Crimea Bridge Explosion Disrupts Crucial Supply Route for Russian Forces (VIDEO)

At the video, just after 10 seconds, the car was spared a direct hit, but the blast-shrapnel ignited the gas tank and blew up the vehicle. Pretty rad actually, though bummer for the occupants. That's definitely called being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Russian officials blame Kyiv; Ukrainian officials have repeatedly threatened to hit the 12-mile bridge":

A major explosion on Saturday severely damaged the bridge connecting Russia’s mainland to the occupied Crimean Peninsula, disrupting traffic on a crucial artery for the supply of fuel, military equipment and food to Russian troops fighting to hold ground in southern Ukraine.

The bridge, opened by President Vladimir Putin to great fanfare in 2018, was meant to symbolize the might of the Russian state and the permanence of Russia’s annexation of the peninsula four years earlier. Russia even released a feature movie about its construction.

Russia’s investigations committee said three people died after the early-morning explosion of a truck on the bridge’s roadway next to a supply train that was carrying fuel.

Mr. Putin signed a decree requiring the boosting of defenses for Crimean transportation and energy infrastructure links. The decree placed the country’s intelligence service, FSB, in charge of the measures.

Sergey Aksyonov, the Russian-appointed leader of Crimea, raised the terrorism alert level to high through Oct. 23.

Some demolition experts who analyzed footage of the blast questioned the Russian version and said that the explosion must have come from under the bridge, caused either by an explosives-laden boat, manned or unmanned, or by shaped charges placed by divers.

Tony Spamer, a former British Army expert on bridge demolitions, said a truck bomb would have created a hole in the middle of bridge but wouldn’t have been sufficient to cut the reinforcing bar and cause the structure to collapse. “You’ve got to attack the whole width of the bridge. Looking at it, it looks like it was attacked from underneath. It’s a monster job,” he said.

Russia rushed to launch ferry services as an alternative, a move made difficult by stormy weather. Crimean authorities said passenger traffic resumed Saturday afternoon on the two surviving lanes of the four-lane road bridge, and rail services should be restarted soon. Civilian flights to Crimea have been suspended since February.

David MacKenzie, a senior technical director at COWI Holding A/S, a Denmark-based company that designs and builds some of the world’s largest and longest bridges, said it would take several months for Russia to be able to fully restore the destroyed spans of the bridge, and that the ban on truck traffic is caused by concerns that the bridge’s substructure has also been damaged. Weight restrictions are likely to be imposed on the railway bridge should it reopen, he said.

“A quite significant fire has taken place, and it will have an impact on the strength of the steel that is there,” Mr. MacKenzie said. “There is a very good chance that the steel on the top of the deck may well have been heated to temperatures well above the limits that the steel takes.”

Russian officials in Crimea were quick to blame Kyiv. “The Ukrainian vandals have managed to reach the Crimean bridge with their bloodied hands,” the speaker of Crimea’s legislature, Vladimir Konstantinov, wrote on social media. Other than ordering a commission of inquiry, Mr. Putin has so far remained silent on the incident, even as Russian lawmakers and politicians called for retribution.

While Ukrainian officials have threatened to hit the strategic bridge in the past, there was no direct claim of responsibility from Kyiv. Senior Ukrainian officials, however, on Saturday expressed delight at the blow to Russian prestige.

Alluding to Mr. Putin’s 70th birthday on Friday, Ukraine’s national-security adviser Oleksiy Danilov posted a video online of the burning bridge next to footage of Marilyn Monroe singing, “Happy birthday, Mr. President.”

Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 is considered illegal by virtually the entire international community, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly said that he seeks to reclaim all Ukrainian territories seized by Russia.

Russia in recent days moved to annex four other regions of Ukraine where fierce fighting continues, while Mr. Putin ordered the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of reservists to shore up the crumbling Russian front lines, prompting an exodus of Russian men to neighboring countries.

Moscow on Saturday for the first time named an overall commander for the faltering campaign in Ukraine, Gen. Sergei Surovikin. Previously the head of Russia’s Aerospace Forces, he was this summer identified by the Russian Ministry of Defense as head of Group South, the military grouping that led the fighting to seize the southeastern city of Mariupol. He is a veteran of the Chechen campaign and a former commander of Russian forces in Syria.

Russian nationalists and personalities such as Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and Yevgeni Prigozhin, owner of the Wagner private military company, have blamed a rival general, Col. Gen. Aleksandr Lapin, commander of Group Center, for recent defeats that saw Russia lose thousands of square miles in the Kharkiv, Donetsk and Luhansk regions. There was no word about Gen. Lapin’s fate.

Crimea, the home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, has also become a focus for the Ukrainian war effort as its forces press farther south, especially in Kherson, where dozens of villages have been taken in recent days. Kyiv has attacked several high-profile targets in Crimea in recent months, striking a major Russian air base in Saky and a railway junction near the town of Dzhankoy. It has used American-made Himars missiles to hit the Antonivsky bridge in Kherson, a lifeline for Russian troops in the area.

The bridge over the Kerch Strait accounted for the bulk of fuel and food supplies to Crimea and represented the only way of traveling to and from the peninsula for ordinary Russians...

 

Louise Mensch on Putin's War

From September 16th, on Twitter:

1/ I don’t think this war, or Putin, are going to make it to next summer.

in case you haven’t been paying attention, Putin just went to China and was snubbed. Tiny Eastern European countries are making him wait around.

He’s finally being treated like the dog he is.

2/ It’s tempting to say I think the war will be over by the end of the year. That certainly possible, but sources say Kherson itself is going to take a little while. Most likely Ukraine is thinking about the push to Crimea. Ukraine WILL be retaking Crimea. cc @Dominic2306

3/ Putin enjoys being hated and feared. Instead, he’s now being hated and mocked. that’s a lethal combination. And the first whiff of future rationing has just hit Russia.

4/ Militarily, I would expect all Ukrainian territory to be liberated by spring 2023, however, if there is a coup in Moscow, (and there is a significant chance of that) before then, I would expect the war to end immediately afterwards with total Russian withdrawal

5/ in any event, surely no serious person can now envisage anything other than the utter defeat of the Russian Federation, and the total victory and complete liberation of Ukraine. Glory to Ukraine. 6/ following the complete victory of the Armed Forces of Ukraine @DefenceU over the Russian Army @MOD_Russia, I believe a coup against Vladimir Putin is inevitable. The only question is whether it will come before, or after, Russia’s total military defeat in Ukraine

7/ the coup, in my view, is marginally more likely to happen after Russia is driven out of Crimea. The reason for this is that Ukraine is going to insist on retaking Crimea, and it would be very difficult indeed, for any Russian president, domestically, to give Crimea back.

8/ it is another thing entirely, if your predecessor has “lost” @Crimea (Crimea is Ukraine, but the Russians lie that it is part of Russia), than if you, the new guy, “surrender” it back to the Ukrainians. Putin’s replacement may want that loss to be on Putin, not them.

9/ I cannot see Putin, surviving this situation, and I take great pleasure in knowing the fear that he must feel every morning when he wakes up. He is a dog. He is utterly despicable. I have often been told by more than one source that there is worse behind him.…

10/ … that Putin cares only about Vladimir Putin, and real Russian nationalists are waiting in the wings, but I’m not going to ‘be careful what I wish for’.

I want justice done against Vladimir Putin, and I want justice to be seen to be done. #смертьворогам

11/ Vladimir Putin is the enemy of the free world, he invaded Ukraine, he committed war crimes against civilians, he propped up Assad’s genocidal regime, he interfered in a sovereign election in the United States, and in two British referendums; all, imo, acts of war.

12/ Putin committed information warfare against every democracy in the world, spreading anti-vaccination propaganda during the Covid pandemic. It’s unacceptable to me that he end his life with nothing worse than humiliation.

*Whoever* is behind him: fiat iustitia ruat caelum.

13/ after Russia is driven from Crimea and Putin is violently deposed in Russia, there must be war crimes trials at the Hague. And large amounts of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund must be simply given to Ukraine as compensation. Glory to Ukraine. Destruction to the Kremlin. Ends.

 

'A Brutal, Needless War ... Chosen by One Man': Biden, at United Nations, Slams Putin's Invasion of Ukraine (VIDEO)

Following-up, "Putin Orders Draft of Reservists for War in Ukraine, Threatens Nuclear Response."

At the Los Angeles Times, "The president says Putin ‘attempted to erase the sovereign state from the map’ and urged the United Nations to add additional members to the Security Council to weaken Russia’s influence":

NEW YORK CITY — President Biden excoriated Russian President Vladimir Putin and announced another $1.2-billion aid package for Ukraine during his annual address to the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday.

“Let us speak plainly: A permanent member of the United Nations Security Council invaded, attempted to erase the sovereign state from the map,” Biden said, calling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “a brutal, needless war” that was “chosen by one man.”

Russia and China’s standing as two of the five Security Council members is undermining the U.N.'s ability to fulfill its mission, Biden went on to argue. Intent on signaling to allies and adversaries alike that the United States will not waver in its defense of Ukraine and support for other sovereign nations, the president urged the United Nations to add additional members to the Security Council to weaken Russia and China’s influence. But he did not go as fas as to call for revoking their Security Council membership, and with it, their veto power.

“The time has come for this institution to become more inclusive,” Biden said.

The annual week of meetings at U.N. headquarters, the first in-person gathering in three years, comes as Putin, his military having suffered major setbacks in recent weeks, has indicated he now plans to annex occupied regions of Ukraine. Moscow-aligned puppet governments there are preparing to hold sham referenda on joining Russia.

“The world should see these outrageous acts for what they are,” Biden said of the planned votes.

Just hours before Biden’s speech, Putin announced an immediate partial mobilization of 300,000 reservists in a pre-recorded address airing on Russian state television. Characterizing the conflict as a war with the West, he went as far as to threaten to deploy nuclear weapons.

“To defend Russia and our people, we doubtlessly will use all weapons resources at our disposal,” Putin said. “This is not a bluff.”

Putin’s remarks won’t come as a surprise to the White House, where national security officials continue to believe the war is nowhere near a resolution despite Ukraine’s success in pushing back Russian forces from formerly occupied territories in the country’s east.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, Biden’s guiding principle has been keeping the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization unified and out of any direct confrontation with Russia. Speaking to the world some seven months later, he looked to bolster the resolve of the world’s leading democracies in continuing to stand behind Ukraine, even as the drawn-out conflict has upended energy markets and exacerbated inflation, creating domestic issues for leaders in London, Paris and Berlin.

He will hold his first meeting with new British Prime Minister Liz Truss later Wednesday.

At the same time, he is trying to ward off a potential attack on Taiwan by China. In an interview Sunday on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Biden said he would respond militarily to any act of aggression by Beijing that violates Taiwan’s sovereignty — the kind of response he took off the table from the get-go when Russia was getting ready to invade Ukraine.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, in his remarks Monday, implored world leaders to rally together in support of the principles enshrined in the organization’s charter, offering a bleak summation of a world where democratic principles and institutions are increasingly under attack and multilateral organizations have been unable to muster the responses necessary to combat climate change, food insecurity, diseases, human rights violations and other challenges...

Watch the full speech is here: "Biden denounces Russia in speech to U.N. General Assembly."

Putin Orders Draft of Reservists for War in Ukraine, Threatens Nuclear Response

A big day in great power politics.

At the Wall Street Journal, "The Russian president’s move sought to bolster his faltering military, while China urged the Kremlin to de-escalate":

MOSCOW—Russian President Vladimir Putin raised the threat of a nuclear response in the conflict and ordered reservists to mobilize, an escalation of the war in Ukraine as Moscow seeks to buttress its army’s flagging manpower and regain the offensive following stinging losses on the battlefield.

“Russia will use all the instruments at its disposal to counter a threat against its territorial integrity—this is not a bluff,” Mr. Putin said in a national address that blamed the West for the conflict in Ukraine, where he said his troops were facing the best of Western troops and weapons.

The speech is the clearest sign yet that seven months into the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II, Russia is unable to counter Ukraine and the West, which has largely united in the face of the Russian invasion. It also raises the stakes for Ukraine’s backers, which have sent billions of dollars of military aid since the beginning of the conflict.

Without providing evidence, Mr. Putin said top officials at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had said that it would be acceptable to carry out nuclear strikes on Russia. He also blamed Ukraine for strikes against the nuclear-power plant in the Zaporizhzhia region, which has been occupied by Russian troops since near the start of the war.

“To those who allow themselves such statements, I would like to remind them, Russia also has many types of weapons of destruction, the components of which in some cases are more modern than those of the countries of NATO,” said Mr. Putin.

In his speech, Mr. Putin cast the partial mobilization—Russia’s first since World War II—as a response to what he called a decadeslong Western plot to break up Russia. He repeated false accusations that the West had stirred rebellion inside the country’s borders, armed terrorist rebels in the Muslim-dominated south, arranged a coup in Ukraine in 2014 and transformed Ukraine into an “anti-Russian bridgehead, turning the Ukrainians themselves into cannon fodder.”

The bellicose address to the nation comes after officials in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine on Tuesday announced plans for Russia to annex four regions in the country’s east and south. The move would allow Mr. Putin to describe a Ukrainian offensive on that territory as tantamount to an attack on Russia.

“He has been pushed into a corner and his only hope is to demonstrate resolve and readiness for escalation to compel the Ukrainians to sit down at the negotiating table,” said Abbas Gallyamov, a Russian political analyst and a former speech writer for Mr. Putin. “I don’t think he believes in victory any longer. He wants to show Ukrainians that victory will be too expensive and it’s better to negotiate.”

Shortly after Mr. Putin’s speech, China urged the Kremlin to de-escalate.

“We call on the parties concerned to achieve a cease-fire and an end to the war through dialogue and negotiation, and find a way to take into account the legitimate security concerns of all parties as soon as possible,” said Wang Wenbin, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry. “We also hope that the international community will create conditions and space for this.”

Western leaders expressed their resolve to continue supporting Ukraine despite Mr. Putin’s threat.

The partial mobilization and annexation of parts of Ukraine are “an admission that [Mr. Putin’s] invasion is failing,” U.K. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said in a tweet Wednesday. “No amount of threats and propaganda can hide the fact that Ukraine is winning this war, the international community are united and Russia is becoming a global pariah.”

Mr. Putin has sought to avoid a full mobilization of troops, fearing that the broad support for the war could become fragile once average Russians are forced to serve.

While both state-run and independent polls show that most Russians support the war, the enthusiasm has been more subdued than eight years ago, when Mr. Putin ignited the conflict with Ukraine by seizing the southern peninsula of Crimea and announcing its annexation to great fanfare in a Kremlin ceremony.

In its mobilization efforts, the Kremlin has so far taken a calibrated approach, avoiding a widespread call-up that would be a shock to Russian society.

The decision, however, is likely to silence nationalist critics of Mr. Putin’s approach, which has seen him stop short of declaring war.

“Nuclear signaling is directed to the West and Ukraine, but it’s also meant to satisfy radical domestic critiques that are turning into a serious opposition,” said Dmitry Adamsky, a Russian expert at the School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at the Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel...

 

Russia’s Battered Army Has No Quick Fix in Ukraine (VIDEO)

 At the Wall Street Journal, "Kyiv’s counterattack tests Moscow’s forces and raises stakes for Kremlin at home":

Russian forces sent fleeing by Ukraine’s recent counterattack are attempting to establish defensive positions and regain their footing. It is a difficult pivot even under ideal conditions, and so far Moscow’s forces show signs of struggling to adapt.

Battlefield setbacks are just one challenge facing the Kremlin as it tries to secure its territorial gains in Ukraine and fend off nascent criticism at home. Kyiv’s forces this month have retaken dozens of settlements and more than 3,500 square miles of Russian-controlled ground in the northeastern Kharkiv region, according to government officials.

Ukraine continued attacking Russian-held territory on Friday, hitting the easternmost parts of the Kharkiv region and other parts of eastern Ukraine. They hope to capitalize on those gains to advance their offensive in the southern city of Kherson. Attacks on government buildings in Kherson and the eastern city of Luhansk killed two Moscow-installed officials, local Russia-backed authorities said.

On the battlefield over recent weeks, Russia has lost hundreds of heavy military vehicles, including over 100 tanks, according to open-source intelligence reports. It also lost several pieces of classified electronic-warfare equipment that are now in the hands of Western-allied forces. Many Russian soldiers—in the thousands, by some estimates—have either surrendered or will become prisoners of war.

Ukraine’s advance will also allow its rockets to hit targets deeper within Russian-controlled areas, potentially in occupied parts of Ukraine such as Crimea and in Russia itself.

Within Russia, criticisms of President Vladimir Putin and his regime remain limited but are growing. Spreading wariness about the war could limit Mr. Putin’s options for responding, such as a limited mobilization or a draft, which under Russian law likely would require an outright declaration of war.

“We gave up the strategic initiative,” said Vladimir Soloviev, a popular host on state-run television this week.

Russian TV pundits acknowledged Ukraine’s successes in its counteroffensive, which they credited to U.S. intelligence, Western weapons and even fighters from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization disguised as mercenaries. They showed clips alleging cruel punishment of Russian sympathizers by Ukrainian forces in retaken areas as supposed proof of Ukrainians’ Nazi-like nature.

Russia still retains significant forces deployed in and around Ukraine and vast stores of weaponry and ammunition, giving it the potential to react and hit back. While Kyiv has seized the initiative in routing some of Moscow’s front-line troops, it is far from uprooting all Russian forces occupying its territories.

Ukraine could also face more opposition in pushing further into Russian-controlled regions, military analysts say. Kyiv’s recent gains near Kharkiv, in the northeast, were achieved using surprise and by finding weak points in Russia’s long and thinly protected front line, according to soldiers involved in the fight. Achieving such surprise again may be difficult and Ukrainian forces are advancing into regions where Russian forces are more dug-in than near Kharkiv.

Eastern parts of Ukraine under pro-Russian occupation since 2014 have been bound more closely to Moscow, so Kyiv’s forces may receive less support from local populations there than they have so far.

“I think it does become somewhat harder for the Ukrainians going forward,” said Dmitry Gorenburg, a Russian military expert at CNA, a defense-research organization in Arlington, Va. As the area Russia is defending shrinks, its ratio of forces to territory should rise, he said.

Working against Russia is low morale, an inflexible military command structure and equipment that has proved to be poorly maintained. Energized Ukrainian forces, who have shown themselves to be nimble in battle, are using new and well-kept equipment...

 

It’s Time to Prepare for a Ukrainian Victory

From Anne Applebaum, at the Atlantic, "The liberation of Russian-occupied territory might bring down Vladimir Putin":

Over the past six days, Ukraine’s armed forces have broken through the Russian lines in the northeastern corner of the country, swept eastward, and liberated town after town in what had been occupied territory. First Balakliya, then Kupyansk, then Izium, a city that sits on major supply routes. These names won’t mean much to a foreign audience, but they are places that have been beyond reach, impossible for Ukrainians to contact for months. Now they have fallen in hours. As I write this, Ukrainian forces are said to be fighting on the outskirts of Donetsk, a city that Russia has occupied since 2014.

Over the past six days, Ukraine’s armed forces have broken through the Russian lines in the northeastern corner of the country, swept eastward, and liberated town after town in what had been occupied territory. First Balakliya, then Kupyansk, then Izium, a city that sits on major supply routes. These names won’t mean much to a foreign audience, but they are places that have been beyond reach, impossible for Ukrainians to contact for months. Now they have fallen in hours. As I write this, Ukrainian forces are said to be fighting on the outskirts of Donetsk, a city that Russia has occupied since 2014.

Many things about this advance are unexpected, especially the location: For many weeks, the Ukrainians loudly telegraphed their intention to launch a major offensive farther south. The biggest shock is not Ukraine’s tactics but Russia’s response. “What really surprises us,” Lieutenant General Yevhen Moisiuk, the deputy commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, told me in Kyiv yesterday morning, “is that the Russian troops are not fighting back.”

Russian troops are not fighting back. More than that: Offered the choice of fighting or fleeing, many of them appear to be escaping as fast as they can. For several days, soldiers and others have posted photographs of hastily abandoned military vehicles and equipment, as well as videos showing lines of cars, presumably belonging to collaborators, fleeing the occupied territories. A Ukrainian General Staff report said that Russian soldiers were ditching their uniforms, donning civilian clothes, and trying to slip back into Russian territory. The Ukrainian security service has set up a hotline that Russian soldiers can call if they want to surrender, and it has also posted recordings of some of the calls. The fundamental difference between Ukrainian soldiers, who are fighting for their country’s existence, and Russian soldiers, who are fighting for their salary, has finally begun to matter.

That difference might not suffice, of course. Ukrainian soldiers may be better motivated, but the Russians still have far larger stores of weapons and ammunition. They can still inflict misery on civilians, as they did in today’s apparent attack on the electrical grid in Kharkiv and elsewhere in eastern Ukraine. Many other cruel options—horrific options—are still open even to a Russia whose soldiers will not fight. The nuclear plant in Zaporizhzhia remains inside the battle zone. Russia’s propagandists have been talking about nuclear weapons since the beginning of the war. Although Russian troops are not fighting in the north, they are still resisting the Ukrainian offensive in the south.

But even though the fighting may still take many turns, the events of the past few days should force Ukraine’s allies to stop and think. A new reality has been created: The Ukrainians could win this war. Are we in the West really prepared for a Ukrainian victory? Do we know what other changes it could bring?

Back in March, I wrote that it was time to imagine the possibility of victory, and I defined victory quite narrowly: “It means that Ukraine remains a sovereign democracy, with the right to choose its own leaders and make its own treaties.” Six months later, some adjustments to that basic definition are required. In Kyiv yesterday, I watched Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov tell an audience that victory should now include not only a return to the borders of Ukraine as they were in 1991—including Crimea, as well as Donbas in eastern Ukraine—but also reparations to pay for the damage and war-crimes tribunals to give victims some sense of justice.

These demands are not in any sense outrageous or extreme. This was never just a war for territory, after all, but rather a campaign fought with genocidal intent. Russian forces in occupied territories have tortured and murdered civilians, arrested and deported hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed theaters, museums, schools, hospitals. Bombing raids on Ukrainian cities far from the front line have slaughtered civilians and cost Ukraine billions in property damage. Returning the land will not, by itself, compensate Ukrainians for this catastrophic invasion.

But even if it is justified, the Ukrainian definition of victory remains extraordinarily ambitious. To put it bluntly: It is hard to imagine how Russia can meet any of these demands—territorial, financial, legal—so long as its current president remains in power. Remember, Vladimir Putin has put the destruction of Ukraine at the very center of his foreign and domestic policies, and at the heart of what he wants his legacy to be. Two days after the launch of the failed invasion of Kyiv, the Russian state-news agency accidentally published, and then retracted, an article prematurely declaring success. “Russia,” it declared, “is restoring its unity.” The dissolution of the U.S.S.R.—the “tragedy of 1991, this terrible catastrophe in our history”—had been overcome. A “new era” had begun...

 Still more.

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 15

At the Institute for the Study of War:

Ukrainian forces are continuing counteroffensive operations in eastern Ukraine, increasingly pressuring Russian positions and logistics lines in eastern Kharkiv, northern Luhansk, and eastern Donetsk oblasts. Russian sources reported that Ukrainian forces are continuing ground operations southeast of Izyum, near Lyman, and on the east bank of the Oskil River, reportedly compelling Russian forces to withdraw from some areas in eastern Ukraine and reinforce others. Russian forces in eastern Ukraine will likely struggle to hold their defensive lines if Ukrainian forces continue to push farther east.

The Kremlin is responding to the defeat around Kharkiv Oblast by doubling down on crypto-mobilization rather than setting conditions for general mobilization. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov called on all federal subjects to initiate “self-mobilization” and not wait on the Kremlin to declare martial law. Kadyrov claimed that each federal subject must prove its readiness to help Russia by recruiting at least 1,000 servicemen instead of delivering speeches and conducting fruitless public events. Russian propagandist Margarita Simonyan echoed the need for Russians to volunteer to join the war effort, and several loyalist Russian governors publicly supported Kadyrov’s speech. The Russian-appointed head of occupied Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, announced the formation of two volunteer battalions on the peninsula in support of Kadyrov’s calls.

The defeat around Kharkiv Oblast prompted the Kremlin to announce a Russia-wide recruitment campaign. Kremlin officials and state media had not previously made country-wide recruitment calls but had instead tasked local officials and outlets to generate forces ostensibly on their own initiative. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov vaguely welcomed the creation of the battalions on July 12, while 47 loyalist federal subjects advertised and funded the regional volunteer battalion recruitment campaign. A prominent Russian milblogger and a supporter of general mobilization praised officials such as Kadyrov for taking the recruitment campaign from the ineffective Russian Ministry of Defense; this recruitment revamp is likely to secure more support for the Kremlin among nationalist figures who are increasingly critical of the Russian MoD, even if the drive does not generate large numbers of combat-effective troops.

The Kremlin has likely abandoned its efforts to shield select federal subjects from recruitment drives, which may increase social tensions. ISW has previously reported that the Kremlin attempted to shield Moscow City residents from reports of the formation of the Moscow-based “Sobyaninsky Polk” volunteer regiment. Russian opposition outlet The Insider noted that several groups in the republics of Buryatia, Kalmykia, Tyva, and Yakytia (Republic of Sakha) are publicly opposed to the Kremlin's emphasis on recruitment on an ethnic basis. Simonyan’s statement about “self-mobilization” prompted numerous negative comments among Russians calling on Russian oligarchs to pay for and fight in the war.

The Kremlin has almost certainly drained a large proportion of the forces originally stationed in Russian bases in former Soviet states since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February, likely weakening Russian influence in those states. A Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) investigation reported on September 14 that the Russian military has already deployed approximately 1500 Russian personnel from Russia’s 201st Military Base in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion began and plans to deploy 600 more personnel from facilities in Dushanbe and Bokhatar, a southern Tajik city, in the future.[10] RFE/RL additionally reported on September 13 that Russia has likely redeployed approximately 300 Tuvan troops from the Russian Kant Air Base in Kyrgyzstan to fight in Ukraine at varying points since late 2021.

The withdrawals from the Central Asian states are noteworthy in the context of border clashes between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Tajik and Kyrgyz border guards exchanged fire in three separate incidents on September 14, killing at least two people. The uptick in violence between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, both of which are members of the Russian-controlled Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), comes alongside renewed aggression by Azerbaijan against CSTO member state Armenia. Russian forces also withdrew 800 personnel from Armenia early in the war to replenish losses in Ukraine, as ISW has previously reported.

Key Takeaways

*Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in eastern Ukraine.

*The Kremlin is responding to the defeat around Kharkiv Oblast by doubling down on crypto-mobilization, rather than setting conditions for general mobilization.

*The Kremlin has almost certainly drained a large proportion of the forces originally at Russian bases in former Soviet states since *Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February, likely weakening Russian influence in those states.

*Russian and Ukrainian sources reported Ukrainian ground attacks northwest of Kherson City, near the Ukrainian bridgehead over the Inhulets River, and south of the Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border.

*Russian-appointed occupation officials and milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted a landing at the Kinburn Spit (a narrow peninsula in Kherson Oblast).

*Russian forces conducted limited ground assaults and are reinforcing positions on the Eastern Axis.

*The Russian proxy Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) is likely attempting to stop its administrators from fleeing ahead of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, demonstrating the bureaucratic fragility of the DNR.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

*Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Southern and Eastern Ukraine

*Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts); *Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast

*Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis

*Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts

*Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)

Eastern Ukraine: (Vovchansk-Kupyansk-Izyum-Lyman Line)

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in eastern Ukraine, setting conditions to drive deeper into the Russian rear in eastern Kharkiv and western Luhansk oblasts. A Russian source claimed that Ukrainian forces expelled Russian forces from Sosnove on the north bank of the Siverskyi Donets River and are fortifying positions at the settlement.[14] The source also reported that Russian forces may have pulled out from Studenok immediately west of Sosnove to avoid encirclement.[15] Official Russian and Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces reinforced Russian positions in Lyman.[16] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that the heavily reduced remnants of the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) 2nd Army Corps 202nd and 204th Motorized Rifle Regiments were disbanded into reserves, possibly meaning that the remnants of these reduced elements reinforced the Russian Combat Army Reserve (BARS) elements fighting in Lyman.

Ukrainian forces are reportedly advancing across the Oskil River in northern Kharkiv Oblast. A Russian source claimed that Ukrainian forces are establishing bases and artillery positions throughout Kharkiv Oblast, including emplacing artillery in Hryanykivka on the east bank of the Oskil River near the R79 highway. A confirmed Ukrainian position in Hryanykivka would indicate that the Russian frontline east of the Oskil River is weak and/or that Russian forces’ lines in this area are farther east of the Oskil River than previously assessed. ISW will continue collecting and reconciling data to refine our control of terrain assessment. A Russian source reported that Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups occasionally cross the Oskil River in unspecified areas.

Ukrainian forces continued operations to disrupt Russian logistics in eastern Ukraine and pin Russian forces away from the frontlines...

Keep reading.

Why Ukraine Will Win

From Frances Fukuyama, at the Journal of Democracy, "The country’s military is advancing on the battlefield. If Ukraine defeats Russia’s massive army, the ripple effects will be felt across the globe":

The war in Ukraine, now in its seventh month, marks a critical juncture that will determine the course of global democracy. There are three important points to be made about its significance.

First is the question of why the war occurred in the first place. The argument was made, even before the Russian invasion, that Vladimir Putin was being driven by fear of NATO expansion and was seeking a neutral buffer to protect his country. While Putin doubtless disliked the idea that Ukraine could enter NATO, this was not his real motive. Ukrainian membership was never imminent. NATO expansion was not a plot hatched in Washington, London, or Paris to drive the alliance as far east as possible. It was driven by the former satellites of the former USSR, which had been dominated by that country since 1945 and were convinced that Russia would try to do so again once the balance of power turned to Russia’s favor. Putin, moreover, has explained very clearly what was at stake. In a long article written in 2021 and in a speech on the eve of the invasion, he castigated the breakup of the Soviet Union and asserted that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people” artificially separated. More broadly, Russian demands in the leadup to the war made it very clear that Moscow objected to the entire post-1991 European settlement that created a “Europe whole and free.” Russian war aims would not be satisfied by a neutral Ukraine; that neutrality would have to extend across Europe.

The real threat perceived by Putin was in the end not to the security of Russia, but to its political model. He has asserted that liberal democracy didn’t work generally, but was particularly inappropriate in the Slavic world. A free Ukraine belied that assertion, and for that reason had to be eliminated.

The second critical point concerns Western solidarity in support of Ukraine. Up to now, the continuing supply of weapons and economic sanctions have been absolutely critical to Ukraine’s ability to resist Russian power. Most observers have in fact been surprised by the degree of solidarity shown by NATO, and particularly by the turnaround in German foreign policy. However, the Russians have now cut off a large part of the gas they supply to Europe in retaliation for Western sanctions, and there are huge uncertainties as to whether foreign support will continue as the weather gets colder and energy prices continue to rise all over Europe.

In this respect, the most critical variable to watch is the outcome of the current military conflict. Political analysts typically believe that military outcomes reflect underlying political forces, but in Ukraine today the opposite is true: The country’s political future will depend first and foremost on its battlefield success in the short run.

Over the summer, when Russia had withdrawn from its initial effort to occupy Kyiv and the fighting was centered in the Donbas, a conventional wisdom emerged that Ukraine and Russia were locked in a “long war” (featured on the cover of the Economist). Many asserted it was inevitable that there would be a stalemate and war of attrition that might go on for years. As Ukraine’s forward military momentum slowed, there were Western voices arguing that peace negotiations and territorial concessions from Ukraine were necessary.

Had this advice been followed, it would have led to a terrible outcome: Russia keeping the parts of Ukraine it had swallowed, leaving a rump country unable to ship exports out of its southern ports. Such a negotiation would not bring peace; Russia would simply wait until it had reconstituted its military to restart the war.

By contrast, if Ukraine can regain military momentum before the end of 2022, it will be much easier for leaders of Western democracies to argue that their people should tighten their belts over the coming winter. For that reason, military progress in the short term is critical for the Western coalition to hold together.

The prospect that Ukraine can actually regain military momentum is entirely possible; indeed, it is likely in my view and unfolding as we speak. The Ukrainian general staff has been extremely smart in its overall strategy, focusing not on the Donbas but on liberating parts of the south that were occupied by Russia in the first weeks of the war. Ukrainian forces have used NATO-supplied weapons, particularly the HIMARS long-range rocket system, to attack ammunition depots, command posts, and logistics hubs all along the front. They have succeeded in attacking supposedly secure Russian rear areas deep in the Crimean peninsula. At the moment, 25,000 to 30,000 Russian troops are trapped in a pocket around the southern city of Kherson, which lies on the west bank of the Dnipro River. The Ukrainians have succeeded in taking out the bridges connecting Kherson to Russia, and have been slowly tightening the noose around these forces. It is possible that the Russian position there will collapse catastrophically and that Moscow will lose a good part of its remaining army.

More broadly, morale on the Ukrainian side has been immensely higher than on the Russian side. Ukrainians are fighting for their own land, and have seen the atrocities committed by Russian forces in areas the latter have already occupied. The Russian military, by contrast, has had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to replace the manpower it has already lost, recruiting prison convicts and people from the poorer ethnic minorities to do the fighting that ethnic Russians seem unwilling to do themselves.

Thirdly, a Russian military failure—meaning at minimum the liberation of territories conquered after 24 February 2022—will have enormous political reverberations around the world...

 

Labor Day Morning Rant: Principled Free Traders™ and the Imaginary World of 'Econ 101'

It's Buck Throckmorton, at AoSHQ, "It is no secret that I have extreme animus toward the Principled Free Traders™ who sought to offshore every last American manufacturing job out of fealty to a utopian economic system that doesn’t exist in the real world. (And let’s be honest, those so-called “free traders” had no interest in there even being reciprocal free trade of American-manufactured goods. They are globalists who dislike American sovereignty and detest working-class Americans. Denying a living wage to blue collar Americans was a feature, not a bug of our elites’ actions.)."

A Flourishing Democracy in Ukraine?

A flourishing Ukrainian democracy. 

That's what Vladimir Putin fears, according to Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, along with Robert Person.

(Contrast this article to John Mearsheimer's, post earlier. The two contrasting takes represents a very common axis in international relations theory: realism vs. liberalism,)

At the Journal of Democracy, "What Putin Fears Most":

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has begun. Russian president Vladimir Putin wants you to believe that it’s NATO’s fault. He frequently has claimed (including again in an address to the nation as this invasion commenced) that NATO expansion—not 190,000 Russian soldiers and sailors mobilized on Ukraine’s borders—is the central driver of this crisis. Following John Mearsheimer’s provocative 2014 Foreign Affairs article arguing that “the Ukraine crisis is the West’s fault,” the narrative of Russian backlash against NATO expansion has become a dominant framework for explaining—if not justifying—Moscow’s ongoing war against Ukraine. This notion has been repeated by politicians, analysts, and writers in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. Multiple rounds of enlargement, they argue, exacerbated Russia’s sense of insecurity as NATO forces crept closer to Russia’s borders, finally provoking Putin to lash out violently, first by invading Georgia in 2008, then Ukraine in 2014, and now a second, likely far larger, invasion of Ukraine today. By this telling, the specter of Ukraine’s NATO membership points both to the cause of the conflict and its solution: take membership off the table for Ukraine, so the argument goes, and war will be prevented.

This argument has two flaws, one about history and one about Putin’s thinking. First, NATO expansion has not been a constant source of tension between Russia and the West, but a variable. Over the last thirty years, the salience of the issue has risen and fallen not primarily because of the waves of NATO expansion, but due instead to waves of democratic expansion in Eurasia. In a very clear pattern, Moscow’s complaints about NATO spike after democratic breakthroughs. While the tragic invasions and occupations of Georgia and Ukraine have secured Putin a de facto veto over their NATO aspirations, since the alliance would never admit a country under partial occupation by Russian forces, this fact undermines Putin’s claim that the current invasion is aimed at NATO membership. He has already blocked NATO expansion for all intents and purposes, thereby revealing that he wants something far more significant in Ukraine today: the end of democracy and the return of subjugation.

This reality highlights the second flaw: Because the primary threat to Putin and his autocratic regime is democracy, not NATO, that perceived threat would not magically disappear with a moratorium on NATO expansion. Putin would not stop seeking to undermine democracy and sovereignty in Ukraine, Georgia, or the region as whole if NATO stopped expanding. As long as citizens in free countries exercise their democratic rights to elect their own leaders and set their own course in domestic and foreign politics, Putin will keep them in his crosshairs....

The more serious cause of tensions has been a series of democratic breakthroughs and popular protests for freedom throughout the 2000s, what many refer to as the “Color Revolutions.” Putin believes that Russian national interests have been threatened by what he portrays as U.S.-supported coups. After each of them—Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, the Arab Spring in 2011, Russia in 2011–12, and Ukraine in 2013–14—Putin has pivoted to more hostile policies toward the United States, and then invoked the NATO threat as justification for doing so.

Boris Yeltsin never supported NATO expansion but acquiesced to the first round of expansion in 1997 because he believed his close ties to President Bill Clinton and the United States were not worth sacrificing over this comparatively smaller matter. Through Partnership for Peace and especially the NATO-Russia Founding Act, Clinton and his team made a considerable effort to keep US-Russian relations positive while at the same time managing NATO expansion. The 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia to stop ethnic cleaning in Kosovo severely tested that strategy but survived in part because Clinton gave Yeltsin and Russia a role in the negotiated solution. When the first post-communist color revolution overthrew Slobodan Milosevic a year later, Russia’s new president, Putin, deplored the act but did not overreact. At that time, he still entertained the possibility of cooperation with the West, including NATO.

However, the next round of democratic expansion in the post-Soviet world, the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, escalated U.S.-Russian tensions significantly. Putin blamed the United States directly for assisting in this democratic breakthrough and helping to install what he saw as a pro-American puppet, President Mikheil Saakashvili. Immediately after the Rose Revolution, Putin sought to undermine Georgian democracy, ultimately invading in 2008 and recognizing two Georgian regions—Abkhazia and South Ossetia—as independent states. U.S.-Russian relations reached a new low point in 2008.

A year after the Rose Revolution, the most consequential democratic expansion in the post-Soviet world erupted in Ukraine in 2004, the Orange Revolution. In the years prior to that momentous event, Ukraine’s foreign-policy orientation under President Leonid Kuchma was relatively balanced between east and west, but with gradually improving ties between Kyiv and Moscow. That changed when a falsified presidential election in late 2004 brought hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into the streets, eventually sweeping away Kuchma’s—and Putin’s—handpicked successor, Viktor Yanukovych. Instead, the prodemocratic and pro-western Orange Coalition led by President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko took power.

Compared to Serbia in 2000 or Georgia in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 was a much larger threat to Putin. First, the Orange Revolution occurred suddenly and in a much bigger and more strategic country on Russia’s border. The abrupt pivot to the West by Yushchenko and his allies left Putin facing the prospect that he had “lost” a country on which he placed tremendous symbolic and strategic importance.

To Putin, the Orange Revolution undermined a core objective of his grand strategy: to establish a privileged and exclusive sphere of influence across the territory that once comprised the Soviet Union. Putin believes in spheres of influence; that as a great power, Russia has a right to veto the sovereign political decisions of its neighbors. Putin also demands exclusivity in his neighborhood: Russia can be the only great power to exercise such privilege (or even develop close ties) with these countries. This position has hardened significantly since Putin’s conciliatory position of 2002 as Russia’s influence in Ukraine has waned and Ukraine’s citizens have repeatedly signaled their desire to escape from Moscow’s grasp. Subservience was now required. As Putin explained in a recent historical article, in his view Ukrainians and Russians “were one people” whom he is seeking to reunite, even if through coercion. For Putin, therefore, the loss of Ukraine in 2004 to the West marked a major negative turning point in U.S.-Russian relations that was far more salient than the second wave of NATO expansion that was completed the same year.

Second, those Ukrainians who rose up in defense of their freedom were, in Putin’s own assessment, Slavic brethren with close historical, religious, and cultural ties to Russia. If it could happen in Kyiv, why not in Moscow? Several years later, it almost did happen in Russia when a series of mass protests erupted in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities in the wake of fraudulent parliamentary elections in December 2011. They were the largest protests in Russia since 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed. For the first time in his decade-plus in power, ordinary Russians showed themselves to have both the will and the capability to threaten Putin’s grip on power. That popular uprising in Russia, occurring the same year as the Arab Spring, and then followed with Putin’s return to the Kremlin as president for a third term in 2012, marked another major negative turn in U.S.-Russian relations, ending the reset launched by Presidents Obama and Medvedev in 2009. Democratic mobilization, first the Middle East and then Russia—not NATO expansion—ended this last chapter of U.S.-Russian cooperation. There have been no new chapters of cooperation since.

But U.S.-Russian relations deteriorated ever further in 2014, again because of new democratic expansion. The next democratic mobilization to threaten Putin happened a second time in Ukraine in 2013–14. After the Orange Revolution in 2004, Putin did not invade Ukraine, but wielded other instruments of influence to help his protégé, Viktor Yanukovych, narrowly win the Ukrainian presidency six years later. Yanukovych, however, turned out not to be a loyal Kremlin servant, but tried to cultivate ties with both Russia and the West. Putin finally compelled Yanukovych to make a choice, and the Ukrainian president chose Russia in the fall of 2013 when he reneged on signing an EU association agreement in favor of membership in Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union. To the surprise of everyone in Moscow, Kyiv, Brussels, and Washington, Yanukovych’s decision to scuttle this agreement with the EU triggered mass demonstrations in Ukraine again, bringing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into the streets in what would become known as the Euromaidan or “Revolution of Dignity” to protest Yanukovych’s turn away from the democratic West. The street protests lasted several weeks, punctuated by the killing of dozens of peaceful protestors by Yanukovych’s government, the eventual collapse of that government and Yanukovych’s flight to Russia in February 2014, and a new pro-Western government taking power in Kyiv. Putin had “lost” Ukraine for the second time in a decade.

This time, Putin struck back with military force to punish the alleged American-backed, neo-Nazi usurpers in Kyiv. Russian armed forces seized Crimea; Moscow later annexed the Ukrainian peninsula. Putin also provided money, equipment, and soldiers to back separatists in eastern Ukraine, fueling a simmering war in Donbas for eight years, in which approximately 14,000 people have been killed. After invading, not before, Putin amped up his criticisms of NATO expansion as justification for his belligerent actions.

In response to this second Ukrainian democratic revolution, Putin concluded that cooption through elections and other nonmilitary means had to be augmented with greater coercive pressure, including military intervention. Since the Revolution of Dignity, Putin has waged an unprecedented war against Ukraine using a full spectrum of military, political, informational, social, and economic weapons in an attempt to destabilize and eventually topple Ukraine’s democratically elected government.

 

Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault

This article from John Mearsheimer is getting a lot of attention, as well as the lecture video I posted the other night. 

Prescient, you might say. (And liberalism here means "classical" liberalism grounded in philosophies of the Enlightenment, from folks like Emmanuel Kant, John Locke, etc.). It's not the American ideological "liberalism" associated with an earlier version of the Democrat Party, now a radical, extreme left party, not *liberal* at all). 

At Foreign Affairs, "The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin":

According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.

But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine—beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004—were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president—which he rightly labeled a “coup”—was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.

Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.

But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine. The crisis there shows that realpolitik remains relevant—and states that ignore it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.

THE WESTERN AFFRONT

As the Cold War came to a close, Soviet leaders preferred that U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an arrangement they thought would keep a reunified Germany pacified. But they and their Russian successors did not want NATO to grow any larger and assumed that Western diplomats understood their concerns. The Clinton administration evidently thought otherwise, and in the mid-1990s, it began pushing for NATO to expand.

The first round of enlargement took place in 1999 and brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second occurred in 2004; it included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Moscow complained bitterly from the start. During NATO’s 1995 bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, for example, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said, “This is the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation’s borders. ... The flame of war could burst out across the whole of Europe.” But the Russians were too weak at the time to derail NATO’s eastward movement—which, at any rate, did not look so threatening, since none of the new members shared a border with Russia, save for the tiny Baltic countries.

Then NATO began looking further east. At its April 2008 summit in Bucharest, the alliance considered admitting Georgia and Ukraine. The George W. Bush administration supported doing so, but France and Germany opposed the move for fear that it would unduly antagonize Russia. In the end, NATO’s members reached a compromise: the alliance did not begin the formal process leading to membership, but it issued a statement endorsing the aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine and boldly declaring, “These countries will become members of NATO.”

Moscow, however, did not see the outcome as much of a compromise. Alexander Grushko, then Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said, “Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.” Putin maintained that admitting those two countries to NATO would represent a “direct threat” to Russia. One Russian newspaper reported that Putin, while speaking with Bush, “very transparently hinted that if Ukraine was accepted into NATO, it would cease to exist.”

Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin’s determination to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who was deeply committed to bringing his country into NATO, had decided in the summer of 2008 to reincorporate two separatist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But Putin sought to keep Georgia weak and divided—and out of NATO. After fighting broke out between the Georgian government and South Ossetian separatists, Russian forces took control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow had made its point. Yet despite this clear warning, NATO never publicly abandoned its goal of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance. And NATO expansion continued marching forward, with Albania and Croatia becoming members in 2009.

The EU, too, has been marching eastward. In May 2008, it unveiled its Eastern Partnership initiative, a program to foster prosperity in such countries as Ukraine and integrate them into the EU economy. Not surprisingly, Russian leaders view the plan as hostile to their country’s interests. This past February, before Yanukovych was forced from office, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the EU of trying to create a “sphere of influence” in eastern Europe. In the eyes of Russian leaders, EU expansion is a stalking horse for NATO expansion...

 

Putin Follows Through on His Word

It's Pat Buchanan, at the American Conservative, "Putin Warned Us":

When Russia’s Vladimir Putin demanded that the U.S. rule out Ukraine as a future member of the NATO alliance, the U.S. archly replied: NATO has an open-door policy. Any nation, including Ukraine, may apply for membership and be admitted. We’re not changing that.

In the Bucharest declaration of 2008, NATO had put Ukraine and Georgia, ever farther east in the Caucasus, on a path to membership in NATO and coverage under Article 5 of the treaty, which declares that an attack on any one member is an attack on all.

Unable to get a satisfactory answer to his demand, Putin invaded and settled the issue. Neither Ukraine nor Georgia will become members of NATO. Russia resolved that it would go to war to prevent that from happening, just as it did on Thursday.

Putin did exactly what he warned us he would do.

Whatever the character of the Russian president, now being hotly debated here in the USA, he has established his credibility. When Putin warns he will do something, he follows through.

Days into this Russia-Ukraine war, potentially the worst in Europe since 1945, two questions need to be answered: How did we get here? And where do we go from here?

How did we get to a place where Russia—believing its back is against a wall and the United States, by moving NATO ever closer to Russia’s borders, put it there—reached a point where it chose war with Ukraine rather than accept the fate and future it believed the West had in store for Mother Russia? ...

Keep reading. 

U.S. and NATO Pressed on Ukraine Aid

 At WSJ, "As Russian Invasion of Ukraine Widens, the West’s Options Shrink":

Seven days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies are coming under increasing pressure to do more to help Ukraine, even as they face diminishing options for doing so.

As Russia continues its push to capture urban areas, one of the more drastic options discussed publicly has been a no-fly zone, which would stop Russian aircraft from launching strikes over Ukraine, eliminating a key military tactic. But the idea has been dismissed by the U.S. and NATO countries.

“That is in many ways for many people, the unspoken question. Why not just engage militarily? But that’s not something any NATO member is thinking of doing. And there’s a reason for that, which is in order to have a no-fly zone above Ukraine, in the current circumstances, you would have to take decisions to shoot down Russian jets,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Wednesday. “And that’s not something that any Western country is contemplating.”

British officials say that while the no-fly zone has been discussed at senior levels, it isn’t a realistic option given the risks of it provoking a direct conflict with Moscow.

Creating a continuous, effective no-fly zone over Ukraine, particularly with several NATO nations, would require several hundred planes, not only to uphold the no-fly zone but to support those aircraft maintaining that no-fly zone. In addition, air forces across multiple nations would have to coordinate. And, should Russia attack NATO-member aircraft, that would be seen as an attack on the 30-member alliance.

The British government has said it would instead continue to impose more sanctions on Russian individuals, deliver more weapons to Ukraine and make it easier for refugees fleeing the conflict to settle in the U.K.

Sanctions, however, won’t have an immediate effect on the battlefield, Western leaders have acknowledged. “This is going to take time,” President Biden said last week as the U.S. began rolling out punitive financial measures that included cutting off some of Russia’s largest banks from the global financial system.

However, officials hope that the unprecedented economic hit will bite the Russian economy rapidly, meaning that as the bombs fall on Kyiv, there will be Russian bank runs and Russian businesses collapsing, showing real-world consequences for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A no-fly zone could be part of an eventual peace agreement, one official said.

While NATO members have rejected any notion of direct intervention, they have recently increased their defensive presence, with more than 100 jets now at high alert, operating from 30 locations, more than 120 ships on patrol from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, and thousands more troops deployed to NATO’s east.

Mr. Putin’s reference to putting his nation’s nuclear-weapons arsenal on alert has also raised concerns among NATO allies about the potential risks of military involvement. There appears to be no consensus yet as to how the West would react to such an escalation, and one European diplomat suggested the nuclear-posture change was a bid to deflect attention away from the conduct of the war.

But if Mr. Putin did follow through with his threat, the nuclear-armed NATO members would put their nuclear arsenal on alert, officials said.

One NATO official speculated that Western countries could in such a scenario attempt to send more substantial support to Ukraine by private channels, without specifying what that would entail. A European official said this had already been discussed in government circles.

“The situation is escalating and Putin seems keen for it to escalate, he is following a logic of war,” the European official said.

On Friday, foreign ministers from NATO member states will hold emergency talks about Ukraine. Among the issues they will discuss, U.S. officials said, is how the alliance can support Ukraine, even though it is a non-NATO member. But officials conceded there aren’t many options.

Even the Western weapons shipments now streaming into Ukraine via Poland could lead to an escalation of hostilities between Russia and NATO, some officials fear, and the alliance members are divided on how much military assistance to provide. Over the weekend, the EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, said the bloc would send jet fighters to Ukraine, and, for the first time, finance member countries’ deliveries of offensive weapons to Kyiv.

Several officials familiar with the discussions said that there was never any agreement on such a move, which had merely been discussed among foreign ministers of the bloc. On Tuesday, officials in several countries that have the types of aircraft Ukrainian pilots are trained to fly said they were unwilling to provide them despite Mr. Borrell’s comment.

NATO and European officials said that there was a great concern about Russia attacking the supply lines that channel weapons and other materiel to Ukraine via Poland. The positioning of troops in Belarus as well as around Kyiv suggested that Russia was planning to cut off the western part of the country and end the shipments of arms and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

NATO members appear to accept that regardless of what measures they take, Mr. Putin appears set on widening the conflict...

Putin the Powerful: Oligarchs Can't Take Out Russian Dictator

Somewhere I read that Vladdy's hold on power had weakened since last Thursday, especially since things were going so badly on the ground. 

Perhaps not.

See Max Seddon, at the Financial Times, "Russia’s oligarchs powerless to oppose Putin over Ukraine invasion: President responds to any criticism with reprisals, leaving business leaders with diminished influence":

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As Russia’s tanks rolled into Ukraine last week, Vladimir Putin gathered the country’s top businessmen in the Kremlin’s ornate Hall of the Order of St Catherine to discuss their response to the economic shocks that would follow.

The Russian president, seated about 20ft away in a conspicuous social-distancing measure, told them he had “no other choice” but to invade Ukraine — and, if they wanted to keep their businesses, neither did they, according to people briefed on the meeting.

“It was a pointless meeting. The main idea was to explain himself. The explanation was: ‘I get it, but I didn’t have any other way out.’ That’s really what he thinks,” one of them said.

The EU on Monday froze the assets and imposed travel bans on more than half a dozen of Russia’s most prominent businessmen in a move officials have said is aimed at compelling the country’s elite to demand Putin change course.

But the power dynamic of the meeting made for a much starker message to the assembled billionaires. He warned that anyone who avoided doing business with companies sanctioned by the west would face punishment under the law — implying that the oligarchs had to make a stand — while also stating that Russia would help companies hit by western sanctions.

The comprehensive guest list for the meeting, where attendees sat in alphabetical order, showed that any form of dissent has become a distant prospect as Putin’s power becomes near-absolute, people close to some of the attendees said.

Though some, such as banker Petr Aven and Vladimir Yevtushenkov, owner of the Sistema conglomerate, were among the first to make a fortune in Russia’s turbulent 1990s, they were outnumbered by the heads of the state-run banking and energy groups that now dominate Russia’s economy — many of whom have ties to Putin’s inner circle.

Mikhail Fridman, Aven’s business partner, has criticised the war in general terms but told reporters on Tuesday he did not want to attack Putin directly because it “will not have any impact for political decisions in Russia” while endangering his employees.

“Nobody really wants to suffer. But the message is we will have to,” said a senior state banker. “Being on the US sanctions list used to be a status symbol of patriotism. But now it’s a requirement. If you’re not on it, it’s suspicious.”

The meeting showed how far Russia — and Putin himself — had come since his first meeting with the oligarchs a few months after he took office in 2000.

Then, the fledgling leader offered a deal to the wealthy businessmen: keep the gains they had made from privatising Russian state assets after the Soviet Union’s collapse in return for pledging fealty and staying out of politics.

Since then, Putin has imposed his will on the oligarchs by responding to any criticism with reprisals, leaving them with vastly diminished influence — and some of them in prison, such as the former oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent 10 years in prison on tax and fraud charges that were largely seen by international observers as politically motivated.

Some who built their fortunes before Putin came to power — such as Khodorkovsky and the banker Sergei Pugachev — have left the country. A few other more recently minted businessmen have left the country or been arrested...

Putin Accidentally Revitalized the West's Liberal Order

It's Kori Schake, at the Atlantic, "The Russian president thought he sensed an opportunity to take advantage of a disunited West. He has been proved wrong":

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has unleashed a chorus of despair—beyond the cost in Ukrainian lives, the international order that the U.S. and its allies built after World War II is, we are told, crumbling. The writer Paul Kingsnorth has declared that the liberal order is already dead. The Indian journalist Rahul Shivshankar has argued that “in the ruins across Ukraine you will find the remains of Western arrogance.” Even the brilliant historian Margaret MacMillan has written that “the world will never be the same. We have moved already into a new and unstable era.”

The reverse is true. Vladimir Putin has attempted to crush Ukraine’s independence and “Westernness” while also demonstrating NATO’s fecklessness and free countries’ unwillingness to shoulder economic burdens in defense of our values. He has achieved the opposite of each. Endeavoring to destroy the liberal international order, he has been the architect of its revitalization.

Germany has long soft-pedaled policies targeting Russia, but its chancellor, Olaf Scholz, made a moving and extraordinary change, committing an additional $100 billion to defense spending immediately, shipping weapons to Ukraine, and ending the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was constructed to bring gas to Germany from Russia. Hungary, thought to be the weakest link in the Western chain, has supported without question moves by the European Union and NATO to punish Moscow. Turkey, arguably the most Russia-friendly NATO country, having bought missile defense systems from Moscow, has invoked its responsibilities in the 1936 Montreux Convention and closed the Bosporus strait to Russian warships. NATO deployed its rapid-reaction force for the first time, and allies are rushing to send troops to reinforce frontline states. A cascade of places have closed their airspace to Russian craft. The United States has orchestrated action and gracefully let others have the stage, strengthening allies and institutions both.

We are a long way from the ultimate outcome of Russia’s invasion, but even if Ukrainian military forces cannot prevail or President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government are killed or captured, it’s difficult to see how Putin’s broader gamble succeeds. If Zelensky falls, another leader will step forward. Even Russian-speaking Ukrainians have become anti-Russian. The scene depicted in Picasso’s Guernica, one of wanton and barbaric violence, is the best Putin can hope for: Conquering Ukraine will require unspeakable brutality, and even if Moscow succeeds on this count, foreign legions are flowing to Ukraine to assist an insurgency in bleeding Russia’s occupation. If Ukraine fends off Russia’s assault, it will be welcomed into NATO and the EU.

The Ukrainian government that so recently seemed mired in corruption and division has been outstanding: President Zelensky has refused to flee and inspired resistance; outgunned and outmanned Ukrainian military forces seem to have held their own. They understand that they’re in a battle of ideas, establishing, for example, a hotline for Russian prisoners of war to call their families.

Civil activism is the lifeblood of free societies, and Ukrainians have been excelling, including the sunflower lady, who cursed Russian soldiers; civilians lining up to collect arms and make Molotov cocktails, or change out street signs to confuse the invaders; and breweries retooling to produce weaponry.

Ukraine’s tenacity and creativity have ignited civil-society energy, corporate strength, and humanitarian assistance. The hacker group Anonymous has declared war on Russia, disrupting state TV and making public the defense ministry’s personnel rosters. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has promised to help keep Ukraine online. The chipmakers Intel and AMD have stopped sending supplies to Russia; BP is divesting from its stake in the Russian energy giant Rosneft; FedEx and UPS have suspended service to Russia. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is cutting all its investments in Russia. YouTube and Meta have demonetized Russian state media. (Even Pornhub is denying Russians access.) Belarusian hackers disrupted their country’s rail network to prevent their government from sending troops to support the Russian war. Polish citizens collected 100 tons of food for Ukraine in two days. Bars are pouring out Russian vodka. Iconic architecture in cities all over the free world is lit up with the colors of the Ukrainian flag to show solidarity. Sports teams are refusing to play Russia in international tournaments. The London Philharmonic opened its Saturday concert by playing the Ukrainian national anthem, and the Simpsons modeled Ukrainian flags. This is what free societies converging on an idea looks like. And the idea is this: Resist Putin’s evil...

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The West's Sanctions Barrage Severs Russia’s Economy from Much of the World

I'm fairly blown away by how monstrous these economic sanctions are. Putin had squirreled away $650 billion in gold reserves, of which he can't even get his hands now. 

It's also fascinating that Russia's oil industry was largely spared from the sanctions barrage, explicitly because Western Europe is so dependent on Russian supplies. This is the killer weakness among the Western democracies, extreme vulnerability interdependence: The abject reliance on the world's worst authoritarian regimes (including Saudi Arabia, etc.) for their energy supplies.

This is conflict oil and should be completely repudiated by Western societies. In the U.S., that would mean the stupid Biden administration would have roll back its green energy agenda, deregulate, restore pipeline projects, allow drilling and production on federal lands, etc., and then just leave freakin' energy markets alone to boost supplies of oil, natural gas, and whatever else we need.

Sheesh. 

At the Wall Street Journal, "The country has been all-but-unplugged from a global system that powered its yearslong transition from a closed society":

Western nations dropped economic sanctions of historic scale on Russia that are hobbling its financial system and effectively reversing 30 years of post-Cold War engagement.

The economic moves by the U.S. and Europe, in response to the invasion of Ukraine, reverberated Monday through Russia’s economy, which was largely cut off from much of the West, and hindered the ability of Russia’s central bank to manage the country’s financial system and mitigate the damage.

Western banks and businesses added to the governments’ actions by halting operations in Russia and sales to Russian companies. Many cited the risks of potentially violating sanctions. More broadly, businesses prize stability, and invasions create chaos.

In just days, Russia has been all-but-unplugged from a global system that powered its transition from a closed, government-controlled economy to a more modern one that yielded Western goods, foreign travel and a middle-class lifestyle.

“Today, Russia’s financial system and economy are facing a totally abnormal situation,” the usually reserved Bank of Russia Gov. Elvira Nabiullina, dressed in black, said Monday.

The impact hit Russian stock, bond and currency markets. Its central bank shut the stock market, avoiding an expected selloff, and raised benchmark interest rates to 20% from 9.5%, to make holding the ruble more attractive and cushion its expected fall.

The ruble fell to 108.014 to the U.S. dollar from 83 on Friday—a drop of more than 20% and its worst one-day decline since Sept. 3, 1998. Shares of several large Russian companies traded in London and they fell as well. Sberbank, the country’s largest lender, was down 74%. The bank was sanctioned by Western nations. The country’s energy giants also got hit, with Gazprom falling almost 53% and Rosneft declining 42%. The central bank said the Russian stock market would remain closed Tuesday.

Russia imposed capital controls, blocking residents from sending money to foreign bank accounts and restricting payments on offshore debt. On the streets, Russians on Monday lined up at ATMs to take out cash.

The speed and breadth of the sanctions overwhelmed years of preparation by Russia after the 2014 sanctions. In a strategy dubbed Fortress Russia, the country built up more than $600 billion in foreign reserves, bought gold and pivoted some exports to China. Closing off Russia’s access to those reserves undercut the strategy, a fact acknowledged by Ms. Nabiullina, the central bank chief.

Timothy Ash, an emerging-market strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, wrote in a note to clients Monday: “From Fortress Russia to Rubble Russia in a week.”

The latest round of sanctions are likely to cause a sizable contraction for Russia’s economy this year, and could prompt bank runs and higher interest rates as the Russian ruble depreciates, according to the Institute for International Finance, a Washington-based global association of financial firms, Elina Ribakova, deputy chief economist at the IIF, said Monday she expected sanctions to bring about a contraction of at least 10% in Russia’s gross domestic product along with double-digit inflation.

“The pressure on the Russian economy is just tremendous,” said Janis Kluge, an expert on the Russian economy at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “And it’s going to get even more dramatic over the next weeks and months.”

Even before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, Russia’s central bank had difficulty bringing inflation under control. In January, the inflation rate stood at 8.7%, more than double the central bank’s target, despite a series of interest rate increases that began last March.

Boris Titov, Mr. Putin’s business ombudsman, criticized the central bank’s rate increase Monday, saying in an Instagram post that it chose to “further strangle” Russian businesses that are already “at the front-line” of sanctions...

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Xi Jinping's Power Grab

From Jude Blanchette, at Foreign Affairs, "Xi’s Gamble: The Race to Consolidate Power and Stave Off Disaster":

Xi Jinping is a man on a mission. After coming to power in late 2012, he moved rapidly to consolidate his political authority, purge the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of rampant corruption, sideline his enemies, tame China’s once highflying technology and financial conglomerates, crush internal dissent, and forcefully assert China’s influence on the international stage. In the name of protecting China’s “core interests,” Xi has picked fights with many of his neighbors and antagonized countries farther away—especially the United States. Whereas his immediate predecessors believed China must continue to bide its time by overseeing rapid economic growth and the steady expansion of China’s influence through tactical integration into the existing global order, Xi is impatient with the status quo, possesses a high tolerance for risk, and seems to feel a pronounced sense of urgency in challenging the international order.

Why is he in such a rush? Most observers have settled on one of two diametrically opposite hypotheses. The first holds that Xi is driving a wide range of policy initiatives aimed at nothing less than the remaking of the global order on terms favorable to the CCP. The other view asserts that he is the anxious overseer of a creaky and outdated Leninist political system that is struggling to keep its grip on power. Both narratives contain elements of truth, but neither satisfactorily explains the source of Xi’s sense of urgency.

A more accurate explanation is that Xi’s calculations are determined not by his aspirations or fears but by his timeline. Put simply, Xi has consolidated so much power and upset the status quo with such force because he sees a narrow window of ten to 15 years during which Beijing can take advantage of a set of important technological and geopolitical transformations, which will also help it overcome significant internal challenges. Xi sees the convergence of strong demographic headwinds, a structural economic slowdown, rapid advances in digital technologies, and a perceived shift in the global balance of power away from the United States as what he has called “profound changes unseen in a century,” demanding a bold set of immediate responses.

By narrowing his vision to the coming ten to 15 years, Xi has instilled a sense of focus and determination in the Chinese political system that may well enable China to overcome long-standing domestic challenges and achieve a new level of global centrality. If Xi succeeds, China will position itself as an architect of an emerging era of multipolarity, its economy will escape the so-called middle-income trap, and the technological capabilities of its manufacturing sector and military will rival those of more developed countries. Yet ambition and execution are not the same thing, and Xi has now placed China on a risky trajectory, one that threatens the achievements his predecessors secured in the post-Mao era. His belief that the CCP must guide the economy and that Beijing should rein in the private sector will constrain the country’s future economic growth. His demand that party cadres adhere to ideological orthodoxy and demonstrate personal loyalty to him will undermine the governance system’s flexibility and competency. His emphasis on an expansive definition of national security will steer the country in a more inward and paranoid direction. His unleashing of “Wolf Warrior” nationalism will produce a more aggressive and isolated China. Finally, Xi’s increasingly singular position within China’s political system will forestall policy alternatives and course corrections, a problem made worse by his removal of term limits and the prospect of his indefinite rule.

Xi believes he can mold China’s future as did the emperors of the country’s storied past. He mistakes this hubris for confidence—and no one dares tell him otherwise. An environment in which an all-powerful leader with a single-minded focus cannot hear uncomfortable truths is a recipe for disaster, as China’s modern history has demonstrated all too well...

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PHOTO CREDIT: "Xi giving a speech at the U.S. Department of State in 2012, with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then Vice-President Joe Biden in the background. Seated in the front row is former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger." (Wikipedia.)

How Chinese Grand Strategy Exploits U.S. Power

 From Mark Pottinger, at Foreign Affairs, "Beijing’s American Hustle":

Although many Americans were slow to realize it, Beijing’s enmity for Washington began long before U.S. President Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and even prior to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012. Ever since taking power in 1949, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has cast the United States as an antagonist. But three decades ago, at the end of the Cold War, Chinese leaders elevated the United States from just one among many antagonists to their country’s primary external adversary—and began quietly revising Chinese grand strategy, embarking on a quest for regional and then global dominance.

The United States and other free societies have belatedly woken up to this contest, and a rare spirit of bipartisanship has emerged on Capitol Hill. But even this new consensus has failed to adequately appreciate one of the most threatening elements of Chinese strategy: the way it exploits vital aspects of American and other free societies and weaponizes them in the service of Chinese ambitions. Important U.S. institutions, especially in finance and technology, cling to self-destructive habits acquired through decades of “engagement,” an approach to China that led Washington to prioritize economic cooperation and trade above all else.

If U.S. policymakers and legislators find the will, however, there is a way to pull Wall Street and Silicon Valley back onside, convert the United States’ vulnerabilities into strengths, and mitigate the harmful effects of Beijing’s political warfare. That must begin with bolder steps to stem the flow of U.S. capital into China’s so-called military-civil fusion enterprises and to frustrate Beijing’s aspiration for leadership in, and even monopoly control of, high-tech industries—starting with semiconductor manufacturing. The United States must also do more to expose and confront Beijing’s information warfare, which spews disinformation and sows division by exploiting U.S. social media platforms—platforms that are themselves banned inside China’s own borders. And Washington should return the favor by making it easier for the Chinese people to access authentic news from outside China’s so-called Great Firewall.

Some have argued that because the CCP’s ideology holds little appeal abroad, it poses an insignificant threat to U.S. interests. Yet that ideology hardly appeals to the Chinese people, either, and that hasn’t prevented the party from dominating a nation of 1.4 billion people. The problem is not the allure of Leninist totalitarianism but the fact that Leninist totalitarianism—as practiced by the well-resourced and determined rulers of Beijing—has tremendous coercive power. Accordingly, U.S. leaders should not ignore the ideological dimension of this contest; they should emphasize it. American values—liberty, independence, faith, tolerance, human dignity, and democracy—are not just what the United States fights for: they are also among the most potent weapons in the country’s arsenal, because they contrast so starkly with the CCP’s hollow vision of one-party rule at home and Chinese domination abroad. Washington should embrace those strengths and forcefully remind American institutions that although placating China might help their balance sheets in the short term, their long-term survival depends on the free markets and legal rights that only U.S. leadership can secure.

THE ART OF POLITICAL WARFARE

The West’s sluggishness in realizing that it has been on the receiving end of China’s elaborate, multidecade hostile strategy has a lot to do with the hubris that followed the United States’ triumph in the Cold War. U.S. policymakers assumed that the CCP would find it nearly impossible to resist the tide of liberalization set off by the collapse of the Berlin Wall. According to this line of thought, by helping enrich China, the United States would loosen the party’s grip on its economy, people, and politics, setting the conditions for a gradual convergence with the pluralistic West.

That was, to put it mildly, a miscalculation, and it stemmed in part from the methods the CCP employs to prosecute its grand strategy. With enviable discipline, Beijing has long camouflaged its intention to challenge and overturn the U.S.-led liberal order. Beijing co-opted Western technologies that Americans assumed would help democratize China and instead used them to surveil and control its people and to target a growing swath of the world’s population outside China’s borders. The party now systematically cultivates Western corporations and investors that, in turn, pay deference to Chinese policies and even lobby their home capitals in ways that align with the CCP’s objectives.

Beijing’s methods are all manifestations of “political warfare,” the term that the U.S. diplomat George Kennan, the chief architect of the Cold War strategy of containment, used in a 1948 memo to describe “the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives.” Kennan credited the Soviet Union with “the most refined and effective” conduct of political warfare. Were he alive today, Kennan would marvel at the ways Beijing has improved on the Kremlin’s playbook.

Kennan’s memo was meant to disabuse U.S. national security officials of “a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war.” He was hopeful that Americans could shed this handicap and learn to fight in the political realm to forestall a potentially catastrophic military conflict with the Soviets. To a great extent, Washington did exactly that, marshaling partners on every continent to contain Soviet influence.

Today, free and open societies are once again coming to terms with the reality of political warfare. This time, however, the campaign is directed by a different kind of communist country—one that possesses not just military power but also economic power derived from its quasi-marketized version of capitalism and systematic theft of technology. Although there are holdouts—financiers, entertainers, and former officials who benefited from engagement, for example—polls show that the general public in the United States, European countries, and several Asian countries is finally attuned to the malevolent nature of the Chinese regime and its global ambitions. This should come as no surprise, given the way the CCP has conducted itself in recent years: covering up the initial outbreak of COVID-19, attacking Indian troops on the Chinese-Indian border, choking off trade with Australia, crushing the rule of law in Hong Kong, and intensifying a campaign of genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China.

HIDE AND BIDE NO MORE

Those aggressive moves represent merely a new phase of a decades-old strategy. In writing his recent book The Long Game, the U.S. scholar Rush Doshi pored over Chinese leaders’ speeches, policy documents, and memoirs to document how Beijing came to set its sights on dismantling American influence around the globe. According to Doshi, who now serves on the National Security Council staff as a China director, three events badly rattled CCP leaders: the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square; the lopsided, U.S.-led victory over the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s forces in early 1991; and the collapse of the Soviet Union that same year. “The Tiananmen Square protests reminded Beijing of the American ideological threat; the swift Gulf War victory reminded it of the American military threat; and loss of the shared Soviet adversary reminded it of the American geopolitical threat,” writes Doshi. “In short order, the United States quickly replaced the Soviet Union as China’s primary security concern, that in turn led to a new grand strategy, and a thirty-year struggle to displace American power was born.”

China’s new grand strategy aimed first to dilute U.S. influence in Asia, then to displace American power more overtly from the region, and ultimately to dominate a global order more suited to Beijing’s governance model. That model isn’t merely authoritarian; it’s “neo-totalitarian,” according to Cai Xia, who served for 15 years as a professor in the highest temple of Chinese communist ideology: the Central Party School in Beijing...

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