By Andrew C. Kuchins, The National Interest, 5/2/24

Andy Kuchins is a Senior Fellow at the Center for the National Interest and Adjunct Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC.

Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya since 2007, was diagnosed with pancreatic necrosis in 2019. It was reported last week that his health has taken a serious turn for the worse, and he is in “critical condition” with perhaps months left to live. Novaya Gazeta Evropa broke the story based on research dating to 2019, including reports of Kadyrov missing many key public appearances, including the United Russia Party Congress in December of last year. Appearing in photos with Vladimir Putin last September, the Chechen leader’s face appeared bloated. A PR video of Kadyrov pumping iron in a gym was released this week to promote an image of health. It is not very convincing; he is lifting at most 50 percent the weight, usually far less, than I, a sixty-five-year-old getting a hip replacement next month, can lift. Ramzan is not in good health.

Chechnya has been reasonably stable since Ramzan took over as president at age thirty, three years after his father Akhmat, also president, was blown up in a Victory Day celebration in May 2004. The relationship between Putin and Kadyrov, while framed as like father and son, is actually a Faustian bargain. Kadyrov receives huge subsidies from Moscow to distribute as he sees fit and free sway in controlling the notoriously troublesome republic. Putin gets a stable Chechnya, and Kadyrov has been eager to support Putin by sending more than 20,000 Chechen soldiers to the war in Ukraine and carrying out the occasional political assassination.

It appears that Kadyrov would like to maintain a family dynasty (he has at least fourteen known children) and has recently promoted his eighteen-year-old son Akhmat to Minister of Sport and Youth and sixteen-year-old Adam as a trustee at Special Forces University in the Chechen capital, Grozny. Adam bears the strongest resemblance to his father and seems to have inherited his father’s sadistic and violent nature. In September 2023, Ramzan released a video of Adam, then fifteen, beating up a Ukrainian in detention accused of burning the Koran. However, since Chechnya’s constitution calls for the president to be at least thirty years old, it would seem unlikely that Kadyrov Sr. could engineer a family dynastic succession, at least in the short term.

Unquestionably, the Kremlin will seek a peaceful succession. Ramzan Kadyrov’s consistent support for Putin has been very valuable for the Russian president, even if it has raised the hackles of some in the Russian intelligence and security agencies who view Kadyrov as a loose cannon with his own regional ambitions in the North Caucasus. But the historical grievances of Chechens against Russia run deep. The Chechens fought decades-long struggles for independence against the Tsars in the nineteenth century, suffered from Stalin’s mass deportations from their homeland, and struggled against Moscow rule in two wars in the 1990s and 2000s. Chechnya is a volatile place with a well-armed population.

The ISIS-K-sponsored attack conducted by Tajik guest workers at Crocus City Hall in Moscow, resulting in more than 140 dead, marked the end of a six-year lull in Islamic terrorist attacks in Russia. For more than twenty years before 2018, the catalyst for nearly all terrorist attacks in Russia came from Chechen groups and others from the North Caucasus. In 2012 and 2013, most of the fighters in the North Caucasus found conditions too difficult for fighting at home and moved to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq, where, by 2018, the majority were killed.

Global Jihadist group ties to the North Caucasus, however, date back to the 1990s, and the links with ISIS remain. Chechnya was de facto independent in the late 1990s as the Islamic Republic of Ichkeria and served as a criminal hub of trafficking in all manner of illicit goods. When legendary Chechen leader and author of the largest terrorist attacks in Russia, Shamil Basaev, led Chechen troops across the border into Dagestan in August 1999, the second Chechen War began, which catapulted new Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to public acclaim.

Putin understands the immense value of a subdued Chechnya in the Russian Federation. His symbiotic relationship with Ramzan Kadyrov has served the interests of each leader very well, but it has not been without costs. Kadyrov and his fearsome legions of “Kadyrovtsy” have created many potential opponents to stability in Chechnya and Russia at large. The large number of Chechen casualties in Ukraine add to a seething dissatisfaction there. It is not hard to imagine that ISIS and other Jihadi groups could come to view Chechnya and the North Caucasus once again as an attractive target for mayhem. Putin’s concern for this possibility may well be a factor in his very public support for Palestinians in the war in Gaza. With Russian intelligence and security forces already stretched to the breaking point, the near future would be a particularly inopportune time for unrest in Chechnya.

Russia Matters, 7/26/24

1. Since last autumn, Ukraine’s armed forces have been going steadily backward and things have become “very difficult” for the ZSU. This follows from Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi’s interview with the Guardian. In the interview, Syrskyi acknowledged that the Ukrainian forces are outgunned and outmanned, warning that Moscow plans to boost its fighting force in Ukraine to 690,000 by the end of 2024. Syrskyi insisted, however, that Russia’s recent creeping advances were “tactical” ones—local gains. The latter included this week the capture of Pishchane in the Kharkiv region and Prohres in the Donetsk region. The Russian military claimed control of these settlements on July 21, and Ukraine’s DeepState OSINT project’s map then appeared to show Russian forces in control of them as of July 25. The Russian Defense Ministry also claimed this week that its forces had captured the villages of Andriivka in the eastern Luhansk region and Ivano-Dariivka in the Donetsk region, but the DeepState OSINT project’s map showed Russian forces not in full control of either Andriivka or Ivano-Dariivka as of July 25.
2. Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s top adviser Mykhailo Podolyak asserted this week that signing an agreement with Russia to stop the war with Ukraine would amount to signing a deal with the devil. It remains unclear how Podolyak’s July 25 comments can be reconciled with Zelenskyy’s recent announcement that a second Ukraine peace summit should include officials from Russia. In addition to Podolyak’s comments, expectations of Russian-Ukrainian peace talks have also been dimmed by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s statement to his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba in Beijing on July 24 that the time was “not yet ripe” for peace talks to end the war. Meanwhile, former president Donald Trump told Fox News that he had told Zelenskyy the following: “This is a war machine you’re facing. That’s what they (the Russians) do they fight wars. They beat Hitler. They beat Napoleon.” “We got to get this war over with,” Trump told Zelenskyy, according to Reuters.
3. Russia and China have flown a joint strategic bomber patrol near Alaska for the first time, according to FT. U.S. and Canadian fighter jets detected, tracked and intercepted two Russian Tu-95 and two Chinese H-6 aircraft on July 24. The interception occurred three days after Russia said it scrambled its own fighter jets as two U.S. strategic bombers approached Russia’s border at the Barents Sea in the Arctic, according to RFE/RL. It’s “not a surprise to us,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said of the Russian-Chinese patrol, according to Bloomberg. Austin’s comments came less than a week after the Pentagon had unveiled a new Arctic Strategy that commits the U.S. to expanding its military readiness and surveillance in the region because of heightened Chinese and Russian interest coupled with new risks brought on by accelerating climate change, Bloomberg reported.
4. Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the U.S. presidential race and support his VP Kamala Harris has Russian influentials divided on whether a Democrat can defeat the GOP’s DonaldTrump in November, according to RM’s review of commentary by Russian influentials on this development. Boris Mezhuev, a Moscow-based political scientist, told pro-Kremlin portal Vzglyad in reference to Harris: “I think her prospects can be described as positive. The gap in ratings with Donald Trump is only a few percent.” According to Russian foreign policy veteran Sen. Alexey Pushkov, however, “in the battle for the presidency, Trump defeated Biden ahead of schedule.” Pushkov’s colleague, and deputy chairman of the Russian Senate, Konstantin Kosachev, also believes Trump is more likely to win. In contrast, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that “nothing good can be expected” when asked what the Kremlin expects from the U.S. presidential elections.
5. Real wages have grown by almost 14% in Russia, and the consumption of goods and services by around 25%, FT reported, citing the Russian state statistics agency. A further bump in real wages of up to 3.5% is expected this year, alongside an expected 3% jump in real disposable income, according to Russia’s Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting, again as cited by FT’s article, “Russia’s surprising consumer boom.”

By Ian Proud, Website, 6/23/24

The G7 recently made the headlines by agreeing to lend Ukraine $50bn which will be repaid using the yearly interest accrued on $329bn of confiscated Russian sovereign foreign exchange reserves. When it is finally structured, the loan will consist of a series of loans by G7 member countries, with the US topping up the fund by the required amount so it hits the $50bn mark.

Taking a step back from the legality of, effectively, expropriating another country’s sovereign assets to repay a rival country’s debt, what does this mean for Ukraine? Figures vary, and the Ukrainian government is increasingly coy about releasing economic data sets, but Ukraine’s economy is currently around $180-190bn in size. To put that into context, that is around 11 times smaller than Russia’s economy and 131 times smaller than the US economy.

$50bn, therefore, represents around 27% of Ukraine’s yearly GDP. That is a huge figure for a single loan. But the problem is that Ukraine has been borrowing this amount every year since the war started. According to politico, Ukraine borrowed $58bn in 2022, $46bn in 2023 and is set to borrow $52bn in 2024. So, in just three years, Ukraine will have borrowed 82% of GDP.

Ukraine needs to borrow this much because its government spends almost twice as much each year as it receives in income from taxation and other sources. To put that into context, the European Union sets a limit that Member States cannot run a budget deficit of more than 3% of GDP. Ukraine, which aspires to join the EU, has been running a yearly budget deficit of 25% since the war began. And in addition to that, with Ukraine running a deficit on its current account each year – the difference between how much it exports and imports – it also needs capital to stop its currency going into meltdown.

And here’s the thing, Ukraine will probably need to borrow even more this year than what is currently forecast. Don’t be fooled by the official defence budget for 2024 of $28.6bn; this is around half of what Ukraine actually spent on defence in 2023. (Ukraine adjusted its original 2023 defence budget up from $39.4bn – still more than the 2024 budget – to $56.3bn). Ukraine’s massive spending spree on the war effort, in 2023 at least, accounted for one third of total economic output. With Zelensky showing no appetite to negotiate, there’s little reason to believe it won’t in 2024. 

So, with Ukraine taking on 25% of its GDP in debt each year, its debt mountain will continue to spiral out of control. The EU forecasts that Ukrainian debt is growing by 10% of GDP each year since the war started, but I view these forecasts with a heavy dose of scepticism. Even if Ukraine’s economy grew by 5.5% in 2023, it remains smaller than it was in 2021, before the war started. More realistically, Ukraine’s debt is growing by 15-20% of GDP each year.

So, Ukraine’s debt will hit 100% of GDP in the current financial year (if it hasn’t already). And the really worrying thing is that there are no plans to repay any of it. Because Ukraine isn’t making debt repayments each year to tamp down its debt growth. In fact, Ukraine stopped making payments ona its existing external debt in 2022 when the war started. For those who remember the onset of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, Ukraine immediately refused to pay a debt of $3bn that Russia had given it as part of the deal with Yanukovich to stay out of the EU Association Agreement.

Fueled by hubris and self-righteousness, Ukraine has become addicted to taking on debt and then refusing to make payments on that debt. Since the start of the war, Zelensky has been pressing for the $329bn in frozen Russian assets to be given to Ukraine. The G7 loan of $50bn therefore marks an alarming shift in that direction. It assumes that Ukraine itself will never need to repay the debt itself, even though it’s Ukraine’s debt. But when the war ends, if this needless war ever ends, who will repay the G7 countries their loans then? The Americans seem to believe that it would be possible to continue to freeze Russia’s frozen reserve assets even after war finished.

If that be so, what motivation, then, for Russia to stop fighting if it feels that massive sanctions and the theft of its assets will continue? As I said at the top, Russia’s economy is 11 times larger than Ukraine’s. Russia is also bringing in healthy amounts of capital each year as its exports continue to exceed its imports. Put simply, Russia gains a surplus of around $50bn each year in its exports, which roughly equates to what Ukraine borrows each year to prop up the war effort. While Putin has offered a peace deal – or at least, terms for peace negotiations to restart – Russia has sufficient resources to keep fighting, even if the fighting results in a barely shifting stalemate.

So, in economic terms at least, winning the war doesn’t matter to Russia right now, even if he and the Russian people would prefer an end to it all. Because the longer the war continues, the more indebted and delinquent Ukraine becomes. Putin knows that practically all of the foreign money that Ukraine borrows comes from western countries that are bankrolling Ukraine’s fight. And we have already seen the sands shift in western support with pure hand-outs transitioning to actual loans. So, over time, the west will increasingly offer Ukraine debt rather than freebees.

And it is pure fantasy to believe that Russia will repay this debt, as Russia wants its frozen money back. A one-sided peace will not be possible in which the west continues to punish Russia, including economically, after the cannon fire stops. Indeed, stealing Russia’s assets will only lead to potential further escalation, prolonging Ukraine’s suffering, and ramping up its unsustainable debt still further. This war will end when Putin feels that there are economic incentives to stand his troops down and to negotiate a lasting peace.  

Until then, the west is holding a ticking time bomb of debt that Zelensky doesn’t believe that he should have to pay. Or, to put it another way, he is paying for this war using credit cards; except that they are our credit cards, not his.

By Leonid Ragozin, Intellinews, 5/27/24

In Odesa, a young woman was badly bruised when a draft officer attacked her with metal crutches as she protested her friend’s detention by a press gang.

Near Dnipro, a man apprehended by draft officers knifed one of them while trying to escape from their vehicle.

In Kharkiv, members of a press gang beat up a man at a bus stop. A video circulated on local Telegram channels shows the dazed man walking staggeringly towards a bench with hands on the back of his head as if suffering a concussion, while women form a human chain protecting the men and shout at the recruiters.

Originating from all around the country, videos of men actively resisting press gangs with the help of women, often random passersby, pop up online on a daily basis. In more than a few of these videos, draft officers are seen using violence against their targets. There were also reports of people dying inside draft centres – either from beatings or from medical conditions, such as epilepsy, ignored by the military.

This has been happening for many months before the new stringent law on mobilisation came into force on May 18. It obliges all draft age men to update their personal data in the reserve registry, making it easier for the military to hand them draft notices or punish them for draft dodging.

The shortage of manpower on the frontline is acute. Both the Ukrainian military and Western allies have been pushing hard to make the government facilitate mobilisation. But its prolonged hesitation is easy to understand when you hear what’s happening in real-life Ukraine, not inside the brilliant minds of military strategists and information warriors.

Sad or outright harrowing stories also come from the national border. In Zakarpattia Region, a man was shot dead by a border guard as he attempted an illegal border crossing. The shooter was charged with misusing the weapon.

In a separate incident, one of the best-known Ukrainian basketball players, Vadym Zaplotnytsky, was detained as he tried to escape into Romania.

More than 30 bodies of draft age men have been found in the Tisza river, which separates Ukraine from Hungary and Romania, since the beginning of the year. Still, Ukrainian men keep risking their lives by swimming across the cold and rapid mountainous stream, ridden with spiky underwater rocks, only to avoid being sent to the frontline. Others walk across the Carpathian mountains, an ordeal that sometimes also proves lethal.

Along a short section of a Ukrainian highway that runs through the territory of Moldova outside Odesa, people abandon their cars and escape into the neighbouring country.

A total of 11 thousand Ukrainian men illegally crossed into northern Romania alone since the start of the full-out Russian invasion over two years ago, according to Liberty Radio, quoting local police. Romania is only one of five countries Ukraine borders in the west.

On social networks, ukhylyant (or draft dodger) is the buzzword – there is an avalanche of memes, Tik-Tok videos, musical clips and posts which more often than not celebrate rather than shame those who try their utmost in order to avoid being sent to the frontline.

Information bubble

The Ukrainian leadership knew well that the mobilisation law would be extremely unpopular, so they kept postponing it despite considerable Western pressure. It was only adopted last month, a few days before the US Congress finally unblocked $61 billion in military aid to Ukraine. That synchronisation at least guaranteed that mobilised soldiers wouldn’t be fighting the Russian army with bare hands.

But the question of what they are really fighting for is dogging Ukrainian society and despite superficial appearances, it is difficult to say what Ukrainians really think on that matter.

Out of all theatres of this war, information space remains the one where the Ukrainian-Western alliance has an absolute advantage over the Russians. Infowar professionals are making a convincing case that Ukrainians are united like one in their desire to fight Putin until the last drop of blood, even though the prospects of victory are extremely dim and the devastation caused by Russian invasion has already set the country back by many decades, demographically and economically.

But when you look at what’s propping up this PR bubble more attentively, it may come across as a colossus with feet of clay. Worse than that, it only manages to linger in an atmosphere that feels eerily similar to the one that is being observed in Russia, Ukraine’s brutal and dictatorial adversary.

Opinion polls show an overwhelming support for the country’s war effort, mirroring similar results in Putin’s Russia. But as many experts, like sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko, point out, war time polls can’t be taken at face value. In Ukraine, millions of people have left the country, also millions have been internally displaced. This migration tsunami primarily affected southeastern regions where pro-peace and pro-Russian sentiments have always been stronger.

But perhaps an even greater factor is preference falsification – a dominant issue in societies where people face serious risks for expressing their private opinions.

Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU, puts out regular updates on people arrested for “justifying Russian aggression” in their social media posts or even in private phone conversations. Vast majority of opinion polls happen to be conducted over the phone.

In February, the Guardian reported that SBU had opened more than eight thousand criminal cases related to collaboration with the enemy since the start of the invasion. By comparison, a total of 483 politically motivated criminal cases (317 of them for antiwar views) were registered in the supposedly more repressive Russia in 2023, according to OVD-Info.

In recent months, the arrest spree extended to the hierarchs and ordinary priests of Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the country’s largest church organisation which used to be formally affiliated with the Moscow Patriarchate. The affiliation naturally raises suspicion about loyalty to Ukraine and some priests in the east of the country did actively support the occupation. But specific charges in individual cases often sound about as plausible as those brought against members of the opposition, or religious dissidents like Jehovah Witnesses, in Putin’s Russia.

The spectrum of opinions in the Ukrainian media space shrank considerably in the early 2021, when president Zelensky decided to clamp down on TV channels associated with Kremlin’s ally Victor Medvedchuk. The channels commanded considerable audiences, but didn’t explicitly promote Russian propaganda. It’s unlikely that the ban made members of these audiences less sceptical of the government or Western-funded Ukrainian media.

When Putin launched a full-out invasion of Ukraine, regular broadcast on main channels was replaced with the government-controlled news stream known as “TV marathon”. Critical coverage is sparse and mostly confined to pointing out the shortcomings of the government’s war effort, not the overall maximalist policy of fighting Russia until Ukraine territorial integrity is fully restored. The criticism of secret services or far right groups, associated with various military units, is virtually impossible.

As a result, millions have drifted to Telegram with its proliferation of Russian military propaganda as well as fugitive Ukrainian media outlets operating out of the EU.

One of these, run by ex-journalist and politician Anatoly Shary, has 1.2 million followers. By comparison, president Zelensky’s channel on Telegram had 760 thousand followers at the time of writing. Shary covers events in Ukraine using combative and often obscene language typical that attracts the largest audiences on the platform.

An unashamedly biased commentator, Shary charges Ukrainian leadership with pursuing a suicidal confrontation with Russia and thus ruining the country. Official Kyiv routinely dismisses him as a Russian stooge, but Shary doesn’t mince words about Putin’s dictatorship and is universally hated by the Russian milblogger community.

A very different phenomenon is Politika Strany, a professional media outlet that was better known as the website strana.ua until it was squeezed out of Ukraine. Associated with media manager Igor Guzhva (and possibly with one of the fugitive Ukrainian oligarchs), it has adopted a neutral and dispassionate tone in its news coverage. It monitors a multitude of regional channels, scouring them for fresh mobilisation videos and other war-related stories. It also does a great job of monitoring Western media output related to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. With over 270 thousand followers, it finds itself well ahead of major professional Ukrainian news outlets, such Ukrayinska Pravda (164K) or NV (50K).

It is no wonder that Ukrainian politicians and security officials periodically call for banning Telegram, but that radical step hasn’t been taken yet.

What are we dying for?

Channels like Shary’s or Politika Strany are popular because they provide an alternative to the predominant view which dwells on two controversial narratives – that the war was inevitable and that it is also existential. That there is no middle ground between Ukraine’s complete subjugation by Russian dictatorship and overwhelming victory that involves complete restoration of the country’s territorial integrity. Or, as people like Estonian prime minister Kaya Kallas and Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov hope, Russia’s disintegration into many small countries.

Russia’s full-out invasion in February 2022 shocked with its brutality, which seemed entirely out of place in the 21st century Europe. Its sheer disregard for international law was also dumbfounding. But when the shock subsided and war became part of the daily routine, people began to get a clearer view of what Putin’s invasion is and what it isn’t.

Notwithstanding the horror Putin has subjected Ukrainians to, when one’s lives are at stake – as in the case of Ukrainian men facing mobilisation – outlandish hyperbole and manipulation of the war’s cheerleaders become a hard sell. It is only natural for people to suspect that an earlier compromise with Putin – any time between 2014 and the failed Istanbul talks in the spring of 2022 – would have likely been a much better outcome for them personally and for their country as a whole. Especially when this idea is backed up by some of Ukraine’s own negotiators.

Over the last two years, infowarriors kept creating an illusion that it only takes this of that new weapon, provided to Ukraine at the risk exceeding the critical mass of Russian red lines crossed, and the Russian regime and its war machine will collapse. But now, after the failure of Ukraine’s counter-offensive in 2023, people are seeing clearly that if anything, the escalatory game is making Russia stronger.

The question which the men facing mobilisation are asking themselves goes along these lines: What if my sacrifice will be in vain or that it only helps to promote the agendas of other people and other countries?

The scope of material which demonstrates resistance to mobilisation in Ukraine is just too overwhelming to be dismissed as abnormal behaviour by people lacking the sense of civic duty or as the result of Russian propaganda.

It shows a growing rift between the public face of Ukrainian society, as presented by cheerleaders calling for war till victorious end, and the private opinion of real life Ukrainian citizens, expressed through draft dodging, cross-border escapes and a seemingly widespread hatred against press gangs hunting for men. This rift may play out in many different ways politically and Putin’s regime will surely try to exploit it to its own advantage.

YouTube link here.

Dr. Grande’s YouTube Channel covers topics related to counselor education and supervision including but not limited to mental health, human behavior, relationship dynamics, psychopathology, personality theory, true crime, pop culture, research, statistics, SPSS, Excel, appraisal, and group counseling. Dr. Grande has a Ph.D. in Counselor Education and Supervision. He is a Licensed Professional Counselor of Mental Health (LPCMH) and a Licensed Chemical Dependency Professional (LCDP).

In this video Dr. Grande recites 12 “word salad” comments made publicly by Kamala Harris in the past few years while trying to keep a straight face. – Natylie