On Feb. 8, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy replaced Valerii Zaluzhnyi with Oleksandr Syrskyi as the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (ZSU). Zelenskyy outlined problems in the military that Syrskyi will need to address, including disparity between the overall number of military servicemen and the number of servicemen participating in actual combat. Zelenskyy also called for “a different approach to mobilization and recruitment,” two issues over which he has had disagreements with Syrskyi’s predecessor. In the first comments on priorities since his appointment, Syrskyi himself vowed to improve the rotation of troops at the frontlines and to focus on the “introduction of new technical solutions and the scaling of successful experience,” including drones, according Bloomberg. Syrskyi—who is seen as a close ally of Zelenskyy and is considered more accessible by some U.S. commanders than Zaluzhnyi was—has been credited with the successful defense of Kyiv in Spring 2022 and recapturing territory in the east and south in Fall 2022. However, his reputation among the Ukrainian servicemen is far from stellar, with some describing him as a “butcher” for his willingness to sacrifice soldiers during the defense of Bakhmut in 2022-2023.
In the past month, Russian forces have captured 64 square miles of Ukrainian territory, while Ukrainian forces have re-gained 0 square miles, according to the Feb. 6, 2024, issue of the Russia-Ukraine War Report Card. This week, Russians have penetrated the eastern Ukrainian city of Avdiivka from the north and south in a development acknowledged by Ukrainian OSINT project DeepState. The Russians are also closing in around Kupyansk, a town in the Kharkiv region that Ukrainian forces retook in 2022, according to WSJ. Russian forces plan to retake more territory in that eastern region, having amassed more than 40,000 troops and hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles near Kupyansk for that purpose, according to NYT.
On Feb. 8, the Democratic-controlled Senate cleared a critical hurdle toward passing a $95 billion national security-focused bill aimed at fortifying Ukraine, Israel and other allies. Most of the proposal’s funding—about $60 billion—is intended to help Ukraine as it fights off Russia’s invasion. The vote was 67-32, clearing the 60-vote bar needed to advance most legislation in the chamber, according to WSJ. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D) has said that he would allow an amendment process, which is something Republican senators said they intend to engage in, suggesting to trim funds that pay public servants in Kyiv, according to WSJ. Of the $60 billion intended for Ukraine, nearly $8 billion is intended to provide direct budget support for Ukraine. The largest portion, $19.9 billion, would replenish inventory levels of Defense Department weaponry that were emptied to help Ukraine’s military, according to WSJ. However, even if the bill ultimately clears the Senate, it faces an even tougher road in the Republican-controlled House, according to WSJ. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R) has declined to say whether he would bring the Senate-passed national-security package onto the floor, but Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R) has already threatened to try to oust Johnson as speaker if he advances more money for Ukraine, according to WSJ.
If Congress doesn’t approve new funding for Ukraine, U.S. equipment won’t suddenly stop, but slowly expire, according to NYT. ”Ukraine could effectively hold for some part of this year” without more American military aid, Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military, told NYT. Western officials and experts predict it would be at least a couple months before the lack of renewed aid has a widespread impact, according to NYT. By next month, Ukraine could struggle to conduct local counterattacks, and by early summer, its military might have difficulty rebuffing Russian assaults, the officials and analysts said to this newspaper.
The year is 2028, and a new and highly infectious coronavirus has struck the sailors of the U.S. Pacific Fleet stationed in the South China Sea. As the world grapples with this emerging pandemic, confusion runs rampant among officials at the CIA, CDC, and DOD, who bicker over the most effective response strategies.
Meanwhile, China, seemingly immune to the novel virus, seizes the opportunity to launch a full-scale assault on Taiwan, capitalizing on the global chaos.
While the World Health Organization praises China’s successful social distancing measures, little do they know that the Chinese government had covertly vaccinated its military and essential workers under the guise of a standard COVID-19 booster campaign.
This scenario, initially conceived by Pentagon researchers, may sound like science fiction, but military strategists believe that a “coronavirus bioweapon” may lurk on the horizon. This possibility is one of several outlined in a new report sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The report “Plagues, Cyborgs, and Supersoldiers: The Human Domain of War Research” delves into how CRISPR gene-editing technology, mRNA vaccines, brain networking, and other technological advancements could unleash new forms of military conflict.
Released earlier this month and reported here for the first time, this provocative report, conducted within the Acquisition and Technology Policy Program of the RAND National Security Research Division, offers futuristic scenarios that military planners should consider.
“We see a complex, high-threat landscape emerging where future wars are fought with humans controlling hyper-sophisticated machines with their thoughts” and “synthetically generated, genomically targeted plagues” that cripple the American military-industrial base,” the report warns.
In another intriguing scenario, seemingly inspired by the decline of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and this time set in a more distant future, the report suggests that elderly congressional leaders, desperate to retain power, secretly install state-of-the-art Brain-Computer Interface devices. These devices, commonly used among wealthy senior citizens in the scenario, initially help the senators regain mobility and speech after years of clear cognitive decline. However, when the brain implants malfunction, causing erratic and belligerent behavior, foreign allies begin to distance themselves from the U.S., damaging national security.
The report further highlights the potential hacking vulnerabilities associated with BCI implants, which, while promising for patients with neuromuscular impairments, could be exploited to inject fear, confusion, or anger.
Additionally, the authors caution against the possibility of government employees replacing their natural eye lenses with artificial ones containing tiny cameras connected to micro-storage devices. The small cameras could collect classified intelligence and leak it to foreign adversaries.
However, not all aspects of the report focus on vulnerabilities. In a section discussing human genomic editing, the researchers explore the potential for creating “supersoldiers” through genetic modifications that enhance physical and psychological capabilities. Despite their vulnerabilities, BCI devices could also serve as a means for commanders to communicate swiftly with their forces during military operations.
The report extensively analyzes the technological capabilities of both China and the U.S. in biotechnology and brain technology, highlighting the differences in focus and status between the two nations. It highlights previous reporting on Chinese research into “ethnic-specific genetic weapons” and “purported brain-control weaponry.”
Nevertheless, the report ventures into cultural observations, emphasizing that the U.S. values openness, diversity, and democratic principles. In the face of a more contagious and deadly pandemic, China’s ethnically homogenous and compliant population could give it an advantage in deploying vaccines swiftly. At the same time, authoritarian states might similarly brutally suppress “anti-vaccine populists” and enforce compliance. The report claims this could hinder the U.S. due to its more relaxed regulatory environment that values individual liberties, where such crackdowns and forced vaccinations are more difficult to deploy…
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Putin as Hitler. The über alles of these mis-analogies is the one with the least foundation. Putin is not a maniacal, genocidal, war-mongering dictator. He is not a racist or a militarist bent on European or world domination. Nor does he have a messianic ideology driving him to re-make the world in Russia’s image. Putin’s geopolitical ambitions are remarkably conservative: security and respect for Russia and its civilisation, a peaceful and prosperous, multipolar world of sovereign states in which there is a balance of interests mediated and harmonised by multilateral institutions such as the United Nations. Such aspirations seem radical only in the context of crumbling Western global hegemony.
Putin as Stalin. Putin is a true son of the post-Stalin Soviet system, but he hasn’tbeen a communist since the late 1980s. As he said not long after he first became President of the Russian Federation, anyone who doesn’t regret the destruction of the Soviet Union has no heart; anyone who wants to see it re-created has no brain. A pro-Western liberal in the 1990s, nowadays his ideology is Christian and capitalistic, not Marxist or socialist. He wields enormous power in Russian politics but does not preside over a totalitarian party dictatorship like Stalin did. The soft authoritarianism of the Russian Federation bears no resemblance to the mass repressions of the Stalin era and not a lot to the much less violent and repressive one-party state of Stalin’s communist successors. Patriotism, multinationalism, internationalism and a love of history are what Putin has in common with Stalin, not dictatorship.
Appeasement and the Munich Syndrome. This most damaging of historical mis-analogies has popularised the idea that the Munich agreement betrayal of Czechoslovakia in September 1938 shows you can’t appease aggressors. Actually, the problem wasn’t appeasement per se, it was the fact that Hitler was bent on world war and didn’t want to be appeased. Stalin was the leader the British and French should have sought to appease, but they eschewed a collective security alliance with the USSR in favour of deals with Nazi Germany. Before invading Ukraine, Putin was desperate to be appeased by the West. That’s why he proposed a comprehensive European security deal between Russia and the West. A few weeks into the war he sought a compromise peace that would have left Russia with a neutral and disarmed Ukraine on its doorstep but gained relatively little additional territory. Moscow remains open to such a negotiation, though the price of peace will be a lot higher than it was two years ago. The sooner Putin is appeased, the quicker the war will end and save Ukraine from further unnecessary suffering.
The Prague analogy. An extension of the Munich analogy which claims Hitler’s occupation of Prague in March 1939 shows that if you concede Putin a territorial inch he will take a proverbial yard. However, Poland was Hitler’s target in 1939, not Czechoslovakia. German troops entered the country, supposedly to impose order, because of an internal crisis that split Slovakia and the Czech lands following the loss of German-populated Sudetenland at Munich. Ukraine may well suffer a deep domestic crisis following military defeat by Russia, but the more likely ‘restorers of order’ in Lviv and Kiev are Polish and Romanian troops. Completely reliant on foreign aid, battered Ukraine is half-way to becoming a Western protectorate not a Russian one.
Finland and the Winter War. Not the worst analogy but more complicated than its proponents may think. Yes, the Finns did sensibly sign a peace treaty with the USSR in March 1940 to save the country’s independence and sovereignty, but they had previously spurned a similar Soviet offer that would have seen them gain as well as lose territory in the borderland region of Karelia. It was not plucky Finnish defence that stopped the Soviet onslaught but Stalin’s fear that an Anglo-French military intervention would turn the country into a battleground of the wider European war – a fate the Finns did not relish either. Finland could have sat out the rest of the Second World War as a neutral but, disastrously, chose to ally itself with Nazi Germany in the so-called ‘continuation war’. Finnish leaders redeemed themselves by turning their armed forces against the Germans in 1944 and then refused Western meddling in their affairs with the Soviets – a stance that persuaded Stalin to allow Finland to become a semi-detached member of the Soviet bloc. ‘Finlandisation’ – domestic autonomy in exchange for restricted external sovereignty – was a far better model for independent Ukraine than the internally divisive path that has led to its partition.
Genocide and the Holocaust. Both sides have bandied the g-word but the atrocities committed during the Russo-Ukrainian war bear no comparison whatsoever with the Nazi mass murder of millions of Jew during World War II. In fact, this war has been notably free of large-scale, systematic atrocities against civilians. The vast majority of the war’s casualties have been combatants. That doesn’t negate the immense suffering of millions of Ukrainian civilians, but as Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan show us, it could have been a lot worse. The g-word propaganda battle also serves to obfuscate two essential facts about the actual Holocaust: it began with the SS’s execution of a million Soviet Jews in 1941-1942 and ended with the Red Army’s liberation of Nazi death-camps in 1944-1945.
Containment and the Cold War. Staring defeat in the face, Western hardliners are increasingly agitating for a long-term strategy to contain Russia that will involve extensive militarisation of their own societies, including, perhaps, the re-introduction of conscription. This re-vamped cold war strategy bears little relation to the views of the containment concept’s originator, George F. Kennan, who saw the policy as primarily a political device: the US would win the cold war not by confrontation and military competition with the USSR but by the demonstrated superiority of its domestic system. Kennan, who vociferously opposed NATO’s post-Soviet expansion eastwards, was fond of quoting President John Quincy Adams’s aphorism that “America should not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy”.
The Domino Theory. President Eisenhower’s eponymous theory was devised, in part, to entice British involvement in France’s losing colonial war in 1950s Indochina. But Winston Churchill didn’t buy the idea that a Red victory there would be followed by the fall of the rest of South-East Asia to the communists, and neither did his Tory and Labour successors as PM when the domino concept was revived in the 1960s to justify massive US intervention in the Vietnam War. Its current incarnation is that if Putin wins in Ukraine, the Baltic States will be his next target. There is no evidence that Putin has any such intentions. No doubt Russia could occupy the Baltics if it chose to do so, but not without running the risk of a nuclear war with NATO. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was risky and adventuristic but his restrained conduct of the war has shown that he is far from reckless – unlike some of his Western counterparts, who have sought every opportunity to escalate the conflict.
The Korean Stalemate Scenario. The Korean War bogged down quite quickly after a few dramatic months of invasion and counter-invasion in the summer and autumn of 1950 but an armistice was not signed until July 1953. Some Western hardliners yearn for a repeat of that scenario, hoping that hostilities will resume once Ukraine has recovered its strength and NATO countries have ramped up their armaments industries. But the Ukraine war is not a stalemate – it is a war of attrition that Russia is slowly but surely winning. Putin will never agree to a ceasefire that does not ensure Russia’s security and safeguard the situation of its Ukrainian supporters. The longer the war goes on, the more likely becomes a dictated peace on the back of a Russian victory.
Proxy Wars Past & Present. Conflicts labelled proxy wars come in all different shapes, sizes and guises. The Russo-Ukrainian war has some similarities with the Spanish Civil War, the Korea and Vietnam wars, and the Soviet war in Afghanistan, but its scale, scope, intensity and dangerousness are unprecedented. It is simultaneously a civil war between Ukrainian nationalists and Russia-leaning Ukrainians; an inter-state war between Ukraine and the Russian Federation; and a Western-waged proxy war on Russia. Without Western military, economic and political support, Ukraine would have lost the war long ago. It is the West’s over-arching anti-Russia and anti-Putin goals that have prolonged the war and could yet transform it into a truly existential conflict.
Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s steady, able, intellectually quick foreign minister, last week held one of those wide-ranging press conferences he and his boss favor. Lavrov’s remarks are subtly delivered but of a significance we must not miss.
Here are a few of Lavrov’s pithier remarks. The first of these appeared under the subhead, “On friends of Russia.” I take the liberty of minorly cleaning up the English translation:
“Relations between Russia and China currently experience the best period of their centuries-long history.
Their relations are firmer, more reliable, and more advanced than a military union as we understood these in the previous Cold War-era.
In all cases, the interests of Russia and China reach a common denominator after negotiation, and this is an example for resolution of any issues by any other participants in global communication.
Relations of particularly privileged cooperation with India develop gradually. Russia also takes relations with African states to a truly strategic level. It develops relations with the Latin American continent. Russia’s close circle also includes Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Qatar.”
Here is Lavrov on the BRICS–Plus group, which expanded last year from its original members, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa:
“About 30 states are interested in rapprochement with BRICS. This association has a great future. Being a superregional global structure, BRICS symbolizes the diversity of a multipolar world.”
At one point Lavrov turned, inevitably, to the conflict in Ukraine:
“It is not up to Ukraine to decide when to stop and when to talk seriously about realistic preconditions for the end of this conflict. It is necessary to talk with the West about it.
The West wants no constructive resolution that would take Russia’s legitimate concerns into account. This is indicated by incitement and coercion of Kiev for increasingly aggressive use of long-range weapons to strike Crimea, in order to make it unsuitable for life, as well as deep into Russian territory, and not only incitement, but the handover of corresponding weapons as well.”
Three practical questions as Russia’s top diplomat interpreted them in a review of “Russia’s diplomatic work in 2023,” as TASS put it. This is fine as it is, but Lavrov’s comments are a case of the subtext being vastly larger than the text. Russia’s objective in 2024 — this is TASS again — is “to remove any dependence on the West.”
I am sure you know the old adage, derived from an 18th century Christian hymn, “God moves in mysterious ways.” So does history. Let us, then, consider this history in brief. Lavrov’s press conference brims with implied references to it.
Notions of Progress
Red Square, Moscow, 2015. (Misha Sokolnikov, Flickr,CC BY-ND 2.0)
Russia is considered among the scholars what is called “a late developer.” Such nations are so named because they were a century or more behind the West as it entered the age of scientific and industrial advances and then — regrettably enough, I would say — on to the Age of Materialism. Railroads, telegraph lines, steamships, photography, Bessemer steel, and all the rest: Late developers, lagging in these technologies, looked Westward with envy well-mixed with a felt inferiority.
The premier case of late development is Japan. Among Russians as among the Japanese, the condition of being “behind” produced profound confusion as to identity and their place in the modern world. This confusion is still easily detected. At its core lie two very consequential misunderstandings.
One, there is the fraudulent Western notion of “progress” as this became an orthodoxy from the mid–19th century onward. I say “fraudulent” because history does not advance in anything like a straight line, and progress is measured in the West strictly according to material advances. In matters of ethos, humaneness, equality, environmental stewardship, the settling of conflicts — of the human spirit altogether — the West remains more primitive than many “primitive” societies.
Two, and the larger point here, from the 19th century onward, there was only one way to modernize. All colonized people who chose the capitalist road understood the imperative this way: modernization = Westernization. All of a sudden, to advance, to make a future in the modern world, meant to repudiate who one was and imitate being someone else.
How hard is it to imagine the deep disturbances and distortions — at bottom psychological but also political, social, economic, and cultural — that arose in consequence of this misapprehension? I count the equation of modernizing with Westernizing, as measured by the extravagant damage it did, among the gravest errors of the late 19th century and all through the 20th to our time.
Russia has spent nearly three centuries in this state of turmoil and — maybe not too strong a term — disorientation. Periods of orthodox conservatism have been followed by cycles of Westward-looking liberalization, this followed by a return to previously abandoned traditions, which have included over many years a return to reaction and a new valorization of one or another kind of nativism and nationalism.
A New Course
U.A.E. welcoming ceremony for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Abu Dhabi, Dec. 6, 2023. (President of Russia)
There is another factor to consider. From the 1830s onward to NATO’s post–Cold War expansions, the horrific U.S.–led program to turn the Russian Federation into a capitalist greedfest after the Soviet Union’s collapse, and now the conflict in Ukraine, Russia’s struggle to understand itself has been accompanied by more or less incessant Western efforts decisively to reshape Russia in the West’s image.
We cannot understand Lavrov’s press conference, or many, many of the things Vladimir Putin has said these past few years, without this historical context. In so many words, all of them well-chosen, the foreign minister and the president have announced that Russia will no longer look Westward as it advances into the 21st century. Modernization will no longer mean Westernization.
It would be altogether impossible to overstate the historical magnitude of what Russia has set as its new course. We live in the most interesting times, to put this point another way — even if most of us, mesmerized by the propaganda of eternal Western superiority, cannot see five feet in front of us as the most significant events of our time unfold.
Many things will now fall into place. Lavrov, in enumerating the members of Russia’s “close circle,” describes, a couple of years on, the “new world order” the Chinese frequently reference.
The 5,000–word charter Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping made public two years ago next month, “Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development,” can be understood now as what your columnist called it at the time: the most important political document to be issued so far in the 21st century.
Gordon Hahn, the accomplished scholar of Russia and Eurasia, last week offered a superb history of Russia’s relations with the West during an appearance last week on The Duran, the daily web program produced by Alexander Mercouris and (in this case) Glenn Diesen. In the course of this long, rich interview Hahn notes, “Putin, as he has stated over and over again now recently, the [Russian] elites routinely demonstrate that they do not trust anyone in the West anymore.” He elaborates:
“For Russia, it looks now, the West is no longer its ‘Other.’… Russia has always identified itself, motivated itself, driven itself in relation to Europe. Now Putin is turning away from that. He said that we are no longer to define ourselves, look at ourselves, through the European prism. For now, we will put all our eggs in one basket, and that is Eurasia…. This close bilateral relationship, of Europe as Russia’s Other, is ending, and therefore the cycle [from conservatism to Westernization and back] is probably ending.”
This moment has been a long time coming. A shallow peruse of the past brings us back to 1990–91, when Michail Gorbachev accepted Washington’s assurance — without a signed document, imprudently — that NATO would not expand eastward from the reunified Germany.
As is well-known, 30 years of betrayals and diplomatic dishonesty followed as Moscow sought a new security architecture that would provide the Russian Federation a place in that “common European home” for which Gorbachev longed.
“I am extremely pessimistic,” Hahn says of the outlook for U.S.–Russian relations. “I can’t see that, even with an agreement between Russia and Ukraine, the West will cease trying to expand NATO. They will try to repeat the same scenario unless something changes in the West itself, in Washington.”
The world turns, even as the West declines or is incapable of turning with it. The teaser on The Duran’s segment with Gordon Hahn reads, “Russia ends 300 years of west-centric foreign policy.” This is big. It rarely gets bigger. History’s mysterious ways lie before us.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
