By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 10/9/24

US intelligence determined in September 2022 that there was a 50% chance of Russia using a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, a new book by journalist Bob Woodward alleges, The Associated Press reported Wednesday.

According to the book, titled “War,” the warning came in late September 2022, with US intelligence believing Russia could use a nuke if its forces were surrounded in Kherson City. Russia withdrew from the city not long after, in November 2022.

The book says the warning caused alarm within the Biden administration as it moved the chance of Russia using a nuclear weapon from 5% or 10% way up to 50%. Around the same time, President Biden said publicly that the risk of nuclear “armageddon” was higher than it had been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“I don’t think there is any such a thing as the ability to easily use a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon,” Biden told donors at a fundraiser in New York City in October 2022. “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

Despite the huge risk of nuclear war, Biden did not alter course on US involvement in the proxy war, which has only escalated since then. The Woodward book says that the US issued several warnings and threats on the potential consequences of what could happen if Russia used a nuclear weapon in Ukraine.

Woodward says that Biden told National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to “get on the line with the Russians. Tell them what we will do in response.” In September 2022, Sullivan said publicly that Russia would suffer “catastrophic consequences” if it used a nuke and said the US conveyed that in private conversations. A few months later, The Wall Street Journal reported that Sullivan had been holding secret talks with Russian officials.

The Woodward book says that Biden also sent a message to Putin that there would be “catastrophic consequences” if a nuke was used, but there has been no known contact between Biden and the Russian leader since Russia launched its invasion in February 2022.

The book also says that when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke with then-Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu in October 2022, he warned, “Any use of nuclear weapons on any scale against anybody would be seen by the United States and the world as a world-changing event. There is no scale of nuclear weapons that we could overlook or that the world could overlook.”

The risk of the Ukraine proxy war turning nuclear is still very high as Putin has ordered changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine in direct response to threats of escalation from the West, specifically the idea of the US and NATO supporting long-range strikes inside Russian territory. The US appeared poised to sign off on the long-range strikes but seems to have backed down, at least for now.

Russia Matters, 10/18/24

1. Volodymyr Zelenskyy asserted Oct. 17 that Ukraine had two options to deter further Russian aggression: becoming a nuclear power or joining NATO, which would guarantee protection from the military alliance’s members, NYT reported. The Ukrainian leader then later clarified during a news conference with NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte that Ukraine was not preparing to build nuclear weapons, according to NYT. When asked by a journalist how long it would take Ukraine to create a nuclear bomb, Zelenskyy responded: “Sometimes we create problems for ourselves. Right now, you are doing exactly that,” according to Media Zone. Vladimir Putin described Zelenskyy’s rhetoric as a provocation and asserted that Russia will not allow the creation of nuclear weapons by Ukraine under any circumstances, according to RIA Novosti.
2. This week Zelenskyy publicly unveiled his five-point “victory plan” to end the war by 2025. The first step of the plan involves Ukraine’s immediate invitation to NATO. The second point focuses on strengthening Ukraine’s security through guarantees allowing the use of long-range weapons for military strikes inside Russia and joint air defense operations with neighboring countries. The third and fourth points provide for the deployment of non-nuclear deterrence assets in Ukraine and for a post-war agreement for joint management of Ukraine’s critical resources. Finally, the plan calls for some U.S. military contingents in Europe to be replaced with Ukrainian troops after the war is over. Given the reaction to the plan in Washington and other Western capitals so far, it is unlikely that Zelenskyy will win the unanimous support of Kyiv’s allies for Ukraine’s immediate admittance into NATO. Countries such as Germany also oppose supplying longer-range weapons, according to Ukraine’s Korrespondent.net, even as Ukrainian forces continue to cede territory in the east, coming closer to losing the strategic town of Chasiv Yar this week.*
3. South Korean and Ukrainian officials have accused Moscow and Pyongyang of arranging for 10,000 or more North Korean soldiers to train in Russia to then fight in the Russian-Ukrainian war on Russia’s side, Bloomberg, Yonhap and Istories reported. The Kremlin has rejected these reports, describing them as an “information hoax,” according to Euronews. North Korea has previously been repeatedly accused of providing artillery ammunition and missiles for Russia’s war efforts.
4. Speaking to BRICS media ahead of the group’s summit on Oct. 22–24 in Russia, Vladimir Putin declared that “the United States is 15 years” too late to “stop China’s development.” Putin—who is to host Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi at the BRICS summit in Tatarstan—also declared that “in some areas, humanity cannot exist without the BRICS countries. I mean food markets, energy markets.”

By Geoffrey Roberts, Brave New Europe, 10/4/24

As it reels from one battlefield defeat after another, Ukraine faces a fateful choice: sue for peace or fight to the bitter end.

Ukraine’s ultra-nationalists would prefer purifying blood sacrifice to a shameful defeat, while Western hardliners want to wear Russia down by fighting to the last Ukrainian. This yearning for Ukraine to re-enact a Nazi-style Götterdämmerung is shared by those Russian hardliners who believe in the pursuit of security through total victory.

The alternative to epochal destruction a la 1945 is a 1918-style armistice along the lines of President Putin’s June peace proposal: a ceasefire in exchange for Ukraine’s neutralisation and the complete withdrawal of its armed forces from the four provinces – Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhe – formally incorporated by the Russian Federation in October 2022 – concessions that would then be followed by detailed peace negotiations.

No historical analogy is perfect, but Germany’s armistice with the Entente powers in November 1918 is an instructive example of a war ending in one side’s victory but on terms that fell far short of the unconditional surrenders of World War II.

When Germany ‘surrendered’ in 1918 it ceased all military operations and withdrew its armed forces from foreign occupied territories. Unlike in 1945, Germany remained unoccupied and was promised a negotiated peace treaty. There was also regime-change in the form of the Kaiserreich’s overthrow, but Wilhelm II was replaced by a democratic republic.

The promised peace negotiations took place at Versailles in 1919. German negotiators expected a discussion framed by President Woodrow Wilson’s 14-point peace plan of 1918 – which had signalled a relatively fair and equitable settlement – but they found themselves faced with a non-negotiable diktat.

Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany lost territory – notably to newly independent Poland – and was forced to demilitarise and pay billions of dollars in reparations. Germans complained the treaty was humiliation that heaped on them all the blame for the war, but it wasn’t a particularly punitive peace. Germany got off lightly compared to its allies, Austria-Hungary and Turkey, whose empires completely collapsed.

Germany’s people suffered greatly during the early postwar years but by the mid-1920s the country had recovered economically and was fully rehabilitated internationally, having been admitted to the League of Nations. Reparations were effectively null and void and Germany’s armed forces were surreptitiously being rebuilt with help from Soviet Russia, a revolutionary state that was seeking to de-stabilise the capitalist world through diplomacy as well as subversion. The Nazi nightmare of the 1930s wasn’t so much a consequence of Versailles as a result of the Wall Street Crash’s catalysation of a worldwide depression that devastated Germany.

Ukraine is in a much stronger position than was Germany in 1918. It has lost a lot of territory but it does not yet face imminent defeat and occupation and can still inflict heavy damage on Russia’s armed forces. Unlike Germany at Versailles, Ukraine wouldn’t be isolated at any peace conference. It would have powerful western backers and influential support from Putin’s well-wishers in the Global South who want him to make a genuine and durable deal with Kiev that will safeguard Ukraine’s future as an independent sovereign state.

So far, there is no sign Putin has any substantial territorial ambitions beyond those specified by his June peace proposal. Doubtless, he will demand a demilitarised zone, but that could suit Ukraine, too, especially if its results in the return to its sovereignty of territory currently occupied by Russia. Russia won’t pay reparations but nor will it demand them, except for the return by the West of its frozen bank assets. Indeed, there are many ways Russia could aid Ukraine’s postwar recovery, not least in relation to the country’s energy supplies. POWs could be released and children returned. Millions of Ukrainian refugees in Russia as well as Europe would be able to return home. Russia would demand protections for its remaining compatriots in Ukraine and Kiev the safeguarding of its citizens’ interests in Russian-occupied territories. Most important, would be the negotiation of an international security guarantee to protect Ukraine from future invasion by Russia. Such a peace settlement would in turn speed up Ukraine’s entry into the EU.

The 1918 armistice led to a bitter peace for Germany at Versailles, but it saved millions of lives and safeguarded the country’s future.

There is another 1918 historical analogy worth considering: the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty of March 1918.

Having seized power in Russia, at the end of 1917 the Bolsheviks sought a separate peace with Germany. A ceasefire was agreed and negotiations began at Brest-Litovsk. The Bolsheviks, however, did not negotiate in good faith. For Bolshevik leader Lenin, the peace talks were a means to buy time to enable his party to consolidate its grip on power at home and promote revolution abroad. Bolshevik Foreign Commissar, Leon Trotsky, turned the Brest talks into a platform for revolutionary propaganda. But the Germans soon tired of Trotsky’s tactics and threatened to annul the negotiations and resume military operations.

By this time Lenin was losing faith in the imminence of world revolution and was prepared to do a peace deal on German terms, arguing that defence of the revolution in Russia was the prime goal. However, a majority of Bolsheviks – not wishing to dirty their hands by signing an onerous treaty that entailed significant territorial losses – opted for Trotsky’s alternative of ‘neither peace nor war’. Trotsky hoped the Germans would acquiesce in a unilateral declaration of demobilisation by Russia. That tactic backfired spectacularly when the Germans launched an offensive that quickly forced the Bolsheviks to sign a treaty conceding vast swathes of territory, payment of reparations and existence of a separate Ukraine. As Trotsky ruefully admitted, had the Bolsheviks been sincere about peace in the first place, they could have gotten a much better deal.

The Bolsheviks were saved from themselves by the failure of Germany’s Operation Michael – its final offensive on the Western Front – and the ensuing armistice, whose preconditions included the annulment of Brest-Litovsk. While the Bolsheviks were now able to repudiate the treaty’s terms, they couldn’t escape its consequences, which fed into the upheavals of Russia’s catastrophic civil war.

In 1918 the Bolsheviks got carried away by their revolutionary rhetoric, while the Germans faced up to the reality of their impending military defeat.

Peace with Putin will be repugnant, but surely preferable to the folly of continuing to fight an unwinnable war.

By John & Nisha Whitehead, 10/8/24

John Whitehead is a constitutional lawyer and author. He is the founder and former president of The Rutherford Institute. Nisha Whitehead is the executive director of The Rutherford Institute.

“What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”—Hannah Arendt

In a perfect example of the Nanny State mindset at work, Hillary Clinton insists that the powers-that-be need “total control” in order to make the internet a safer place for users and protect us harm.

Clinton is not alone in her distaste for unregulated, free speech online. A bipartisan chorus that includes both presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump has long clamored to weaken or do away with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which essentially acts as a bulwark against online censorship. It’s a complicated legal issue that involves debates over immunity, liability, net neutrality and whether or not internet sites are publishers with editorial responsibility for the content posted to their sites, but really, it comes down to the tug-of-war over where censorship (corporate and government) begins and free speech ends. 

As Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes for Reason, “What both the right and left attacks on the provision share is a willingness to use whatever excuses resonate—saving children, stopping bias, preventing terrorism, misogyny, and religious intolerance—to ensure more centralized control of online speech. They may couch these in partisan terms that play well with their respective bases, but their aim is essentially the same.” In other words, the government will use any excuse to suppress dissent and control the narrative.

The internet may well be the final frontier where free speech still flourishes, especially for politically incorrect speech and disinformation, which test the limits of our so-called egalitarian commitment to the First Amendment’s broad-minded principles. 

On the internet, falsehoods and lies abound, misdirection and misinformation dominate, and conspiracy theories go viral. This is to be expected, and the response should be more speech, not less. As Justice Brandeis wrote nearly a century ago: “If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

Yet to the government, these forms of “disinformation” rank right up there with terrorism, drugs, violence, and disease: societal evils so threatening that “we the people” should be willing to relinquish a little of our freedoms for the sake of national security. 

Of course, it never works out that way. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, the war on COVID-19: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns only to become weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands. Indeed, in the face of the government’s own authoritarian power-grabs, coverups, and conspiracies, a relatively unfettered internet may be our sole hope of speaking truth to power. The right to criticize the government and speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom. You see, disinformation isn’t the problem. Government coverups and censorship are the problem. Unfortunately, the government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power, reveals its corruption, exposes its lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. Every day in this country, those who dare to speak their truth to the powers-that-be find themselves censored, silenced or fired.

While there are all kinds of labels being put on so-called “unacceptable” speech today, the real message being conveyed by those in power is that Americans don’t have a right to express themselves if what they are saying is unpopular, controversial or at odds with what the government determines to be acceptable. Where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police. Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably. This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats. 

This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat. This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list. Thus, no matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes. Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.

For instance, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts. 

The next phase of the government’s war on anti-government speech and so-called thought crimes could well be mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions. Under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list. This is how it begins.

In communities across the nation, police are already being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, based solely on their own judgment, even if those individuals pose no danger to others. In New York City, for example, you could find yourself forcibly hospitalized for suspected mental illness if you carry “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibit a “willingness to engage in meaningful discussion,” have “excessive fears of specific stimuli,” or refuse “voluntary treatment recommendations.” 

While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, they could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.” 

As the Associated Press reports, federal officials are already looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit. Make no mistake: these are the building blocks for an American gulag no less sinister than that of the gulags of the Cold War-era Soviet Union. 

The word “gulag” refers to a labor or concentration camp where prisoners (oftentimes political prisoners or so-called “enemies of the state,” real or imagined) were imprisoned as punishment for their crimes against the state. The gulag, according to historian Anne Applebaum, used as a form of “administrative exile—which required no trial and no sentencing procedure—was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.” This age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by making them disappear—or forcing them to flee—or exiling them literally or figuratively or virtually from their fellow citizens—is happening with increasing frequency in America.

Now, through the use of red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, and pre-crime policing prevention programs, the groundwork is being laid that would allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling those whistleblowers, dissidents and freedom fighters who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates. 

Each state has its own set of civil, or involuntary, commitment laws. These laws are extensions of two legal principles: parens patriae Parens patriae (Latin for “parent of the country”), which allows the government to intervene on behalf of citizens who cannot act in their own best interest, and police power, which requires a state to protect the interests of its citizens. The fusion of these two principles, coupled with a shift towards a dangerousness standard, has resulted in a Nanny State mindset carried out with the militant force of the Police State. 

The problem, of course, is that the diagnosis of mental illness, while a legitimate concern for some Americans, has over time become a convenient means by which the government and its corporate partners can penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors. In fact, in recent years, we have witnessed the pathologizing of individuals who resist authority as suffering from oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), defined as “a pattern of disobedient, hostile, and defiant behavior toward authority figures.” 

Under such a definition, every activist of note throughout our history—from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. to John Lennon—could be classified as suffering from an ODD mental disorder.

Of course, this is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced, declared unfit for society, labelled dangerous or extremist, or turned into outcasts and exiled. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how you subdue a populace. The ensuing silence in the face of government-sponsored tyranny, terror, brutality and injustice is deafening.

Russia Matters, 10/15/24

1. “There is talk behind closed doors” in Western capitals of a deal in which “Moscow retains de facto control over… one-fifth of Ukraine it has occupied—though Russia’s sovereignty is not recognized—while the rest of the country is allowed to join NATO or given equivalent security guarantees,” according to FT editors. “Under that umbrella, it could rebuild and integrate with the EU, akin to West Germany in the Cold War,” they write. Some of these discussions are echoed in Kyiv, according to Der Spiegel. “For the first time since the Russian invasion in February 2022, the Ukrainian capital is seriously discussing scenarios in which the country foregoes the complete reconquest of its occupied territories, almost 20% of Ukrainian territory, for the time being,” this German outlet reports. According to Robert Kagan of Brookings, however, a stable peaceful resolution of the conflict is unlikely because Putin will assume that the West will keep arming Ukraine even if a deal is reached. “Unless something dramatic changes, this is a war that, like most wars, will be won or lost on the battlefield… Americans need to decide soon whether they are prepared to let Ukraine lose,” Kagan writes in WP.
2. Requests for more weapons and security guarantees by the West, which Volodymyr Zelenskyy is to refer to when briefing the Rada leadership on his victory plan on Oct. 16, have so far received a tepid response by the Biden administration, according to WSJ. In their comments on the plan, U.S. officials have pointed out that it repackages some of Ukraine’s earlier requests for arms and noted that members of NATO are divided about whether to offer Ukraine a formal invitation to join, WSJ reported. Ukrainians are increasingly exhausted by the war, and polls show an incremental increase in the number of Ukrainians prepared for negotiations, according to this U.S. newspaper.
3. The fall of Pokrovsk in Ukraine’s Donetsk region would leave the Ukrainian military without a key logistics hub for operations in eastern Ukraine, and it could serve as Russia’s gateway to conquering the rest of that region, according to Keith Johnson of FP. Moreover, “Pokrovsk’s fall could have an even more insidious impact on Ukraine’s ability to keep fighting: The city is the source of most of the coal used for the country’s steel and iron industry” which is the second-largest sector of the Ukrainian economy, according to Johnson. Without Pokrovsk’s mine, “the country’s remaining steel industry will be crippled,” according to The Economist.
4. “Russian forces proved more flexible and effective in the conduct of defensive operations in 2023 through a combination of maneuver and positional defense,” according to Michael Kofman of CEIP. Despite these adaptations, however, the Russian army’s assaults on Ukraine’s prepared defenses led to grinding battles. “The net effect was incremental Russian gains at high cost, as Russian forces proved unable to attain operationally significant breakthroughs when possessing quantitative advantages in manpower, materiel and munition,” according to Kofman. However, “[w]hat was true in 2023 may not hold for 2024, and beyond,” this leading expert on the Russian military finds in his CEIP piece, “Assessing Russian Military Adaptation in 2023.” Looking beyond 2023, Kofman finds Ukraine’s fall 2024 incursion into Russia’s Kursk region to be a success on the tactical level, but not “that successful” on the operational level “because if the primary goal was to shift significant Russian forces from their advances” in eastern Ukraine, “this did not take place,” Kofman told NYMag.
5. Since the first Western restrictions on Russian oil exports were introduced in 2022, Moscow has assembled a fleet of more than 400 tankers that are currently moving some 4 million barrels of oil a day beyond the reach of sanctions, according to FT’s investigation. Presently nearly 70% of the Kremlin’s oil is being transported on these shadow tankers, according to a separate investigation conducted by the Kyiv School of Economics Institute and reported by NYT. Russia has invested about $10 billion in developing its fleet of such shadow tankers. Commenting on the FT investigation, Harvard professor and RM principal investigator Graham Allison wrote on his X account: “For those who still imagine that Western sanctions are strangling Russia’s economy, the FT’s Big Read… masterfully illuminates how Russia is out-playing the US at the cat and mouse game of economic sanctions.”*
6. Without dedicated reintegration programs in Western countries for fighters returning from Ukraine, the risk of radicalization and violence appears “rather high,” according to Jean-François Ratelle of the University of Ottawa in his PONARS commentary. Western governments may think that most such fighters will not pose a security threat, but that view seems “short-sighted… because it… puts the focus on ideology rather than the broader context of the war and postwar experience,” Ratelle warns.