US-European politics of the Ukraine-Russia war for the coming year

The US role in the Russia-Ukraine war is obviously a key factor for Americans and Europeans to watch.

Connor Echols calls attention to the role of American training, and presumably some amount of direction, by the US of Ukrainian military operations in US military trained Ukrainians days before they sank two Russian ships Responsible Statecraft 09/07/2022:

U.S.-trained Ukrainian soldiers sank two Russian ships in June, according to Bill LaPlante, the Pentagon’s top acquisitions official. The incident came just two months after Washington gave Ukraine intelligence that helped it sink the Moskva, then Russia’s most powerful warship in the Black Sea.

Washington trained the combatants on how to use Harpoon anti-ship missiles over Memorial Day weekend earlier this year. “The next week, two Russian ships were sunk,” LaPlante said during an interview with Defense News.

The revelation emerged less than a week after news broke that Washington conducted war games with Kyiv in order to plan for its counter-offensive in Kherson, highlighting the close operational ties between the U.S. and Ukrainian militaries. The news adds to concerns that the United States is engaged in a full-scale proxy war with Russia ...

Experts say that such a proxy conflict brings up two concerns. The first is that the United States will be incentivized to draw out the conflict for as long as possible in order to maximize their damage to Russia’s strategic interests. [my emphasis]

I keep referring back to US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's statement of the American war aims in April, "We want to see Russia weakened to the point where it can’t do things like invade Ukraine." (Dan Sabbagh and Helen Livingstone, US pledges extra $713m for Ukraine war effort and to weaken Russia Guardian 04/25/2022) This is a much more expansive goal that restoring Ukrainian control over all its territory.

Echols:

The second concern is perhaps the most significant: the risk of escalation to full-blown war between the U.S. and Russia. Washington already has CIA operatives in Ukraine and special operations forces nearby, and the obvious closeness of U.S. cooperation with Ukrainian forces could at some point convince Russian President Vladimir Putin that America is a true belligerent in the war.

The New Cold War enthusiasts have tried to stigmatize the phrase "proxy war," which the Russians are using in their propaganda. And the war is a direct war between Russia and Ukraine, initiated by Russia. We're still referring to this year as the beginning of the current conflict, though it could also be said to have begun in 2014 with Russia's seizure and annexation of Crimea and de facto seizure of two "breakaway" parts of the Donbas region.

But it is also a proxy war between the US and Russia. DefSec Austin's statement of the war aims is a strong indication that the Biden-Harris Administration sees it as a proxy war. The Ukrainian army could not have put up the kind of resistance it has this year without NATO countries supplying substantial weapons and training.

The US foreign policy establishment, both Democrats and Republicans, seems to see Western policy toward Russia only as Cold War or as American triumphalism. But conventional geopolitical considerations certainly need to be taken into account. The US certainly needs to take account of international law and its own value priorities - the latter factor often turns out in practice to be a justification for policies motivated by very "practical" considerations. And from lobbying pressure by companies who benefit financially from those considerations.

But ideas do matter in international relations. And the way members of the foreign policy and defense establishment conceive the world and US interests do shape their actions which in turn shape events.

The current state of the war in Ukraine makes it likely that it will go on for at least another year. As various analysts regularly point out, serious peace negotiations won't happen until both sides decide that continuing the war is likely to bring them most costs than benefits. Although those judgments are not mathematical calculations. The difference is that Russia can make its own decisions on that calculation, while Ukraine must share its decision-making with its NATO (de facto) allies.

Russia is currently concentrating on dividing the European allies, not least by its reductions of oil and gas supplies. But they will also encourage sympathetic rightwing parties in Europe to agitate the anti-immigration sentiment, which is one of the EU's greatest political weaknesses. I would say it's already happening, but anti-immigrant rhetoric is such a staple now of far-right and many conservative parties that they don't need much encouragement to roll it out.

Europe is looking at significantly more disruptions from the energy shortage than the US. US energy companies in fact benefit from it because it raises prices and widens the markets in the West. The Biden Administration's deal with Saudi Arabia to produce more oil to help with the European shortfalls seems at the moment to have fallen through, and Saudi Arabia is balking. American New Cold War enthusiasts like to bash their NATO allies for not showing enough manly fortitude in standing up to Bad Guy Putin. But the real negative effects on the voting populations in Europe are notably more negative and potentially politically volatile, as we are already starting to see on the energy problem.

So at the moment, the political vulnerabilities of European government around energy shortages and refugee issues are the more immediate challenge for NATO unity in the Ukraine-Russia war. But once Russia and Ukraine are ready to negotiate peace, if the American policy preference really remains what Austin said it is, the US is likely to be looking to extend the war for years into the future, that could make for some serious policy disputes.

It's worth remember here the sneering distinction another Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, make between "new Europe" (east-central countries, strongly anti-Russian) and "old Europe" (more oriented toward peace and stability). Both NATO and the EU have survived for longer than may have sometimes seemed possible. But the America First MAGA sentiment that dominates the US Republican Party sees NATO at best as an annoyance.

But complacency is not a good position for policymakers to take, either. We're talking here about an ongoing military conflict between the world's two biggest nuclear powers right near the border of one of them. When a similar situation occurred in 1962, the world was very lucky to have avoided nuclear war.

I'm including here earlier videos featuring the analysts of the two Über-Realist of the moment, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Mearsheimer is a particular bogeyman for the New Cold Warriors at the moment, a role he seems happy to play for now.

Wrecking Ukraine: The cost of Winning the War with Geopolitics Expert John Mearsheimer 06/19/2022:

The interviewer there, Jasmin Kosubek, was formerly with the German RT channel. She talks about her departure from RT last year in this video.

Munk Debate: Russia-Ukraine War-Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer v Michael McFaul, Radosław Sikorski 05/13/2022:

The causes and consequences of the Ukraine war A lecture by John J. Mearsheimer 06/16/2022 (full text available here):

Joe Cirincione gives his own perspective on What’s Missing from Mearsheimer’s Analysis of the Ukraine War in the Harvard Kennedy School website Russia Matters 07/29/2022, in what for me is a surprisingly critical take on Mearsheimer's position. In his conclusion, he seems to dismiss the idea that we even need to look at "the root causes of the conflict." He seems to have adopted something like the "democracy vs. autocracy" view that Biden espouses, at least when it comes to the Russia-vs.-Ukraine conflict.

Yes, Putin's malicious intentions and imperatives of his particular autocratic government played a role in his decision to initiate this year's invasion. But to understand the dynamics of the war, the actual history of US-Russia relations and the role NATO expansion also has to be understood. And since the Clinton Administration, the Russian government has expressed openly and the US government was very much aware that Russia regarded NATO enlargement as threatening to their security.

No one actually believes that if Canada or Mexico entered a military alliance with China that allowed China to station troops and weapons under their own control in those countries that the United States would not regard that as a threat to national security and act in accordance with that perception.

China and Russia after the invasion of Ukraine

Zenel Garcia and Kevin Modlin write in the current Autumn issue of the US Army War College's journal Parameters on the implications of the Ukraine-Russia war for the China-Russia relationship. (Sino-Russian Relations and the War in Ukraine 07/28/2022)

The invasion of February 24 obviously puts Russia in a position of greater dependence on China. But Garcia and Modlin look at some important features of that alignment, which in general favors China's international position though it also comes with significant risks.

China has been using the war to position China as a "nonhegemonic international actor" in the Global South nations, a powerful country that has benefits to offer but without the dangers those nations often associate with the United States. They have been warning that the US in its position against Russia in Ukraine is operating from a "Cold War mentality". They are presenting China as a champion of developing countries while portraying the US as a source of instability.

They do identify new challenges for China this situation presents. China has been presenting itself as a defender of nonintervention and of national independence and development as state in their Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. But China's unwillingness to straightforwardly condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine does at least partially contradict that position.

China has a long common border with Russia and a big interest in stability in Central Asian countries like Kazakhstan that both gives them an interest in good relations with Russia but also carries risks if Russia pursues interventionist policies.

Garcia and Modlin also note that development with Russia and Ukraine have been offering new opportunities for the economic relationships between China and Russia:

Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 provided another opportunity for China. The resulting Western sanctions left Moscow with few options except to turn to Beijing for investment. Consequently, Chinese investments in critical Russian economic sectors that had stalled due to the latter’s informal barriers were approved. The outcome of the Power of Siberia Pipeline benefited from this delay, given the crisis allowed China to negotiate a lower price for gas purchases. The sanctions also facilitated China’s involvement in the Yamal liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects in northern Russia. As a Carnegie Endowment report suggests, “due to the impact of Western sanctions,” China’s share in the Yamal LNG project increased to 30 percent. This Chinese investment endeavor allowed Russian resources to commit to liquified natural gas and the pipeline project. [my emphasis]

And they note that this situation means, "Due to the war in Ukraine, Russia is likely to become more reliant on Chinese investments. In time, China may face diminishing returns and the choices it currently faces on Belt and Road Initiative partnerships."

They discuss this in a section on risks for China. But it seems that for the foreseeable future, this part of the relationship is mainly an opportunity for China, unless they become excessively dependent on Russian oil and gas or get stuck with big financial risks. They also describe some of the methods China has to offer financial support to Russia, although they have to be managed against the risks of clashing with Western (particularly US) sanctions.

But they also stress that the Russia-China relationship:

.. is not predicated on deeply shared politics or economics. Instead, it hinges on how the two countries independently and jointly want to operate in the international system, which contrasts with how neither side viewed the other as a legitimate actor after the Sino-Soviet split.

As they also describe it as China and Russia having common interests but more limited commitments to common action. China-Russia is not a Eurasian NATO.

In this vein, they caution US policymakers against viewing that relationship in a simplistic Cold War manner, the very sort of problem that resulted in Washington taking years to fully appreciate the significant of the Sino-Soviet split that was in full view during the early 1960s:

In the context of the deterioration of US-Chinese relations in recent years, Beijing’s position is increasingly viewed [by the US] as pro-Moscow and a sign of authoritarian unity against the “rules-based” international order. This view fundamentally oversimplifies Sino-Russian relations and fails to account for the impact the Ukrainian invasion might have on them. [my emphasis] 

Here it's not at all a simple matter of polemics to note that the image of a solid, threatening bloc of China and Russia against "the West," or a variation of it in the form of democracy-vs.-autocracy may not serve the national interest of the US or the need for peace and cooperation on global threats. But it is very convenient for the more short-term perspective of the military-industrial complex.

Ukraine-Russia war: a look back at possible alternatives now closed out

There seems to be little doubt that the current war in Ukraine marks a turning point of relations between the West, represented by NATO, and Russia. The adjustments in world politics include the now-tighter alignment of Russia and China and an initial orientation of the EU countries toward a more active geopolitical role.

During most of the Cold War period after the internal armed conflicts in Greece and Turkey (that were the occasion of the Truman Doctrine of 1947) were resolved, the US and the USSR established a practice of avoiding proxy wars in Europe. Now we have one in Ukraine, although the West is leery of calling it a "proxy war" because Russia is using that as a propaganda phrase. The Russian role is more direct than "proxy".

Historians, foreign policy experts, and war partisans will take some time (if ever) before everyone agrees whether the current war began in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and established effective control over part of the Donbas area, or with the new Russian invasion that began on February 24th of this year.

I'm inclined to think 2022 is a better defining point. But things can look different after a few years.

Reading analyses of the Ukraine-Russia conflict from the last decade or so, I'm struck once again by how a situation that looks in retrospect like an inevitable outcome was in earlier years a situation open with possibilities and alternatives now superceded by later events.

For instance, a 2020 collection of essays (Peter Schulze and Winfried Veit eds, Ukraine in the crosshairs of geopolitical power play 2020) featured various essays on the conflict. In one of them, Andrey Kortunov - director of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) - looks at how the post-2014 situation looked like another so-called frozen conflict in the post-Soviet space:

Almost seven years have passed since the start of the dramatic events of the Maidan in Kiev [the "Euromaidan" protests of 2014], which engendered a profound crisis in Russia’s relations with both Ukraine and the West. This is not a short period of time: World War One lasted a little over four years, World War Two dragged on for six years, and only about five years passed between the start of Perestroika and the collapse of the USSR. All wars and crises come to an end, and, as a rule, the more acute the crisis, the faster it moves towards some kind of a resolution. [my emphasis]

How closely Kortunov's RIAC may tied to the Russian government, I don't know. The Carnegie Endowment has featured columns by Kortunov. He was interviewed briefly by Christiane Amanpour in late March (Andrey Kortunov on the Future of the Ukraine War 03/29/2022), where he said, "I think that the most important thing is for the Russian leadership to recognize that Ukraine has the right to exist as an independent country, that it has the right to choose its own political trajectory, its own domestic directions of development."

The EU's European Institute for Security Studies published an "expert opinion" by him in 2016. Internationale Politik Quarterly published this online analysis of his on 05/31/2022, Moscow’s Painful Adjustment to the Post-Soviet Space, in which he writes:

The launch of a “special military operation” in Ukraine is clearly an exception from the trend toward a more rational, more risk aversive, and more pragmatic approach to the post-Soviet space. It seems that in the eyes of the leadership in the Kremlin, a West-oriented Ukraine collaborating closely with NATO presented a formidable challenge not only to Russia’s security interests, but even to Russia’s existence. Any rational cost-benefit analysis would suggest that the Kremlin has a lot to lose, but not much to gain by trying to reconstruct Ukraine by military means. It is premature to analyze the outcome of the Kremlin’s move in Ukraine, but one can speculate that this will be remembered as the last act of the 30-years-long drama of Russia struggling with its imperial legacy. [my emphasis]

Kortunov looked at the options at that point (end of 2020) in terms of the options of a strong Ukraine/weak Ukraine and of a detente/confrontation stance between NATO and Russia. This was a way of emphasizing that Ukraine itself had critical agency, but that it also really was a part of the geopolitical calculations of spheres of interests between the West and Russia.

One of the developments in the polemics over the current war that I find particularly unfortunate is the insistance by some anti-Russia hawks that Russian leaders could not have seriously perceived any legitimate security issues with Ukraine aligning with the West. That's a sign of how superficially foreign policy issues including wars are often discussed.

Because almost any discussion of Ukraine's pre-2022 situation recognized that Russia did regard Ukraine's alignment with the West as a security problem. Not least because Vladimir Putin was saying openly and explicitly starting in 2007 that Russia did see the possible accession of Georgia and Ukraine to NATO that way. That obviously doesn't mean we shouldn't look at other Russian motives for their Ukraine policy. But to pretend that Russia wasn't paying attention to the defense implications for itself is not only unrealistic. It makes much of the actual policy discussions of 2014-2021 around Ukraine nearly incomprehensible.

Here's a more recent interview with Kortunov a few days after February 24, 'Russia has a lot to lose, not much to gain,' says senior policy advisor Andrey Kortunov Deutsche Welle News 03/02/2022:

It appears now that Ukraine has taken more of the "strong Ukraine" route that Kortunov described in 2020, which involves increased public trust in the elected government and a movement toward meeting the governance standards of the EU, though without near-term EU membership being feasible. In this option, "Kiev will succeed in overcoming ehe temptations of political authoritarianism and radical ethnic nationalism, instead being oriented towards political plurality and the European model of a civic nation."

From what we've seen this year, Ukraine certainly seems to have largely taken that route. Although war itself is often not good for democracy. Kortunov expected that in this case, Ukraine would become "a significant additional asset" to "the West in its protracted confrontation with Moscow."

And he summarizes the likely Russian evaluation of that development as follows:

If this scenario materialises, then for Russian authorities, Ukraine will become not merely a major nuisance, but a fundamental existential challenge. The prospect of Ukraine inevitably joining NATO entails the intensive militarisation of the Russia-Ukraine border. Perceiving the Ukrainian development model as a functional alternative to the political system established in Moscow, the Russian opposition will borrow inspiration and practical experience from the story of Ukraine's success. Young educated professionals will emigrate from Russia to Ukraine in great numbers. In response, the Russian leadership will have to isolate their country frotn the alien Ukrainian inßuence with progressive determination, thereby further expanding the abyss between the two societies and countries. [my emphasis in bold]

However much one may want to dismiss such Russian concerns as illigitimate or even as sinister propaganda, this is how power-politics works. And ten thousand Putin-is-the-New-Hitler messages on Twitter won't change that. (Reminder: America's opponents in an international conflict since 1945 pretty much always get labeled the New Hitler. We only have wars against "Hitler".)

Kortunov gives this modest definition to the NATO-Russia detente option: "While not friendly, Russia-NATO relations at least emerge from a state of acute conßict."

Well, that didn't happen.

Kortunov's vision of what a Happy Ending might have looked like prior to 2022 does contain some hints of what a positive, definitive peace settlement to the war might include:

For this scenario to materialise, it is crucial that Russia - not only the current Russian authorities, but also a significant portion of Russian society today - recognise and accept Ukrainian people and Ukrainian authority as an independent agency. That is, to accept as given a fact that is far from apparent to everyone [in Russia]: that Russians and Ukrainians are two different peoples, even if they are close both historically and culturally, and that Ukraine is not and will not in the foreseeable future be another failed state. Over the seven years of the crisis [early 2014-2022], Ukraine has not collapsed, nor has its economy collapsed. And the so-called Kiev junta has not been overthrown by phantom pro-Russian [so-called] healthy forces. [my emphasis in bold]

In short, continued Ukrainian political cohesion around independence and an acceptance of that independence by Russia. That's not a development that is going to be right around the corner now.

Ukraine-Russia war, six months in

We're six months into the Russia-Ukraine war. This is a short summary of my own impression of the state of the war as of this summer.

If you feel like binging on perspectives on the Ukrainian war, this is an 8 1/2 hour video of an English-language conference, and there's an additional two hours on a video of the 2nd day of the conference.

Ukraine's official perspective

Ukraine's public pitch is basically: Western nations should give Ukraine anything and everything they ask for and if they don't, a mega-domino-theory scenario will kick in where Russia will take over all of Europe and democracy will be destroyed forever. Or something along those lines.

Since Ukraine has been in basically a nothing-to-lose situation, I can understand why would take a position like this and scold their de facto allies as having been suckers and wimps for ever engaging Russia in any kind of cooperative way over anything.

Still, the Ukrainians call for things like setting up a no-fly zone against Russia. Which means in practice the United States shooting down Russian planes and even taking out Russian antiaircraft installations in Russia itself. Calling for a world war - and that's what we're talking about here - is a reckless thing to do. That could be one of the things behind Tom Friedman's cryptic comment:

... privately, U.S. officials are a lot more concerned about Ukraine’s leadership than they are letting on. There is deep mistrust between the White House and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine — considerably more than has been reported." (Why Pelosi’s Visit to Taiwan Is Utterly Reckless (New York Times 08/01/2022)

How long will the war go on?

The easy answer is that it will continue until both sides see more disadvantages than advantages in continuing. But that isn't an purely material or financial consideration. Factors like patriotism, leadership ambitions, and saving face all play big roles. Here the famous statement of Basil Liddell-Hart, “The purpose of war is to make a better peace,” is very relevant.

It could well go on for years.

Ukraine, the EU, and NATO

The polemics over the causes of the war have made it an article of faith for New Cold Warriors that Russian concerns over Ukraine joining NATO and/or the EU had nothing at all to do with Russian actions. It's a ideological rather than any kind of practical argument.

But what comes after the war? Any near-term peace settlement is likely to involve some kind of practical and even formal neutrality for Ukraine. Even if Russian leadership to suddenly (miraculously) decide they had no objection to Ukraine joining the EU and NATO, the process for Ukrainian accession to either would be a years-long process.

As awkward as it might be for New Cold Warriors to admit, The US in particular looked at NATO expansion as a kind of "freebie," in that they saw Russia as effectively so permanently weakened that they wouldn't be able to mount any effective military action against the new NATO members. That's why NATO is now scrambling to station hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the Baltic countries to provide an actually credible conventional military defense to deter a Russian attack there.

NATO now has a whole new set of calculations when it come to its goal, formally stated in 2008, of making both Ukraine and Georgia NATO members. (A commitment done in a worst-of-both-worlds form that may be one of the dumbest diplomatic blunders in history.) Now it's clear that NATO would have to station large numbers of troops in Georgia and Ukraine in that scenario and creat a prolonged period of much-heightened risk of US-Russia direct conflict. And, not least of the problems, keep Russia heavily dependent on China for the foreseeable future.

And it's always worth keeping in mind as well that the EU Treaty includes a mutual-defence clause. So accepting Ukraine as a full EU member before a stable settlement is achieved would basically be all of the EU countries declaring war on Russia. And most EU members are also NATO members. This doesn't seem like a great idea. If the EU governments can't manage the current refugee flows - and they are doing a poor job of it so far - no way they're going to go into a direct war with Russia unless it invades a current EU and NATO country.

American goals in the war

It's not at all clear to me at this point what the Biden Administration sees as the end goal. He himself made what was passed off as a slip of the tongue saying that Putin should be removed. And DefSec Lloyd Austin said the goal was to weaken Russia militarily to the point it would not be able to carry out another invasion like this. That sounds like a couple of orders of magnitude beyond restoring Ukraine's sovereignty over all its territory. (US pledges extra $713m for Ukraine war effort and to weaken Russia Guardian 04/25/2022)

And assuming we get to Austin's stated goal with no nuclear war, that pretty much leaves Russia with all its nuclear weapons as a very dependent partner of China. Add to that: massive famine in mostly poor countries from Ukraine's grain exports being devastated and maybe Russia's sanctioned (the recent Ukraine-Russia-UN agreement on grain shipments is a gleam of hope here), drastic readjustments of energy suppliers (with critical help from our lovely friends in Saudi Arabia who have their own dubious priorities), and the almost-sure-to-come political crises in EU countries over Ukrainian refugees. The upcoming Italian election campaign is likely to feature some heavy anti-refugee rhetoric.  The conversation about the war is likely to change an awful lot over the next six months.

State Department spokesman Ted Price addressed US goal in a Press Briefing of 08/18/2022, emphasizing the goal of restoring Ukrainian sovereignty:

Everything we have provided our Ukrainian partners has been in the name of one principle, and that’s self-defense, because what our Ukrainian partners are facing is an external aggressor, a country – a foreign country crossing over sovereign Ukrainian borders onto independent, sovereign Ukrainian territory as part of an effort to wrest an independent country away from the Ukrainian Government and ultimately the Ukrainian people.

But he continued directly by stressing the US intends to keep the conflict contained:

So yes, we have provided precisely what our Ukrainian partners need to defend against this external invader, against this external aggressor. At the same time, we’ve also been clear that it is not in Ukraine’s interest, it is not in NATO’s interest, it is not in Europe’s interest, it is not in our interest to see Russia’s aggression against Ukraine become a broader conflagration, and for this war to spill beyond the borders of Ukraine more broadly into Europe, or potentially bringing Russia into conflict with NATO and the United States. That is not in anyone’s interest. [my emphasis]

This is a seemingly clear statement of intention to avoid the broader conflict a no-fly zone by NATO would represent. But it also doesn't rule the prospect of a protracted war in Ukraine.

Regime change in Russia?

The foreign policy establishment can be very imaginative when it comes to diplomatic polemics and talking itself into supporting risky and even reckless actions. But when it comes to Russia, they will have a hard time breaking out of the habit of thinking of Russia in their optimistic-arrogant post-USSR framing. "Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness," Obama said in 2014, in one of his prounouncements that didn't age so well. (Steve Holland and Jeff Mason, Obama, in dig at Putin, calls Russia 'regional power' Reuters 03/25/2014)

But hoping for a replay of a series of events like the one that led to the end of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact would be a very risky brand of imagination on which to base Western policies.As George Beebe writes (NATO’s Tunnel Vision Quincy Brief 28 08/11/2022):

Opinion polls suggest that Putin is more popular than he was prior to the war. Although Russia is taking a sizable economic hit from sanctions, the ruble is trading higher than it was before the war, and Russian energy earnings have gone up even as its export volumes have declined, thanks to rising oil prices and reluctance outside the West to join in sanctioning Russia. Western sanctions and military aid have reinforced perceptions in Russia that the war is not against Ukraine but with the West, which is intent on Russia’s demise.7 So far, Russia’s battlefield losses seem to be producing a patriotic, rather than an anti-Putin, response.

Beebe cautions especially against any assumption that any Putin successor "would be intent, like Gorbachev in the waning days of the Cold War, on democratizing Russia and making amends with the West." He holds this to be "perhaps even more unlikely than Putin’s near-term ouster." He continues:

Certainly, there are many Russians, particularly in elite circles in Moscow and St. Petersburg, who are unhappy about the rupture in relations with the West and would like to see efforts to repair them. Some privately believe that Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was unnecessary and counterproductive, and they are horrified by the brutality of the war. That said, in contrast to the late Soviet and early post-Cold War periods, many of these same people are quite disillusioned with what they see as an increasingly decadent and illiberal West. And after the fiasco of Western reforms in the 1990s, many of those who would like to see Russia become more democratic believe that its form of governance should evolve gradually in consonance with Russian traditions, culture, and history, rather than by forced imitation of American or West European models. Russians across the political spectrum agree that NATO expansion is a threat to Russian security, as Gorbachev himself has long believed. [my emphasis]

Even though Gorbachev has insisted that the supposed commitment by the Bush I Administration on stationing NATO troops in East Germany was not the general commitment to not expand NATO in eastern Europe that Putin's government and some Western critics have claimed that it was, he shared the belief that Russian should regard the later NATO enlargement as a potential security threat.

Sanctions

Economic sanctions seem on the face of it to be less drastic than military action. But I'm convinced the US public and many policymakers have a general impression that they are far more effective than they typically work out to be in practice. When a country's leaders and their political case believe something is in their vital national interest (their form of government like in Venezuela and Cuba now or Iraq in the 1990s, a military project like Iran's nuclear program, or a national security priority as Russia officially regards Ukraine), they won't be inclined to easily back down in the face of sanctions.

And sanctions tehmselves become an obvious nationalist rallying point for even unpopular regimes. And understadably so. Sanctions aimed at denying a country access to military technology, supplies, or resources are one thing, though not likely a popular thing in the target country. But sanctions aimed at impoverishing the civilian population to induce a switch to a government more to the liking of the country imposing the sanctions are a much more volatile kind of undertaking.

And any diplomatic settlement short of a unliteral surrender by Russia would require dropping Western sacctions in return for military and political concessions. If the Lloyd Austin position on US war aims is the actual Biden Administration policy, would the US be willing to drop sanctions even in return for a full Russian withdrawal from Ukraine?

And in the Ukrainian case, the European allies of the US are bearing more of the costs of the sanctions than the US. The market for US oil is even helped by the sanctions against Russia.

Ukrainian refugees

I'm leery of talking about refugees as a threat to the EU in any way. Because that can very easily play into the xenophobic rhetoric of the far right, and of radicalized conservatives, who always talk about refugees as a threat and a burden ("carravans," "illegal migrants").

But Putin's government would be foolish not to see that as a weakness that could potentially work to Russia's favor in the goal of strenthening the EU. The European Union didn't roll over and die after Brexit. In fact, Britain itself is taking more of very much self-imposed economic blow because of it than the EU.

But fear and hatred of foreigners has always been a key element of fascist propaganda. Refugees make a useful political target because (1) people can see them in their own cities and towns, (2) they have restricted legal rights and are initially very dependent on assistance of the host country, and (3) they mostly can't vote in elections in their host countries.

To any rightwing demagogue, that combination spells T-A-R-G-E-T.

The UN Data Portal on Ukrainian Refugees is a reminder that the number of refugees from Ukraine is still an estimate, which itself is a measure of how unprepared the EU countries are for such an inflow. (The EU officially designates Ukrainian refugees as "displaced persons," a different legal category than "refugees." But they are generically refugees in normal journalistic usage.)

Essentially, that data as of 08/16/2022 indicates that there are currently something like four million Ukrainian refugees in central and western European countries, mostly in EU countries. As many as four million or more have fled Ukraine since February 24 and then gone back. Around two million or so Ukrainians have gone to Russia, though how that number breaks down between people fleeing war and people forcibly deported is not apparent.

Ukraine has a population of 44 million. The UN data show that at least ten million of them have left Ukraine during the war. Even keeping in mind that four million may have gone back, this is still a massive displacement of people. And that doesn't count how many have been internally displaced, in addition.

And this is just in the first six months of the war. If the war goes on for another year, the number of external refugees in EU countries could be double that. Like most refugees, most of them would presumably like to go back home. But the longer the war continues, the more established refugees will become in their host countries and much more destruction will take place in Ukraine. Even if the war ended today, a significant percentage of the refugees currently in the EU would stay permanently.

Russian information operations can be expected to encourage and amplify anti-refugee messaging in the EU, which the far right would do even without Russian encouragement. The effectiveness such political moves depends critically on how well the European conservative parties in particular push back on anti-refugee agitation. 

New WaPo story on the runup to the Ukraine-Russia war

The Washington Post has a long story reporting on the US response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Road to war: U.S. struggled to convince allies, and Zelensky, of risk of invasion 08/16/2022, with Shane Harris and four other reporters on the byline.

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.

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]

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.

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?”

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.

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.

We could also call that "World War III."

Weird Newsweek story about Belarus and the Russia-Ukraine war

Here’s another piece on the role Belarus, the Russian ally to Ukraine’s north, plays in the Ukraine-Russia war. And the role it’s not playing, that is, as an active military combatant: Brendan Cole, Could Belarus Join Vladimir Putin's Troops in Ukraine? Newsweek 08/13/2022.

To those of us not privy to highly classified documents at Mar-a-Lago or elsewhere, it may seem surprising that Belarus isn’t using its armed forces in Ukraine. What seems to have been Russia’s hope to seize Kiev quickly didn’t work out that way. And the war looks to be in more-or-less a stalemate, though it seems there are rumors of new “offensives” every few days.

Belarus participated in the Russian troop maneuvers that preceded the war. One might suppose this would be a good time for Russia to call on its close ally for military help. Belarus’ President Aleksandr Lukashenko, who has held that office since 1994, was until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this year commonly referred to as “Europe’s last dictator.” Now that we have a New Cold War (more-or-less), of course now Putin is the New Hitler – America’s Big Bad of the moment is always the New Hitler – I guess we can’t call Lukashenko the last dictator any more.

But this is still surprising. First: "Anyone openly speaking out against Putin's war will be treated like an opponent of the regime, posing danger in a country that retains the death penalty and has seen regular reports of protesters dying in custody."

Then comes this:

The General Staff of the Ukrainian Army said that Belarusian troops had been testing their readiness in the Brest and Gomel border regions.

However, senior officers from Belarus's special forces have warned in an open letter to Lukashenko that sending Belarusians to fight alongside Russians would be "pure suicide." Also, deploying troops who are not considered to be combat ready to a war Belarusians do not want risks further unrest for Lukashenko.

Konrad Muzyka, a defense analyst who focuses on Belarus and Russia, expected Lukashenko to recognize the independence of the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics at the start of the war and then send in his troops to Ukraine.

"But neither of these things happened," he told Newsweek, "I was very surprised by this. As the war has dragged on, my assessment has changed. Now I don't expect him to commit troops, if it hasn't happened already."

Muzyka, who is the director of Rochan Consulting, said that he has tracked Belarusian troops near the border where they have been undertaking "serious" exercises, albeit on a small scale.

This could point to not preparing for war but a plan to "tie up Ukrainian forces near the border with Belarus to make sure that these guys are not deployed to Donbas or Kherson or anywhere else."

Much of the first part of the article is about the severity of the rule of the Once-Last Dictator of Europe, and quotes Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a major opposition leader in exile, at some length. They also quote a pseudonymous oppositionist in Poland:

"It's not only about Lukashenko now in Belarus, because they have a lot of Russian officers now in Belarus who are making orders."

"It's like a double occupation in Belarus now. We have Lukashenko who is actually beating people and there is a lot of repression," she said, "and we have Russians who are even much worse than Lukashenko."

So, on the one hand, the Once-Last Dictator is ruling with an iron hand. But the country is half-controlled by Russians, or something. But serving officers in the Once-Last Dictator’s armed forces are publishing an open letter practically threatening to murder him (“pure suicide”) if he sends Russian troops to Ukraine? This is pretty clearly a hodgepodge of information that is some combination of dodgy and poorly explained.

Lukashenko in the last couple of years has clearly tilted more heavily toward Russia. But for a long time he tried to strike some kind of balance between Russia and the EU, though careful to stay on friendly terms with Russia. And to the extent Putin’s government really is operating on some sort of Greater Russia annexationist ambitions – as the New Cold Warriors gleefully assume – Belarus would be a part of that vision. And certainly part of the Eurasian Union that Putin has been working to build.

So, there are different reasons why Lukashenko may not be sending his regular armed forces into Ukraine now. Or, yet.

1. The Russians might not want him to, because it might look Russia look weak to rely on Belarusian troops.
2. The Russians may not want him to at this time. There are surely contingency plans of some sort in both Moscow and Minsk.
3. Lukashenko sees the costs of direct intervention as notably greater than the cost of disappointing Putin. The one active war Russia currently has with a western neighbor country isn’t looking all that promising for Russia at the moment and no quick end is in sight. So a Russian threat to invade Belarus or overthrow Lukashenko may not look so immediately threatening as it might have six or seven months ago.

There's another curious item in the Newsweek report:

[Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya] said Belarusian partisans sabotaged railway lines against important supply routes at the start of the invasion, when Russian missiles were fired from Belarus' territory toward Ukraine. 

Information was also passed on to Ukrainian forces about bases from where the Russian missiles were fired and this resistance would be repeated if Belarusian troops were forced to fight.

Ukraine hinted at Belarusian partisan involvement behind explosions on Wednesday at the Ziabrovka airfield, in the Gomel region, where Russian aircraft are reportedly stationed. [my emphasis]

Assuming that there are anti-Russian partisans militarily active in Belarus, the obvious question is who is running them and/or supporting them? Presumably it’s not Russia. The anti-intervention Belarusian officers reported as publishing an open death threat to Lukashenko? Possible, but still seems unlikely.

Bottom line: this is a story that’s both very interesting and very odd.

Lockdown in the Ukrainian port city Mykolaiv

This is another development in the Ukrainian war effort. In the port city of Mykolaiv, the Ukrainian government did a lockdown for 54 hours to investigate collaborators with the Russians: Michael Schwirtz, In War-Torn Mykolaiv, Ukrainians Search for Informers New York Times 08/08/2022.

Map Source: Wikipedia

ich sealed the city, preventing residents from entering or leaving — a success. Five people were arrested, he said, and a number of weapons and communications devices confiscated, though he provided no details.

“I’m sorry for the discomfort over the weekend, but it was worth it,” Mr. Kim said in a video message Monday morning.

He added, “No Russian-speaking person was shot.”

As just someone reading the news, I wonder what kind of hairs the governor might be splitting by saying, “No Russian-speaking person was shot.” It might just be a way of saying that no one was killed in the search for collaborators in the city during the lockdown.

Having heard endless police accounts in the US of people being killed by police which turn out to be, well, not entirely fact-based, a sentence like that sounds a little dodgy. Like: "No, the police did not kill a five-foot-ten-inches-tall, 51-year-old man with ten fillings in his teeth and wearing a blue shirt, on the corner of 3rd and Main at 10:02 on Friday morning." That leaves quite a bit of wiggle-room for what the police might actually have done.

Wolfgang Richter of the German Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) talked about the lockdown in this German-language report from Deutsche Welle: Selenskyjs Strategien gegen Russland-Kollaborateure 08/12/2022:

Richter doesn't claim to have any particular insight about the raid. He explains that the justification is not implausible on its face. But we also don't know all that it implies. He talks about the fact that Russia does obviously have collaborators and supporters, even though there's no reason to uncritically accept Russian claims about how widespread such support is.

He notes that as the war continues, there could be a kind of emerging civil war within the larger war.

This part of the New York Times report illustrates why reporting on an incident like the Mykolaiv lockdown is tricky:

Amid the devastation, some residents said the checks for collaborators brought some comfort, despite the inconvenience.

“It calmed us down a bit,” said Valentina Hontarenko, 74, who was at a kiosk selling kvas, a popular drink made from fermented bread. “They asked about our connections to Russia. We don’t have any.”

During the lockdown, officers went door to door and stopped people in the street, checking their documents and scrolling through their phones looking for evidence that they might be coordinating with Russian forces. Video of the operation released by local authorities shows officers checking computers and text messages on phones.

At least that third paragraph describes the context. But in that context, pretending to conduct random interviews of locals is even more fluff than the hackneyed reports of journalists going to a diner in some small city to interview white people about what they think about politics and presenting it as some kind of special insight in the thinking of Regular Folks.

So, you're a local in a Ukrainian city in a war zone. The government has locked the city down for over two days and is apparently stopping people randomly to examine their electronic devices to see if people might be collaborating with the Russian army to kill Ukrainians. A foreign reporter interviews you at a public kiosk, and asks you what you think about the event.

How many people in that situation are going to tell the foreign reporter something like, "This lockdown is ridiculous! It's nothing but an excuse by our corrupt, incompetent government in Kyiv to intimidate people. It's a total disgrace that they're doing this!"

Nobody's going to say that. On the other hand, would an actual Russian spy or collaborator who actually talked to a foreign reporter in a government-controlled city under lockdown say anything much different from what this supposedly random 74-year-old at a kiosk said?

This kind of man-on-the-street interview is especially silly in this context.

Schwirz also quotes this guy:

Dmitry Boychenko, the driver of a truck that daily delivers water to Mykolaiv from nearby Odesa, said the lockdown allowed him to reconnect with neighbors. Residents were allowed out of their homes, but were urged to stay in their courtyards, prompting impromptu gatherings outdoors.

“There are people here who are giving out the locations of our guys,” Mr. Boychenko said. “It may be sad, but we have traitors to our motherland living here.”

It's important to recognize that such quotes are pure fluff in an article like this. It's a stylistic way to illustrate the obvious: of course Russia would find or insert collaborators and spies into a contested city.

I do wish that the Times had provided a bit more information, since only some fraction of one percent of the readers have any idea whether it's normal or sensible in a situation like this to declare a citywide lockdown for more than two days to search for collaborators. And they arrested only five people in the whole process?

I picked out this article to highlight because it's a good reminder that to pretty much everyone who is not former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul that actual wars are a lot more complicated and messy than Twitter trolling and hooray-for-our-side memes.

Ukraine's removal of suspected security risks from their government

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky surprised the world in July when he announced he was removing hundreds of officials on suspicion of collaboration with Russia.

Euronews reported on the firings (Ukraine war: President Zelenskyy fires spy chief and top prosecutor 07/23/2022):

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired his country's spy chief [Ivan Bakanov] and top prosecutor [Iryna Venediktova], citing hundreds of criminal proceedings into treason and collaboration by people in their departments, and other law enforcement agencies.

“In particular, more than 60 employees of the prosecutor’s office and the SBU (state security service) have remained in the occupied territory and work against our state,” Zelenskyy said.

“Such an array of crimes against the foundations of the state’s national security, and the links recorded between Ukrainian security forces and Russian special services raise very serious questions about their respective leaders," he said in his nightly video address to the nation.

Zelenskyy dismissed Ivan Bakanov, a childhood friend and former business partner whom he had appointed to head the SBU. Bakanov had come under growing criticism over security breaches since the war began.

He also dismissed Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova, and replaced her with her deputy Oleksiy Symonenko. Venediktova has helped lead war crime investigations. [my emphasis]

Brian Mann told NPR (Ukrainian officials fired after probe shows their workers collaborated with Russia 07/18/2022):

You know, this is the biggest reshuffling we've seen in Zelenskyy's government since the war began. Zelenskyy himself described this as an important step to purify - that's his word - purify Ukraine as the war continues. There is continuing tension within Ukraine, especially in the south and east, over government officials and some business leaders who were openly pro-Russian before the invasion. Many of the people in those regions speak Russian, of course. They have strong cultural ties to Russia. So this is an ongoing challenge for Ukraine. Now Zelenskyy says there are hundreds of criminal cases open involving alleged collaborators. And this comes at a moment when the war is escalating again. Russia is pressing hard right now ... with artillery and ground forces in the east, heavy cruise missile strikes hitting cities across Ukraine. [my emphasis]

Ben Hall reports for the Financial Times, "In total, 651 criminal proceedings had been opened for 'treason and collaboration activities', [Zelensky] added." (Volodymyr Zelenskyy fires security chiefs over ‘treasonous’ officials 07/18/2022)

It's no surprise that a government would purge officials seriously suspected of treasonous activity with the enemy during a war. But the head of the intelligence service and the chief prosecutor in charge of dealing with war crimes are Russian collaborators? I can imagine that the hair of intelligence officials in all NATO countries stood up straight when they first heard this news. NATO is providing extensive military and intelligence support to Ukraine in the war.

This is a reminder that NATO regarded Ukraine as far away from meeting the requirements to join the alliance. Obviously, a certain standard of intelligence security is one of those factors.

And it's striking that the removed head of the intelligence service was a lifelong friend of Zelensky. That doesn't necessarily mean he wasn't qualified. And of course Zelensky would want a trusted person at the head of the security service. And a professional actor like Zelensky didn't necessarily spend a lot of time with people who were intelligence experts earlier in his career.

Eugen Theise reporting for Deutsche Welle adds these relevant observations in Meinung: Selenskyj selbst ist das Problem, nicht seine Freunde [Zelenskyy himself is the problem, not his friends] 07/19/2022; my translation):

Had the war perhaps forced the president to rethink, after he initially surrounded himself in politics with friends and former business partners? Hardly. Because his crackdown only looks determined at first glance. Initially, there was only talk of a suspension and not of a dismissal. According to the presidential office, they wanted to investigate cases of high treason in both authorities. But then it suddenly went blow by blow: Already on Tuesday, the parliament dismissed Bakanov and Venediktova at the request of Zelenskyi. There was no further talk of an investigation that had been mentioned two days before.

The president's back-and-forth in this strange personal poker leaves the impression that the ex-comedian, who outgrew himself after the Russian invasion of his country and became a courageous leader of a proud nation before the eyes of the world, suddenly dwarfed himself. And that is when it came to taking responsibility for the failures of his confidants.

War crimes and war propaganda: Amnesty International and Ukraine

A couple of reminders. One is that the causes and meanings of the war are not determined by particular crimes and atrocities committed by either side. The second is that laws of war are there for good reasons and countries should follow them, even when the other side doesn't.

It's worth mentioning in this regard that Amnesty International has criticized Ukraine for a particular practice in the current war, Ukraine: Ukrainian fighting tactics endanger civilians 08/04/2022.

Deutsche Welle gives a critical report about AI's charges, Amnesty International accuses Ukraine of endangering civilians 08/05/2022:

The DW reporters seem fairly eager to dismiss the AI report, although they are raising legitimate questions in the context. From the discussion in that report, it appears that the practice being criticized is not considered a "war crime" in the sense that perpetrators should be prosecuted, but rather an illegal practice for which victims would be entitled to compensation by the perpetrating government.

This is why I.F. Stone's guideline on reporting about wars is perennially relevant: "All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Amnesty International of ignoring Russian misconduct and making one-sided propaganda against Ukraine (Isobel Koshiw, Zelenskiy rebukes Amnesty for accusing Ukraine of endangering civilians Guardian 08/05/2022):

During his nightly address, Zelenskiy accused Amnesty of “immoral selectivity” that helps a terrorist state by portraying the victim and aggressor as the same and ignoring what the aggressor is doing. Zelenskiy said that there cannot be – even hypothetically – any condition under which any Russian attack on Ukraine becomes justified.

Klaus Stimeder comments on the initial reception of the report by Zelenskiy's government (Ukrainische Reaktionen nach Amnesty-Bericht: Die Wut der Überfallenen Der Standard 06.08.2022, my translation), essentially arguing that of course AI shouldn't be criticizing misconduct by the Ukrainian military. Anyone reading the article linked above at the AI website will see that by the fifth paragraph in the piece reporting on its criticism of Ukraine it starts mentioning Russian war crimes. And then goes on to discuss that topic further.)

As for the accusation of the faction that now sees AI as a tool of the Russian regime: as ridiculous as calling the organization a bastion of the Putin dictatorship may seem, its [AI's] representatives must nevertheless acknowledge that their work does not take place in the vacuum within which it claims to do its work. AI Secretary General Agnes Callamard's sweeping insult to critical users ("Mob", "Trolls") speaks volumes about the self-image not only of her, but of all Western-dominated human rights organizations, which never miss an opportunity to flaunt their supposedly moral superiority.

Accordingly, the reactions to the AI report in Ukraine reveal one thing above all: the limits of working in the service of human rights, whose exponents insist on a "clean" war at all costs, regardless of the balance of power on the ground and the political character of the opposing systems, in which the same standards are applied to invaders and attackers. The archive images from London from the time of the Blitzkrieg, which draw the all too obvious historical parallels to the current situation, may not be a justification in this respect, but at least an explanation for how this form of non-partisanship is received in Ukraine.

Again, the laws of war are important and they apply to all sides in a war. Even if Stimeder sneers at the idea.

AI posted an additional statement on the weekend that is actually a classic non-apology, which basically says, well, we understand that people who don't like hearing what the report says are upset, but we're standing by the report: Statement on publication of press release on Ukrainian fighting tactics 08/07/2022:

Amnesty International deeply regrets the distress and anger that our press release on the Ukrainian military’s fighting tactics has caused. Since Russian’s invasion began in February 2022, Amnesty International has been rigorously documenting and reporting on war crimes and violations committed in Ukraine, speaking to hundreds of victims and survivors whose stories illuminate the brutal reality of Russia’s war of aggression. We have challenged the world to demonstrate its solidarity with Ukrainians through concrete action, and we will continue to do so.

Amnesty International’s priority in this and in any conflict is ensuring that civilians are protected; indeed, this was our sole objective when releasing this latest piece of research.

Of related interest, Stefan Schocher gives a bit of background on Zelensky's head of information operations (PR im Krieg: Wie sich die ukrainische Medienlandschaft verändert Der Standard 08/08/2022; my translation):

For more than a decade, Serhiy Leshchenko has devoted himself to the excesses of corruption in Ukraine. It was he who, as an investigative journalist for Ukrainska Pravda, followed the threads that converged in the residence of the then President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych: in Meshyhirya, a palatial country house north of Kiev including a zoo. Today, Leshchenko is one of the architects of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's communications and his advisor on information issues and the fight against fake news. Zelenskyi's speech at the Glastonbury Music Festival, for example, was his idea.

It is a strategy that is not without controversy. Some call it a show. Others without content. Others see it as the actual content of Zelensky's politics and as a continuation of his TV career, others also point to authoritarian traits.

Realist-minded observers trying to sort through the Russia-Ukraine war

There is an academic-sponsored website called Russia Matters, which describes itself this way: "Russia Matters is a project launched in 2016 by Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and made possible with support from Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Stanton Foundation."

The fact that they publish Über-Realist Stephen Walt is a good sign, e.g., Does Anyone Still Understand the 'Security Dilemma'? 07/26/2022. He explains how the International Relations (IR) theory of the security dilemma is important to understand current discussions and polemics over the Russia-Ukraine war:

Consider this recent propaganda video tweeted out from NATO headquarters, responding to assorted Russian "myths" about the alliance. The video points out that NATO is a purely defensive alliance and says it harbors no aggressive designs against Russia. These assurances might be factually correct, but the security dilemma explains why Russia isn't likely to take them at face value and might have valid reasons to regard NATO's eastward expansion as threatening.

Adding new members to NATO may have made some of these states more secure (which is why they wanted to join), but it should be obvious why Russia might not see it this way and that it might do various objectionable things in response (like seizing Crimea or invading Ukraine). NATO officials might regard Russia's fears as fanciful or as "myths," but that hardly means that they are completely absurd or that Russians don't genuinely believe them. Remarkably, plenty of smart, well-educated Westerners — including some prominent former diplomats — cannot seem to grasp that their benevolent intentions are not transparently obvious to others. [my emphasis]

My guess is that his reference to "some prominent former diplomats" includes Michael McFaul, who was Obama's US Ambassador to Russia 2012-2014. McFaul is well-informed. But on Twitter, he often comes off like a New Cold War troll taking jabs at any kind of critical commentary on US policy toward Ukraine.

Walt's colleague and sometime collaborator John Mearsheimer (who also counts as an Über-Realist in IR theory) seems to enjoy being provocative on the matter of Russia and Ukraine more so than Walt. Here are three videos of Mearsheimer talking about that set of issues, including one featuring both Walt and McFaul.

Munk Debate: Russia-Ukraine War | Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer v Michael McFaul, Radosław Sikorski 05/13/2022:

The causes and consequences of the Ukraine war-A lecture by John J. Mearsheimer Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies 06/16/2022. (This one is not available for embedding but can be viewed at YouTube.)

Here (Wrecking Ukraine: The cost of Winning the War with Geopolitics Expert John Mearsheimer) he's being interviewed by Jasmin Kosubek, who was formerly with the German RT channel, which has now been banned in Germany as a Russian disinformation outlet. She talks about her departure from RT last year here. In this interview, Mearsheimer expresses his assumption that getting relations with Russia back to a much less confrontive posture like during the 1990s will take decades.

Al Franken in this July 31 podcast talks to Julia Ioffe about the Russia-Ukraine War, Russia-Born Journalist Julia Ioffe Gives an Update on Ukraine (which does include some not-appropriate-for-the-office words):

Al seems a little taken aback by how emphatic Julia is about not seeing the Putin regime as a bunch of masterful operators as the New Cold Warriors prefer to portray them. "The evil we see coming out of the Kremlin is often mitigated by incompetence and stupidity." (10:30) She continues, "What they are doing is really bad s**t. But they often trip over themselves."

I don't share her position that the US should be "the world's policeman." But she's taking a complex and fact-based view. She not just using Twitter talking points. I do think she makes an important point that negotiating an end to the war will have to wait until one way or the other, both Russia and Ukraine are tired of fighting. Or, to put it another way, until both sides decide the cost of continuing the fight is greater than the benefits to be expected.

What is the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine?

I was listening to a Mary Trump podcast on US politics featuring Malcolm Nance. At the first of the interview, they talk about Ukraine and Nance talks about how he's home from fighting in Ukraine and about his background in US Naval intelligence.

This made me wonder how this works. It turns out Vance is a member of the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine.

I’m DONE talking. #JoinTheLegion #StopRussia #SlavaUkraini pic.twitter.com/ob3gL1cZ7P

— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) April 19, 2022

The name echoes the International Brigades of foreigners who fought in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side. But since it's 2022, they have a Facebook page:

The Washington Post reported on this in April (Ex-MSNBC analyst joins Ukrainian forces against Russia: ‘I’m done talking' 04/19/2022):

Nance, 60, is a “globally recognized counterterrorism expert” with decades of experience in U.S. intelligence, according to his author biography. Nance, executive director of the Terror Asymmetrics Project, a think tank focusing on terrorism and defense, previously deployed on intelligence operations to the Balkans, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, his author biography says. ...

“The international legion is one of the best-kept secrets in the country,” Nance told the Daily Beast. “I was very touched when I met the first platoon and saw they were here for the right reasons.”

The State Department has warned Americans that citizens traveling to Ukraine, “especially to take up arms,” face “profound risks … to their health, to their safety, their security.” State Department spokesman Ned Price said last month that U.S. citizens traveling to Ukraine to fight against the Russians “face significant risks, including the very real risk of capture or death.”

This raises a question if this is a way for NATO governments to involve some American and other NATO forces directly in the the war with the "international legion" as a cover. It's also not clear to me what the legal status of such foreign fighters would be if captured. Under international law, mercenaries can tried as criminals and are not required to be treated as prisoners of war.

David Malet pointed out in March (The Risky Status of Ukraine’s Foreign Fighters Foreign Policy 03/15/2022):

But what will happen to those foreign volunteers when some are inevitably captured or killed? If Ukraine is enlisting foreign volunteers into its regular military, something it also did in the 2010s with the foreigners who joined nationalist militias to fight pro-Russian separatists, then they should have full rights as soldiers under the Geneva Conventions.

Under international law, when soldiers become noncombatants when wounded or captured, they are supposed to be protected from reprisals, torture, or degrading treatment as hostages, and they must be provided legal protections against collective punishment for acts of their country. However, mercenaries do not enjoy the same protections as lawful combatants, including the rights afforded to prisoners of war, and governments are free to treat them as they see fit.

The standards for identifying mercenaries are also arbitrary. Under international law, they are foreign participants in the conflict who are motivated primarily by personal gain. That motivation is difficult to prove or disprove for anyone. And there are in fact some soldiers for hire among the number of legionnaires who have traveled to Ukraine, blurring the distinction. Moscow even appears to be importing its own mercenaries from Syria. But Russia can claim it is following international law in any actions it might take against foreign legionnaires if they are not regarded as legitimate soldiers. [my emphasis]

Malet notes that Russia has stated that any foreign fighters would be treated as mercenaries.

Andy Blanchard reports in Band of others: Ukraine’s legions of foreign soldiers are on the frontline Politico 03/25/2022:

Cpl. Damien Magrou, a spokesperson for the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine, says his fighting force is made of a large contingent of British, American and Polish volunteers.

Magrou, a Norwegian who has lived in Kyiv for several years, declined to provide specifics on the total number of legionaries or details on how many have come from which part of the world.

When it comes to qualifications, Magrou said a military background on its own isn’t good enough. The legion is looking for foreign fighters with live combat experience.

“What we want is for people to come that have already been in the line of fire,” he said.

For this reason, Americans with “concrete combat experience” are very attractive candidates.

He also reports, "Russian forces have appeared to target foreign volunteers." And what he relates about the Canadian position on its citizens serving in the International Legion suggests they are concern that foreigners in the Legion could be considered mercenaries:

The Canadian Armed Forces has instructed its members — including those in its regular force, reserves and those on leave — to stay away from the region.

Lt.-Gen. Frances Allen, Canada’s vice-chief of the defense staff, told a parliamentary committee Wednesday that the directive came from Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre. The only exception to the prohibition are personnel with approval from Eyre, she said.

Canada has warned would-be fighters about the risks of going to Ukraine’s conflict zone as well as the possibility the Russian regime could use the presence of Canadian mercenaries as part of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine. Allen warned that Russian disinformation may use the engagement of foreign fighters in Ukraine in “counterproductive” ways that could compromise the efforts of Ukraine’s Western allies.

There is also a separate group of Georgian citizens called the Georgian Legion.

The International Legion is something that could have significant "unintended consequences." We should recall that there were foreign fighters in Afghanistan assisting what the West then called "brave mujahadeen Afghan freedom fighters" against the Soviet forces. That brand of foreign legionnaires later became known as "jihadi terrorists."

There is also a question of what risks these international fighters raise for intelligence operations. Ukraine has been having its issues within its own government with Russian espionage operations. NATO has been sharing intelligence with the Ukrainian government. And security of "sources and methods" is always a concern. These international legions are presumably working closely with the Ukrainian armed forces, but without being part of the nation's military.

There's always a lot of gray areas in war. The presence of these international fighters provides some additional ones.

Looking forward from back to 2016 with Richard Haass on Russia and Ukraine

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

In trying to keep some perspective on the current Russia-Ukraine war, I find it particularly helpful to look back at perspectives that foreign policy experts were elaborating a few years ago, specially since 2014, the year of Russia's annexation of Crimea.

Richard Haass is president of the stereotypically establishment Council on Foreign Relations. So he's hardly some hippie pacifist. But he has an obvious pragmatic streak and is not inclined to toss out superficial hawkish slogans. I see his viewpoint on foreign affairs as an attempt to meld the "liberal internationalist" and "realist" outlooks.

In his 2016 book, A World in Disarray, Haas gives an account of developments in the relationship of the West and Russia, including  the disputes over NATO expansion to Georgia and Ukraine; the Euromaidan uprising, the Russian annexation of Ukraine, and its de facto occupation of portions of the Donbas regions all in 2014; and, the Minsk Accord of 2015.

He also notes, "in early March 2014, Putin articulated a security doctrine that essentially declared it was Russia's right to intervene on behalf of ethnic Russians where they were under threat." (The citations he gives are to two statements on the Kremlin website, which as of this writing seem to apply only to Russian-speakers in Ukraine. See also: Jon Swaine, Obama's marathon Putin Ukraine call: candid, direct but no meeting of minds Guardian 03/02/2014.)

He summarizes this background from his perspective in 2016:

All this is relevant for reasons that transcend the importance of Ukraine, a country of some forty-five million people. What happened broadly affected perceptions of and relations with Russia. lt also reintroduced a military dimension to Europe that many observers thought had vanished with the end of the Cold War. And it weakened the global norm that military force should not be used to change borders. Russia paid a political and economic price for its actions, but not one high enough to reverse a policy that enjoyed the support of most of its people. [my emphasis]

He also makes the observation, "lt is no exaggeration to say that [Putin] is less constrained by bureaucracy and colleagues than were his predecessors who oversaw the Soviet Union." But even the most centralized dictatorship has to have some social basis to survive, so even Putin faces internal constraints. As Haass writes further:

Russia's economy for its part is heavily dependent on oil and gas and thus closely tied to the price of energy. As the price in oil collapsed in 2015, the Russian economy shrank along with it. The question is whether Putin will decide to do what it takes to improve his country's relations with the outside world (so as to ease [post-2014] sanctions) and even introduce some reform, or instead turn to an even more confrontational foreign policy in an effort to tap into the population's nationalism and distract from multiple problems at home. [my emphasis]

In the context of 2022 polemics, it's worth noting here that Haass saw plausible motives for further Russian military adventures that weren't based exclusively an incurable desire of Valdimir Putin to conquer every country in Europe.

Like other countries so dependent on oil and gas to qualify as petrostates, Russia experiences that status as both a blessing and a curse. In the current situation in 2022, it has to shift its oil business to depend much more heavily on China to act as a new market to replace the reduction in Western purposes, though a complete switch can't be made overnight.

In 2016, writing six years before the February 24 invasion, Haass calls attention to the problematic nature of the 2011 US-French intervention in Libya against Muammar al-Gaddafi's government. The Obama Administration (Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State) persuaded Russia not to block a UN Security Council authorization of the intervention, which was authorized as a humanitarian action to protect mass killing of civilians. As Haas explains in a realist-pragmatic mode:

There were any number of problems with all this. First, it is far from certain that the situation on the ground warranted a humanitarian intervention. The protests against the government were violent from the outset, and any government, even an authoritarian .one, has the right to counter armed opponents. This is, after all, what civil wars are all about. What is more, there is reason to believe that the civil conflict was petering out on the eve of the NATO intervention. There was also no hard evidence that Gadhafi planned an indiscriminate attack on civilians.

Second, that the intervention quickly went beyond a narrowly designed effort to protect civilian lives (the thrust of the UN mandate) and expanded to regime change introduced important new costs. Russia and China complained bitterly that they had not signed on to any such broader undertaking. What they came to see as a diplomatic bait and switch served mostly to reinforce their view that the Responsibility to Protect doctrine was a dangerous concept that could be used to violate sovereignty and overthrow governments. Not only would gaining international support for humanitarian intervention in the future be more difficult, but Russia would use humanitarian intervention as the cynical pretext for its intervention in Ukraine. [my emphasis]

The "responsibility to protect" was a formulation that became a part of international law as a result of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s.

And Haass calls attention to the very serious effect on nuclear nonproliferation that the Libya intervention had. An effect that has been particularly magnified by the Russian intervention in Ukraine in 2014 and much more by the current conflict:

The ouster of Gadhafi also sent the unfortunate message that giving up nuclear weapons could be dangerous to your political health. In a matter of months the Libyan leader went from the poster child of responsibility in the proliferation realm to war criminal. [my emphasis]

But Haass isn't exactly a "restrainer" in international relations theory, either. He writes, "China and Russia need to know that the United States has both the will and the ability to respond locally to anything they might do." Anything?!? I guess that's not quite as expansive as "anywhere." But it still sounds pretty bluster-y. I suppose that's necessary now and then to establish one's cred as a member in good standing of the foreign policy "Blob," as Stephen Walt likes to call it.

In his 2016 book, he explicitly rejects the notion of a "containment" policy in relation to Russia or China. Instead he favors an "integration" strategy. Which sounds downright utopian now if you listen to the New Cold War polemics:

Russia's behavior in Ukraine, no matter how regrettable, is not the first phase of a bid for global domination, any more than is China's behavior in the South China Sea. Rather, each has political (nationalist) and security-related concerns that, however large, are not insatiable, and as a result can be influenced and shaped. This reinforces the case for adopting a policy toward them that is best described as "integration." lt seeks to involve them in regional and global orders both by giving them a role in defining what constitutes legitimacy and by "hedging," by making clear that they will not benefit from but rather will pay a steep price for pursuing a policy that the United States and its allies view as illegitimate. Another way to say this is that military preparations and signs of strength, while necessary, are not sufficient. The United States does not want to communicate the impression that confrontation and conflict are inevitable. lt is thus important to offer and where possible bolster what might be described as diplomatic and economic interdependence. [my emphasis]

The US and NATO and the US are currently in a "pay a steep price" mode with Russia, it seems.

Haass also makee this important caution about sanctions:

Sanctions can all too easily become the instrument of choice, a "safe" third way between doing nothing and using military force. History suggests, though, that sanctions alone can rarely accomplish big things. They can also have a range of unintended and undesirable consequences, including hurting civilians and strengthening authoritarian governments. Second, it is equally important that the United States be careful not to turn sanctions into a major source of friction with friends and allies who for one reason or another refuse to sign on to all that Congress or the executive branch desires. Sanctions should be used by the United States when they exact a price from the intended target and do not cause collateral damage to other relationships. [my emphasis]

These are risks that policymakers should keep in mind with the current extensive sanctions on Russia. Giddy triumphalism about sanctions is a risky point of view.

Haass also observes, "The focus of the relationship with both China and Russia would need to be on their external behavior - their foreign policy - rather than on their domestic politics." The Democracy vs. Autocracy foreign policy framework that some New Cold Warriors are currently promoting doesn't fit with that advice.