine issue. Xi emphasized that China has always independently assessed the situation on the basis of the historical context and the merits of the issue, and actively promoted world peace and the stability of the global economic order.”

And in a call on February 25, the day after the invasion began, Xi told Putin that “China determines its position concerning the Ukrainian issue on its own merits. It is important to reject Cold War mentality, take seriously and respect the reasonable security concerns of all countries and reach a balanced, effective and sustainable European security mechanism through negotiation.”

Taken together, from February to June and now to September China has subtly backed away from its already nuanced support for Russia’s position. The calls also show a common pattern: Russia is willing and ready to explicitly condemn U.S. actions on Taiwan, the first of China’s “core interests.” China, however, is increasingly unwilling to do the same when it comes to Ukraine. The impression is that Russia fully has China’s back, while China is noncommittal.

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Sergey Radchenko, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies specializing in Chinese and Russian foreign policies, concluded from the readouts of the latest meeting that “Putin looks desperate. Xi looks like he is calling the shots. The whole relationship is rapidly becoming very, very lop-sided.”

But that observation contrasts sharply with recent reports following Li Zhanshu’s visit to Russia earlier this week. Li, the chairman of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee and China’s number three leader, did reference “strategic coordination” between China and Russia, which he said had “reached an unprecedented level,” according to China’s state news agency, Xinhua.

Again, the Chinese summary of Li’s trip did not mention Ukraine. But the Russian readout did – to explosive effect.

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According to Russia’s State Duma, Li told Russian legislators that “China understands and supports Russia on issues that represent its vital interests, in particular on the situation in Ukraine.”

“We see that the United States and its NATO allies are expanding their presence near the Russian borders, seriously threatening national security and the lives of Russian citizens. We fully understand the necessity of all the measures taken by Russia aimed at protecting its key interests, we are providing our assistance,” the readout continued, again quoting Li.

“On the Ukrainian issue, we see how they have put Russia in an impossible situation. And in this case, Russia made an important choice and responded firmly,” Li concluded.

This marks a level of support China has never before offered Russia over the Ukraine issue – at least not publicly. China has not said that it “supports” Russia on Ukraine, only that it understands (and, implicitly, sympathizes with) Russia’s position. China has also strongly denied offering “assistance” to Russia’s war efforts in Ukraine, so Li’s apparent assertion to the contrary raised eyebrows around the world.

It’s clear from the fact that China did not mention Ukraine at all in its readout that Beijing would rather not highlight this aspect of Li’s visit. Moscow, however, did so eagerly, desperate to show support from a major global power. But that explicitness may have angered China, which very much does not want to be seen as fully in Moscow’s quarter.

In that light, Putin’s reference to China’s “questions and concerns” about Ukraine may be a sort of mea culpa. Russia went too far in broadcasting China’s support after Li’s meeting; the penalty is having to underline China’s reservations after the Putin-Xi summit.

Importantly, though, we should not read the change in language as signaling an imminent break with Russia over the Ukraine issue. Whatever doubts China may have about the war, they were not enough to dissuade Beijing from sealing an “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership” with Belarus, Russia’s partner in the Ukraine war, the day after Xi’s meeting with Putin.

Ultimately, Russia is simply too important to China as an ally against the U.S. for Beijing to offer even tepid criticism. Instead, China is trying – to very limited success – to erect a firewall between its relationship with Russia and Putin’s war in Ukraine.

To quote Putin from his meeting with Xi: “[T]he world is undergoing multiple changes, yet the only thing that remains unchanged is the friendship and mutual trust between Russia and China. The Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination is as stable as mountains.” Xi gave no indication that we should doubt that assessment.

Shannon Tiezzi

Shannon Tiezzi is Editor-in-Chief at The Diplomat.

thediplomat.com · by Shannon Tiezzi · September 17, 2022

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

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com