RT, 8/24/24

Vladimir Zelensky has signed a law that calls for the banning of any religious group suspected of having ties to Russia. It threatens to effectively shut down the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) – the largest faith-based organization in the country.

The Ukrainian parliament introduced the legislation earlier this week; it is expected to take effect in 30 days. After that, all the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and all affiliated religious organizations will be outlawed.

The UOC will have nine months to sever all ties with the ROC, despite the Ukrainian church having already declared full autonomy from the Moscow Patriarchate in 2022, following the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict.

After signing the legislation on Saturday, the country’s Independence Day, Zelensky released a video address stating that “Ukrainian Orthodoxy is today taking a step towards liberation from Moscow’s devils.”

Moscow has condemned Ukraine’s crackdown on religious communities; the Holy Synod of the ROC issued a statement on Thursday comparing the new legislation with Soviet-style repression and other historical persecutions of Christians.

“The purpose of this law is to liquidate [the UOC] and all its communities and to forcibly transfer them to other religious organizations,” the Synod surmised, noting that “hundreds of monasteries, thousands of communities, and millions of Orthodox believers in Ukraine will find themselves outlawed and will lose their property and place of prayer.”

The Synod stated that it would appeal Kiev’s actions with international human rights organizations and call on them to immediately and objectively respond to the “flagrant persecution of believers in Ukraine.”

Meanwhile, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev responded to the new law by stating that Zelensky has “no religious identity” and describing the crackdown as “full-fledged Satanism,” supported by Ukraine’s Western backers.

“This story will not go unpunished for Ukraine,” Medvedev wrote, stating “the country will be destroyed, like Sodom and Gomorrah,” referring to the Old Testament story of two cities obliterated by divine intervention for their wickedness. “The demons will inevitably fall,” he continued, adding that their punishment will be “earthly, cruel, painful and will happen soon.”

Religious tensions have plagued the country for a long time, with a number of entities claiming to be the true Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The two main rival factions are the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Kiev-backed Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), which is considered by the Russian Orthodox Church to be schismatic.

The UOC remains the largest Orthodox church in Ukraine, with more than 8,000 parishes across the country. However, since the 2010s, some of these have been choosing to transfer to the jurisdiction of the OCU under pressure from authorities in Kiev.

By Hekmat Aboukhater and William Hartung, Responsible Statecraft, 8/8/24

The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive $2 trillion multiyear plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines. A large chunk of that funding will go to major nuclear weapons contractors like Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. And they will do everything in their power to keep that money flowing.

This January, a review of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program under the Nunn-McCurdy Act — a congressional provision designed to rein in cost overruns of Pentagon weapons programs — found that the missile, the crown jewel of the nuclear overhaul plan involving 450 missile-holding silos spread across five states, is already 81% over its original budget. It is now estimated that it will cost a total of nearly $141 billion to develop and purchase, a figure only likely to rise in the future.

That Pentagon review had the option of canceling the Sentinel program because of such a staggering cost increase. Instead, it doubled down on the program, asserting that it would be an essential element of any future nuclear deterrent and must continue, even if the funding for other defense programs has to be cut to make way for it. In justifying the decision, Deputy Defense Secretary William LaPlante stated: “We are fully aware of the costs, but we are also aware of the risks of not modernizing our nuclear forces and not addressing the very real threats we confront.”

Cost is indeed one significant issue, but the biggest risk to the rest of us comes from continuing to build and deploy ICBMs, rather than delaying or shelving the Sentinel program. As former Secretary of Defense William Perry has noted, ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” because they “could trigger an accidental nuclear war.” As he explained, a president warned (accurately or not) of an enemy nuclear attack would have only minutes to decide whether to launch such ICBMs and conceivably devastate the planet.

Possessing such potentially world-ending systems only increases the possibility of an unintended nuclear conflict prompted by a false alarm. And as Norman Solomon and the late Daniel Ellsberg once wrote, “If reducing the dangers of nuclear war is a goal, the top priority should be to remove the triad’s ground-based leg — not modernize it.”

This is no small matter. It is believed that a large-scale nuclear exchange could result in more than five billion of us humans dying, once the possibility of a “nuclear winter” and the potential destruction of agriculture across much of the planet is taken into account, according to an analysis by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

In short, the need to reduce nuclear risks by eliminating such ICBMs could not be more urgent. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock” — an estimate of how close the world may be at any moment to a nuclear conflict — is now set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s been since that tracker was first created in 1947. And just this June, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a mutual defense agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, a potential first step toward a drive by Moscow to help Pyongyang expand its nuclear arsenal further. And of the nine countries now possessing nuclear weapons, it’s hardly the only one other than the U.S. in an expansionist phase.

Considering the rising tide of nuclear escalation globally, is it really the right time for this country to invest a fortune of taxpayer dollars in a new generation of devastating “use them or lose them” weapons? The American public has long said no, according to a 2020 poll by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, which showed that 61% of us actually support phasing out ICBM systems like the Sentinel.

The Pentagon’s misguided plan to keep such ICBMs in the U.S arsenal for decades to come is only reinforced by the political power of members of Congress and the companies that benefit financially from the current buildup.

Who decides? The role of the ICBM lobby

A prime example of the power of the nuclear weapons lobby is the Senate ICBM Coalition. That group is composed of senators from four states — Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming — that either house major ICBM bases or host significant work on the Sentinel. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the members of that coalition have received more than $3 million in donations from firms involved in the production of the Sentinel over the past four election cycles. Nor were they alone. ICBM contractors made contributions to 92 of the 100 senators and 413 of the 435 house members in 2024. Some received hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The nuclear lobby paid special attention to members of the armed services committees in the House and Senate. For example, Mike Turner, a House Republican from Ohio, has been a relentless advocate of “modernizing” the nuclear arsenal. In a June 2024 talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which itself has received well over a million dollars in funding from nuclear weapons producers, he called for systematically upgrading the nuclear arsenal for decades to come, while chiding any of his congressional colleagues not taking such an aggressive stance on the subject.

Although Turner vigorously touts the need for a costly nuclear buildup, he fails to mention that, with $305,000 in donations, he’s been the fourth-highest recipient of funding from the ICBM lobby over the four elections between 2018 and 2024. Little wonder that he pushes for new nuclear weapons and staunchly opposes extending the New START arms reduction treaty.

In another example of contractor influence, veteran Texas representative Kay Granger secured the largest total of contributions from the ICBM lobby of any House member. With $675,000 in missile contractor contributions in hand, Granger went to bat for the lobby, lending a feminist veneer to nuclear “modernization” by giving a speech on her experience as a woman in politics at Northrop Grumman’s Women’s conference. And we’re sure you won’t be surprised that Granger has anything but a strong track record when it comes to keeping the Pentagon and arms makers accountable for waste, fraud, and abuse in weapons programs. Her X account is, in fact, littered with posts heaping praise on Lockheed Martin and its overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft.

Other recipients of ICBM contractor funding, like Alabama Congressman Mike Rogers, have lamented the might of the “far-left disarmament community,” and the undue influence of “anti-nuclear zealots” on our politics. Missing from the statements his office puts together and the speeches his staffers write for him, however, is any mention of the $471,000 in funding he’s received so far from ICBM producers. You won’t be surprised, we’re sure, to discover that Rogers has pledged to seek a provision in the forthcoming National Defense Authorization Act to support the Pentagon’s plan to continue the Sentinel program.

Lobbying dollars and the revolving door

The flood of campaign contributions from ICBM contractors is reinforced by their staggering investments in lobbying. In any given year, the arms industry as a whole employs between 800 and 1,000 lobbyists, well more than one for every member of Congress. Most of those lobbyists hired by ICBM contractors come through the “revolving door” from careers in the Pentagon, Congress, or the Executive Branch. That means they come with the necessary tools for success in Washington: an understanding of the appropriations cycle and close relations with decision-makers on the Hill.

During the last four election cycles, ICBM contractors spent upwards of $226 million on 275 extremely well-paid lobbyists. For example, Bud Cramer, a former Democratic congressman from Alabama who once sat on the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, netted $640,000 in fees from Northrop Grumman over a span of six years. He was also a cofounder of the Blue Dog Democrats, an influential conservative faction within the Democratic Party. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that Cramer’s former chief of staff, Jefferies Murray, also lobbies for Northrop Grumman.

While some lobbyists work for one contractor, others have shared allegiances. For example, during his tenure as a lobbyist, former Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Trent Lott received more than $600,000 for his efforts for Raytheon, Textron Inc., and United Technologies (before United Technologies and Raytheon merged to form RX Technologies). Former Virginia Congressman Jim Moran similarly received $640,000 from Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics.

Playing the jobs card

The argument of last resort for the Sentinel and similar questionable weapons programs is that they create well-paying jobs in key states and districts. Northrop Grumman has played the jobs card effectively with respect to the Sentinel, claiming it will create 10,000 jobs in its development phase alone, including about 2,250 in the state of Utah, where the hub for the program is located.

As a start, however, those 10,000 jobs will help a minuscule fraction of the 167-million-member American workforce. Moreover, Northrop Grumman claims facilities tied to the program will be set up in 32 states. If 2,250 of those jobs end up in Utah, that leaves 7,750 more jobs spread across 31 states — an average of about 250 jobs per state, essentially a rounding error compared to total employment in most localities.

Nor has Northrop Grumman provided any documentation for the number of jobs the Sentinel program will allegedly create. Journalist Taylor Barnes of ReThink Media was rebuffed in her efforts to get a copy of the agreement between Northrop Grumman and the state of Utah that reportedly indicates how many Sentinel-related jobs the company needs to create to get the full subsidy offered to put its primary facility in Utah.

A statement by a Utah official justifying that lack of transparency suggested Northrop Grumman was operating in “a competitive defense industry” and that revealing details of the agreement might somehow harm the company. But any modest financial harm Northrop Grumman might suffer, were those details revealed, pales in comparison with the immense risks and costs of the Sentinel program itself.

There are two major flaws in the jobs argument with respect to the future production of nuclear weapons. First, military spending should be based on security considerations, not pork-barrel politics. Second, as Heidi Peltier of the Costs of War Project has effectively demonstrated, virtually any other expenditure of funds currently devoted to Pentagon programs would create between 9% and 250% more jobs than weapons spending does. If Congress were instead to put such funds into addressing climate change, dealing with future disease epidemics, poverty, or homelessness — all serious threats to public safety — the American economy would gain hundreds of thousands of jobs. Choosing to fund those ICBMs instead is, in fact, a job killer, not a job creator.

Unwarranted influence in the nuclear age

Advocates for eliminating ICBMs from the American arsenal make a strong case. (If only they were better heard!) For example, former Representative John Tierney of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation offered this blunt indictment of ICBMs:

“Not only are intercontinental ballistic missiles redundant, but they are prone to a high risk of accidental use…They do not make us any safer. Their only value is to the defense contractors who line their fat pockets with large cost overruns at the expense of our taxpayers. It has got to stop.”

The late Daniel Ellsberg made a similar point in a February 2018 interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

“You would not have these arsenals, in the U.S. or elsewhere, if it were not the case that it was highly profitable to the military-industrial complex, to the aerospace industry, to the electronics industry, and to the weapons design labs to keep modernizing these weapons, improving accuracy, improving launch time, all that. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower talked about is a very powerful influence. We’ve talked about unwarranted influence. We’ve had that for more than half a century.”

Given how the politics of Pentagon spending normally work, that nuclear weapons policy is being so heavily influenced by individuals and organizations profiting from an ongoing arms race should be anything but surprising. Still, in the case of such weaponry, the stakes are so high that critical decisions shouldn’t be determined by parochial politics. The influence of such special interest groups and corporate weapons-makers over life-and-death issues should be considered both a moral outrage and perhaps the ultimate security risk.

Isn’t it finally time for the executive branch and Congress to start assessing the need for ICBMs on their merits, rather than on contractor lobbying, weapons company funding, and the sort of strategic thinking that was already outmoded by the end of the 1950s? For that to happen, our representatives would need to hear from their constituents loud and clear.

This article was originally published at Tom Dispatch and was republished with permission by Responsible Statecraft.

By Big Serge, Substack, 8/20/24

On Tuesday, August 6, the Russo-Ukrainian War took an unexpected twist with the beginning of a brigade-level Ukrainian assault on Kursk Oblast, across the border from Ukrainian Sumy. The decision by Ukrainian command to willingly open up a new front, at a time when their defenses on critical axes of the Donbas are failing, is both aggressive and fraught with peril. The sensational spectacle of a Ukrainian offensive into prewar Russia in a region that is operationally remote from the critical theater of the war has whipped the peanut gallery into a frenzy, and most commentators and observers seem to have fled straightaway to their base narrative instincts. Russian “doomers” have been quick to denounce the affair as a catastrophic failure of preparedness by the Russian Ministry of Defense, accelerationists have trumpeted the immateriality of Russian red lines, while the more disillusioned pro-Ukrainian commenters have despaired of the operation as a wasteful sideshow which dooms the Donbas line to defeat.

People form opinions very rapidly in the current information ecosystem, and the prospect of excitement often leads them to throw caution to the wind despite the orgy of misinformation and deception that surrounds such events. It is worth noting, however, that only two weeks have passed since the beginning of an operation that apparently nobody was expecting, and we should therefore be cautious of certainty and carefully distinguish between what we think and what we know. With that in mind, let’s take a careful survey of the Ukrainian operation as it stands and attempt to parse out both the strategic concept of the assault and its possible trajectories.

The sudden and unexpected eruption of combat in Kursk oblast has, of course, raised comparisons to the 1943 Battle of Kursk, which is often incorrectly called the “biggest tank battle of all time.” For a variety of reasons, that famous battle is a poor comparison. Germany’s Operation Citadel was a constrained and unambitious operation against a fully alert defense, characterized by a lack of both strategic imagination and strategic surprise. The current Ukrainian endeavor may lay on the opposite end of the spectrum – highly imaginative, and perhaps dangerously so. Nevertheless, the return of German military equipment to the environs of Kursk must raise eyebrows. The current battlefield around the town of Sudzha is precisely the spot where, in 1943, the Soviet 38th and 40th armies coiled for a counteroffensive against the German 4th Army. Russia’s southwestern steppe tastes blood again, and the fertile earth opens wide to accept the dead.

Krepost: Strategic Intentions

Before we talk about the strategic concept behind Ukraine’s operation in Kursk, let us briefly ponder what to call it. Repeating the phrase “Ukraine’s Kursk Operation” will rapidly become tiresome and dry, and calling it “Kursk”, or “The Battle of Kursk” is not a good option – both because it raises some confusion as to whether we mean the city of Kursk or the larger oblast around it, and because there has already been a Battle of Kursk. Therefore, I am suggesting that for now we simply refer to the Ukrainian assault as Operation Krepost. Germany’s 1943 offensive towards Kursk was codenamed Operation Citadel, and Krepost (крепость) is a Slavic word for a fortress or citadel.

Ukraine has made repeated forays across the Russian border throughout this war – generally suicidal thunder runs into Belgorod Oblast which met with disaster. Krepost, however, stands apart from previous episodes in several ways, chief among them being the use of regular AFU brigades rather than the paramilitary fronts stood up by the GRU (that is, the Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate, not Steve Carell’s character in the Despicable Me franchise).

For previous expeditions towards Belgorod, the Ukrainians opted to use thinly veiled irregular formations like the “Freedom of Russia Legion” and the “Russian Volunteer Corps”. These are the sort of sheep dipped units that can be useful in certain contexts by allowing states to maintain a token façade of plausible deniability – a good corollary might be Russia’s own use of unmarked special forces in the 2014 annexation of Crimea. In a time of active war, however, these paramilitaries came across as exceptionally lame. Whatever the “Freedom of Russia Legion” called themselves, they were obviously forces stood up by the Ukrainian government, using Ukrainian weaponry, fighting Ukraine’s war. The paint job fooled nobody, and absurdities like the “Belgorod People’s Republic” did not exist beyond a few bad memes on twitter.

It is notable, however, that the Kursk incursion has been undertaken not by forces disguising themselves (however poorly) as independent Russian paramilitaries but by Ukrainian forces operating as themselves – that is, as regular Ukrainian army brigades. Committing core AFU assets to a ground incursion in Russia, especially during a time of general operational crisis in the Donbas, is something entirely different than flinging a disposable paramilitary battalion at Belgorod.

But why? The obvious thing that stands out about Kursk is how operationally remote it is from the critical theater of the war. The center of gravity in this conflict is the Donbas, and Ukraine’s line of defenses around the cities of Pokrovsk, Kostyantinivka, Kramatorsk, and Slovyansk, with crucial flanking axes in the land bridge and on the Oskil River line. The frontier of Kursk Oblast, where the Ukrainians are now attacking, is more than 130 kilometers away from the subsidiary battles around Kharkov, and more than 200 kilometers away from the main theater of the war. Given the scope of this war and the pace of advances, Kursk may as well be on the moon.

In short, the Ukrainian operation in Kursk bears no possibility of being supportive of the other, critical fronts of the war, and even in the most generous range of outcomes it has no potential to exert a direct operational influence on those fronts. Parsing through the strategic intention behind Krepost, therefore, in that it has no immediate operational bearing on extant fronts. A variety of opportunities have been proposed, which we will review and contemplate in turn.

1) The Atomic Hostage

Sixty kilometers from the Ukrainian border lies the small city of Kurchatov (named after Igor Kurchatov, the father of Soviet nuclear weaponry) and the Kursk Nuclear Powerplant. The proximity of such an obviously significant – and potentially dangerous – installation so close to the scene of the fighting led many to immediately presume that the nuclear plant is the objective of Krepost.

These theories are highly reductive and unsupported, and act as if the powerplant is the object in a game of tag – as if Ukraine can “win” by reaching the plant. It’s not immediately obvious that this is the case. There’s plenty of hand-wringing about Ukraine “capturing” the plant, but the question then remains: to do what with?

The implication would seem to be that Ukraine might use the plant as a hostage, threatening to sabotage it and initiate some sort of radiological disaster. This, however, would seem to be both impractical and unlikely. The Kursk plant is currently in a state of transition, with its four older RBMK reactors (similar to those used at Chernobyl) being phased out and replaced with new VVER reactors. The plant features modern biologic shields, a robust containment building, and other protective mechanisms. Furthermore, nuclear power plants do not explode in the sense that is often feared. Chernobyl, for example, experienced a steam explosion due to particular design flaws which do not exist in currently operable plants. The idea that Ukrainian soldiers could simply flip a bunch of switches and detonate the plant like a nuclear bomb are not realistic.

It is theoretically possible, one supposes, that the Ukrainians could try to bring in colossal amounts of explosives and send the entire plant sky high, spreading radioactive material into the atmosphere. While I am certainly no great admirer of the Kiev regime, I cannot help but doubt the willingness of the Ukrainian government to intentionally create a radiological disaster which would irradiate much of their own country along with swathes of central Europe, particularly because the Kursk region is part of the Dnieper watershed.

The powerplant story sounds scary but is ultimately too phantasmagorical to take seriously. Ukraine is not going to intentionally create a radiological disaster in close proximity to their own border, which would likely poison their own primary river basin and turn them into the most intensely hated international pariah ever seen. Even for a country at the end of its strategic rope, it’s hard to give credence to a harebrained scheme that uses critical maneuver assets of the regular army to capture an enemy nuclear plant and rig it to blow.

2) Diversionary Front

In another formulation, Krepost is construed as an attempt to draw Russian resources away from other, more critical sectors of front. The idea of a “diversion” as such is always appealing, to the point where it becomes something of a trope, but it’s worth considering what this might actually mean in the context of the relative force generation in this war.

We can begin with the more abstract problem here – Ukraine is operating at a serious disadvantage in total force generation, which means that any widening of the front will disproportionately burden the AFU. Extending the frontline with an entirely new – and strategically isolated – axis of combat would be a development that works against the outnumbered force. This is why, in 2022, we saw the Russians contract the frontline by hundreds of kilometers as a prelude to their mobilization. The idea of extending the front becomes a shell game for the Ukrainians – with fewer brigades than the Russians to cover more than 1000 kilometers of frontline, it becomes questionable as to just which army is being “diverted” in Kursk. For example, the spokesman for the 110th Mechanized Brigade (currently defending near Pokrovsk) told Politico that “things have become worse in our part of the front” since Ukraine launched Krepost, with less ammunition coming in as the Russians continue to attack.

The more concrete problem for Ukraine, however, is that the Russians formed an entirely new Northern Army Group covering Belgorod, Kursk, and Bryansk and is in the process of raising two additional army equivalents. To the extent that Krepost forces the deployment of Russian reserves, it will draw from forces organic to this northern grouping, and not the Russian formations currently attacking in the Donbas. Ukrainian sources are already taking a dour mood, noting that there has been no drawdown of Russia’s grouping in the Donbas. Thus far, the identified Russian units fighting in Kursk have essentially all been drawn from this northern grouping

More to the point, Krepost seems to have meaningfully denuded Ukrainian strength in the Donbas while affecting the Russians very little. A recent piece in the Economist featured interviews with several Ukrainian troops fighting in Kursk, all of whom said that their units had been “pulled, unrested, from under-pressure frontlines in the east with barely a day’s notice.” The article goes on to quote a source in the AFU’s general staff who notes that the Russian units scrambling into Kursk are coming from the northern army group, not the Donbas. A recent New York Times piece, which triumphantly announced the redeployment of Russian forces, admitted that none of Russia’s troop movements are affecting the Donbas – instead, it is deploying resting units from the Dnipro axis.

And this is Ukraine’s problem. Fighting an enemy with superior force generation, attempts to divert or redirect the fighting ultimately threaten to become a shell game. Russia has approximately 50 division equivalents on the line against perhaps 33 for Ukraine – an advantage that will stubbornly persist no matter how they are arranged on the line. Adding 100 extra kilometers of front in Kursk is fundamentally contradictory to the AFU’s fundamental interests at this juncture, which hinge on economizing forces and avoiding overextension.

3) Bargaining Chip

Another strand of thought suggests that Krepost may be an effort to strengthen Ukraine’s position for negotiations with Russia. An anonymous Zelensky advisor allegedly told the Washington Post that the point of the operation was to seize Russian territory to hold as a bargaining chip which could be swapped in negotiations. This view was then corroborated by senior advisor Mykhailo Podolyak.

If we take these claims at face value, we perhaps have arrived at the strategic intention of Krepost. If Ukraine indeed intends to occupy a swathe of Kursk Oblast and use it to bargain for the return of prewar Ukrainian territory in the Donbas, then we must ask the obvious question: have they lost their minds?

Such a plan would instantly founder on two insurmountable problems. The first of these would be an obvious misread of the relative value of the chips on the table. The Donbas – the heart of Russia’s war aims – is a highly urbanized region of nearly seven million inhabitants, which – along with Russian annexed Zaporozhia and Kherson – forms a critical strategic link to Crimea and grants Russia control over the Sea of Azov and much of the Black Sea littoral. The idea that the Kremlin would consider walking away from its aims here simply to bloodlessly recover a few small towns in southwestern Kursk is, in a word, lunacy. It would, in the luminary words of President Trump, be “the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals.”

If Ukraine thought that seizing Russian territory would make Moscow more amenible to peace talks, they badly miscalculated. The Kremlin responded by declaring an Anti-Terror Operation in Kursk, Byransk, and Belgorod Oblasts, and Putin – far from appearing humiliated or cowed – projected anger and defiance, while Foreign Ministry officials have suggested that the Kursk operation now precludes negotiations.

The other problem with trying to hold Kursk as a bargaining chip is, well, that you have to hold it. As we will discuss shortly, this will be very difficult for the AFU. They managed to achieve strategic surprise and make a modest penetration into Kursk, but there are a variety of kinetic factors that make them unlikely to hold it. For something to be useful as a bargaining chip, it must be in your possession – this would therefore compel Ukraine to commit forces to the Kursk front indefinitely, and hold it to the bitter end.

4) Pure Spectacle

Finally, we come to the more nebulous option – that Krepost was conceived purely to scandalize and embarrass the Kremlin. This is certainly the sensationalized solution that much of the commentariat has converged on, with plenty of vicious delight in the reversal of fortunes and the spectacular reverse uno of Ukraine invading Russia.

This all plays well with foreign audiences, of course, but it ultimately does not matter much. There’s no evidence that the Kremlin’s grip on the conflict or the commitment of Russian society to support the war are wavering. This war has seen a long sequence of nominal Russian “embarrassment”, from the 2022 withdrawals from Kharkov and Kherson, to the Ukrainian air strikes on Sevastopol, to drone and terror attacks deep inside Russia, all the way to the bizarre mutiny of the Wagner PMC. None of these things have detracted from the central objectives of the Kremlin’s war, which remain the capture of the Donbas and the steady exhaustion of Ukraine’s military resources. Did the AFU throw a grouping of its dwindling strategic reserves into Kursk Oblast purely to scandalize and embarrass Putin? Possibly. Would it matter? Highly unlikely.

It’s very common, particularly on social media, to see a sort of reveling in the great reversal of Ukraine liberating Russia, and battlefield updates frequently make reference to the AFU “liberating” Kursk oblast. This is, of course, very childish and meaningless. Once one extracts oneself from the spectacle, the entire enterprise seems obviously disconnected from the larger logic of Ukraine’s war. It’s not at all clear how occupying a narrow slice of the Russian frontier correlates to Ukraine’s self-professed war aims of regaining its 1991 borders, or how widening the front is supposed to promote a negotiated end to the settlement, or – for that matter – how the little town of Sudzha could be a fair trade for the Donbas transit hub of Pokrovsk.

Ultimately, we have to acknowledge that Krepost is a very odd military development – an overmatched force, already heaving from the strain of a grinding, 700 kilometer front, voluntarily opened a new, independent axis of combat which has no possibility of operationally synergizing with the war’s critical theaters. There is some satisfaction to be derived from bringing the war into Russia and scandalizing the Kremlin. Perhaps Kiev hopes that simply unsettling the situation will cajole the Russian military into making a mistake or redeploying out of position, but so far the Kursk axis has not denuded Russian strength in other theaters. Perhaps they really do think that they can seize enough ground to bargain with, but to do that they will need to hold it. Or perhaps they are simply losing the war, and desperation breeds strange ideas.

History will probably conclude that Krepost was an inventive, but ultimately far-fetched gambit. The crude calculus on the ground shows that the existing trajectory of the war simply doesn’t work for Ukraine. Russian progress across the contact line in the east has been steady and relentless throughout the spring and summer, and the devastating Ukrainian failure in 2023’s counteroffensive showed that banging away against alert and entrenched Russian defenses is not a good answer. Faced with the prospect between slow strangulation in the east, Ukraine has attempted to unlock the front and introduce a more kinetic and open pace.

On the Ground

The biggest problem with the more fanciful and explosive theories of Operation Krepost are fairly simple: the results on the ground are not very good. The attack has been both limited in scale and constrained in its advance, but the shock and surprise of the operation has allowed the narrative to spin out of control, both on the part of exuberant Ukrainian supporters and the usual doomposters in the Kremlin orbit, who have been bemoaning and expecting imminent Russian defeat for years at this point….

Krepost ultimately reflects a growing Ukrainian frustration with the trajectory of the war in the east, where the AFU has grown weary of the industrial slugfest with its bigger and more powerful neighbor. By flinging a secretly assembled mechanized package at a lightly defended and previously ancillary sector of front, they briefly managed to reopen mobile operations, but the window of mobility was far too small and the gains far too meager. It has now become clear that the decision to divert forces to Kursk has undermined the already precarious defense of the Donbas. Ukraine hold Sudzha and may very well clear the south bank of the Seim, but if it comes at the expense of Pokrovsk and Toretsk, that is a trade that the Russian Army will be happy to make.

The AFU is expending carefully husbanded and scarce resources in the pursuit of operationally inconsequential objectives. The exhilaration of taking the fight to Russia and being on the attack again can certainly work wonders for morale and create a spectacle for western backers, but the effect is short lived – like a broke man gambling away his last dollar, all for the momentary thrill of chance.

YouTube link here.

Written article by Berletic here.

By Alexander Mercouris, Consortium News, 8/22/24

YouTube link to CN interview with Richard Medhurst on his recent arrest here.

At the time when Prime Minister Tony Blair brought in the Terrorism Act 2000 — note that this was before 9/11 – I was working in the Royal Courts of Justice. As I remember the lawyers were buzzing about it, worried about its vague and sloppy language, and its overt authoritarianism and capacity for abuse.

There was general incredulity that Blair, who is himself a lawyer, as of course is his wife, and his Home Secretary Jack Straw, who is also a lawyer and a former adviser of Barbara Castle, one of the most revered figures in modern Labour history, would bring in a law like that.

Looking back and thinking of those days, it’s amazing how naive we were.

Here we are and this terrible law is now being used against journalists, and is being used in a way which violates fundamental human rights.

The terrible thing is that it was at precisely this same time that the Blair government was bringing into law – with wide support from within the legal community — the Human Rights Act 1998, which embedded the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into U.K. law (the Human Rights Act 1998 was signed into law in 1998 but only came into force on Oct. 2, 2000).

At the time everyone in the legal world assumed that it was the Human Rights Act 1998 that was by far the more important Act, and which would be far more consequential than the Terrorism Act 2000.

Indeed I distinctly remember all sorts of assurances floating around that there was no need to worry because the Terrorism Act 2000 would be restricted and its loose wording interpreted by reference to the ECHR and the Human Rights Act 1998.

In reality what has happened is the opposite. Far from the Human Rights Act 1998 mitigating the effect of the Terrorism Act 2000, it is the Terrorism Act 2000 which is prevailing over the ECHR and the Human Rights Act 1998 – as the Medhurst case shows.

None of this would be happening were it not for a radical change in the whole legal and political culture in the U.K., which has taken place since these two Acts were brought into law.

I don’t want to romanticise the past, but the shift towards authoritarianism, and the ongoing repression of free speech and journalism, which has taken place since 2000, still seems to me astonishing and at some level inexplicable.

The cases brought against Julian Assange and former British diplomat Craig Murray (imprisoned for his journalism on a contempt of court conviction) and the misuse of the Terrorism Act 2000 to harass journalists, including Murray, illustrate this.

What illustrates it even more is that all of this is happening practically without protest. The media here in the U.K. are currently maintaining a stony silence about the Medhurst arrest, whereas if anything like that had happened in 2000 or before there would have been outrage.

It is this sharp authoritarian turn in British legal and political culture — and the lack of any pushback against it — which shocks me. Its origins are obviously in the U.S., but the extent to which it is now sweeping the entire West, is astonishing.

I have heard that in Germany things are even worse, with people like former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis prevented from entering the country.

Here in Britain we are throwing away the liberties people once fought for, for example in the 18th century Wilkes Case. Moreover we are doing it without a murmur. Liberty is dying in silence.

On the specifics of the Medhurst case, I would say two things:

1. I think the objective is to intimidate and silence Medhurst, and to get Google to de-platform his YT channel, rather than to prosecute him. Even allowing for the current climate I cannot believe that the U.K. authorities are going to bring a prosecution.

If they do something like that then things are even darker than I supposed. Having said that, assuming I am right, acting to intimidate and silence a journalist, thereby depriving him of his livelihood, is already appalling enough.

2. It’s clear from Medhurst’s account that the police were acting under instructions and under tight supervision. Based on what he says, it looks as if the police were constantly checking and getting instructions throughout the entire period of his detention and arrest.

It would be interesting to know from whom, and what the chain of command was. Perhaps in better times we will find out.

Alexander Mercouris is a legal analyst, political commentator and editor ofThe Duran.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.