This is clearly a major story. The first part is obviously in the well-established tradition of "access journalism." This story opens with the scene of a masterful and diligent President Joe Biden consulting thoughtfully with his cabable band of Churchillian advisers to counter the plans of the dastardly foe, Vladimir Putin.
That characterization doesn't mean we shouldn't pay attention to the contents. On the contrary, there is good information here that, as always, needs to be critically evaluated. It gets more interesting after the initial paragraphs.
The WaPo's sources claim that the US insisted to the NATO allies that Putin actually intended to invade Ukraine. Since he actually did invade Ukraine, that's fairly easy to accept. Even if some NATO countries may present a different spin on that prewar consultation process.
Few reading the article will much care. But WaPo specifically states Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Michael "laid out the array of forces on that October morning, [and] he and the others summed up Putin’s intentions" (my emphasis) in the meeting from October 2021 it first describes. In theory, the military's focus is supposed to be the opponent's capabilities, while judging the decision-makers' intentions is a civilian responsibility.
According to the reconstruction of the Churchillian leaders' consultations, the intelligence assessments in October 2021 correctly judged from the positioning of Russian forces that this could be much more serious than a smaller mobilization on Ukraine's borders early in 2021.
But there seems to be a touch of hindsight in the account: "Although the administration would publicly insist over the next several months that it did not believe Putin had made a final decision, the only thing his team couldn’t tell the president that autumn day was exactly when the Russian president would pull the trigger."
Further down in the article, we get a description a visit by CIA Director William Burns to Moscow in November, the following month:
[I]t left the CIA director to wonder if Putin and his tight circle of aides had formed their own echo chamber. Putin had not made an irreversible decision to go to war, but his views on Ukraine had hardened, his appetite for risk had grown, and the Russian leader believed his moment of opportunity would soon pass. [my emphasis]I'm glad to hear the CIA Director was considering various alternative possibilities. Obviously, it's his job to do that. But it may also indicate that the Churchillian advisers meeting in October weren't quite so sure of Putin's intentions that "the only thing his team couldn’t tell the president that autumn day was exactly when the Russian president would pull the trigger."
The Russian military plans described in WaPo's account as they appeared to the participants in the October meeting envisioned a Russian push to take all of Ukraine except "a rump Ukrainian state in the west — an area that in Putin’s calculus was populated by irredeemable neo-Nazi Russophobes."
It does describe an assessment by Burns of Putin's own intent, based on an evaluation of the war preparations in the context of what was known about Putin's governing style. He gave particular emphasis to an essay published under Putin's name in July 2021, “On the Historical Unity Between Russians and Ukrainians.” That document has since been much discussed in the public analysis of Putin's territorial ambitions.
A Biden-Putin summit the previous month apparently raised no particular apprehension in the Biden Administration over Russia's immediate military intentions. Then, after the publication of Putin's July essay, "on Aug. 27, Biden authorized that $60 million in largely defensive weapons be drawn from U.S. inventories and sent to Ukraine."
The following two paragraphs touch on one of the most sensitive points for the New Cold War advocates:
By late summer, as they pieced together the intelligence from the border and from Moscow, analysts who had spent their careers studying Putin were increasingly convinced the Russian leader — himself a former intelligence officer — saw a window of opportunity closing. Ukrainians had already twice risen up to demand a democratic future, free from corruption and Moscow’s interference, during the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution, and the 2013-2014 Maidan protests that preceded Russia’s annexation of Crimea.It's an article of faith among some New Cold Warriors (check Michael McFaul's tweets for examples) that it was entirely phony and cynical for Russians to even pretend they had any kind of security concerns around Ukraine's relationship with NATO and the US. That is, they are not just claiming those concerns were exaggerated or legitimate, but entirely phony.
While not a member of NATO or the European Union, Ukraine was now moving steadily into the Western political, economic and cultural orbit. That drift fed Putin’s broader resentment about Russia’s loss of empire. [my emphasis]
Apparently, the Churchillian advisers gathered in that October meeting seemed to think that Russia was acting as if they took some of those security concerns seriously.
In stories like this, it's worth paying attention to what is actually being said, especially farther down in the article after the lede paragraphs. For instance, "Months later, Milley still carried in his briefcase note cards encapsulating the U.S. interests and strategic objectives discussed at the October briefing. He could recite them off the top of his head."
And the story proceeds to provide direct quotes. But in that sentence just quoted, WaPo is obliquely telling its readers they are quoting from Milley's words months later about what was on the October document. Did the reporters see the notecards? It's probably not important, but sometimes a close reading is helpful.
It's somewhat reassuring that Milley told WaPo that the Churchillian gathering in October saw their task as responding to a Russian invasion "without going to World War III." That's not just snark. The New Cold War polemicists sneer at the very idea that the US and NATO should worry in the slightest about Russian threats to use nuclear weapons.
The US press wasn't exactly blaring news about Western assistance to Ukraine in 2014-2022. Most of that time, they were too busy following Donald Trump's outrageous remark of the day. But this claim - which apparently is not specifically focused on the October meeting - is intriguing:
Biden’s advisers were confident Ukraine would put up a fight. The United States, Britain and other NATO members had spent years training and equipping the Ukrainian military, which was more professional and better organized than Biden’s advisers were confident Ukraine would put up a fight. The United States, Britain and other NATO members had spent years training and equipping the Ukrainian military, which was more professional and better organized than before Russia’s assault on Crimea and the eastern region of Donbas seven years earlier. But the training had focused nearly as much on how to mount internal resistance after a Russian occupation as on how to prevent it in the first place. The weapons they had supplied were primarily small-bore and defensive so that they wouldn’t be seen as a Western provocation. [my emphasis]This piece does mention one of the concerns about Ukrainian leadership to which Tom Friedman obliquely referred in a recent New York Times column. WaPo reports:
The administration also had grave concerns about Ukraine’s young president, a former television comic who had come into office on a huge wave of popular support and desire for fundamental change but had lost public standing in part because he failed to make good on a promise to make peace with Russia. [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky, 44, appeared to be no match for the ruthless Putin.In other words, the Biden-Harris Administration was worried that not only that the West's current hero Zelensky was too concerned to maintain peace with Russia, but that Ukrainian voters were, too. This could prove to be significant in the context of US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's own statement in April of US war aims. (“We want to see Ukraine remain a sovereign country, a democratic country able to protect its sovereign territory. We want to see Russia weakened to the point where it can’t do things like invade Ukraine.”)
In that light, this is also interesting from WaPo, "Kyiv might not fall as quickly as the Russians expected, the Americans concluded, but it would fall."
The Ukrainian version of these events obviously needs to be seen in light of the fact that Ukraine has fired and launched investigations of hundreds of members of its security agencies on suspicion of working with the Russians. So it's not the least surprising that US officials may have had good reason to think that they had to be very selective in the type of intelligence they were sharing with Kyiv:
Zelensky heard the U.S. warnings, he later recalled, but said the Americans weren’t offering the kinds of weapons Ukraine needed to defend itself. “You can say a million times, ‘Listen, there may be an invasion.’ Okay, there may be an invasion — will you give us planes?” Zelensky said. “Will you give us air defenses? ‘Well, you’re not a member of NATO.’ Oh, okay, then what are we talking about?”In the separate text of an WaPo interview with Zelensky himself, he still demands that NATO "close the sky," i.e., set up no-fly zones. That means in practice US planes shooting down Russian planes and firing missiles into Russian antiaircraft installations, including any operating inside Russia against the US planes. A direct military clash between the US and Russia, in other words, the world's two biggest nuclear powers.
The Americans offered little specific intelligence to support their warnings “until the last four or five days before the invasion began,” according to Dmytro Kuleba, Zelensky’s foreign minister.
We could also call that "World War III."
No comments:
Post a Comment