A few comments here – Russia showing Ukrainian POW’s on television would seem to be a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Any lawyers specializing in international law/laws of war can correct me if I’m wrong. Clearly, such POW’s will have a tendency to say what they think their captors will want to hear, so one must always take such testimonies with a grain of salt. But observing the age of the POW’s and the question it leads Doctorow to ask is interesting. Most important, however, is Doctorow’s point about the US’s view of foreign affairs through the lens of it’s ideological idealism (narcissism is how I would more accurately describe it) versus a realism lens. – Natylie
Ideological blinkers prevent a correct U.S. assessment of the Russian successes in the Ukraine war, of the likely outcomes and of what to do now
Yesterday’s edition of the premier Sunday news wrap-up on Russian state television, Vesti nedeli, hosted by Dmitry Kiselyov, marked a turning point in what the Russians are saying officially about their achievements on the ground in Ukraine. It set me to thinking over why Washington is getting it all wrong and how America’s ideological blinkers may lead to very unfortunate consequences on a global level.
Up until now, Russian news has been very quiet about the country’s military achievements in Ukraine. The daily briefings of Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov have only given summary figures on the planes, tanks and other armored vehicles, command centers in Ukraine that were destroyed by high precision Russian missiles plus the names of towns that were taken, without elaborating on their strategic or other value. Otherwise, Russian television programming has been showing only the damage inflicted daily by Ukrainian forces on the city of Donetsk and its suburbs from artillery and Tochka U missile strikes. There is a steady toll of destroyed homes, hospitals, schools and loss of civilian lives. The sense of this programming is clear: explaining again and again to the Russian audience why we are there.
Yesterday’s News of the Week devoted more than 45 minutes to Russian military operations on the ground. The message has changed to what we are doing there. Television viewers were led by the Rossiya team of war zone reporters through the wrecked forests and fields of the Kharkov oblast in northeastern Ukraine as well as in newly liberated parts of the Donetsk People’s Republic. Filming from an armored all-terrain vehicle, they showed us kilometers long stretches of burned out Ukrainian tanks and other heavy military gear as well as dozens and dozens of corpses of Ukrainian soldiers “killed in action” and left behind to rot by their fast retreating comrades and deserters. Then came interviews with Ukrainian prisoners of war, whose faces and words tell a very different story from the heroic encomiums raining down from Zelensky and his entourage. Finally, there were interviews with some of the civilians who were let out of the Azovstal underground complex these past couple of days and made their way to freedom via the humanitarian corridor which the Russians set up each afternoon.
I will deal briefly with each of these segments from last night’s News of the Week. But first, allow me to offer two overall generalizations.
First, the Russian ‘special military operation’ is a millstone that grinds slowly but grinds fine. It is working. The Russians are crushing the Ukrainian forces. It is improbable that any amount of deliveries of foreign equipment to Kiev can make a difference on the outcome of this conflict. Indeed, while critics of the US-led intervention in the conflict claim, correctly, that the deliveries are drawing out the war by encouraging Kiev to fight on, it is also true that the Russians have no problem with that: the longer it goes on, the more territory they can seize, with a view to controlling and ultimately annexing the entire Black Sea littoral. They would thereby ensure that what survives of the Ukrainian state can never again pose a military threat to Russia, with or without NATO help.
Second, the Ukrainian army indeed has NATO trained officers and skilled professionals who may be admirable fighters, as the Western media insist. But it also has a lot of cannon fodder. By cannon fodder I mean overaged recruits dragooned into the forces and also volunteers who are useless to any modern military and are no longer trainable. Most of the prisoners of war shown on Russian television were in their late 50s and even late 60s; they had no prior military experience. One of the latter, with haggard face and scraggly beard down to his chest was asked why he enlisted to fight. The answer came back: “There was no work. So I signed up just to make some money.” After seeing their mates shot dead, is it any wonder that such soldiers raise their arms to surrender at the first opportunity?
The question not being asked is where are all the young and able Ukrainian males? How have they evaded the draft? Given the widely acknowledged corruption in Ukrainian government and society, would it not be strange if some just buy their way out of the war? Are they among the 5 million Ukrainians who have gone abroad since the start of the hostilities? Are they the ones now driving their high priced Mercedes with Ukrainian license plates around the streets of Hamburg? Who in the West records this or really cares about it?
The testimony of the prisoners of war shows that they were misled by their officers. They were told that the Russians would simply slaughter them if they showed the white flag. The testimony of the several women who walked to freedom from the Azovstal catacombs supports the official Russian version of the situation there: they were intimidated by the nationalist warriors who used them as human shields. They were barely fed and were warned that the way out was mined so that they would die in any attempt at escape.
The advance of the Russians on the ground as they finish preparations of the cauldron or total encirclement of the major part of Ukrainian forces in the Donbas is slow, only a couple of kilometers per day. The reason was clear from the reporting last night: apart from the open fields and forests mentioned above, the Ukrainians are in well-fortified bunkers that they constructed over the past eight years and they are situated in the midst of small towns where they have to be flushed out street by street, house by house. Carpet bombing or unlimited shelling would result in heavy loss of life among the civilian population, many of whom are Russian speakers, precisely the people whom the Russians are seeking to liberate.
The reasoning underlying the Russian Way of War in Ukraine has been wholly overlooked or dismissed out of hand by official Washington. American media and senior politicians speak only of Russia’s supposed logistical problems and poor implementation of its war plans. This is so is not because Biden’s advisers are lame-brained. It is so because of the ideological blinkers that the whole foreign policy establishment in the United States wears. The ideology may be called (Wilsonian) Idealism. It stands in contrast to Realism, which is espoused by a tiny minority of American academics.
The distinction is not mere words. It is how foreign policy issues are analyzed. It is about the creation in the United States of a post-factual world that might just as well be called a virtual world.
Idealism in foreign policy rests on the assumption that universal principles shape societies everywhere. It systematically ignores national peculiarities, such as history, language, culture and will. By contrast, Realism is based precisely on knowledge of such specifics, which define national interests and priorities.
Under these conditions, the think tank scholars in the United States can sit at their computers and write up their evaluations of the Russian prosecution of the war in Ukraine solely on what they, the Americans and their allies, would do if they were directing the Russian military effort. They would fight the American way, meaning a start with “shock and awe” followed by vast destruction of everything in the way of their march on the capital of the enemy state to bring about total capitulation in short order. The reasoning of the men in the Kremlin holds no interest for them. Hence, the dead wrong conclusion that the Russians are losing the war, that Russia is not the strong military force that we feared, and that Russia can be successfully challenged and beaten down until it submits to American directions and American definitions of its national interest.
The same problem of a “virtual world” approach comes up now in the discussion among American experts of the likelihood that Putin will use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine and how the US-led West should respond. The possibility that the Russians are winning and have no need for extreme solutions is excluded. The possibility that non-nuclear solutions like carpet bombing might be applied if the Russians genuinely were stymied is excluded.
The latest variation on Russia’s possibly escalating towards WWIII by using tactical nuclear weapons is a reaction to President Putin’s vague threat of a ‘lightning quick’ response to any sign of Western powers becoming co-belligerents by their deeds in support of Ukraine. Curiously, the threat was deemed to mean precisely tactical nuclear attacks, not the launch of the new Sarmat hypersonic and ABM-evading ICBMs, or the dispatch of the deep-sea drone Poseidon to wash away Washington, D.C. in a nuclear explosion caused tidal wave. In any case, the assortment of devastating new weapons systems at Russia’s disposal seems to be ignored by our policy experts. They have settled on just one, about which they speculate endlessly.
The virtual world bubble in which the U.S. foreign policy community exists and flourishes is a disaster waiting to happen. Who will heed the wake-up call of John Mearsheimer and the few policy experts who hold up the Realpolitik standard?
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA – Google has sent a warning shot across the world, ominously informing media outlets, bloggers, and content creators that it will no longer tolerate certain opinions when it comes to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Earlier this month, Google AdSense sent a message to a myriad of publishers, including MintPress News, informing us that, “Due to the war in Ukraine, we will pause monetization of content that exploits, dismisses, or condones the war.” This content, it went on to say, “includes, but is not limited to, claims that imply victims are responsible for their own tragedy or similar instances of victim-blaming, such as claims that Ukraine is committing genocide or deliberately attacking its own citizens.”
This builds on a similar message Google’s subsidiary YouTube released last month, stating, “Our Community Guidelines prohibit content denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events. We are now removing content about Russia’s invasion in Ukraine that violates this policy.” YouTube went on to say that it had already permanently banned more than a thousand channels and 15,000 videos on these grounds.
Journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin was deeply troubled by the news. “It is really disturbing that this is the trend that we are on,” she told MintPress, adding:
It is a preposterous declaration considering that the victim is whoever we are told by our foreign policy establishment. It really is outrageous to be told by these tech giants that taking the wrong side of a conflict that is quite complicated will now hurt your views, derank you on social media or limit your ability to fund your work. So you have to toe the line in order to survive as a journalist in alternative media today.”
The most prominent victim of the recent banning spate has been Russian state media such as RT America, whose entire catalog has been blocked throughout most of the world. RT America was also blocked from broadcasting across the U.S., leading to the network’s sudden closure.
“Censorship is the last resort of desperate and unpopular regimes. It magically appears to make a crisis go away. It comforts the powerful with the narrative they want to hear, one fed back to them by courtiers in the media, government agencies, think tanks, and academia,” wrote journalist Chris Hedges, adding:
“YouTube disappeared six years of my RT show, ‘On Contact,’ although not one episode dealt with Russia. It is not a secret as to why my show vanished. It gave a voice to writers and dissidents, including Noam Chomsky and Cornel West, as well as activists from Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, third parties and the prison abolitionist movement.”
Smaller, independent creators have also been purged. “My stream last night on RBN was censored on Youtube after debunking the Bucha Massacre narrative… Unreal censorship going on right now,” wrote Nick from the Revolutionary Black Network. “My video ‘Bucha: More Lies’ has been deleted by YouTube’s censors. The Official Narrative is now: ‘Bucha was a Russian atrocity! No dissent allowed!’” Chilean-American journalist Gonzalo Lira added.
Other social media platforms have pursued similar policies. Twitter permanently suspended the account of former weapons inspector Scott Ritter over his comments on Bucha and journalist Pepe Escobar for his support for Russia’s invasion.
Those views are certainly currently in the minority, with testimonies from locals pointing the finger at Russian forces, who have carried out similar acts during other conflicts. Yet even the Pentagon has refused to categorically conclude Russian culpability without a full investigation.
Beyond Bucha, where the line is in terms of accepted speech is being kept vague, leading to confusion and consternation among independent media outlets and content creators. “This is going to limit reporting on the Ukraine crisis because people are going to be scared,” Martin said. “People [in alternative media] are going to opt to not publish or not report on something because of fear of retaliation. And once you start to get demonetized, the next fear is that your videos are going to get blanket banned,” she added.
While support for Russia has essentially been prohibited, glorification of even the most unsavory elements of Ukrainian society on social media is now all-but-promoted. In February, Facebook announced that it would not only reverse its ban on discussing the Azov Battalion, a Nazi paramilitary now formally incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard, but also allow content praising and promoting the group – as long as it was in the context of killing Russians.
Facebook and Instagram also instituted a change in policy that allows users to call for harm or even the death of Russian and Belarussian soldiers and politicians. This rare allowance was also given in 2021 to those calling for the death of Iranian leaders. Needless to say, violent content directed at governments friendly to the U.S., such as Ukraine, is still strictly forbidden.
The media demands more censorship
Leading the campaign for more intense censorship has been corporate media itself. The Financial Times successfully lobbied Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch to delete a number of pro-Russian streamers. The Daily Beast attacked Gonzalo Lira, going so far as to contact the Ukrainian government to make them aware of Lira’s work. Lira confirmed that, after The Daily Beast’s article, he was arrested by the Ukrainian secret police.
Meanwhile, The New York Times published a hit piece on anti-war journalist Ben Norton, accusing him of spreading a “conspiracy theory” that the U.S. was involved in a coup in Ukraine in 2014, while claiming that he was helping promulgate Russian disinformation. This, despite the fact that the Times itself reported on the 2014 coup at the time in a not-too-dissimilar fashion, thereby incriminating its own previous reporting as Russian propaganda. If referencing The New York Times’s own previous reporting becomes grounds for suppression, then meaningful online discourse is under threat. As journalist Matt Taibbi wrote last week, the West is in danger of establishing an “intellectual no-fly zone,” where deviating from orthodoxy will no longer be tolerated.
The invasion of Ukraine has also raised a number of troubling questions for Western anti-war figures: How to oppose Russian aggression without providing more political ammunition to NATO governments to further escalate the conflict? And how to critique and highlight our own governments’ roles in creating the crisis without appearing to justify the Kremlin’s actions? Yet this new perilous media environment raises a further quandary: How to express views online without being censored?
Google’s new updated rules are vaguely worded and open to interpretation. What constitutes “exploiting” or “condoning” the war? Does discussing NATO’s eastward expansion or Ukraine’s aggressive campaign against Russian-speaking minorities constitute victim blaming? And is referencing the seven-year-long civil war in the Donbas region, where the UN estimates that over 14,000 people have been killed, now illegal under Google’s policy of not allowing content about Ukraine attacking its own citizens?
For some, the answer to at least some of these questions should be an emphatic “yes.” On Thursday, journalist Hubert Smeets attacked longtime anti-war activist Noam Chomsky, explicitly accusing him of blaming President Zelensky and Ukraine for its fate. Chomsky has previously described Russian actions as incontestably “a major war crime, ranking alongside the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Hitler-Stalin invasion of Poland in September 1939.” Yet he has also for years warned that NATO actions in the region were likely to provoke a Russian response. If Google and other big-tech monopolies decide an intellectual giant like Chomsky’s voice must be suppressed, it will mark a new era of official censorship not seen since the decline of McCarthyism.
Old propaganda, new Cold War
The United States was allied with the Soviet Union during World War II. However, as the Cold War began to set in, so did attacks on dissenting voices. The postwar anti-communist push began in earnest in 1947, after President Harry S. Truman mandated a loyalty oath for all federal employees. As a result, the political beliefs of two million people were investigated, with authorities attempting to ascertain whether they belonged to any “subversive” political organizations.
Those in positions of influence were most aggressively vetted, leading to purges of academics, educators, and journalists. Many of the most celebrated individuals from the world of entertainment – including actor Charlie Chaplain, singer Paul Robeson, and writer Orson Welles – had their careers destroyed because of their political beliefs. “Socialism was canceled, dissent was canceled after World War Two,” Breakthrough News host Brian Becker recently said, warning that this new Cold War with Russia and China could usher in a new McCarthyist era.
The old Cold War against Russia ended in 1991. However, the new Cold War arguably started 25 years later with the electoral victory of Donald Trump. On November 8, 2016, the Clinton campaign alleged that the Kremlin had used social media to spread fake news and misleading information, leading to Trump’s victory. Despite the lack of hard evidence, corporate media immediately took up Clinton’s message. Only two weeks after the election, The Washington Post published a report claiming that hundreds of fake news websites had pushed Trump over the line and that a credible group of nonpartisan expert researchers had created an organization called “PropOrNot” to track this effort.
Using what it called sophisticated “internet analytics tools,” PropOrNot published a list of over 200 websites that they claimed were “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.” Included on the list were publisher WikiLeaks, Trump-supporting websites like The Drudge Report, libertarian ventures such as The Ron Paul Institute and Antiwar.com, as well as a host of left-wing websites like Truthout, Truthdig, and The Black Agenda Report. MintPress News was also featured on the list. While there were some obviously fake-news websites included, the political orientation of the list was obvious for all to see: this was a catalog of outlets – right- and left-wing – that was consistently critical of the centrist Washington establishment.
A sure sign that you are reading Russian propaganda, PropOrNot claimed, was if the source criticizes Obama, Clinton, NATO, the “mainstream media,” or expresses worry about a nuclear war with Russia. As PropOrNot explained, “Russian propaganda never suggests [conflict with Russia] would just result in a Cold War 2 and Russia’s eventual peaceful defeat, like the last time.”
Despite the blatantly shoddy list, one that even included the websites of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, The Washington Post’s article went viral, being shared millions of times. PropOrNot’s list was subsequently signal-boosted by hundreds of other outlets. And despite calling for McCarthyist investigation into and suppression of hundreds of outlets, PropOrNot categorically refused to reveal who they were, how they were funded, or any methodology whatsoever.
It is now almost certain that it was not a neutral, well-meaning independent organization but the creation of Michael Weiss, a non-resident senior fellow of NATO think tank The Atlantic Council. A scan of PropOrNot’s website showed that it was controlled by The Interpreter, a magazine of which Weiss is editor-in-chief. Furthermore, one investigator found dozens of examples of the Twitter accounts of PropOrNot and Weiss using the identical and very unusual turn of phrase, strongly suggesting they were one and the same. Thus, claims of a huge [foreign] state propaganda campaign were themselves state propaganda.
The reaction to this crude “propaganda about propaganda” campaign was both swift and wide-ranging. In early 2017, Google launched Project Owl, a massive overhaul of its algorithm. It claimed that it was purely a measure to stop foreign fake news from taking over the internet. The main outcome, however, was a catastrophic, overnight collapse in search traffic to high-quality alternative media outlets – drops from which they have never recovered. MintPress News lost nearly 90% of its organic Google search traffic and Truthout lost 25%. Websites that were not on PropOrNot’s list also suffered devastating losses. AlterNet experienced a 63% reduction, Common Dreams 37% and Democracy Now! 36%. Even liberal sources only moderately critical of the status quo, such as The Nation and Mother Jones, were penalized by the algorithm. Google search traffic to alternative media has never recovered and has, in many cases, gotten worse.
This, for Martin, is a sign of the increasingly close relationship between Silicon Valley and the national security state. “Google willingly changed their algorithm to backpage all alternative media without even a law in place to mandate them to do so,” she said. Other social media juggernauts, such as Facebook and YouTube rolled out similar changes. All penalized alternative media and drove people back towards establishment sources like The Washington Post, CNN and Fox News.
The consequence of all this was to retighten the elite’s grip over the means of communication, a grip that had slipped owing to the rise of the internet as an alternative model.
The “nationalization” of social media
Since 2016, a number of other measures have been taken to bring social media under the wing of the national security state. This was foreseen by Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who wrote in 2013, “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.” Since then, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM have become integral parts of the state apparatus, signing multibillion-dollar contracts with the CIA and other organizations to provide them with intelligence, logistics and computing services. Schmidt himself was chairman of both the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and the Defense Innovation Advisory Board, bodies created to help Silicon Valley assist the U.S. military with cyberweapons, further blurring the lines between big tech and big government.
Google’s current Global Head of Developer Product Policy, Ben Renda, has an even closer relationship with the national security state. From being a strategic planner and information management officer for NATO, he then moved to Google in 2008. In 2013, he began working for U.S. Cybercommand and in 2015 for the Defense Innovation Unit (both divisions of the Department of Defense). At the same time, he became a YouTube executive, rising to the rank of Director of Operations.
Other platforms have similar relationships with Washington. In 2018, Facebook announced that it had entered a partnership with The Atlantic Council whereby the latter would help curate the news feeds of billions of users worldwide, deciding what was credible, trustworthy information, and what was fake news. As noted previously, The Atlantic Council is NATO’s brain-trust and is directly funded by the military alliance. Last year, Facebook also hired Atlantic Council senior fellow and former NATO spokesperson Ben Nimmo as its head of intelligence, thereby giving an enormous amount of control over its empire to current and former national security state officials.
The Atlantic Council has also worked its way into Reddit’s management. Jessica Ashooh went straight from being Deputy Director of Middle East Strategy at The Atlantic Council to Director of Policy at the popular news aggregation service – a surprising career move that drew few remarks at the time.
Also eliciting little comment was the unmasking of a senior Twitter executive as an active-duty officer in the British Army’s notorious 77th Brigade – a unit dedicated to online warfare and psychological operations. Twitter has since partnered with the U.S. government and weapons manufacturer-sponsored think tank ASPI to help police its platform. On ASPI’s orders, the social media platform has purged hundreds of thousands of accounts based out of China, Russia, and other countries that draw Washington’s ire.
Last year, Twitter also announced that it had deleted hundreds of user accounts for “undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability” – a statement that drew widespread incredulity from those not closely following the company’s progression from one that championed open discussion to one closely controlled by the government.
The first casualty
Those in the halls of power well understand how important a weapon big-tech is in a global information war. This can be seen in a letter published last Monday written by a host of national security state officials, including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA directors Michael Morell and Leon Panetta, and former director of the NSA Admiral Michael Rogers.
Together, they warn that regulating or breaking up the big-tech monopolies would “inadvertently hamper the ability of U.S. technology platforms to … push back on the Kremlin.” “The United States will need to rely on the power of its technology sector to ensure” that “the narrative of events” globally is shaped by the U.S. and “not by foreign adversaries,” they explain, concluding that Google, Facebook, Twitter are “increasingly integral to U.S. diplomatic and national security efforts.”
Commenting on the letter, journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote:
[B]y maintaining all power in the hands of the small coterie of tech monopolies which control the internet and which have long proven their loyalty to the U.S. security state, the ability of the U.S. national security state to maintain a closed propaganda system around questions of war and militarism is guaranteed.”
The U.S. has frequently leaned on social media in order to control the message and promote regime change in target countries. Just days before the Nicaraguan presidential election in November, Facebook deleted the accounts of hundreds of the country’s top news outlets, journalists and activists, all of whom supported the left-wing Sandinista government.
When those figures poured onto Twitter to protest the ban, recording videos of themselves and proving that they were not bots or “inauthentic” accounts, as Facebook Intelligence Chief Nimmo had claimed, their Twitter accounts were systematically banned as well, in what observers coined as a “double-tap strike.”
Meanwhile, in 2009, Twitter acquiesced to a U.S. request to delay scheduled maintenance of its app (which would have required taking it offline) because pro-U.S. activists in Iran were using the platform to foment anti-government demonstrations.
More than 10 years later, Facebook announced that it would be deleting all praise of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani from its many platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp. Soleimani – the most popular political figure in Iran – had recently been assassinated in a U.S. drone strike. The event sparked uproar and massive protests across the region. Yet because the Trump administration had declared Soleimani and his military group to be terrorists, Facebook explained, “We operate under U.S. sanctions laws, including those related to the U.S. government’s designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and its leadership.” This meant that Iranians could not share a majority viewpoint inside their own country – even in their own language – because of a decision made in Washington by a hostile government.
In this light, then, Google’s message to creators about victim-blaming Ukraine or trivializing and condoning violence is a threat: toe the line or face the consequences. While we continue to consider tech monopolies such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook to be private companies, their overwhelming size and their increasing proximity to the national security state means that their actions are tantamount to state censorship.
While fake news – including that emanating from Russia – continues to be a genuine problem, these new actions have far less to do with combatting disinformation or denial of war crimes and far more to do with reestablishing elite control over the field of communication. These new rules will not be applied to corporate media downplaying or justifying U.S. aggression abroad, denying American war crimes, or blaming oppressed peoples – such as Palestinians or Yemenis – for their own condition, but instead will be used as excuses to derank, demote, delist or even delete voices critical of war and imperialism. In war, they say, truth is always the first casualty.
By Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), Antiwar.com, 5/1/22
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) SUBJECT: Nuclear Weapons Cannot Be Un-invented, Thus … PRECEDENCE: IMMEDIATE REF: Our Memo of 12/20/21, “Don’t Be Suckered on Russia“
May 1, 2022
Mr. President:
Mainstream media have marinated the minds of most Americans in a witches’ brew of misleading information on Ukraine – and on the exceedingly high stakes of the war. On the chance you are not getting the kind of “untreated” intelligence President Truman hoped for by restructuring intelligence, we offer below a 12-point factsheet. Some of us were intelligence analysts during the Cuban missile crisis and see a direct parallel in Ukraine. As to VIPs’ credibility, our record since Jan. 2003 – whether on Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or Russia – speaks for itself.
The growing possibility that nuclear weapons might be used, as hostilities in Ukraine continue to escalate, merits your full attention.
For almost 77 years, a common awareness of the awesome destructiveness of atomic/nuclear weapons created an (ironically stabilizing) balance of terror called deterrence. Nuclear-armed countries have generally avoided threatening to use nukes against other nuclear-armed countries.
Putin’s recent reminders of Russia’s nuclear weapons capability can easily fit into the category of deterrence. It can also be read as a warning that he is prepared to use them in extremis.
Extremis? Yes; Putin regards Western interference in Ukraine, particularly since the coup d’etat in Feb. 2014, as an existential threat. In our view, he is determined to rid Russia of this threat, and Ukraine is now a must-win for Putin. We cannot rule out the possibility that, backed into a corner, he might authorize a limited nuclear strike with modern missiles that fly many times the speed of sound.
Existential threat? Moscow sees U.S. military involvement in Ukraine as precisely the same kind of strategic threat President Kennedy saw in Khrushchev’s attempt to put nuclear missiles in Cuba in violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Putin complains that US”ABM” missile sites in Romania and Poland can be modified, by simply inserting an alternate compact disk, to launch missiles against Russia’s ICBM force.
As for putting missile sites in Ukraine, according to the Kremlin readout of your Dec. 30, 2021 telephone conversation with Putin, you told him the US”had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine”. So far as we know, there has been no objection to the accuracy of that Russian readout. Nevertheless, your reported assurance to Putin disappeared into thin air – contributing, we imagine, to Russia’s growing distrust.
Russia can no longer doubt that the US and NATO aim to weaken Russia (and to remove him, if possible) – and that the West also believes it can accomplish this by pouring weapons into Ukraine and urging the Ukrainians to fight on. We think these aims are delusional.
If Secretary Austin believes that Ukraine can “win” against Russian forces – he is mistaken. You will recall that many of Austin’s predecessors – McNamara, Rumsfeld, Gates, for example – kept assuring earlier presidents that corrupt regimes could “win” – against foes far less formidable than Russia.
The notion that Russia is internationally “isolated” also seems delusional. China can be counted on to do what it can to prevent Putin from “losing” in Ukraine – first and foremost because Beijing has been designated “next in line”, so to speak. Surely, President Xi Jin-Ping has been briefed on the Pentagon’s “2022 National Defense Strategy” identifying China as the #1 “threat”. Russia-China entente marks a tectonic shift in the world correlation of forces. It is not possible to exaggerate its significance.
Nazi sympathizers in Ukraine will not escape attention on May 9, as Russia celebrates the 77th anniversary of the victory by the Allies over Nazi Germany. Every Russian knows that more than 26 million Soviets died during that war (including Putin’s older brother Viktor during the merciless, 872-day blockade of Leningrad). Denazification of Ukraine is one of the key factors accounting for Putin’s approval level of above 80 percent.
The Ukraine conflict can be called “The Mother of All Opportunity Costs”. In last year’s “Threat Assessment”, National Intelligence Director Avril Haines identified climate change as a major national security and “human security” challenge that can only be met by nations working together. War in Ukraine is already diverting much needed attention from this impending threat to coming generations.
We note that we sent our first Memorandum of this genre to President George W. Bush on Feb. 5, 2003, critiquing Colin Powell’s unconfirmed-intelligence-stuffed speech at the UN earlier that day. We sent two follow-up Memos in March 2003 warning the president that intelligence was being “cooked” to justify war, but were ignored. We end this Memo with the same appeal we made, in vain, to George W. Bush: “You would be well served if you widened the discussion beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.“
Lastly, we repeat the offer we made to you last December (in the VIPs Memorandum referenced above): ‘We stand ready to support you with objective, tell-it-like-it-is analysis.’ We suggest you might benefit from “outside” input from veteran intelligence officers with many decades of experience on the “inside”.
FOR THE STEERING GROUP: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Fulton Armstrong, former National Intelligence Officer for Latin America & former National Security Council Director for Inter-American Affairs (ret.)
William Binney, NSA Technical Director for World Geopolitical & Military Analysis; Co-founder of NSA’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (ret.)
Richard H. Black, Former Virginia Senator; Col. US Army (ret.); Former Chief, Criminal Law Division, Office of the Judge Advocate General, the Pentagon (associate VIPS)
Graham E. Fuller,Vice-Chair, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
Larry Johnson, former CIA Intelligence Officer & former State Department Counter-Terrorism Official (ret.)
Michael S. Kearns, Captain, USAF Intelligence Agency (ret.), former Master SERE Instructor
John Kiriakou, former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Edward Loomis, Cryptologic Computer Scientist, former Technical Director at NSA (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst; CIA Presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council & CIA political analyst (ret.)
Pedro Israel Orta, former CIA and Intelligence Community (Inspector General) officer
Todd Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Theodore Postol, Professor Emeritus, MIT (Physics). Former Science and Policy Adviser for Weapons Technology to the Chief of Naval Operations (associate VIPS)
Scott Ritter, former MAJ., USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq
Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA (ret.)
Sarah G. Wilton, CDR, USNR, (Retired)/DIA, (Retired)
Robert Wing, former Foreign Service Officer (associate VIPS)
Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret.); Foreign Service Officer (resigned in opposition to the war on Iraq)
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPs) is made up of former intelligence officers, diplomats, military officers and congressional staffers. The organization, founded in 2002, was among the first critics of Washington’s justifications for launching a war against Iraq. VIPS advocates a US foreign and national security policy based on genuine national interests rather than contrived threats promoted for largely political reasons. An archive of VIPS memoranda is available at Consortiumnews.com.
As sanctions have their intended effect – getting companies from the US and allied countries to leave Russia – there’s also an unintended effect as competitors from countries led by India, Turkey and China pick up the slack.
Despite the bad news, Russians can justify harboring hope based on the actions of some countries that do not support the sanctions and are increasing their involvement in Russia’s economy.
Anecdotal evidence for this includes such hints of ambiguity as a rhetorical question from US national public radio network NPR (April 13, 2022): “The West is hammering Russia with sanctions. But, do they work?”
Nearly 300 American, European, East Asian and other foreign companies have completely stopped doing business in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, according to a survey conducted by the Yale School of Management.
More than 470 have suspended or scaled back their operations and more than 110 others have postponed new investments.
Prominent firms that have either abandoned or suspended their businesses in Russia include oil companies BP, Exxon and Shell; aircraft manufacturers Airbus and Boeing; telecom equipment vendors Ericsson and Nokia; and tech companies Alphabet (Google), AMD, Apple, Cisco, Global Foundries, Intel, Nvidia, Samsung, TSMC and Qualcomm.
Will this cripple the Russian economy? Some people think so. Investment Monitor published an article entitled: “Taiwan’s semiconductor ban could spell catastrophe for Russia” (March 18, 2022).
More about this later. The Mayor of Moscow, Sergey Sobyanin, blogged that in his city, “According to our estimates, about 200,000 people are at risk of losing their jobs.“
On April 24, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and his research team at the Yale School of Management published an updated list of companies that have halted or curtailed their operations in Russia. Sonnenfeld is senior associate dean for leadership programs at the school and president & CEO of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute (CELI).
Sonnenfeld and CELI Director of Research Steven Tian are openly biased, proclaiming a clear and simple goal: “Every corporation with a presence in Russia must publicly commit to a total cessation of business there.”
Apartheid comparison
They compare their effort to the boycott of apartheid South Africa: “The corporate exodus contributed to the end of apartheid, and was a remarkable display of the power that companies have. When they’re courageous enough to use that power for good, it can help topple repressive governments.”
Their survey ranks companies as follows:
-Grade A: Withdrawal – Clean break. Companies totally halting Russian engagements or completely exiting Russia (299 companies)
-Grade B: Suspension – Temporarily curtailing most operations while keeping options open for return (364 companies)
-Grade C: Scaling Back – Reducing some significant operations but continuing others (112 companies)
-Grade D: Buying Time – Postponing new investments while continuing substantive business. (143 companies)
-Grade F: Digging In – Defying demands for exit or reduction of activities. Companies that are continuing business-as-usual in Russia (181 companies)
This points to tough times ahead for Russia. But before seeing it as an unmitigated negative, we need to add another category:
Grade E: Eurasia – Indian, Turkish and Chinese companies seeking to take advantage of the mass withdrawal of Western and East Asian competitors from the Russian market.
Where Yale and many other Westerners see moral certitude, the non-Western world tends to see hypocrisy and opportunity. Why?
Conflicting viewpoint
The “Costs of War” research project conducted by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University concludes that:
-More than 929,000 people have died in America’s post-9/11 wars due to direct war violence, and several times as many due to the reverberating effects of war.
-Over 387,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting.
-The number of war refugees and displaced persons is about 38 million.
-The wars have been accompanied by violations of human rights and civil liberties, in the US and abroad.
Has this led to a campaign to impose economic sanctions on America? Of course not.
With this double standard and their own interests in mind, the majority of the world’s nations have refused to support sanctions on Russia. The most important of these are China, India and Turkey.
India
According to the Indian government, about 300 Indian companies are now operating in Russia. According to the Indian press, many more are on the way. The president of the Federation of Indian Export Organizations (FIEO), A Sakthivel, explains:
“Export to Russia is not much, only in agriculture and pharmacy products. Now that the whole of the West is banning Russia, there will be a lot of opportunities for Indian firms to enter Russia.”
The FIEO is an association established by the Indian Ministry of Commerce and the private sector to assist entrepreneurs and exporters in foreign markets. It represents more than 200,000 Indian exporters.
Susil Dungarwal, founder of Indian retail consultancy Beyond Squarefeet Advisory, says:
“We are seeking to take Indian brands to Russia as most of the American and European brands don’t sell there anymore… Say one guy was running 50 stores of Calvin Klein as a master franchisee in Russia. Now, Calvin Klein is no more there, but that company still has 50 empty stores with him. So, either he closes those 50 stores and exit the business, or he can bring alternative [Indian] brands” (“As global brands take flight, Indian retailers book tickets for Russia.”
Sakthivel was understating the case: Indian business in Russia ranges from tea, coffee and tobacco to seafood, spices and rice, textiles and footwear, pharmaceuticals, IT services, coal, oil and natural gas.
Pricing some or all of this trade in rupees and rubles should help India circumvent Western economic sanctions and reduce its dependence on the US dollar. India already has a rupee-rial trading arrangement with Iran.
A few Indian companies do not like what they see in Ukraine. One, Infosys, is shutting down in Russia (Grade A); and three more – Reliance, Tata Motors and Tata Steel – are suspending operations there (Grade B).
But 13 Indian companies are conducting business as usual (Grade F).
Turkey
“Over 3,000 Turkish businesses are working in different economic sectors in Russia,” Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said at last summer’s Turkish-Russian Business Forum. “We are certainly interested in investments, the input of experience and professionalism to Russia in areas where our Turkish partners have expertise.”
Turkey, which also has (or had) more than 600 companies working in Ukraine, is also interested – in stopping the war and revitalizing its business interests in both countries, not in making the disruption of its economy even worse by implementing sanctions.
Speaking on Turkish television, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said, “As a principle, we didn’t participate in such sanctions in a general sense [in the past]. We have no intention of joining in these sanctions, either.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan explained that,
“We are buying nearly half of the natural gas we use from Russia. Separately, we are making our Akkuyy Nuclear Power Plant with Russia. We cannot set these aside… So there is nothing that can be done here. We must maintain our sensitivity on this issue. Firstly, I can’t leave my people in the cold of the winter. Secondly, I cannot halt our industry. We must defend these.”
Turkish companies are active in the Russian markets for commercial building, transport infrastructure and industrial plant construction, real estate development, machinery, electrical equipment, auto parts, aviation, foods, textiles, metals and minerals, renewable energy and natural gas. The two countries are also working to facilitate trade in Turkish lira and rubles.
It is notable that the Yale survey mentions only one Turkish company – Turkish Airlines (Grade F), which is still flying to Russia. Not on its radar are more than 3,000 other Turkish companies representing the world’s 11th largest economy in purchasing power parity terms.
A NATO member with a growing industrial economy and a population of 85 million, Turkey is an important economic partner of both Russia and Ukraine. Or perhaps the researchers concluded that trying to lay a guilt trip on Turkey would be an exercise in futility.
China
Yale’s Grade F list includes 41 Chinese companies (including one from Hong Kong and two from Taiwan). These include state-controlled construction, engineering and energy firms, banks, SAIC Motor, and several prominent tech companies including Alibaba, ANT, China Mobile, Oppo, Tencent, Xiaomi and ZTE.
Huawei, which has suspended new orders and furloughed some staff in Russia, is classed Grade D, but its actions may be an attempt to avoid attracting more American attention.
In any case, Huawei is already the largest telecommunications equipment, software and services vendor in Russia. Along with ZTE, it stands to pick up the market share abandoned by Nokia and Ericsson.
It also seems likely that China will do what it can to replace the semiconductors that Russia can no longer import from the West and East Asia. It won’t be a complete replacement, but it should grow with time as China’s own semiconductor industry develops.
It is not clear exactly how many Chinese companies are doing business in Russia, but information from various media and government sources suggests that the number is at least in the hundreds, perhaps in the thousands, and that it is likely to increase.
The Chinese government is helping private Chinese companies “fill the void in the Russian market” with special emphasis on small and medium-sized enterprises that are less likely to attract attention than large state-owned enterprises. The companies concerned, which are already highly motivated, are unlikely to waste the opportunity.
Wang Chuanbao, president of the Federation of Overseas Chinese in Moscow, puts it in a larger context: “We will actively assist incoming Chinese companies in studying and collaborating with the Russian market, as well as explore ways to work with Russian companies under the backdrop of the belt and road strategic development.”
Russia and China are also increasing the amount of trade denominated in rubles and yuan, reducing their reliance on the dollar.
Import substitution
This brings us to import substitution and the erosion of Western technological dominance. In the case of China, this possibility (or threat, depending on your point of view) has received a lot of attention. In the case of Russia, the West seems to be as complacent as it is about Turkish industry.
But the country that was first into space and that graduates more engineers and gets a bigger bang for the military buck than the United States is more capable than many observers seem to think.
Commercial aircraft – as I reported in “China’s jets set to challenge Boeing and Airbus” – is a good example. When imports of composite materials were blocked by American sanctions, Russian industry developed its own. The first flight of a Russian aircraft with composite wings made in Russia was successfully completed last December.
A year before that, Russia’s United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) began flight tests of the first Russian passenger plane equipped with Russian engines since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Now, with Boeing and Airbus having suspended operations in Russia and sales of aircraft and aircraft parts to Russia having been prohibited, we should assume that if the Soviet Union could make its own passenger aircraft (Ilyushin and Tupolev), Russia (and China) probably can, too.
In March, TASS reported that UAC plans to deliver more than 20 regional and medium-haul passenger jets to domestic customers this year. UAC also says it can ramp up production of Ilyushin and Tupolev aircraft if needed. Limited numbers of these older aircraft are still being produced.
Intended to stifle progress, sanctions actually incentivize technically competent nations such as Russia (and China) to make themselves more competitive.
In summary, a new Russian economy is likely to emerge as Indian, Turkish, Chinese and Russian companies move into markets vacated by Europeans, Americans, Japanese, South Koreans and others opposed to the war in Ukraine.
The adjustments will take time, but they are shaping up to be a serious but temporary inconvenience for Russia while leading to substantial and sometimes permanent losses for America and its allies and a big step forward for the Eurasian economy.
The combined losses of BP, Exxon and Shell from abandoning their businesses and assets in Russia are estimated at about $30 billion. The aggregate losses of all the withdrawals, suspensions and curtailments are yet to be calculated.
The value of future opportunities lost or gained in a country of about 150 million people with enormous quantities of natural resources and a GDP almost as large as Germany’s on a purchasing power parity basis is incalculable.
Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, San Jose, California, www.cetisresearch.org; an expert analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com; and an analyst at Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation (Chicago), www.geostrategicforecasting.com. He is the author of the forthcoming book from McFarland Publishers Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the Making of the Ukrainian Crisis and ‘New Cold War.
Recent reporting suggests that my sense that Russian President Vladimir Putin had not planned to invade and was instead engaged in coercive diplomacy in massing troops around Ukraine is supported, though not necessarily confirmed by US intelligence, according to a recent report on US per-war intelligence. The decision to invade and, in particular, to conduct a ‘special military operation’ rather than declare war on Ukraine has led to a prolonged conflict fraught with the risk of escalation and direct NATO involvement. NATO countries are already de jure co-belligerents, bringing — together with Russia — the world to the brink of a world war that could quickly go nuclear.
The relevant report notes: “Putin did not make a final decision to invade until just before he launched the attack in February, according to senior current and former U.S. intelligence officials.” “The CIA was saying through January that Putin had not made a decision to invade.” “Putin was still keeping his options open.” “It wasn’t until February that the agency and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community became convinced that Putin would invade” “Putin waited until almost the last minute to decide to start a war with Ukraine” (https://theintercept.com/2022/03/11/russia-putin-ukraine-invasion-us-intelligence/).
The new report has some erroneous information that exculpates Ukrainian actions that might have prompted Putin’s decision to invade, believing that 8 years of unfulfilled Minsk agreement promises and three months of stalling on his proposals for Ukraine, NATO, and European security architecture settlements had proven finally futile: “‘Biden took the unusual step of making the intelligence public, in what amounted to a form of information warfare against the Russian leader. He also warned that Putin was planning to try to fabricate a pretext for invasion, including by making false claims that Ukrainian forces had attacked civilians in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which is controlled by pro-Russian separatists. The preemptive use of intelligence by Biden revealed ‘a new understanding … that the information space may be among the most consequential terrain Putin is contesting,’ observed Jessica Brandt of the Brookings Institution” (https://theintercept.com/2022/03/11/russia-putin-ukraine-invasion-us-intelligence/). Ignored by Ms Brandt is that Washington was issuing disinformation; something that would also make Putin less likely to believe his ‘Western partners,’ as he used to refer to them.
There is no benefit for Washington or the US intelligence community to issue the report indicating a last minute decision by Putin as disinformation. The event has already occurred. Moreover, the US government and intel and Western narrative is that Putin is bent on territorial expansion and recreating the USSR. Therefore, a narrative in which Putin was not initially prepared to invade Ukraine goes against this traditional narrative. The same is true for the origins of the August 2008 Five-Day Georgian-Ossetiyan/Russian War, which was sparked by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s invasion of South Ossetiya and the August 7-8 bombing of its sleeping capitol with inaccurate GRAD rockets, killing tens if not hundreds of Ossetiyan civilians and 19 Russian peacekeeping troops.
Putin’s decision to invade was likely driven by several factors: (1) Western intransigence and dismissive, even disdainful reaction to Putin’s demand for a reordering of the European security architecture, fist of all an end of NATO expansion, especially to Ukraine; (2) a Ukrainian commitment to non-aligned status; and (3) Kiev’s defiance of and challenge through escalation to the explicit threat posed by Putin’s troop deployments and coercive diplomacy. By February, Washington and NATO had made it clear they had not intention of even considering an end to NATO expansion to Ukraine, insisting on the inviolability of its ‘open door’ policy. This was occurring on a background of several years of expanding NATO-Ukrainian military cooperation, most notably U.S. and its allies continued training of Ukrainian forces, including neo-Nazi formations such as the terrorist Azov and Right Sector’s Ukrainian Volunteer Army, the conduct of NATO exercises with Ukraine designed to make Kiev’s forces interoperable with NATO forces much as NATO member-states’ armies are, the construction by the British of a proto-naval base on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, and NATO’s conduct of military flights over Ukrainian territory. These developments prompted Putin to see and state that Ukraine de facto was already a NATO member.
Similarly, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy refused to make any clear expression of a willingness to renounce the Poroshenko-era constitutional amendment on Kiev’s aspiration to NATO membership and the mandatory implementation of policies aimed at achieving that membership. Days before the February 24th invasion, Zelenskiy rejected a February 19th proposal from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that would have included Kiev’s renunciation of its aspiration to NATO membership, a declaration of Ukraine’s neutrality, and a joint American-Russian security guarantee codified in a treaty to be signed by Presidents Biden and Putin. The Wall Street Journal reported that Zelenskiy’s rejection of the German offer “left German officials worried that the chances of peace were fading.” French President Emmanual Marcon had the same sense and in a phone call issued an appeal to Biden to make another push for diplomacy. “I think the last person who could still do something is you, Joe. Are you ready to meet Putin?” Macron said to Biden. But Washington expressed no interest in more diplomacy (www.wsj.com/amp/articles/vladimir-putins-20-year-march-to-war-in-ukraineand-how-the-west-mishandled-it-11648826461 and www.defenddemocracy.press/zelensky-rejected-german-security-proposal-before-russian-invasion/). It may or may not be relevant that “Biden’s warning on February 18 that the invasion would happen within the week turned out to be accurate,” since Biden’s indifference to forestalling Putin’s invasion helped fulfill his ‘prophecy’ (https://theintercept.com/2022/03/11/russia-putin-ukraine-invasion-us-intelligence/).
Nevertheless, Sholtz continued to engage Putin. In a February 21st call to the Kremlin, Sholtz tried to forestall Putin’s recognition of the independence of Ukraine’s breakaway LNR and DNR (https://www.rferl.org/a/germany-scholz-phone-talk-putin/31714435.html). Putin surely was informed of Zelenskiy’s rejection of the proposal and of the Americans’ lack of interest in engaging either Kiev or Moscow. Perhaps Putin hoped that the threat of such a declaration would concentrate Zelenskiy’s mind at the last minute and prompt him to take a neutrality position seriously. No such reconsideration on Zelenskiy’s part came, and Russia recognized the breakaway regions’ independence and then invaded Ukraine along several fronts.
However, it is very likely that by the time Sholtz’s February 21st call, Putin had already issued the order to begin military operations. Zelenskiy’s actions helped Putin in deciding. Putin’s final decision was also prompted by the Ukrainian army’s military escalation in Donbass. From the OSCE SMM monitoring mission’s data, it appears that Ukrainian side — regular Ukrainian army forces or the informal volunteer armed formations of the DUK type — provoked Putin’s moves, first, to recognize the DNR/LNR’s independence, then to attack Ukraine. The first major escalation occurred on the evening of February 18-19 from the Ukraine government-controlled side of the contact line. In the Donetsk region/DNR “The majority of ceasefire violations were recorded on the morning of 19 February in areas east, east-south-east, and south-east of Svitlodarsk (government-controlled, 57km north-east of Donetsk), on the evening and night of 18-19 and 19-20 February in areas north, north-north-east, and north-north-west of Shyrokyne (government-controlled, 100km south of Donetsk) and on the morning of 19 February close to Staromykhailivka (nongovernment-controlled, 15km west of Donetsk).” In the Luhansk region, “(t)he majority of ceasefire violations were recorded in areas close to the disengagement area near Stanytsia Luhanska (government-controlled, 16km north-east of Luhansk) during the day on 19 February (see below), and in areas inside and close to the disengagement area near Zolote (government-controlled, 60km west of Luhansk) during the day and evening of 18, 19 and 20 February. In the previous reporting period, the SMM recorded 975 ceasefire violations in the region, the majority of which also occurred near the disengagement areas near Stanytsia Luhanska and Zolote” (OSCE SMM Report, 20 February 2022, p. 4, http://www.osce.org/files/2022-02-20-21%20Daily%20Report_ENG.pdf?itok=82567). On According to the Ukrainian website Tsenzor.net, during this period and for some period before, Ukraine’s authorities were refusing journalists access to conflict zone to around 400 journalists, permitting access only to a selected 25 ‘international journalists.’ Some journalists had been denied access for over a month (https://echo.msk.ru/news/2982672-echo.html). On February 21, Ukrainian fire on Donetsk put a coal mine ventilator off line, forcing more than 250 Donbass miners to evacuate from the mines (https://echo.msk.ru/news/2983086-echo.html).
Meanwhile, in the same period, Zelenskiy displayed virtually no effort to meet Moscow halfway on security issues and even escalated tensions by implying Kiev was ready to reconsider its non-nuclear status rather than its non-aligned status. At the February 19th Munich Security Conference, Zelenskiy issued a not very vailed threat to reconsider its adherence to the Budapest Memorandum, which had led to the post-Soviet exchange for Ukraine’s recognized sovereignty over Crimea in return for Kiev’s transfer of all Soviet nuclear forces on Ukraine SSR territory to Moscow. Zelenskiy stated that if NATO would not guarantee Ukraine’s security even as Kiev and NATO insisted on Ukraine’s NATO aspirations in defiance of Moscow’ security concerns, then “Ukraine will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and all the package decisions of 1994 are in doubt” (https://euromaidanpress.com/2022/02/19/ukraine-now-has-neither-weapons-nor-security-zelenskyy-demands-budapest-memorandum-consultations/). Zelenskiy’s threat of possible acquisition of some nuclear capability demonstrated clearly Kiev’s unwillingness to bend to Moscow’s demands.
Special Military Operation, War, and Total War
Putin’s decision also included limits on the war, which Moscow calls a ‘special military operation.’ This aspect of the war is particularly intriguing and telling. The Russian army has refrained from shelling anywhere near central Kiev. Unlike the US war in Iraq, Putin’s war is not war, no less total war. There have been no airstrikes or missile attacks on the Ukrainian government’s central civilian and military leadership, and civilian infrastructure has gone largely untouched, despite thousands of targeted rockets raining down on military targets. In Iraq and in any full-scale war such targets are priority in order to disrupt leadership. In the first days of the US-led war in Iraq, Sadaam Hussein’s presidential office, intelligence service headquarters, the Defense Ministry, and other government buildings were targeted. So far in the Russo-Ukrainian ‘war’ the Office of the President, Rada, government ministries, the Defense Ministry and General Staff headquarters have not been targeted. In this sense, Putin’s ‘operation’ is not a war in the way we usually understand a full-out declared war.
In addition, numerous video speeches Zelenskiy has made demonstrate precisely where he is located: in, around, and underneath the Presidential Office. Why has Putin not ordered the Russian military to hit such targets? First, he needs or at least needed at the war’s outset to have a negotiating partner with legitimacy inside Ukraine who can sign and carry through any ceasefire agreements and final peace treaty, if he hopes to avoid having to occupy all of Ukraine and getting bogged down in a guerilla war quagmire, which very possibly could emerge in western Ukraine. In other words, the fact that Putin has not targeted Zelenskiy, regardless of unconfirmed reports in Western media of special forces teams hunting him down, demonstrates that Putin is preserving and prefers an option in which he and Zelenskiy agree to terms.
On the other hand, the Russian invasion force that moved south from Belarus to threaten Kiev may not have been deployed merely to hold Ukrainian troops in place so that they could not move south to help the nearly encircled 60,000 force in Donbass. It may also may have represented an alternative option for a potential Plan B or C that could have been built around an encricelment and blockade of Kiev in the event Zelenskiy and his government evacuated to Lviv or elsewhere to the west. In this case, the Russians would have been in a position to establish a new, friendly regime without having to enter into force-destroying urban warfare or even prolonged operations beyond Donetsk and Luhansk, though a western Ukrainian-based insurgency would have been the likely result as it may be in future under numerpus scenarios. The new regime would have been less able than Zelenskiy’s Maidan regime to guarantee fulfillment of agreements, but the Ukrainian military likely would have stood down, and Russian forces could have moved forward with de-nazification in Mariupol, Dnepropetrovsk, and elsewhere.
We will know that all hope for a negotiated settlement is lost when Russian operations begin against such government and critical civilian installations, perhaps preceded by a vote in the Russian Federal Assembly on a resolution declaring war on Ukraine. This will be the last step prior to the present Ukrainian regime being forced to escape to Lvov and likely then surrendering or being annihilated. This could lead to a prolonged guerrilla war conducted by Ukrainian partisans, with any departure of Russian forces leading to an Iraqi/Syrian scenario of various forces prolonging chaos, including terrorist attacks carried out by Ukrainian nationalist, ultranationalist, and neofascist groups. The only stopgaps to such catastrophic outcomes are a concerted Western drive to push forward Russo-Ukrainian peace talks or WW III.
The Vulnerabilities
Therefore, Putin’s decision to undertake a ‘special military operation’ and at the same time limit the war far below the total war threshold along with Western decisions to deepen the conflict by providing massive military assistance to Kiev rather than to contain and end it through diplomacy make a ‘World War III’ scenario beginning across Europe with the potential to spread through a Taiwan conflict through much of Asia more likely. By avoiding total war, Putin has allowed NATO countries, led by the US, to act as co-belligerents as James Carden and constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein have noted. Supplying billions of dollars in weapons, financial aid, and military intelligence, NATO countries have violated any accepted legal definition of neutrality and open themselves up to direct military retaliation (https://asiatimes.com/2022/04/us-a-co-belligerent-in-ukraine-war-legal-expert-says/). The stakes were raised this week when British officials urged Kiev to use weapons London is supplying to attack Russian territory, leading to a Russian warning that any such attack, should it materialize, is already in the que for “lightning” retaliation upon Putin’s orders. Germany will replace Polish Soviet era tanks that the Poles have now pledged to send to Ukraine. Numerous other NATO members have sent lethal weapons to Ukraine. At the same time, attacks on a television tower and arms depot in Transdniestria carried out by unknown forces but blamed on Ukrainians by Russia and Transdniestria. This raises the specter of Transdniestrian and Russian forces in the breakaway Moldovan region entering the war, which could bring in Moldova’s fraternal state and NATO member Rumania. In other words, the US and a host of other NATO states are co-belligerents; some on the verge of becoming direct participants.
Whether one or both parties want it or not, their actions have set the stage for a Kremlin decision to declare war, meaning total war, on Ukraine, A Russian declaration and accompanying escalation of violence is likely to be followed by a NATO intervention supported by a desperate and illegitimate US administration, which appears bent on aping Ukrainian and Russian authoritarianism at home and creating a besieged fortress rally around the flag dynamic before the upcoming elections in which the Democrat Party-state is destined for a resounding defeat (https://dossier.substack.com/p/ministry-of-truth-biden-admin-appoints?s=r).
Russia started this war, viewing de facto or de jure NATO expansion to Ukraine as an existential threat. Now the West is backing a war to defeat Russian in Ukraine, set the stage for Ukraine’s NATO membership, bring the war to Russian territory while simultaneously the collective West seeks to create political chaos inside Russia through massive economic sanctions in an attempt to bring Putin’s removal from power. In short, the existential threat has not gone away; it has simply been transformed and intensified. We are at the edge looking into the abyss without any seriousness in diplomatic purpose, no less the requisite grave urgency now necessary to preserve what remains of peace.
