Cameron Leckie served as an officer in the Australian Army for 24 years. An agricultural engineer, he is currently a PhD candidate.
Imagine if Ukraine had capitulated three days after the Russian invasion commenced in February 2022, as some predicted? The Donetsk and Luhansk Republic’s would likely have gained autonomy within the Ukrainian state and life would have carried on like normal for most Ukrainians (minus the regular shelling for the residents of the Donbass). No doubt the capitulation would have seen changes in Ukraine’s political leadership – politics is a ruthless game; whilst the casualties resulting from Russia’s incursion would have been (from a numbers perspective) insignificant compared to the mass loss of life that has since occurred.
Or even better yet, imagine if the United States and NATO had negotiated in good faith with Russia on the proposals it presented in December 2021 that sought to address Russia’s core security concerns. The war would have been avoided, Ukrainian neutrality enshrined, and the world could have got on with solving other pressing problems. But NATO had its ‘principles’ which it must stand by. As forcefully argued by Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani, the “absence of a culture of pragmatism,” meant that reaching a compromise with Russia was unacceptable to the Western powers.
Alas these and other opportunities were missed. Russia resorted to a “military-technical” solution. The focus of the Western project in Ukraine now become an opportunity to “weaken Russia,” which when the dusts settle could well be remembered as the greatest strategic miscalculation in the history of the American imperium.
Russia effectively won this war on 24 February 2022 – the day it launched its invasion. What remained uncertain then as it is now was how much territory Ukraine would lose, the extent of the death and destruction, and the geopolitical convulsions that would result.
However, the ultimate hopelessness of the Ukrainian position was not the narrative that was sold in the West. Rather we heard that Russia’s invasion was unprovoked, the Russian military incompetent, the Russian economy would collapse, Putin would be overthrown, Russia was isolated, Russia is a pariah state, Russia is running out of [insert weapon of choice here], or most farfetched of all that Ukraine was ‘winning.’
The result of these false narratives is that the West has reverse ‘OODA’ looped itself (see here for a primer on the OODA loop – a four step decision making cycle that starts with observing the situation, contextualising or orientating your thoughts to those observations before making a decision and acting). In a competitive environment such as war, the idea is that the combatant who can cycle through the OODA loop more rapidly causes the actions of the other combatant to become less and less relevant to the situation overtime until they are defeated.
The starting mindset of Western leaders, after decades of internalising anti-Russian propaganda, (best encapsulated by the infamous, and empirically false claim that “Russia is but a gas tank masquerading as a country”) was an overestimation of their own strength and an underestimation of Russia’s. This resulted in a mistake for the ages, with the assumption that the imposition of the harshest possible sanctions on Russia would be such a “slam dunk” outcome that no rigorous thinking through of the implications was required.
What actually resulted however was that the West has entrapped itself in a positive feedback loop – continuing to escalate the war on economic (nine rounds of sanctions) and military fronts (more support and wonder weapons to Ukraine) with an ever-weakening and less effective hand. No positive feedback loop is sustainable, and as I concluded in July of last year, and is becoming increasingly clear, events in Ukraine will result in the demise of the West as a major power bloc.
Now we are at the point where the inevitable and ignominious unravelling of the Ukrainian project, both within Ukraine and its Western partners is becoming impossible to hide.
In recent weeks the apparent unity of the Kiev regime has started to splinter. First, we have the resignation of Oleksiy Arestovich, President Zelensky’s Strategic Communications Advisor, over comments he made indicating that an explosion that killed 44 civilians in Dnipro was because of Ukrainian air defence intercepting a Russian missile. We have the deaths of the Ukrainian Interior Minister and other top officials in a helicopter crash. We also have the recent acknowledgement by an aide to President Zelensky that a Ukrainian negotiator was assassinated by the SBU (Ukrainian intelligence) in March 2022. Finally we have a purge of senior Ukrainian officials including deputy ministers and regional governors over allegations of corruption. Whilst it is unclear exactly what is unfolding in Ukrainian internal politics, it seems safe to assume that the cracks which are forming will widen, particularly with the ever-growing number of casualties being suffered by the Ukraine.
Last December, the President of the European Commission claimed that over 100,000 Ukrainian military personnel have been killed (an average of over 350 killed per day). Colonel Douglas Macgregor’s latest estimate suggests that over 150,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed (an average of 450 killed per day). A recent intelligence estimate by German military intelligence suggests that Ukraine is losing hundreds of soldiers killed every day just in the battle for Bakhmut alone. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Ukraine is suffering horrendous casualties.
What is truly shocking however is the apparent ratio of Russian casualties to Ukrainian. Colonel Macgregor suggests a ratio of eight Ukrainian’s being killed for every one Russian. Whilst it is impossible to confirm this, it does seem plausible that Ukraine is suffering far more casualties than Russia for multiple reasons. First and most importantly, Russia has an overwhelming advantage in firepower, particularly with artillery. Numerous figures have been provided by both Ukrainian and Western sources on this difference, with ratio’s ranging anywhere from five to nineteen to one in Russia’s favour. Secondly, the apparent slow ‘progress’ by Russia’s forces is an indicator of their strategy. Namely to batter the Ukrainian’s senseless with its overwhelming superiority in firepower, only then risking troops in an assault once there is little resistance left. Third, Ukraine continues to reinforce locations that are supposedly “strategically unimportant” such as around Bakhmut, which actually facilitates the Russian “demilitarisation” of Ukraine. Finally, and in stark contrast to Russia’s circumstances (where previously trained reservists have been mobilised and most provided with months of refresher training), the training being provided to Ukrainian troops is clearly insufficient to develop the individual skills and physical stamina required of a soldier let alone the collective training required at platoon, company or battalion level.
Ukraine’s casualties are despite the mindbogglingly enormous support provided by the Western powers. Yet the limitations of this support are becoming all too clear. The provision of main battle tanks to Ukraine provides a pertinent example. Ukraine started the war with well over 2000 main battle tanks. We were then told that the Ukrainian Army had more tanks a month into the war than when they started. Ukraine also received around 500 Soviet era tanks from former Warsaw Pact nations. 100 or thereabouts Challenger, Leopard 2 or M1 tanks represents maybe four per cent of the tanks it already had in service or has already been provided. You don’t need to be a military expert to understand that providing a small number of tanks, with hurriedly trained crews, and the logistics burden of multiple platforms, will not make any significant difference to the outcome.
The last weeks of political theatre associated with the provision of tanks to Ukraine should be seen for what it is. A form of jockeying to prepare the ground for the blame game that will follow Ukraine’s (and NATOs) ultimate defeat. The same could be said of Angela Merkel’s recent comments on the Minsk II Accord’s which were viewed by the leaders of Ukraine, Germany, France, and no doubt other NATO powers as a mechanism to buy time, rather than a pathway to the peaceful resolution of the crisis. There is also a change in the rhetoric emanating from various power centres such as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warning that it will be “very, very difficult” to force Russia out of Ukrainian territory. Meanwhile there is the unresolved issue of responsibility for the Nord Stream terrorist attack. As reported in the Washington Post, numerous European officials have concluded that there “is no evidence at this point that Russia was behind the sabotage,” implying that one or more NATO countries destroyed the energy infrastructure of another.
As others have noted, the ideologues in control of Western countries have no reverse gear. The only way is forward, no matter the cost or how slim the chances of success. Yet again we see the lack of pragmatism with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock now claiming that the EU countries are “fighting a war against Russia.”
Meanwhile, in a brilliant must read article, retired United Kingdom diplomat Alistair Crooke gets to the nub of what is driving the United States on its Ukrainian misadventure, where he argues that the resilience of Russia to the financial armageddon that was launched upon it has shattered “the plate-glass floor to western convictions about its ability to ‘manage the world’.” The United States has boxed itself into a corner from which it cannot escape with its Ukraine project.
It is difficult to predict what will happen next. The Western powers appear to have no viable strategy to bring the war to an end. The best they can do is keep Ukraine on life support while they try to figure something out, within an environment where Russia ratchets up the pressure on the battlefield and domestic pressures mount. But as Sun Tzu put it, tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. The best option would be for the key Western leaders, in particular President Biden, to seek immediate negotiations with President Putin without pre-conditions. The worst option would be to continue the escalation cycle, which ultimately could lead to direct conflict between NATO and Russia, and potentially nuclear war.
As we stand on the brink of an unthinkable abyss, I for one hope that pragmatism makes a return.
CN Editor Joe Lauria was one of 644 Twitter accounts that secretly formed part of Hamilton 68’s fake “dashboard” that wrongly influenced major media about alleged “Russian influence.”
The editor of this website [Consortium News] is part of a secret list created by the organization Hamilton 68 that was fed to major media and Congress to identify so-called “Russian accounts” that were “sowing discord” in the United States.
The list of 644 Twitter accounts was shared with Twitter executives who were unable to prove any links to Russia, reported Matt Taibbi in his latest installment of the Twitter Files on Friday.
“This was digital McCarthyism, taking people with dissident or unconventional opinions and mass-accusing them of ‘Un-American activities,’” writes Taibbi.
Hamilton 68 was created in 2017 by Clint Watts, a former F.B.I. counterintelligence officer and MSNBC analyst as a project of the German Marshall Fund and the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a bipartisan think-tank.
On Hamilton’s advisory council sits former acting C.I.A. chief Michael Morell, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and former editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard Bill Kristol.
Twitter Pushes Back
Twitter executives were not taken in by Hamilton 68’s secret list of Twitter accounts, with Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth, saying in an email obtained by Taibbi: “I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is.” Twitter uncovered the secret list by analyzing Hamilton’s Application Program Interface (API) requests to reverse-engineer the list in late 2017, Taibbi reported.
Taibbi wrote:
“The two founders of Hamilton 68, the blue-and-red team of former counselor to Marco Rubio Jamie Fly and Hillary for America Foreign Policy Advisor Laura Rosenberger, told Politico they couldn’t reveal the names of the accounts because “the Russians will simply shut them down.” Tchya, right. One look at the list reveals the real reason they couldn’t make it public.
This was not faulty science. It was a scam. Instead of tracking how ‘Russia’ influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming. As Roth put it, ‘Virtually any conclusion drawn from [the dashboard] will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.’”
But as Taibbi points out, it was not only conservatives who were targeted. “The names ranged from well-known media figures like David Horowitz to conservatives like Dennis Michael Lynch and progressives like Consortium editor Joe Lauria. It’s crucial to understand that the list captured not just Trump supporters but a range of political dissidents, including leftists, anarchists and humorists,” he wrote.
Major U.S. universities as well as members of the U.S. Congress were also duped by the Hamilton 68 scam, writes Taibbi.
39.Perhaps most embarrassingly, elected officials promoted the site, and invited Hamilton “experts” to testify. Dianne Feinstein, James Lankford, Richard Blumenthal, Adam Schiff, and Mark Warner were among the offenders. pic.twitter.com/X97OmZ3dv1
“Watts, who clearly knew how to play up the melodrama of his role, gave dire warnings to the Senate Intelligence Committee, telling them they should ‘follow the dead bodies’ if they wanted to get to the bottom of the Russian interference problem,” Taibbi reported. Twitter tried to privately warn Feinstein and Blumenthal about Hamilton 68 but were ignored. By not going public, Twitter helped perpetuate the fraud, Taibbi said.
Taibbi wrote:
“The scam needed just three elements: credentials of someone like ‘former FBI agent’ Watts, the absence of any semblance of fact-checking, and the silence of companies like Twitter.
On the third point, Twitter is not guiltless. Though people like Roth wanted to go hard at the fabulists — ‘My recommendation at this stage is an ultimatum: you release the list or we do,’ he wrote — ultimately people like future White House and National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne advised caution. ‘We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,’ she wrote. Carlos Monje, future senior advisor to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, concurred.
‘I also have been very frustrated in not calling out Hamilton 68 more publicly, but understand we have to play a longer game here,’ Monje decided.
Even if Twitter had pushed back, it wouldn’t have mattered. As it was, when company spokespeople urged reporters off the record to stay away, they didn’t — just as Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Blumenthal didn’t, when Twitter tried to warn them that ‘Russian bot’ stories were fake. Horne wrote several times that she had no luck in steering journalists away from these hack headlines. ‘Reporters are chafing,” she wrote, adding, ‘it’s like shouting into a void.’” …
Indeed, corporate media gobbled up what Hamilton 68 was serving. Wrote Taibbi:
“If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as the single greatest case of media fabulism in American history. Virtually every major news organization in America is implicated, including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and the Washington Post. Mother Jones alone did at least 14 stories pegged to the group’s ‘research.’ Even fact-checking sites like Politifact and Snopes cited Hamilton 68 as sources.”
Illusion of Ongoing Russian Interference
28.What makes this an important story is the sheer scale of the news footprint left by Hamilton 68’s digital McCarthyism. The quantity of headlines and TV segments dwarfs the impact of individual fabulists like Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass. pic.twitter.com/zfyjLb5Tkq
Taibbi wrote: “The Hamilton 68 tale has no clear analog in media history, which may give mainstream media writers an excuse not to cover it. They will be under heavy pressure to avoid addressing this scandal, since nearly all of them work for organizations guilty of spreading Hamilton’s ‘bullshit’ stories in volume.”
He added:
“The Hamilton 68 story shows how the illusion of ongoing ‘Russian interference’ worked. The magic trick was generated via a confluence of interests, between think-tanks, media, and government. Before, we could only speculate. Now we know: the ‘Russian threat’ was, in this case at least, just a bunch of ordinary Americans, dressed up to look like a Red Menace. …
‘Outfits like Hamilton 68 don’t have to agree with us,’ says Lauria. ‘But they should just leave us the hell alone.’”
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe
Does anyone remember this reporting from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project a few months before the Russian invasion? – NB
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rode to power on pledges to clean up the Eastern European country, but the Pandora Papers reveal he and his close circle were the beneficiaries of a network of offshore companies, including some that owned expensive London property.
Key Findings
-Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his partners in comedy production owned a network of offshore companies related to their business based in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, and Belize.
-Zelensky’s current chief aide, Serhiy Shefir, as well as the head of the country’s Security Service, were part of the offshore network.
-Offshore companies were used by Shefir and another business partner to buy pricey London real estate.
-Around the time of his 2019 election, Zelensky handed his shares in a key offshore company over to Shefir, but the two appear to have made an arrangement for Zelensky’s family to continue receiving money from the offshore.
Actor Volodymyr Zelensky stormed to the Ukrainian presidency in 2019 on a wave of public anger against the country’s political class, including previous leaders who used secret companies to stash their wealth overseas.
Now, leaked documents prove that Zelensky and his inner circle have had their own network of offshore companies. Two belonging to the president’s partners were used to buy expensive property in London.
The revelations come from documents in the Pandora Papers, millions of files from 14 offshore service providers leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with partners around the world including OCCRP.
The documents show that Zelensky and his partners in a television production company, Kvartal 95, set up a network of offshore firms dating back to at least 2012, the year the company began making regular content for TV stations owned by Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch dogged by allegations of multi-billion-dollar fraud. The offshores were also used by Zelensky associates to purchase and own three prime properties in the center of London.
The documents also show that just before he was elected, he gifted his stake in a key offshore company, the British Virgin Islands-registered Maltex Multicapital Corp., to his business partner — soon to be his top presidential aide. And in spite of giving up his shares, the documents show that an arrangement was soon made that would allow the offshore to keep paying dividends to a company that now belongs to his wife.
A comedian and actor who had been famous since the 2000s, Zelensky began his political rise a few years after taking on a starring role in the political satire “Servant of the People,” which began airing on the oligarch’s network in 2015. The show starred Zelensky as a humble history teacher whose anti-corruption rant in class is filmed by a student, goes viral online, and wins him national office.
In a case of life imitating art, Zelensky ended up winning the real-world Ukrainian presidency just three-and-a-half years after the show’s launch, with more than 73 percent of the vote.
Zelensky capitalized on widespread public anger at corruption, but his 2019 campaign was dogged by doubts over his anti-graft bona fides, given that his campaign was boosted by media belonging to Kolomoisky — who is accused of stealing US$5.5 billion from his own bank and funneling it offshore in concert with his partner, Hennadiy Boholiubov.
In the heat of the campaign, a political ally of incumbent President Petro Poroshenko published a chart on Facebook purporting to show that Zelensky and his television production partners were beneficiaries of a web of offshore firms that allegedly received $41 million in funds from Kolomoisky’s Privatbank.
That ally, Volodymyr Ariev, didn’t provide evidence, and his accusations have never been proven. But the Pandora Papers show that at least some of the details in this alleged scheme correspond to reality. The leaked documents show information on 10 companies in the network that match structures detailed in Ariev’s chart.
The new documents show that part of the network was managed with help from Fidelity Corporate Services, an offshore consultancy that was one of 14 firms whose documents make up part of the Pandora Papers leak. The documents show that Zelensky and his partners used companies based in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), Belize, and Cyprus.
Two of Zelensky’s associates in the offshore network, who were also part of his TV production company, now hold powerful positions. Serhiy Shefir is Zelensky’s top presidential aide, while Ivan Bakanov heads the Security Service of Ukraine.
These powerful positions also come with risks. Shefir narrowly escaped an apparent assassination attempt when his car was fired on outside Kyiv on September 22. He was unharmed, but his driver was wounded.
Zelensky has repeatedly pledged to rein in oligarchs. The day after the attack on Shefir, the country’s parliament passed a bill that would create a register of oligarchs and bar them from financing political parties or taking part in privatizations. Zelensky said that the attempt on Shefir’s life will receive a strong response and will not influence his fight against vested interests.
A spokesman for Zelensky declined to comment. Shefir and Bakanov did not respond to questions.
Serhiy Shefir’s brother Borys, who is a part-owner of Maltex Multicapital Corp, said he may indeed be an owner, but was unaware of the details of the offshore arrangement, which was largely the work of Ukraine’s now-Security Service chief, Bakanov.
“Bakanov was our financial director, he set up the financial schemes of our company. Speaking honestly, I’m not ready to respond to you,” he said.
Borys Shefir said such offshore arrangements were necessary because of the threat to the company of “authorities and bandits.” Kvartal 95’s members were moving to divest themselves of offshores, but it was a slow and difficult process, he said….
The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.
The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.
Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”
Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.
There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Forces Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.
President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.
The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.
From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding company behind it, Nord Stream AG, was incorporated in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51 percent of the company, with four European energy firms—one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in Germany—sharing the remaining 49 percent of stock, and having the right to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were shared with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.
America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market and trading economy.
Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September of 2021, would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas that would be available to Germany and Western Europe. The second pipeline also would provide enough gas for more than 50 percent of Germany’s annual consumption. Tensions were constantly escalating between Russia and NATO, backed by the aggressive foreign policy of the Biden Administration.
Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken as Secretary of State. By then a unified Senate had successfully passed a law that, as Cruz told Blinken, “halted [the pipeline] in its tracks.” There would be enormous political and economic pressure from the German government, then headed by Angela Merkel, to get the second pipeline online.
Would Biden stand up to the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added that he had not discussed the specifics of the incoming President’s views. “I know his strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord Stream 2,” he said. “I know that he would have us use every persuasive tool that we have to convince our friends and partners, including Germany, not to move forward with it.”
A few months later, as the construction of the second pipeline neared completion, Biden blinked. That May, in a stunning turnaround, the administration waived sanctions against Nord Stream AG, with a State Department official conceding that trying to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy had “always been a long shot.” Behind the scenes, administration officials reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by then facing a threat of Russian invasion, not to criticize the move.
There were immediate consequences. Senate Republicans, led by Cruz, announced an immediate blockade of all of Biden’s foreign policy nominees and delayed passage of the annual defense bill for months, deep into the fall. Politico later depicted Biden’s turnabout on the second Russian pipeline as “the one decision, arguably more than the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan, that has imperiled Biden’s agenda.”
The administration was floundering, despite getting a reprieve on the crisis in mid-November, when Germany’s energy regulators suspended approval of the second Nord Stream pipeline. Natural gas prices surged 8% within days, amid growing fears in Germany and Europe that the pipeline suspension and the growing possibility of a war between Russia and Ukraine would lead to a very much unwanted cold winter. It was not clear to Washington just where Olaf Scholz, Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, stood. Months earlier, after the fall of Afghanistan, Scholtz had publicly endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a more autonomous European foreign policy in a speech in Prague—clearly suggesting less reliance on Washington and its mercurial actions.
Throughout all of this, Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine, and by the end of December more than 100,000 soldiers were in position to strike from Belarus and Crimea. Alarm was growing in Washington, including an assessment from Blinken that those troop numbers could be “doubled in short order.”
The administration’s attention once again was focused on Nord Stream. As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia.
It was at this unsettled moment that Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.
All options were to be on the table. But only one would emerge.
PLANNING
In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.
It would be the first of a series of top-secret meetings, in a secure room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). There was the usual back and forth chatter that eventually led to a crucial preliminary question: Would the recommendation forwarded by the group to the President be reversible—such as another layer of sanctions and currency restrictions—or irreversible—that is, kinetic actions, which could not be undone?
What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.
Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for an attack. The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”
At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.
Something like this had been done before. In 1971, the American intelligence community learned from still undisclosed sources that two important units of the Russian Navy were communicating via an undersea cable buried in the Sea of Okhotsk, on Russia’s Far East Coast. The cable linked a regional Navy command to the mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.
A hand-picked team of Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency operatives was assembled somewhere in the Washington area, under deep cover, and worked out a plan, using Navy divers, modified submarines and a deep-submarine rescue vehicle, that succeeded, after much trial and error, in locating the Russian cable. The divers planted a sophisticated listening device on the cable that successfully intercepted the Russian traffic and recorded it on a taping system.
The NSA learned that senior Russian navy officers, convinced of the security of their communication link, chatted away with their peers without encryption. The recording device and its tape had to be replaced monthly and the project rolled on merrily for a decade until it was compromised by a forty-four-year-old civilian NSA technician named Ronald Pelton who was fluent in Russian. Pelton was betrayed by a Russian defector in 1985 and sentenced to prison. He was paid just $5,000 by the Russians for his revelations about the operation, along with $35,000 for other Russian operational data he provided that was never made public.
That underwater success, codenamed Ivy Bells, was innovative and risky, and produced invaluable intelligence about the Russian Navy’s intentions and planning.
Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation. Would the divers have to go to Estonia, right across the border from Russia’s natural gas loading docks, to train for the mission? “It would be a goat fuck,” the Agency was told.
Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”
Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”
What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack.
“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”
Biden’s and Nuland’s indiscretion, if that is what it was, might have frustrated some of the planners. But it also created an opportunity. According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”
The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”
The Agency working group members had no direct contact with the White House, and were eager to find out if the President meant what he’d said—that is, if the mission was now a go. The source recalled, “Bill Burns comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”
THE OPERATION
Norway was the perfect place to base the mission.
In the past few years of East-West crisis, the U.S. military has vastly expanded its presence inside Norway, whose western border runs 1,400 miles along the north Atlantic Ocean and merges above the Arctic Circle with Russia. The Pentagon has created high paying jobs and contracts, amid some local controversy, by investing hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade and expand American Navy and Air Force facilities in Norway. The new works included, most importantly, an advanced synthetic aperture radar far up north that was capable of penetrating deep into Russia and came online just as the American intelligence community lost access to a series of long-range listening sites inside China.
A newly refurbished American submarine base, which had been under construction for years, had become operational and more American submarines were now able to work closely with their Norwegian colleagues to monitor and spy on a major Russian nuclear redoubt 250 miles to the east, on the Kola Peninsula. America also has vastly expanded a Norwegian air base in the north and delivered to the Norwegian air force a fleet of Boeing-built P8 Poseidon patrol planes to bolster its long-range spying on all things Russia.
In return, the Norwegian government angered liberals and some moderates in its parliament last November by passing the Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement (SDCA). Under the new deal, the U.S. legal system would have jurisdiction in certain “agreed areas” in the North over American soldiers accused of crimes off base, as well as over those Norwegian citizens accused or suspected of interfering with the work at the base.
Norway was one of the original signatories of the NATO Treaty in 1949, in the early days of the Cold War. Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as Norway’s prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO post, with American backing, in 2014. He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since. “He is the glove that fits the American hand,” the source said.
Back in Washington, planners knew they had to go to Norway. “They hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas exploration,” the source said. They also could be trusted to keep the mission secret. (The Norwegians may have had other interests as well. The destruction of Nord Stream—if the Americans could pull it off—would allow Norway to sell vastly more of its own natural gas to Europe.)
Sometime in March, a few members of the team flew to Norway to meet with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy. One of the key questions was where exactly in the Baltic Sea was the best place to plant the explosives. Nord Stream 1 and 2, each with two sets of pipelines, were separated much of the way by little more than a mile as they made their run to the port of Greifswald in the far northeast of Germany.
The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island. The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult.
After a bit of research, the Americans were all in.
At this point, the Navy’s obscure deep-diving group in Panama City once again came into play. The deep-sea schools at Panama City, whose trainees participated in Ivy Bells, are seen as an unwanted backwater by the elite graduates of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, who typically seek the glory of being assigned as a Seal, fighter pilot, or submariner. If one must become a “Black Shoe”—that is, a member of the less desirable surface ship command—there is always at least duty on a destroyer, cruiser or amphibious ship. The least glamorous of all is mine warfare. Its divers never appear in Hollywood movies, or on the cover of popular magazines.
“The best divers with deep diving qualifications are a tight community, and only the very best are recruited for the operation and told to be prepared to be summoned to the CIA in Washington,” the source said.
The Norwegians and Americans had a location and the operatives, but there was another concern: any unusual underwater activity in the waters off Bornholm might draw the attention of the Swedish or Danish navies, which could report it.
Denmark had also been one of the original NATO signatories and was known in the intelligence community for its special ties to the United Kingdom. Sweden had applied for membership into NATO, and had demonstrated its great skill in managing its underwater sound and magnetic sensor systems that successfully tracked Russian submarines that would occasionally show up in remote waters of the Swedish archipelago and be forced to the surface.
The Norwegians joined the Americans in insisting that some senior officials in Denmark and Sweden had to be briefed in general terms about possible diving activity in the area. In that way, someone higher up could intervene and keep a report out of the chain of command, thus insulating the pipeline operation. “What they were told and what they knew were purposely different,” the source told me. (The Norwegian embassy, asked to comment on this story, did not respond.)
The Norwegians were key to solving other hurdles. The Russian navy was known to possess surveillance technology capable of spotting, and triggering, underwater mines. The American explosive devices needed to be camouflaged in a way that would make them appear to the Russian system as part of the natural background—something that required adapting to the specific salinity of the water. The Norwegians had a fix.
The Norwegians also had a solution to the crucial question of when the operation should take place. Every June, for the past 21 years, the American Sixth Fleet, whose flagship is based in Gaeta, Italy, south of Rome, has sponsored a major NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea involving scores of allied ships throughout the region. The current exercise, held in June, would be known as Baltic Operations 22, or BALTOPS 22. The Norwegians proposed this would be the ideal cover to plant the mines.
The Americans provided one vital element: they convinced the Sixth Fleet planners to add a research and development exercise to the program. The exercise, as made public by the Navy, involved the Sixth Fleet in collaboration with the Navy’s “research and warfare centers.” The at-sea event would be held off the coast of Bornholm Island and involve NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them.
It was both a useful exercise and ingenious cover. The Panama City boys would do their thing and the C4 explosives would be in place by the end of BALTOPS22, with a 48-hour timer attached. All of the Americans and Norwegians would be long gone by the first explosion.
The days were counting down. “The clock was ticking, and we were nearing mission accomplished,” the source said.
And then: Washington had second thoughts. The bombs would still be planted during BALTOPS, but the White House worried that a two-day window for their detonation would be too close to the end of the exercise, and it would be obvious that America had been involved.
Instead, the White House had a new request: “Can the guys in the field come up with some way to blow the pipelines later on command?”
Some members of the planning team were angered and frustrated by the President’s seeming indecision. The Panama City divers had repeatedly practiced planting the C4 on pipelines, as they would during BALTOPS, but now the team in Norway had to come up with a way to give Biden what he wanted—the ability to issue a successful execution order at a time of his choosing.
Being tasked with an arbitrary, last-minute change was something the CIA was accustomed to managing. But it also renewed the concerns some shared over the necessity, and legality, of the entire operation.
The President’s secret orders also evoked the CIA’s dilemma in the Vietnam War days, when President Johnson, confronted by growing anti-Vietnam War sentiment, ordered the Agency to violate its charter—which specifically barred it from operating inside America—by spying on antiwar leaders to determine whether they were being controlled by Communist Russia.
The agency ultimately acquiesced, and throughout the 1970s it became clear just how far it had been willing to go. There were subsequent newspaper revelations in the aftermath of the Watergate scandals about the Agency’s spying on American citizens, its involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders and its undermining of the socialist government of Salvador Allende.
Those revelations led to a dramatic series of hearings in the mid-1970s in the Senate, led by Frank Church of Idaho, that made it clear that Richard Helms, the Agency director at the time, accepted that he had an obligation to do what the President wanted, even if it meant violating the law.
In unpublished, closed-door testimony, Helms ruefully explained that “you almost have an Immaculate Conception when you do something” under secret orders from a President. “Whether it’s right that you should have it, or wrong that you shall have it, [the CIA] works under different rules and ground rules than any other part of the government.” He was essentially telling the Senators that he, as head of the CIA, understood that he had been working for the Crown, and not the Constitution.
The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer?
The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.
FALLOUT
In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House—but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution. A few months later, when it emerged that Russian authorities had been quietly getting estimates for the cost to repair the pipelines, the New York Times described the news as “complicating theories about who was behind” the attack. No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.
While it was never clear why Russia would seek to destroy its own lucrative pipeline, a more telling rationale for the President’s action came from Secretary of State Blinken.
Asked at a press conference last September about the consequences of the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described the moment as a potentially good one:
“It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come, but meanwhile we’re determined to do everything we possibly can to make sure the consequences of all of this are not borne by citizens in our countries or, for that matter, around the world.”
More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise of the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, “Like you, I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached. “Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”
Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did.
“It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a covert signal.
In 1966, the Soviet writer Vladimir Soloukhin penned an article in the journal Molodaia Gvardiia (Young Guard) entitled “Letters from the Russian Museum” (the Russian Museum being an institution in Leningrad devoted to Russian art). In this, Soloukhin lamented the destruction of Russian churches under the Soviets and complained about the habit of renaming historical Russian towns and streets after communist heroes. “The best thing would be restore all [the old names] either gradually or immediately (immediately would be better in my opinion), without exception,” Soloukhin wrote, before going on to complain further about the general neglect of Russia’s national heritage.
Soloukhin’s article reflected the reality that under the façade of Soviet communism, Russian nationalism retained a powerful grip on much of the population, including its artistic community. This was shown by the hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens who lined up to view exhibitions by the nationalist painter Ilya Glazunov some years later in 1978. The attention paid to Soviet dissidents and to the liberal intellectuals who swept to the fore under Gorbachev in the 1980s hid this nationalist substrata from many observers’ eyes. But it was always there and had strong popular backing.
This is still the case, but there’s a tendency in the West to look for signs of something different, in the hope of discovering that the Russian people are in reality pro-Western liberals, longing to liberate themselves from tyranny and move their country in our direction. Evidence for this is found in the few remaining Russian liberals, who tend to be concentrated in what are often called the ‘creative classes’—artists, journalists, IT technicians, and the like. In the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine, the Western media has noted the opposition of many such Russians to the war and the fact that thousands of them have left the country. With this, hopes have risen that what nowadays are called ‘influencers’ (those who influence and form public opinion) will mobilize the Russian people against the ‘Putin regime,’ topple the state, and bring the war to an end.
Musicians have been particularly notable for their opposition to the war. For instance, Boris Grebenshchikov, founder and lead member of the legendary Soviet rock group Aquarium, has called the war in Ukraine “madness” and said that “those who unleashed it are a disgrace to Russia.” Many others, such as Soviet megastar Alla Pugacheva, Oxford-educated rapper Oxxxymiron, and popular singer-songwriter Monetochka (Elizaveta Gyrdymova) have followed suit. Just last week, Monetochka, who has fled Russia, caused something of a scandal after telling concert goers in Latvia: “Russia will be free! Glory to Ukraine! Long live Belarus!” One might be forgiven for thinking that the ‘creative classes’ are indeed united in their opposition to Putin and the war.
This isn’t actually the case. As in the past, a powerful patriotic/nationalist movement coexists alongside the rather weaker liberal, pro-Western one. And so it was last week that another former Aquarium member, violinist Andrei Reshetin, wrote an open letter to Grebenshchikov, denouncing his anti-war views and explaining why he (Reshetin), at the grand old age of 59, had joined the Russian army and gone to fight in Ukraine.
“Bob,” he wrote, addressing Grebenshchikov, “As you know, I am on the other side of the trenches and I’m a soldier. … I’m here because my conscience dictates it. And neither I, nor those who stand beside me, are fascists, like you say. We are on our own land. We are liberating it from those who seek to destroy everything Russian, our memory, our culture, our church, our thoughts. … Bob, you collected money for those who are shooting at us! … Stop! Let your legacy be your magical, perfect songs, not this shame.”
Aquarium aren’t just any old pop group. In the canon of Russian pop music, they’re the equivalent of something like the Rolling Stones. So although Reshetin was a somewhat lesser member of the group, his stance is symbolically significant (imagine a member of the Rolling Stones joining the British Army and going off to fight in Iraq). And he’s far from alone. While many Russian artists have spoken out against the war, for every one who has, another can be found who’s done the opposite. An example is popular singer Iuliia Chicherina, who has long expressed her support for the rebel Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics of eastern Ukraine. Following the invasion of Ukraine last year, she toured the front giving concerts to Russian troops and allowed herself to be photographed pulling down a Ukrainian flag in the town of Energodar (Enerhodar). “Everything is different. Even the air is different. We’re on our land. We’re on the frontline. Not one step back. No retreat. This is our land and we will stand,” goes the chorus of her song “Na peredovoi” (On the frontline).
It’s not just musicians and singers who tout the patriotic line. One of Russia’s foremost novelists, Zakhar Prilepin, several years ago formed a volunteer battalion to go fight on behalf the Donbas rebels. “When the documents are looked over, they’ll see the most people died where my battalion was stationed,” Prilepin later boasted.
While many academics, political commentators, and other intellectuals quietly oppose the Russian war effort in Ukraine, many others can be found lining up to back it. This even includes some previously in the liberal camp, such as political activist Aleksei Chadayev, who recently gave a lecture entitled “The drone as instrument of practical philosophy.” A one time aide to murdered liberal icon Boris Nemtsov, Chadayev has moved in a different direction to his former boss, arguing that throughout history war has been the main driver of technological progress and that Russia needs to master modern technology in order to win its war against the West. For this, he says, it needs more freedom. As one critic put it, Chadayev’s position comes down to “Without LGBT, you can’t build a decent UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle].” More freedom, so we can better smash the West!
Chadayev’s liberal militarism would have fitted in well around 1914, but nowadays is rather quixotic. There aren’t many like him. Still, even among those political commentators who at one point would have been considered moderate Westernizers, there is a strong sense that even if Russia shouldn’t have got itself into this position, now that it is, it has to win. Analysts like Dmitri Trenin and Fyodor Lukyanov, once the go-to men for Western journalists wanting moderate-minded quotes on Russian foreign policy, at one point argued that Russia’s place was in the West. Now they write articles for RT explaining why the war in Ukraine is existential in nature and must therefore be pursued until final victory. The intellectual atmosphere has shifted.
None of this means that Russia’s creative and intellectual classes are united behind their country’s war effort. Quite clearly, they’re not. But neither are they united against it. In fact, a considerable number of them are freely and spontaneously lending the war their support. And they seem to have a lot of public backing. One of the primary social media platforms in Russia is Telegram. Its most popular channels are dominated by pro-war, anti-Western military bloggers and war correspondents, such as Rybar, War Gonzo, and Alexander Kots. It was once believed that as Russians shifted from TV to social media, they’d come out from under the influence of the state and shift towards more liberal sources of information. Reality is proving very different—it is patriotic voices who seem to be winning the social media popularity game.
There’s a tendency to view the war in Ukraine as ‘Putin’s war.’ An article this week in the National Post noted that the West was sending tanks to “help Kyiv win its war against Vladimir Putin,” as if Putin was manning the entire 1,000 kilometer frontline all by his lonely self.
This is, of course, not the case. Putin has many allies, including among those to whom the Russian public listens. This may change if the situation at the front alters drastically. But for now, it is not Putin whom Ukraine is fighting but Russia, and that makes its task much more difficult than many might like to imagine.
Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.
