Stromata Blog

Quote of the Day: Paying the Dane-geld

That sixteen innocent Westerners, most visibly Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, have been released from Russian captivity is a happy occasion for them, their families and their countries, but it is not, as Jim Geraghty points out this morning, an untainted diplomatic triumph:

 

The message is clear to every Russian spy, assassin, operative, hacker, or criminal: If you get caught, don’t talk. Sit tight. Be patient. Vladimir Putin can and will get you out eventually. He can get anybody out, from an arms dealer so notorious he inspired a Nicholas Cage movie to a guy who’s executing dissidents in front of horrified kids in a German park. There is no monster so heinous and wicked that Putin can’t strongarm a foreign government into releasing him.

 

We should expect additional wrongful arrests, detentions, kidnappings, and abductions in the future, because the U.S. government had made clear that the tactic works; if you arrest our people on nonsense charges and throw them in prison, we will give you back the worst of the worst, the ones who required Herculean efforts to bring to justice.

 

As the price paid for the prisoners’ release sinks in, expect to see this Rudyard Kipling quotation “again and again”:

 

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;

   But we've  proved it again and  again,

That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld

   You never get rid of the Dane.

 

If you have travel plans in Russia, it might be prudent to reconsider.

Another View of the Putin Monologue

Many watchers thought that Tucker Carlson’s interview of Tsar Putin was boring. Some thought it was outrageous: “It brings war, genocide, and fascism.” An old friend of Lithuanian descent found it mostly amusing: “Preppie Mouse Interviews Big Bad Wolf.”

Watching Putin delivering that lengthy and self-flattering version of the history of the Muscovite Despotism to the gapingly naive and historically clueless Tucker was more than a little sad and sent me struggling for a comparison case of the innocent bourgeois herbivore conversing with the monster predator who is, just for now, managing to refrain from making him into an amuse bouche.

 

One pictures Tucker as another Bilbo sitting and interviewing the Dragon Smaug about his current dwarf policies and his friction with the Rivertown. Or as Jonathan Harker listening to Count Dracula boast of his descent from Attila the Hun and victories over the Turk. I kept waiting to hear the howling of wolves nearby briefly interrupt the conversation, and expecting Putin to remark: “The Children of the Night! What music they make!”

 

But neither Bilbo nor Jonathan Harker were anywhere nearly as oblivious to the real nature of their interlocutor. Nor did either publish his own account, failing as Tucker Carlson does, to comment on the disingenuity of the Big Bad Wolf complaining of the possible installation of guard dogs at the neighboring sheep flock as an example of aggression against himself.

 

Nonetheless, “bow tie or four-in-hand, you have to give it to [Tucker], he makes an excellent tie. St. George School clearly grounds its graduates in at least some of the important fundamentals.”

Now Breaking: “Old News”

John Durham, the veteran Justice Department lawyer who was appointed to review the manner in which the FBI, CIA and other government agencies investigated (or helped contrive) allegations of Donald Trump’s collusion with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, has issued his report. The public version (there is also a classified appendix) is over 300 pages long, single-spaced. I haven’t yet read it; in fact, it has barely finished downloading to my computer. I already know, however, what enlightened opinion will say in response: “That’s old news, and Durham didn’t convict anybody of a crime. Send this to the memory hole.” Still, as Steven Hayward observes, the story is at least being reported prior to its burial:

Justice Department special counsel John Durham has at long last released his final report into the FBI’s investigation of the Trump Russia hoax of 2016, and even the mainstream media can’t conceal or disguise the blows Durham delivers at the FBI. Moreover, besides launching an investigation of Trump based on nothing and not telling him, Durham notes that very different handling of corroborated evidence that foreign interests were trying to influence Hillary Clinton’s campaign – and that she was told about it by the FBI. But as we like to say about double-standards for liberals around here. . .

On the other hand, the New York Times already has its shovels out:

John Durham, the Trump-era special counsel who for four years has pursued a politically fraught investigation into the Russia inquiry, accused the F.B.I. of a “lack of analytical rigor” in a final report made public on Monday that examined the bureau’s investigation into whether the 2016 Trump campaign was conspiring with Moscow.

Mr. Durham’s 306-page report appeared to show little substantial new information about the F.B.I.’s handling of the Russia investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, and it failed to produce the kinds of blockbuster revelations impugning the bureau that former President Donald J. Trump and his allies had once suggested that Mr. Durham would find.

As I said, “Old News”. Funny that one never saw it in the Times.

A Stalin Fan

Though their number may be diminishing, one still runs into soi-disant “social conservatives” who think that Vladimir Putin is one of their own. Sure, he lives with a concubine and occasionally has his opponents murdered, but only a squishy cuckservative makes a big deal about things like that. Perhaps Putinophiles will have second thoughts if they peruse this article on his campaign to rehabilitate the reputation of Josef Stalin.

The rationale for that effort is the Soviet tyrant’s supposed achievement of elevating Russia to the status of Great Power. Tsar Putin admires his predecessor’s expansion of Soviet power beyond the farthest reaches ruled by the Romanovs. He ignores the countervailing fact that, except perhaps for the Mongol Invasion and the Time of Troubles, no period of Russian history was more disastrous for the Russian people. That is the attitude of a ruler who, in his heart, values his subjects only as serfs whose sacrifices will redound to their master’s glory.

The Great Distraction

During my absence from this blog (occasioned by the demands of paying work), the news has been even more ominous than usual:

• Our Second Cold War adversaries, Communist China and Russia (same as the First Cold War, with the senior and junior adversaries reversed), have shattered the anti-Iran front that has long been a pillar of U.S. Middle East policy by brokering a reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Tehran.
• Meanwhile, President Biden barged into the politics of America’s other Middle East pillar, Israel. Not only did he announce his opposition to proposed judicial reforms and declare that he would shun Israel’s prime minister for an indefinite period, but the U.S. ambassador to Israel took a leading role in coordinating the anti-reform campaign. I’ll forgo discussion of the merits of the proposals, which now appear to be stalled. John Podhoretz has penned an informed discussion of the political background, showing inter alia how aberrant it is to claim that Israel’s governing coalition is flouting, rather than practicing, democracy.
• Notwithstanding the array of Ukrainian flags on Twitter feeds, the Russo-Ukrainian War has ground to a stalemate, as the Biden Administration continues its dual policies of fervent rhetorical support for Kiev and tardy, desultory action.
• Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, two significant if not gigantic institutions, have collapsed. They were the victims of either inflation or a preference for left-wing politics over sound banking practices. However that may be, the federal government reacted with a de facto extension of insurance coverage to all bank deposits, the equivalent of a fire insurance company’s announcement that it’s fine to scatter oil-soaked rags around your house while smoking cigarettes. Either this is a moral hazard blunder that will lead to more bank failures in the future or</.em> it is a special deal for politically connected bankers that won’t be repeated when community banks in flyover country experience runs. Either alternative is unsettling.
• A mob of thugs who have somehow been admitted to Stanford Law School shouted down a federal judge who had been invited to speak to the campus Federalist Society chapter. The dean in charge of diversity, equity and inclusion (who else would it have been?) sided with the hooligans, warning the judge to consider whether, when it comes to freedom of speech, “the juice is worth the squeeze”. That ought to be the metaphor to be pondered by the “students”: Is the joy of harassing heretics worth the squeeze of expulsion? But, needless to say, none of them will receive any punishment more severe than being required to attend a half day seminar on the First Amendment, at which they will jeer.
• Nashville was the site of what may have been our country’s (and probably the world’s) first incident of “stochastic terrorism”. That’s an idea that has been floating around the Left, to wit, that disagreeing with leftists leads mentally ill individuals to target the persons disagreed with. The theory’s proponents overlook two points: First, there’s no reason why disagreeing with conservatives or moderates wouldn’t have the same effect. Second, the more hysterical the cause, the more plausible the effect. There’s currently no cause more given to hysterical overstatement than “transgender rights”. A few days ago, a psychotic young female who desired to demonstrate that she was really a male (and a toxic male at that) massacred six human beings of both sexes who taught at or attended a Christian school. Thus we see the chain leading from rabid denunciation through mental illness to murder of the denounced. It’s worth noting that the anti-biology zealots have rushed to declare that the “trans community” is the real murder victim. If “stochastic terrorism” is something real, won’t that narrative beget the next slaughter?
• Oh, by the way, the trustees of the Social Security System have released their annual report, which is as gloomy as ever. The time when either benefits will have to be slashed or taxes hiked is a year closer. The somewhat misnamed Center on Budget and Policy Priorities assures us that there’s nothing much to worry about: Full benefits are safe until 2035 (or maybe 2034), and that’s a dozen years away. Something will turn up, as financial wizard Wilkins Micawber used to say.

Well, then, as I emerge from my burrow, what is everyone talking about? Former President Trump has been indicted for what is, to all appearances, conduct that no one even pretends would be criminal if committed by anybody not named Donald John Trump. That’s not good, but Mr. Trump is hardly the first public figure to be subjected to unmerited prosecution. Franklin Roosevelt’s minions devoted thousands of hours of effort and millions of dollars of tax money to trying to jail Andrew Mellon. More recent the farcical indictments of John Connolly, Ray Donovan and Tom DeLay (and Senator Ted Stevens, whose conviction was obtained through prosecutorial misconduct). Before declaring that America’s Constitutional order has broken down, perhaps we see how our judicial system operates under pressure. Mr. Trump isn’t without resources. He can defend himself and doesn’t need for every amateur lawyer in the county to weigh in on his case.

China, Russia, the Middle East, Israel, Ukraine, the banking system, enemies of reasoned discourse, looming financial commitments that our country lacks the resources to meet: Those deserve more attention, I think, than the legal tangles of a billionaire.

Put Not Your Trust in Serial Liars

Seymour Hersh, whose deceit-filled journalistic career is replete with “bombshell narratives” based on unidentified sources (in D.C. circles, it is generally believed that only the anonymous tell the truth), has a new narrative to bedazzle the gullible: “that Navy divers, operating under the cover of NATO’s annual BALTOPS exercise last June, planted remotely-operated explosives that were detonated months later, last September” and thereby put the Nord Stream pipelines out of operation for an indefinite period.

Right-of-center commentators who ought to blanch at the name “Hersh” have picked this story up with minimal skepticism (e. g., “BOMBSHELL: Yep, It Looks Like Team Biden Blew up Europe’s Nord Stream Pipeline”), presumably because the story makes the Biden Administration look bad (albeit cunning and competent, the first indicator that it’s all make-believe). The post under the headline just cited concludes:

In the reader comments a while ago, I responded to one reader with something like, “This is exactly the kind of stupid move the kids in the White House might think is really clever.”

Hersh is not always the most reliable source, but between Nord Stream and Keystone XL, it’s fair to ask: What does this administration have against energy pipelines, anyway?

Many comments on that post and on an Instapundit item linking to it took it for granted that of course the sabotage must be “Team Biden’s” doing. Some even applauded it.

Now, I yield to no one in my confidence in the ability of the incumbent Administration to act foolishly, but Hersh’s tale stretches credulity beyond the snapping point.

According to Hersh, “the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022”, that is, after President Biden had waived sanctions on companies that were constructing Nord Stream 2, thereby making it possible for that pipeline to be completed, and before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Hersh has an elaborate and unbelievable explanation of why, having forgone the easy route to blocking Nord Stream 2, the Biden Administration decided to destroy it secretly. To add to the implausibility, an inter-agency task force – evidently of considerable size, “men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments” – discussed and approved the operation. Some of those in the know were, according again to Hersh, strongly opposed to it. Nonetheless, it remained a deep, dark secret in leak-rampant Washington, D.C. until an unknown person told his story to Seymour Hersh months after the fact.

That putative source is, by the way, well-informed about every aspect of the project’s planning and implementation. There was seemingly no concept of limiting information to those with a need to know. The source knows the details of debates among the planners, of discussions with the Norwegian navy, of the way in which the bombs were planted and detonated, and so on. The Houston Astros had better operational security.

Mr. Hersh has, in short, written the scenario for a thriller rather than a credible account of events that happened in real life. This isn’t his first time. He has not with age become less of a monger of hate-America fiction.

Further Reading: Jim Geraghty, “Joe Biden, the Unilateralist Cowboy Warmonger? Really?”, rounds up more reasons to relegate Hersh’s story to the shelf reserved for fairy tales.

The Crimean Conundrum

Here is an interesting report, dated yesterday:

President Joe Biden announced on Wednesday that the U.S. would for the first time send 31 of the sophisticated [M1 Abrams] tanks to aid Ukraine’s war effort. Speaking anonymously during a press briefing, a senior administration official acknowledged that those tanks could roll on Crimea.

“We want to make sure that [the Ukrainians] have the capabilities to not only defend themselves against the Russian onslaught … but also that they have the ability to retake, to reclaim their sovereign territory, and that means everything that is recognized by international borders,” the official said.

The official was asked to clarify whether they meant retaking territory in Crimea or in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, where Russia purported to annex several areas last year.

“Crimea is Ukraine,” the official responded. “We’ve never recognized the illegal annexation of Crimea. But where the Ukrainians decide to go and how they decide to conduct operations in their country, those are their decisions to make.”

That “senior official” may be an outlier. The Biden Administration’s enthusiasm for Ukrainian victory seems to wax and wane unpredictably. The decision to equip Ukraine with our top-of-the-line armored fighting vehicles followed days of insistence that the country’s armed forces didn’t need and couldn’t effectively use M1’s. Still, the quoted statement raises a question that isn’t often addressed but will need to be answered if the current war is to come to a satisfactory conclusion: What should happen to Crimea?

Neither Ukraine nor Russia has strong historical ties to the peninsula. After the Mongol invasions in the 13th Century, it fell under the rule of the Golden Horde, then of the Ottoman Empire, then, briefly, of an independent Crimean Tatar state. In 1783, Catherine the Great annexed it to the Russian Empire. During the Russian Civil War, it was a White bastion under a democratic Tatar regime. After the Bolshevik triumph, it became the “Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic”. Agriculture was collectivized with the usual communist brutality. The Tatars were subjected to forced Russification. During World War II, they were deported en masse to the Russian far east. After the war, the “autonomous republic” was demoted to an oblast.

In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, an action of zero political significance. It wasn’t a recognition of any Ukrainian character. According to the 1959 census, ethnic Ukrainians made up only 22 percent of the population.

In the referendum on Ukrainian independence in December 1991, Crimea had the lowest voter turnout (68 percent versus 84 percent for Ukraine as a whole) and the lowest percentage of “yes” votes (57 percent in Sevastopol, 54 percent in the rest of Crimea; next lowest voting district was 83.9 percent). Those figures suggest tepid enthusiasm for the Ukrainian connection.

In 1992, the Crimean parliament voted to declare independence from Ukraine, then retracted the declaration the next day. In 1994, Yuri A. Meshkov, a supporter of Crimean independence and closer ties with Russia, won the Crimean presidency. A referendum endorsed greater autonomy for Crimea and dual Russian-Ukrainian citizenship for its residents, but the movement fizzled out as the separatists turned to fighting among themselves. The Crimean parliament and presidency were subsequently abolished (ironically, by a Ukrainian president known for his pro-Russian sympathies).

Also in 1994, Russia and Ukraine agreed to the Budapest Memorandum, which recognized Crimea as an integral part of Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine’s surrender of its nuclear weapons. That agreement seemed to settle Crimea’s status – until Russia’s “little green men” invaded in 2014 and, almost bloodlessly, seized control. A referendum in March 2014 supposedly gave 97 percent approval to annexation to Russia, but polls taken shortly before the Russian takeover showed majority opposition to joining Russia, and “a report by Russian human rights experts that was posted on the website of the Russian Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights found that turnout was only 30 to 50 percent, with just 50 to 60 percent of participants voting in favor of annexation”.

Now it is 2023, Ukraine and Russia are at war, and among Ukraine’s overt war aims is the recovery of Crimea. The strongest basis for the Ukrainian claim is the Budapest Memorandum. If this were the 18th Century, when sovereigns exchanged territories like trading cards, that argument would have heavy weight, but the notion has since developed that the inhabitants of a region should have a major say in who rules them. One can hardly say with confidence what the Crimeans, given a free choice, would prefer, and no alternative looks very satisfactory.

The first idea that comes to mind is a referendum. Let Crimeans vote for Ukraine or Russia. That would indeed resolve the issue if one side or the other won decisively, but there’s no good reason to expect that outcome. A close vote would leave the losers discontented and determined to try again, a pattern that we’ve seen in Scotland and Quebec, while nationalists in the losing party’s preferred partner would press their government to work for a reversal (not necessarily peaceful) of the electoral verdict.

Unpromising as a solution via referendum is, annexation without any formal expression of popular consent, or with a phony plebiscite like the farce of 2014, would be worse, for reasons that are too obvious to need stating.

What about independence? In different circumstances, an independent Crimea with its own national identity might obviate the current ethnic divisions. In the world as it exists, there are drawbacks. Eastern Europe doesn’t need a minuscule state (about the size of Houston in population and Vermont in area) in a strategic location, encircled by neighbors (Russia, Ukraine, Turkey) with motives for interfering in its affairs.

All in all, it seems that Crimea is not a “problem”. Problems have solutions. Crimea may have none. If, as somebody in the Biden Administration thinks would be a good idea, Ukraine recovers it by force of arms, that won’t bother me at all, but the event will be just another stage in the conflict, not its end.

Those Masterly Biden Tacticians

The Washington Post, doubtless prompted by State Department officials who are Leaking As Instructed, has reported that the Administration wants Ukraine to show the world that it is willing to negotiate with Russia (non-paywalled summary here). The aim isn’t, however, to bring about actual talks between the warring parties.

“The request by American officials is not aimed at pushing Ukraine to the negotiating table, these people said. Rather, they called it a calculated attempt to ensure the government in Kyiv maintains the support of other nations facing constituencies wary of fueling a war for many years to come.”

What better way to maintain the support of war-worried friends than to announce to readers of the Post that you have launched an insincere peace initiative?

Not that a sincere peace initiative would be any better. It would only feed Tsar Vladimir’s belief that the decadent West will give up if he just fights on long enough. When one is fighting Joe Biden and his coven of America Lasters, that belief isn’t as absurd as it ought to be.

How and Why the Experts Misunderestimated Ukraine

As Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, few observers (extremely few outside Ukraine itself, I venture to say) foresaw any result other than a quick Russian victory. The United States hastily evacuated its embassy from Kiev to Lviv, 300 miles to the west. President Biden offered to take President Zelensky to safety, too, foreseeing that he might preside over a government in exile while Tsar Vladimir’s toadies gained control of his homeland.

Matters turned out differently. I am reminded of what Winston Churchill said about the French government’s decision to surrender to Hitler. “When I warned them that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, [the French] generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, ‘In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.’ Some chicken; some neck.”

Writing for Geopolitical Monitor, Taras Kuzio, a Canadian-based British-Ukrainian scholar, has probed “why Western experts exaggerated the strength of the Russian army and underplayed Ukraine militarily and as a resilient society”. His essay is long, and much of it recounts the opinions of Ukraine’s pre-war detractors. For instance:

Watling and Reynolds writing ‘The Plot to Destroy Ukraine’ for RUSI, published nine days before the invasion, outlined a large list of victories Russia would score in the event of an invasion – none of which have actually come about. They described Ukraine as corrupt, badly divided, with ‘widespread penetration’ of Ukrainian politics and government by Russian intelligence agents. In the opening phase of the war, they wrote that Russia would destroy Ukraine’s defense, command-and-control, and other military installations. Ukraine’s best armed forces were in the Donbas and because of Russia’s advantage in artillery, armor, and aircraft, Watling and Reynolds claimed the invasion would ‘likely lead to the rapid overrunning of Ukrainian conventional units’ with Kyiv ‘enveloped within days.’

What Professor Kuzio sees as the root of such failed prognostications is summed up succinctly:

Western experts got the Russian military and Ukrainian resilience wrong because of the way post-communist studies is structured in universities and think tanks. Western experts continue to believe they are experts on both Russia and the remainder of the USSR. In no other region of the world is this the case. An expert on Argentina, for example, is not an expert on Latin America and an expert on Japan is not an expert on East Asia. Experts on Russia believe they are also possessing expertise about Ukraine and other non-Russian republics of the former USSR. This is especially true since 2014 when the number of Ukraine experts expanded many fold.

Russian experts and scholars have therefore tended to look at Ukraine through the eyes of Moscow. Western media outlets and companies were nearly always headquartered in Moscow – as in the USSR – and their journalists and employees rarely traveled to Ukraine. [Orysia] Lusevych writes that this led to: ‘At best, Ukraine was viewed as being, well, like Russia; but maybe worse. It was seen as unstable, prone to uprisings and at the mercy of its oligarchs – more corrupt, more divided, more troubled than the behemoth next door. And because it was viewed as a weak state it was assumed that Ukraine was doomed to collapse in the face of a Russian invasion.’ Western experts on Russia have always been reluctant to use sources of information from Ukraine and Ukrainian opinion polls, which I described as academic orientalism in my 2020 book entitled Crisis in Russian Studies?

Western experts exaggerated Russian military power, downplayed Ukrainian military power, ignored corruption in the Russian military, believed fairy tales about Russian military reforms, exaggerated regional divisions and under-estimated national cohesion in Ukraine. Western military reforms in Ukraine since 2014 were ignored. Meanwhile, changes in identity since 2014, the factors behind the failure of Putin’s New Russia project in 2014 and the loyalty of Ukraine’s Russian speakers were not considered.

It might help, of course, if a large segment of America’s “Russia experts” didn’t despise their own country and favor its withdrawal from world affairs.

The Long KGB

In the post below, I linked en passant to the latest piece by The Spectator’s Russia correspondent, Owen Matthews. It’s titled “Kremlin crack-up: who’s out to get Putin?” and is much worth reading but probably behind a paywall, so here are a preçis and some excerpts:

Mr. Matthews’s thesis: “Modern Russia is not just a security state but a state that has been taken over by its own security services”, that is, by the Federal Security Service (Federal'naya sluzhba bezopasnosti, “FSB” for short). The FSB is the most important of the successor agencies to the notorious KGB, which was ostensibly dissolved after the communist diehards’ failed coup of August 1991 but did not fade away.

The three most powerful men in Russia today are all current or former FSB chiefs – Putin himself, the Security Council chairman Nikolai Patrushev and the current FSB head Alexander Bortnikov. They met in the Leningrad KGB in the mid-1970s and have known and worked with each other for nearly half a century. Most other top Kremlin mandarins – for instance the Rosneft head Igor Sechin, the foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin and many more – are also drawn from that same tiny Leningrad KGB circle, leavened by a few of Putin’s old friends from his time as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the 1990s.

This coterie has been described by one of its insiders as Russia’s “new nobility”, whose members control a large part of the Russian economy, “appoint their children as ministers and even – just like the aristocracy of czarist Russia – make dynastic marriages among themselves”.

So when we consider whether regime change is possible in Russia, what we are really wondering is whether some outside force could ever challenge the rule, not of Putin himself, but of the extended FSB clan that currently holds ultimate political and economic power.

The clan faces little risk from the politically neutered armed forces:

The army has not played a decisive political role in Russia since the aftermath of Stalin’s death in 1953, when Marshal Georgy Zhukov effectively pulled off an armed coup by arresting and soon after murdering KGB boss Lavrentiy Beria. Ever since that painful showdown between soldiers and secret police, the KGB and FSB made very sure that Russia’s military had no role in internal security – most recently by creating the Russian National Guard, headed naturally by a former KGB man, Putin’s former body-guard Viktor Zolotov. The silent majority of Russia’s elite – the mid-level bureaucrats, professionals and business-people who have been robbed of their futures and their wealth by the war – are by all accounts collectively horrified by it. Notionally these people represent significant economic and bureaucratic power. But they have no organized political voice and generally have too much to lose to risk rebellion.

Potentially more potent, however, is an array of billionaires, intellectuals and media figures –

who were once in the nationalist opposition to the Kremlin but now find themselves more or less aligned with the newfound radical nationalism of the Putin regime. All have called for Putin to be more ruthless and aggressive in Ukraine. [Former Donetsk People’s Republic defense minister Igor] Strelkov has been a vocal critic of the Russian military’s failures from the start, and last month said that the war is already lost. Such radical nationalists are the true believers, they are armed, and they have spilled blood for their country. And they will not forgive further failure on the front lines.

Should the war continue to go badly, “such nationalist firebrands will be the Kremlin elite’s most dangerous foes. It is much more likely, however, that the FSB clique around Putin will respond to a rising tide of nationalist anger and frustration by becoming more nationalist and authoritarian themselves.”

That’s not a hopeful prospect. Mr. Matthews concludes –

The power of the extended FSB dwarfs that of any potential challengers except for one: a rising, angry people who feel cheated of victory by their corrupt leaders. That revolution is likely to be as chaotic and ugly as the one which followed Russia’s last catastrophic military defeat in 1917 – and will doubtless begin, as the previous one did, with angry soldiers on remote train platforms railing against the czar’s corrupt ministers.

Are Wokeness Critics Disciples of Putin?

Last Sunday, David French uncovered the cause of the Russian military’s less than juggernaut performance in Ukraine: It was “a Christian Nationalist Military Defeat”.

That Vladimir Putin is, as Mr. French puts it, “the world’s most powerful Christian nationalist” is certainly a tenable position. However one defines the term, Christian nationalists don’t occupy many leadership posts outside of neo-ultramontane chat rooms, so he has few rivals for “most powerful”. His declared desire to redeem as much as possible of the territory that Russia “lost” at the breakup of the Soviet Union and his many expostulations on Russia’s rightful place in the hierarchy of states certainly mark him as a nationalist. As for “Christian”, ever since coming to power two decades ago, he has labored, with considerable, though not complete, success, to enlist the Russian Orthodox Church as a supporter of his regime (and to redefine the Soviet Union as a covert buttress of Orthodoxy). A striking symbol of the State-Church alliance is the recently dedicated Cathedral of the Armed Forces.

Also tenable, and looking more so every day, is Mr. French’s description of how the war that Putin launched against Ukraine is going:

An incompetent army has raped, looted, and murdered its way across the Ukrainian countryside. Even its elite units lie in shattered ruins outside key Ukrainian cities, and a Ukrainian counterattack is breaking the Russian line. While the Russian elite cries for “holy war” in front of a listless crowd of state employees, the men who would be holy warriors run for the border, eager to escape conscription by any means possible.

The French connection (pardonnez-moi) is that Tsar Vladimir’s Christian nationalism led directly to his country’s military failure. That is a pure post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, whose aim isn’t to explain what is happening in Ukraine but to bolster Mr. French’s pacifist position in America’s current kulturkampf.

The Russian armed forces, already deteriorating in the twilight of the Soviet era, collapsed along with the rest of the communist tyranny, leaving behind “a shambles of an army and a totally confused military doctrine” that the inept reformers of the 1990’s were unable to rebuild. After the ill-managed war against Georgia in 2008, Putin embarked on serious military reform. Many observers saw it as a success. In November 2020, The Economist, that reliable disseminator of unbaked elite opinions, proclaimed, “Russian military forces dazzle after a decade of reform”. Some people are dazzled by gaslight.

When it became evident that Russia wasn’t going to roll over the lightly regarded Ukrainian army, Sir Antony Beevor, a military historian of some repute (and who has the distinction of having had his books banned at various times in both Russia and Ukraine), examined the flaws in Putin’s “dazzling” reform: Russia had constructed a force to refight the Great Patriotic War, oblivious to developments since 1945. It was hardly the first army to cling to the obsolete ways of the past. Nothing in Sir Antony’s analysis even hints that any ideology, much less “Christian nationalism”, was at the root of the failure.

Nor, for that matter, did a writer who, by an incredible coincidence, is also named “David French”. That David French, writing after the first week of the war, attributed the early Russian setbacks to operational planning that –

minimized Russian strengths and maximized Russian weaknesses, apparently in service of a strategy that seems to have been predicated on a catastrophic intelligence failure. Russia seems to have believed that Ukraine would collapse. It didn’t begin its invasion with a truly intense aerial or artillery bombardment because it didn’t think that would be necessary. Why destroy a city you intend to almost immediately control? Why risk inflaming Ukrainian (and world) opinion when you’d be presenting the international community with a fait accompli – something like the Crimean takeover, except on a national scale?

And the other Mr. French concluded with a warning that Russia could recover, that its failure was adventitious rather than systemic:

But for all of the stories of Russian failure, here is the very bad news: Russia will far more likely respond to battlefield setbacks the way it traditionally has – with overwhelming firepower – than by seeking peace. The history of warfare (including the history of Russian warfare) is replete with examples of early failures and terrible command decisions. But armies tend to be learning organisms. If the fight doesn’t go as they expect, they adjust tactics.

What one French didn’t see at all, the other touts as central and decisive, apparently in service of a strategy of finding a point of contact between the reviled, unsuccessful Tsar Vladimir and Mr. French’s own intellectual adversaries, on the strength of which he can make the latter guilty by association with the former.

The point of contact is opposition to the “woke” campaign to refashion human nature, an opposition to which Mr. French attaches the label “the modern Christian nationalist project”. He identifies four “salient characteristics” of this project, consisting of a premise and three tactics.

The allegedly Christian nationalist premise is “that modern ‘wokeism’ or the ‘globalist’ uniparty has not only seized absolute control of every key cultural and economic institution, it also aims to wipe out the church and destroy traditional Christian civilization”. The “Christian nationalist project” would, according to Mr. French, respond to “this existential threat” by relying on “government force”, inculcating the government with “a specific allegedly Christian moral vision” and dispensing with concern for individual moral character, which is viewed as “an impediment to necessary political victory”.

Now, I agree with Mr. French that those tactics have nothing to recommend them. I do not, as it happens, see any sign that they are the favored weapons of real-world opponents of wokeness, who, unlike denizens of the neo-ultramontane chat rooms, rely on “government force” to this extent only: that public schools should not indoctrinate students with hatred of their country and civilization or try to sexualize children, that the law should not condone the killing of unborn infants or the mutilation of adolescents, and that traditional families should be supported rather than undermined by government policy. That may be a “Christian moral vision”, but it is a vision that, until about ten minutes before this morning, was the common moral vision of almost all of mankind.

The key issue is not the tactics but the premise. Russian propaganda castigates woke culture. To Mr. French, it is scandalous that conservatives agree with Vladimir Putin to that extent. For instance, he criticizes Rod Dreher for “prais[ing] a Putin speech that attacked western ‘cancel culture’ and gender ideologies with these words [Dreher’s, not Putin’s]”:

Whatever else you think of him, Putin is telling the God’s honest truth here.

See, this is the thing. Putin, Orban, and all the illiberal leaders that our baizuocracy loves to hate are all completely clear and completely correct on the society-destroying nature of wokeness and postliberal leftism. (Emphasis in original.)

I note two points: First, Rod Dreher is about as far from an advocate of reliance on government power as one can get. His best known book urges Christians to separate themselves from secular society and build countercultural institutions independent of the state.

Second, does Mr. French deny “the society-destroying nature of wokeness and postliberal leftism”? The Woke vanguard certainly talks and acts as if it “aims to wipe out the church and destroy traditional Christian civilization”. Is it so terrible to pay them the compliment of assuming that they mean what they say?

Another of Mr. French’s “Christian nationalists” is Jordan Peterson, whose connection with Christianity is tenuous and with nationalism nonexistent but who is a vocal critic of wokeness. So far as I can discern, he opposes government imposition of values and has never suggested that good character should be subordinated to political victory.

In short, Mr. French’s essay amounts to an ad hominem assault on the proposition that wokeness is a danger to society, not a useful criticism of anti-woke tactics. In fact, by directing his fire at the premise of anti-wokeness, he makes it likely that budding neo-ultramontanes will wave aside his tactical advice.

It is possible to agree with someone, including Vladimir Putin, about the dangers of wokeness without otherwise embracing him. Putin is no exemplar of Christian principles or practice (his speeches are antithetical to the Sermon on the Mount, he assassinates opposition politicians and journalists, and he lives with a concubine on whom he has showered riches stolen from the Russian treasury), but even he has no truck with the fashionable pseudo-theology that now confronts Western civilization. Concurring with him on one thing, even one big thing, doesn’t entail being a Putinist, much less a follower of “Christian nationalism”.

Defenders of civilization would be ill-advised, putting it mildly, to adopt the methods of the ex-KGB clique that currently dominates Russia, which share much with the methods of distributed totalitarianism’s “cancel culture”. But they would be disastrously wrong to abandon the fight out of distaste for unsavory figures who have shown up on the same side.

.

The Case of the Leaking Pipelines

The leaks in the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines have attracted the attention of Internet Nero Wolfes, and why shouldn’t I join the investigation? Let us review the facts, Archie.

• Two pipelines running underneath the Baltic Sea connecting Russia with Germany have sprung major leaks.
• The leaks were preceded by seismic events in their vicinity, one measuring 1.8 on the Richter Scale, the other 2.3. The director of the Swedish National Seismic Network says that there is “no doubt” that the events were explosions rather than earthquakes. By earthquake standards, the blasts were puny, but as explosions they were more than a pipeline would likely be able to withstand.
• The pipelines are not currently doing anything useful, because Russia has cut off deliveries via Nord Stream 1, and Nord Stream 2 has yet to start up.
• There are no estimates of how long repairs will take. It doesn’t sound like they will be completed swiftly.
• Within the past few days, a natural gas pipeline connecting Norway and Poland via Denmark has begun operations, and Germany has secured supplies of liquified natural gas from Abu Dhabi.

Applying the reader-tested mantra of “motive, method, opportunity”, what can we make of this?

The suspects that have so far been suggested are Russia, the United States, Poland and Ukraine. All four surely possess the means to sabotage the pipelines. It doesn’t appear to be an overly complex operation. The Baltic is shallow. Properly equipped divers could reach the lines and plant explosives without great difficulty.

Opportunity is questionable for Ukraine. It has no access to the Baltic and would be very foolish to take the risk of hiring third parties who might betray the plot.

Motive is murky. If we rule out insanity, the ancient question cui bono offers little insight.

• Nord Stream gives Russia its major leverage over a Western Europe that is nearing an energy-short winter. That leverage is now gone. Russia can’t wave offers to resume the natural gas flow as a lure to freezing Germans. I have seen the suggestion that Putin wanted to demonstrate that he has the ability to render pipelines inoperable, in order to discourage competitors like the Norway–Poland line, but (i) who ever doubted that?, and (ii) if that were the motive, wouldn’t Putin be advertising what he did rather than denying it?
• The United States may be pleased that Tsar Putin has lost an important card from his deck, but the card is diminishing in importance. More seriously, inflicting damage of this kind on his country would be monumentally short-sighted. Someday Putin will no longer be in power, and it will be in our interest to repair relations with Russia. If the U.S. had a hand in this operation, the odds are high that it will come to light, as have so many secrets that would be better kept in the cupboard. That will certainly do nothing to foster amity. In any event, it stands not within the prospect of belief that the timorous fools around Joe Biden would take any bold action.
• Poland has very little to gain from shutting down Nord Stream. Its own new line would have an operational Nord Stream as a competitor, but there is plenty of demand for natural gas to go around, and any hint of Polish involvement would destroy its already frayed relations with other EU members.

Where does that leave us? We are looking for a suspect that (i) has reasons to keep Nord Stream from operating, (ii) has the capability of sabotaging it and (iii) would not be deterred by the prospect that its role might become known. Let me hazard a guess at a culprit that fits that description.

Eco-extremists loathe natural gas. They would like to see it replaced by wind and sunshine and fairy dust. They aren’t scrupulous about how they achieve their ends. Knocking out two major pipelines is a step toward their energy-free utopia.

Some eco-extremist groups are very well-funded. The cost of a few ships, trained divers and explosives would be well within their means.

Most importantly, these groups have demonstrated that they are utterly unafraid of adverse public reactions to their exploits. Being quasi-religious fanatics, they are willing to be martyred for their cause.

Of course, this is all theorizing in my study, and I have no Archie to do the leg work. Nonetheless, it seems to me to be a theory worth thinking about.

A Ukrainian Perspective on the Murder of Darya Dugina

One of my old college buddies sent me these gleanings from his recent visit to his son, who married a Ukrainian girl and now lives there. The son is fluent in Russian and follows the Russian media closely. Here is a summary of his observations concerning the murder of crackpot intellectual Aleksandr Dugin’s daughter Darya and its impact on the Russo-Ukrainian war:

1. Dugin was a marginal extreme Orthodox-nationalist with little influence on Putin or Russian opinion in general.
2. Blowing up his daughter has changed that situation overnight. She is now a martyr and his public statement about the matter is widely known and probably influential.
3. Dugin’s statement is that revenge is beneath us Russians as a nation; what is worthy of us is winning this war, and we must now unite our efforts to do it.
4. This is potentially a game changer, as Putin has lacked sufficient support for a general mobilization and all-out war effort. As my son puts it, Putin has avoided any inconvenience to the wealthy and powerful elites of Moscow and St Petersburg, who definitely don’t want their sons sent off to war. Nor does the military-age population of Russia’s large cities have any enthusiasm for killing Ukrainians.
5. I’ve seen how Russian atrocities have motivated my son’s Ukrainian friends to support all-out war, as in, “We’d rather die than submit to Russia.” That dynamic is capable of working both ways.

The first point is, by the way, consistent with Mark Galeotti’s appraisal of Dugin in The Spectator:

This murder will only add to the Dugin myth, one he himself has so assiduously developed. There are many in the West happy to take him at face value, as “Putin’s Brain” or “Putin’s Rasputin.” He is not, though, and never has been especially influential. He has no personal connection to Putin, but rather is just one of a whole breed of “political entrepreneurs” trying to pitch their plans and doctrines to the Kremlin. For a while, in 2014, he was in favor; his notions of Russia’s civilizational destiny and status as a Eurasian nation convenient to rationalize a land grab in Ukraine’s Donbas. Suddenly he was on every TV channel, his book Foundations of Geopolitics was on the syllabus at the Academy of the General Staff and he was offered a chair at MGU, Moscow State University, the country’s premier institute of higher learning.

But then the Kremlin decided against outright annexation of the Donetsk and Lugansk “People’s Republics” and Dugin was no longer useful. The invitations began to dry up, MGU rescinded its offer, and he was back in the marketplace, hawking his books to the public and his ideas to the leadership. In the process, he mastered the art of retrospective thought-leading. In other words, of picking up on hints about what the Kremlin was about to do and loudly advocating just this move – and then claiming the credit. Overall, though, he has been more effective in selling himself to western alt-right circles – which to be sure, gives him some value to Moscow as an agent of influence – than to the Kremlin.

So this is the Dugin paradox, he is Schrödinger’s Ideologist: at once important and also not. He may not have real traction with the government, but his capacity to present himself as a profound thinker whose (often barking mad) ideas frame Kremlin thinking means he is considered important. And if people think him important, then to a degree he becomes important. Or rather, the myth of Dugin does.

The comparison of Dugin to Rasputin is ironic. While the false monk was undoubtedly an evil presence in the Romanov court, his opinions about foreign policy were pacific. He pleaded with Nicholas II not to enter the Great War. If the Tsar had listened, Russia might well have been spared a century of sorrow.

Here and There Around the Web

* Is Vladimir Putin, as is often alleged, no more than a revenant of the Soviet Union? Ilan Berman of the American Foreign Policy Council argues that the Russian strongman’s world view owes more to the tsars than the commissars: a melding of “persistent imperial nostalgia, internal demographic pressures, and an appealing ideology of expansionist destiny”.

While at least some hope in the West remains that, post Putin, Russia will trend in a more pluralistic and open direction, such a future is far from assured. In fact, in historical terms, it is far more likely that Russia undergoes what political scientists Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright and Erica Frantz have described as an “autocratic to autocratic” transition, in which Putin is replaced by another strongman or analogous illiberal figure. Once he is, the same strategic factors that have preoccupied Putin to date can be expected to weigh upon his successor as well, irrespective of the way in which they ascend to power in Russia’s fractious domestic political scene. [footnotes omitted]

* Theodore Kupfer asks, “Where Did Wokeness Come From?” and reviews the leading theories: idealist (“the offspring of long-gestating intellectual trends”), psychological (either a quasi-religion “filling a spiritual vacuum in American life” or “a byproduct of the infantilization of young Americans”), materialist (“woke capital” finding money making opportunities in fads like ESG or “woke labor”, “a glut of well-educated but insecure white-collar workers use their control over corporate resources to push a political agenda that they not only agree with but also depend upon for job security”) and legalist (the metastasis of civil rights laws intended to combat discrimination into a set of legal doctrines that actively promote it). Mr. Kupfer doesn’t think that any of these has sufficient explanatory power by itself.

Left with a set of theories that don’t seem to work on their own but complement each other well, one could embrace a synthesis: a perfect-storm view, in which all these different phenomena happen at once. Thus, a certain brand of overprotective parent raised a generation of kids susceptible, in an era of declining religiosity, to morally urgent ideologies. The theory-suffused academy was happy to supply such an ideology, which these kids took up with gusto upon arriving on campus, despite its evident shortcomings. When they graduated and started entering the white-collar work force, litigation-averse corporations – already seasoned in adjusting their behavior to comply with civil rights laws – happily indulged the political demands of this socially engaged class of workers. And, thanks to the immense cultural power of well-educated Americans and the economic power of large companies, that ideology became increasingly visible, and eventually all but inescapable.

Well, maybe. My theory is that progressives become Woke by taking ergot supplements.

* James Carroll, a veteran anti-Christian polemicist, offers a screed in The New Yorker fulminating against the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. Ho, hum, you say. What makes it noteworthy is this bit of lunacy:

The elevation of the issue of abortion as the be-all and end-all of Catholic orthodoxy echoes the anti-modern battles that the nineteenth-century Church fought. A pair of dates tells the story. In 1859, Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” and the idea of biological evolution began to grip the Western imagination. In 1869, Pope Pius IX, in his pronouncement “Apostolicae Sedis,” forbade the abortion of a pregnancy from the moment of conception forward – an effective locating of human “ensoulment” at the joining of the ovum and sperm, an all but explicit rejection of evolutionary theory. [emphasis added]

So the Pope’s recognition of biological reality – that conception brings into being a new, unique organism of the human species – was a rejection of science? A couple of paragraphs later, Mr. Carroll endorses “the idea that ensoulment unfolds during the process of fetal development, at some indeterminate point weeks or months after conception”, an idea with no scientific grounding at all. Next to this nincompoop, Pio Nono was Charles Darwin’s blood brother.

* The invaluable Steven Hayward calls attention to a draft report by a committee of Yale University faculty on “Size and Growth of Administration and Bureaucracy at Yale”. It’s a draft report, because, although it was completed last January, Yale administrators have fought vigorously to suppress it, after a determined effort to deny the committee access to pertinent data. Professor Hayward’s source is an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a publication whose outlook is far from conservative or anti-bureaucratic. You can read the article here if you don’t mind signing up to get e-mail traffic from the Chronicle.

* And, in conclusion, this is the most appalling thing you will read today. Theodore Bilbo has soul siblings in the Minnesota Federation of Teachers.

What Ukraine Means to Russia

Lest there be any misunderstanding, this post isn’t an exercise in tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. I don’t believe that the historical links between Ukraine and Russia justify Tsar Putin’s program of uniting by force what are now two distinct countries. I do believe, on the other hand, that refusal to recognize that the Russian view isn’t simply an arbitrary and capricious excuse for naked conquest hinders the formulation of effective policies. One debilitating consequence has been an underestimation of Russians’ willingness to suffer for the sake of victory in the present war. A second is a lack of awareness of the possibilities for peace and reconciliation founded on a common heritage.

Ironically, many of the setbacks to Russia’s own war effort can be traced to its rulers’ misunderstanding of Ukraine. Thinking of the Ukrainians as Russians-at-heart oppressed by neo-Nazis, Putin prepared for a short war against an enemy that he thought would welcome liberation or, at worst, be ambivalent about resisting à l'outrance.

To Americans, it may seem that Ukraine is peripheral to Russia, just as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan were peripheral to the United States, perhaps important for reasons of state but incapable of arousing popular sentiment. There are, however, many reasons for Russians to regard Ukraine in much the same way that the Americans regard Great Britain, that is, as a land to which they have a long and deep historical and cultural attachment, in fact, as the original Russia.

The truth is that Ukraine is to Russia as Great Britain is the United States. Ukraine and Russia had no meaningful separate histories until the Thirteenth Century. After the formation of the first Rus’ state in the Ninth Century, the Grand Principality of Kiev was the center of the Rus’ lands. Attached to it were lesser principalities that were independent in their foreign and domestic policies and yet in some sense belonging to a single entity. Every prince was (at least notionally) descended from the dynastic founder, Rurik. Moreover, the principalities formed a hierarchy. When a prince died, the holders of the lower-ranked appanages moved up. The deceased’s heir had to start on the bottom rung.

The Mongol invasions in the 1240’s broke Rus’ apart. Ukraine fell under Polish domination except for the easternmost, largely unsettled region. The Metropolitans of Kiev, the foremost hierarchs of the Rus’ church, abandoned the city, eventually settling in then-obscure Moscow. Their see is ancestral, albeit in a complicated way, to the present-day Patriarchate.

The breakup of the Rus’ state and the political sway over its lands exercised by Mongols and Poles didn’t wholly sever the ties among the Rus’ peoples. In particular, Orthodoxy remained the common faith. St. Peter Mogila, elevated to a restored Kiev Metropolitanate in 1633, is one of the key figures in Russian Orthodox history. His Orthodox Confession of the Catholic and Apostolic Eastern Church was one of the earliest and most influential Orthodox responses to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in the West. His educational reforms and patronage of printing likewise provided the tools needed to preserve Orthodoxy in the face of contemporary challenges.

In 1648, Ukrainians rebelled against Polish rule. After a long, bitter war, the majority of their territory gained independence. Establishing a stable government proved impossible, however. In 1654, the Treaty of Pereiaslav united Ukraine and Muscovy, although the unified Tsarist state was very different from medieval Rus’. During the Soviet era, schoolchildren were taught that the principal motive for the rebellion was Ukrainians’ fervent desire to join their Muscovite brethren in a single state – a dubious historical theory that was inculcated vigorously and is bound to have left a mark on the popular consciousness.

For the next 337 years after Pereiaslav, Ukraine (excepting the western regions that Poland held onto until Austria seized them in the Partitions) was an important part of the Russian Empire. Ukrainians held high positions in the Imperial Army, the Civil Service and the Russian Orthodox Church. Among the luminaries of Russian literature was Mykola Vasyl’ovych Hohol’, whom you know as “Nikolai Gogol”. Many Ukrainians agreed completely with the idea that there was no fundamental difference between the two peoples and adopted without qualms the designation of their territory as “Little Russia”.

These historical facts are not Putinist propaganda. One may find them in Orest Subtelny’s Ukraine: A History, a work that, it has been said, “seep[ed] into the consciousness of those at the forefront of the independence movement and embolden[ed] them”. There are, of course, other facts, such as emergence of a distinctive Ukrainian literary language and national consciousness in the 18th and 19th Centuries, the attempt by both Tsars and Bolsheviks to suppress Ukrainian identity, and, above all, the Holodomor, the Stalin-made famine that killed three or four million Ukrainians.

Soviet oppression led to consequences that haunt Ukrainian nationalism to this day. Ukraine’s hesitancy between evils during World War II is the frail scaffold supporting Putin’s calumnies about a “Nazi regime” in Kiev.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, many Ukrainians preferred the devil they didn’t know to the one that they did. Villages welcomed German soldiers with bread and salt, the traditional symbols of hospitality. Ukrainian collaboration with the invaders was widespread. Some went so far as to enlist in the invaders’ armed forces, which assigned them to such repulsive duties as policing extermination camps.

Needless to say, Adolf Hitler had no more use for Soviet subjects who assisted the Germans than for those who fought against them or tried to remain neutral. All were Slavic Untermenschen destined to be enslaved or starved. A German general said after the war that it was lost on the day that the Wehrmacht entered Kiev and raised the swastika rather than the Ukrainian flag. Once Hitler’s plans for the conquered lebensraum became evident, the leading Ukrainian nationalist groups fought both the Nazis and the communists, a noble effort (continuing for several years after the end of World War II) but doomed to failure.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine became, for the first time since the pre-Mongol era, an independent, self-governing nation. It is worth noting that in the referendum on independence from Russia (December 1, 1991), every administrative region in the Russian-majority Donbas voted at least 75 percent “da”. (The only relatively close vote was in Crimea (54.19% in favor).)

Ukraine is not alien to Russia, though it has been alienated. From that fact, we can draw some conclusions. First, the Russian war to subdue Ukraine stems from more than an appetite for random conquest. To attribute it to “security concerns” prompted by Kiev’s potential membership in NATO and the European Union is an obvious error. Russians of the Putin stripe would covet the birthplace of Rus’, were it as neutral as Switzerland, and they are unlikely to be appeased by any partial victory imposed by outside powers.

Second, the mutual history of the two countries could form the foundation for lasting amity. Peoples with close cultural and historical links don’t often become perpetual enemies. The United Kingdom and the United States are the classic example, but the same is true of Spain and its former New World colonies. There is no inherent reason why Kiev and Moscow can’t someday be as friendly as Washington and London.

Admittedly, reconciliation hardly seems possible in the midst of the present war, and a great many Ukrainians evidently want to treat Russia in the way that Black Lives Matter treats America, as an oppressive “colonial” power. Excising everything Russian from Ukraine will, however, leave very little of Ukraine, for Ukraine, not Muscovy, is the real, historical heart of Russia.

Russian Sanctions: A Dissenting Opinion from Yale

Google “Russian sanctions failing”, and you’ll get a screenful of skepticism about the effectiveness of the West’s economic warfare against the Putin regime. A new article in Foreign Policy asserts that the naysaying is based on myth, indeed, on a congeries of myths. According to two Yale academics (who don’t even include their preferred pronouns in their bylines, so maybe they aren’t crazy), “Actually, the Russian Economy Is Imploding”. (The article summarizes an academic paper that can be downloaded from SSRN. For those who like such things, a deck of PowerPoint slides is also available).

Their conclusions are based on data gathered from various unofficial sources, a necessity owing to the cessation of large swathes of formerly available government statistics.

The Russian government has progressively withheld an increasing number of key statistics that, prior to the war, were updated on a monthly basis, including all foreign trade data. Among these are statistics relating to exports and imports, particularly with Europe; oil and gas monthly output data; commodity export quantities; capital inflows and outflows; financial statements of major companies, which used to be released on a mandatory basis by companies themselves; central bank monetary base data; foreign direct investment data; lending and loan origination data; and other data related to the availability of credit. Even Rosaviatsiya, the federal air transport agency, abruptly ceased publishing data on airline and airport passenger volumes. . . .

Mindful of the dangers of accepting Kremlin statistics at face value, our team of experts, using private Russian-language and direct data sources including high-frequency consumer data, cross-channel checks, releases from Russia’s international trade partners, and data mining of complex shipping data, have released one of the first comprehensive economic analyses measuring Russian current economic activity five months into the invasion, with contributions from Franek Sokolowski, Michal Wyrebkowski, Mateusz Kasprowicz, Michal Boron, Yash Bhansali, and Ryan Vakil. From our analysis, it becomes clear: Business retreats and sanctions are crushing the Russian economy in the short term and the long term.

The article makes these key points:

• Russia lacks the infrastructure needed to replace European natural gas sales with sales to Asia. “Less than 10 percent of Russia’s gas capacity is liquefied natural gas, so Russian gas exports remain reliant on a system of fixed pipelines carrying piped gas. The vast majority of Russia’s pipelines flow toward Europe; those pipelines, which originate in western Russia, are not connectable to a separate nascent network of pipelines that link Eastern Siberia to Asia, which contains only 10 percent of the capacity of the European pipeline network.”
• Russian oil exports to Asia likewise cannot replace the loss of European sales. “Recognizing that Russia has nowhere else to turn, and mindful that they have more purchasing options than Russia has buyers, China and India are driving an unprecedented approximately $35 discount on Russian Urals oil purchases.” Further impediments are distance – “it takes Russian oil tankers an average of 35 days to reach East Asia, versus two to seven days to reach Europe” – and declining projections of oil production by Russia’s own energy ministry.
• Russia isn’t substituting Chinese imports for goods no longer available from the West; “in fact, according to the most recent monthly releases from the Chinese General Administration of Customs, Chinese exports to Russia plummeted by more than 50 percent from the start of the year to April, falling from over $8.1 billion monthly to $3.8 billion” (though figures for imports from China since the start of the war would be more pertinent).
• Despite Kremlin claims to the contrary, the Russian Purchasing Managers Index and “high-frequency data such as e-commerce sales within Yandex and same-store traffic at retail sites across Moscow reinforce steep declines in consumer spending and sales”.
• Russia’s finance minister anticipates “a budget deficit this year equivalent to 2 percent of GDP”, and the money supply has nearly doubled since the beginning of the war.
• On paper, Russia has $600 billion or so of foreign exchange reserves, but half of that is frozen in Western institutions, and reserves have decreased by about $75 billion since the war began, “an alarming rate”.
• The strong ruble is a favorite Putin talking point (and the one most often presented, in my experience, as prime evidence that sanctions have accomplished nothing), but “the appreciation of the ruble is an artificial reflection of unprecedented, draconian capital control [sic] – which rank among the most restrictive of any in the world. The restrictions make it effectively impossible for any Russian to legally purchase dollars or even access a majority of their dollar deposits, while artificially inflating demand through forced purchases by major exporters.”

At least at first reading, the case is pretty strong, although the lack of data leaves room for doubt. The authors seem to have a salmon of doubt themselves, for they end with a plea for more and tougher sanctions. If the Russian economy is truly imploding, is that course necessary, or even wise? Someday the war in Ukraine will end, perhaps in the less than distant future, as each side’s resources are badly strained. It’s not in our long-term interest for Russia to become a wounded pariah. The victors in the Great War made impoverished outcasts of the defeated nations. How well did that work out?

Should We Start Thinking About Cutting the Internet Cord?

The war in Ukraine has called at least some people’s attention to cybernetic warfare. Russia has in the past launched massive attacks on Internet-connected computers in other countries (Estonia in 2007, Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2022). If, as seems increasingly likely, its current conflict ends in embarrassing defeat, a weakened and humiliated Russia may see hacking in the same way that Hitler saw rockets and jet fighters, as a last equalizer against the country’s perceived enemies.

With that thought in mind, consider the speculative scenario that James Meigs lays out in the May issue of Commentary:

The event that would come to be known as “Cyber Harbor,” or “Cyber 11th,” started small. One morning, the “autopilot” mode on some Tesla cars started going haywire. First, dozens, then thousands of cars began veering into oncoming traffic all across the country. Emergency rooms were swamped with crash victims. Then, office workers in dozens of industries watched in shock as their computers began spontaneously deleting files. It took about 24 hours for officials to realize that these scattered problems were connected. The power grid was next: Blackouts began in California and soon rolled across most of the U.S. The Internet started crumbling as well. Routine communications became impossible.

It took only a few days for grocery-store shelves to go bare. Gas stations put out “No Fuel” signs. Even if supplies of food and gas were available, trucks couldn’t deliver them. The country’s banking system had collapsed; with credit cards and ATMs disabled, truckers had no way to buy diesel fuel. The backup generators powering hospitals, police stations, water-treatment plants, and other critical infrastructure eventually drained their fuel tanks and went silent.

In most cities, the looting tapered off after about two weeks. There was nothing left to steal. By then, armed gangs had begun roaming the suburbs, breaking into houses and ordering the terrified homeowners to surrender any hidden caches of food.

The remainder of the article presents evidence that –

a large-scale cyberattack on the United States of the sort I describe here is becoming more thinkable by the day. Ukrainian military victories and Western sanctions have pushed Vladimir Putin into a desperate corner. And while Russia is now making a show of negotiations, there’s no doubt Putin is keeping his options open. Russian leaders have raised the threat of nuclear weapons several times during this conflict. We need to take that threat seriously, especially if Putin concludes that his regime, and therefore his life, is at risk. But a full-blown cyberwar is far more likely than a nuclear exchange. And it could be just as devastating.

Mr. Meigs outlines the factors “greasing the skids toward cyberwar”: “First, our vital infrastructure is more automated than ever before.”

“Second, there are more computers to hack: Not just smartphones and laptops, but the myriad devices that make up the Internet of Things – digital doorbells, smart speakers, thermostats, children’s toys, and more.”

Third, “all these previously disparate technologies” are connected through the Internet. For example –

Modern vehicles contain 50 or more computer systems, and many receive automatic, over-the-air software updates. Once, a criminal who wanted access to your car would have had to jimmy the lock. Today, a few bits of malicious code could give a hacker entrée to all vehicles of a particular make and model. To put it another way, hackers trying to sow chaos on our highways wouldn’t need to target individual cars; they could target entire networks of cars. Now apply that same logic to other networks of crucial technology: gas pumps, ATMs, aircraft cockpits, hospital ICUs, and so on.

A decade ago, Iranian hackers showed how oil production could be drastically curtailed without setting fire to wells, blowing up refineries or hijacking supertankers.

They just exploited a weakness in Microsoft’s Windows operating system to take over the computers of some 40,000 Aramco office employees. Workers in marketing, finance, HR, and other departments watched as the “wiper virus” systematically erased files and then disabled 85 percent of the company’s computers. Aramco’s only solution was to unplug every workstation and completely disconnect from the Internet.

Of course, that made work impossible. In an effort to go green, Aramco had done away with most paper records. So the company didn’t have a database of customers or vendors, or even contact information for its own employees. Even though its refineries and drilling rigs had been left untouched, Aramco struggled to keep product flowing. Gasoline tankers backed up for miles at Aramco refineries as workers tried to invent paper-based systems for billing and record-keeping on the fly. It took months to sort out the mess. There’s a lesson here: It is natural to focus security efforts on high-risk infrastructure such as pipelines or power plants. But even humble back-office functions can prove crucial if they are disabled en masse. Everything is connected.

It would be ideal to have an “Iron Dome” against that kind of attack, but that is a fantasy. The great vulnerability of computer networks is the human beings who use them. The Democratic National Committee in 2016 had a top-of-the-line IT staff, but nothing could prevent John Podesta from falling for a grade school level phishing scam.

Mr. Meigs urges greater attention to cybersecurity, but he puts little trust in its efficacy. Just as there is only one sure way not to become pregnant (just one known failure in the past 2,000-plus years), there is only one sure way to prevent a cybernetic catastrophe: Don’t let the Internet be critical to your life.

Private business and public utilities should rethink their fashionable focus on lean, just-in-time supply chains. Efficiency has been the watchword, but as the Covid pandemic revealed, hyper-efficient supply chains are also hyper-vulnerable to disruption. We need more redundancy – more slack in the system. That goes double for the power grid and other physical infrastructure. It’s important to protect these systems from attack. But it is just as important to ensure they can bounce back quickly if they are damaged. Even people in seemingly noncritical fields should remember that nothing digital is secure. Virtual assets need redundancy, too: Any information an organization can’t function without should have a paper backup. [emphasis added]

Homeowners as well need to plan for the worst. We don’t all need to start building fallout shelters, but every home should have enough food, medicine, batteries, and other essentials to survive for three weeks at least. And toilet paper. Never forget the toilet paper.

How many people will follow that advice? How many, in the current state of things, can? Could it be that the country needs a Resiliency Board far more urgently than one for “Disinformation Governance”?

From the Pen of the Disinformation Tsarina

If the information that we receive is going to be “curated” by the federal government, we should pay attention to the views of the curator. With that in mind, I expended ten bucks for the Kindle version of Nina Jankowicz’s book How to Lose the Information War. It’s easy to see why Biden minions wanted its author on their information control team. For the past several years, she has engaged in research on Russian disinformation campaigns. Her book includes chapters on the responses of the United States, Estonia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine and the Czech Republic, responses that she judges to have been sadly inadequate. So she brings a plausible aura of expertise to her new post as executive director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board (a name that could have been coined only by some bureaucrat who privately loathes it).

She has a second qualification that comes through as one browses through the book. She is a one-dimensional political partisan: There is a “near-complete lack of evidence” for “alleged anti-conservative bias on the [social media] platforms.” [p. 130] It is a “falsehood” to say “that the Biden family engaged in corrupt activity in Ukraine”. [p.149] In what is clearly a sub silentio allusion to the New York Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell”, she commends Twitter for “no longer allow[ing] the distribution of hacked materials” (the ex post facto excuse for blocking the Post reporting). [p. 130] The Trump Administration enacted a “travel ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries”. [p. 22] The Mueller Report is mentioned but not its most dramatic disinformation-related finding, that the “Steele Dossier”, the bludgeon that Democrats wielded for three years against Donald Trump, was a work of fiction. [pp. 23 and 31] And so on.

So what prescription does Tsarina Nina have for disinformation? After six chapters of case studies, Chapter 7 deals with remedies. She quotes testimony that she delivered before a Senate committee in 2018 regarding what will not suffice:

Even if the United States Government were to acknowledge the threat posed by Russian influence campaigns today in no uncertain terms, and we were to walk out of the hearing room and secure beyond a shadow of a doubt the country’s election infrastructure; even if we hermetically sealed our information environment from inauthentic users and false or misleading information, and if social media companies finally put forth a good faith effort to put users and the security of our democracy first; even then, we would still not successfully dispel the threat our democracy faces from malign actors’ political influence operations. [p. 137]

She goes on to say –

These short-term solutions do not address the underlying societal fissures that left us vulnerable to information operations in the first place. As Estonia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic have learned, it’s past time to begin a generational investment to build resilience within populations and target the root causes of our weaknesses. [p. 139]

She has already observed that –

many of the countries I’ve profiled here still believe that good communications or the establishment of a compelling narrative is the key to winning the information war. They’re not alone. This sentiment is popular in the West as well. It is misguided, but persistent. [p. 134]

The “generational investment” is not, then, to go toward expounding truth and countering falsehood. The Tsarina and I almost agree here. Government investment in “narratives” generally has a low ROI, particularly where citizens are left free to dispute the narrative. That is as far as our agreement goes.

The first, near-term element of the Tsarina’s program is –

to set the guardrails of the internet and the social media platforms on which we share so much of our lives.

That begins with setting clear and unified definitions of not only the rules of the road, but the vehicles on them. . . . Imagine how difficult driving would become if neighboring states or countries defined simple concepts like right of way or speed limits differently. This is essentially how social media platforms operate today. Each has its own definition of disinformation, of hate speech, and of targeted abuse, among other concepts, and each deals with each of those concepts differently. [p. 139]

While conceding that “we are hesitant to allow government bodies jurisdiction over our right to free speech”, she justifies the intrusion by the fact that “social media platforms are highly curated, highly addictive content farms that have total control over what we see and how we communicate; it’s time they do it in a way that promotes the greater democratic good and not just their bottom line”. [pp. 139-40] The same phenomenon – “control over what we see and how we communicate” – is often cited by right-wing critics of social media. The difference is that the latter argue, rightly or wrongly, for limiting the ability of the platforms to block content that they don’t like. The Tsarina wants to expand social media censorship and give the government control over how the censors operate.

Phase two of the Tsarina’s plan is a great expansion of government-funded media.

I hope to one day see an America that invests more in journalism as a public good, not only through the variety of philanthropic initiatives to support the industry that have proliferated since 2016, but through further government investment in public broadcasters. In 2018, the US government allocated $447 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds the Public Broadcasting Station and National Public Radio, as well as their local affiliates. In comparison, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s budget for the same year was over $6 billion, despite the fact that Britain’s GDP is about a fifth of the size of the United States’. [p. 141]

She laments that the BBC didn’t save Britain from Brexit but happily notes that 57 percent of the British public regards it as the country’s most trustworthy news source (at least according to the BBC survey that she cites). She continues –

Investments in journalism as a public good are critical to maintaining a healthy information environment in which disinformation can more easily be dispelled, and in which a trusted voice is readily accessible in times of chaos and turmoil. [p. 142]

Put slightly differently, the U.S. government needs a propaganda arm and has been remiss about funding it. That need is all the more acute, because –

In New Jersey [where the Tsarina grew up], no one is ever very far from several bustling metropolitan areas, and the coverage afforded by any one of those cities’ newspapers or radio and television stations is applicable and useful for daily life. But imagine a similar situation in the nation’s heartland, and you begin to understand why so many people are flocking to dubious websites that replicate their worldview; the connective tissue between the local and the national or international has been lost. [p. 141]

Still, social media “rules of the road” and tax-funded subventions to friendly newspapers and TV stations aren’t enough.

Even with greater investments in quality journalism, people will still need help navigating the unending flow of information that characterizes the modern media environment, as I found in every country I visited over the course of researching this book. In Estonia, education and outreach form the backbone of the government’s renewed efforts to build an inclusive Estonian identity that is resilient to outside influence. As Irene Käossar, the head of Estonia’s Integration Foundation, told me, the government is no longer trying to express “why” ethnic Russians should pursue citizenship or learn Estonian language; instead, the onus is on the government to figure out how to “change thinking.” [p. 142]

Estonia is a tiny country threatened by a huge, hostile neighbor that conquered it once and shows many signs of seeking to absorb it again. An unassimilated Russian minority is a threat to its very existence. I will wager a good deal, though, that Nina Jankowicz would find Estonia’s policy abhorrent if pursued by a country with which she didn’t sympathize. Note that she has taken an initiative to persuade resident aliens to “pursue citizenship or learn Estonian language” as a template for a government program to furnish “help navigating the unending flow of information that characterizes the modern media environment”. These things are not quite like one another.

The nature of the “help” that the government is to provide and how it is to be inculcated are the vaguest parts of the Tsarina’s plan. She complains that the social media platforms have made only perfunctory attempts to educate their users:

So far, efforts to raise awareness of media and digital literacy best practices on the platforms have been lackluster; in its “Tips to Spot False News,” which is available online in the “Help Center” and has run in several of the world's major newspapers (arguably not the audience that most needs assistance spotting “false news”), Facebook even writes “reliance on unnamed experts may indicate a false news story,” a tip that might cause readers to discount reporting that uses anonymous or background sources, as many whistleblowing investigations do. More worryingly, the Trump administration has used this tactic to question critical reporting from a variety of outlets. [Did I mention that the Tsarina is a Thoroughly Progressive Tsarina?]

Overall, platforms’ efforts to promote media literacy awareness have been surface-level distractions, not deep-rooted attempts to change user behavior. They should be developed in broad consultation with experts in the field and be integrated into the user interface of the platform – not buried in a help section or in a print newspaper advertisement – at the platform’s expense. Like reminders to grab an umbrella or do your civic duty, social media platforms can empower users to be more discerning consumers of information. It is not a question of ability; it’s a question of volition. [p. 145, footnote omitted; emphasis added]

What the tools “integrated into the user interface” would look like is hard to discern, but it certainly sounds like a mechanism not simply to warn users about trollish Internet tricks but to make it impossible, or nearly so, to get access to government-disapproved content. That the Tsarina favors limiting choices rather than relying on users’ judgment is suggested by the scenario with which she closes the chapter, a hypothetical happy ending six years hence.

It’s Election Day, November 2028. The latest polls are close; it will probably be another nail-biter. But unlike eight or twelve years ago, this campaign hasn’t been characterized by the rancor of the past. After the scandalous foreign hack-and-leak operations that marked the 2016 and 2020 elections, affecting first the Democratic and later the Republican Party, a remarkable thing happened. Party leaders, editors-in-chief of the country’s newspapers, major broadcasters, and even the social media platforms convened to sign a Declaration on Truth and Integrity: they would not discuss, cover, or amplify content for which a legitimate source could not be established. This bipartisan effort did not eliminate all attempts at foreign interference, but rather than boosting the bogus claims, repeating them on the airwaves, printing them on front pages, and retweeting and sharing them online, it relegated them to the fringes of the internet, where they never gained much traction. The publicity surrounding the declaration served as a primer and awareness campaign for millions of Americans who believed for years that foreign interference was a specter politicians unleashed for personal gain.

In the months after the declaration, while the new administration settled into office, Congress took stock of what the document had achieved. It engendered cooperation between politicians and the fourth estate, across social media platforms, and between all these groups and law enforcement, which was notified as suspicious posts were encountered. They worked to build on the informal structure they created, creating an independent government hub to serve as coordinator, watchdog, and educator. The new body worked with civil society to write a curriculum for schools and professional development programs, doled out educational grants, and advocated for users’ rights in the development of new technologies on social media platforms. It also acted as a neutral researcher, employing an apolitical group of experts to act as a watchdog on questions of hate speech, political bias, disinformation, and “fake news,” among others. The government allocated greater funding to American public broadcasters, encouraging a more balanced news landscape.

In 2028, the information war is still not won. There were and continue to be challenges. It is not utopia; the project of democracy will never be. Online abuse, while on a downturn, is still a problem. But people are beginning to have more inquisitive, respectful conversations, based on responsible, level reporting. They are recognizing the humanity in their fellow avatars. Americans regularly have heated debates about how to protect free speech in the age of the internet. But unlike during the height of the information war, that speech is not being manipulated to drive division and chaos from without and within.

This may only be a dream for the future, but it is one that feels possible to achieve. [pp. 146-47]

The dream of the totalitarian utopians, from Rousseau and Robespierre to Marx and Lenin: All will be peace and harmony when the wise and the virtuous shape how everyone else is permitted to think.

Further Reading: Jonathan Turley, “Biden’s ‘Mary Poppins of Disinformation’ the perfect nanny to tidy up mess of free speech?”

The Cost of Stalemate

Yesterday’s Institute for the Study of War’s update was so devoid of movement, and I was so busy on other matters, that I didn’t get around to posting it. The March 22nd update is slightly more exciting:

Russian forces did not make any major advances on March 22 and Ukrainian forces conducted local counterattacks northwest of Kyiv and around Mykolayiv. Russian forces around Kyiv and other major cities are increasingly prioritizing long-range bombardment after the failure of Russian ground offensives but are unlikely to force major cities to surrender in this manner. Russian forces did not conduct any offensive operations toward the northeastern Ukrainian cities of Chernihiv, Sumy, or Kharkiv in the last 24 hours. Russian forces continued to further reduce the Mariupol pocket.

ISW has also posted an analysis by Frederick Kagan of what the apparent stalemate means:

The initial Russian campaign to invade and conquer Ukraine is culminating without achieving its objectives – it is being defeated, in other words. The war is settling into a stalemate condition in much of the theater. But the war isn’t over and isn’t likely to end soon. Nor is the outcome of the war yet clear. The Russians might still win; the Ukrainians might win; the war might expand to involve other countries; or it might turn into a larger scale version of the stalemate in Ukraine’s east that had persisted from 2014 to the start of Russia’s invasion in February 2022. The failure of Russia’s initial military campaign nevertheless marks an important inflection that has implications for the development and execution of Western military, economic, and political strategies. The West must continue supplying Ukraine with the weapons it needs to fight, but it must now also expand its aid dramatically to help keep Ukraine alive as a country even in conditions of stalemate. . . .

Our assessment that the Russian campaign has culminated and that conditions of stalemate are emerging rests on our assessments, laid out carefully in many fully documented reports published on our website (not just maps) and increasingly validated by reports from various Western intelligence communities, that the Russians do not have the capability to bring a lot of fresh effective combat power to the fight in a short period of time. The kinds of mobilizations the Russians are engaging in will generate renewed fighting power in months at the earliest. Unless something remarkable happens to break the stalemate now settling in, the stalemate is likely to last for months. Hence our assessment and our forecast.

Meanwhile Wall Street Journal has a dramatic account of the siege of Mariupol. The headline and subhead capture the flavor:

Ukrainians Flee Mariupol as Russian Forces Push to Take Port City Russian airstrikes, artillery and mortar rounds have gutted entire neighborhoods in the strategically important Ukrainian city

An excerpt from the story:

Streams of cars from Mariupol pull into the parking lot of a hardware store on the outskirts of Zaporizhzhia – now a way station for people fleeing to safety further west, or abroad – part of the more than 10 million people uprooted by the fighting.

Taped to the windows are homemade signs reading “children” in Russian, and strips of white material tied to the door handles, scant protection from the war raging over their city.

More than a dozen residents who fled since last week described a desperate struggle to stay alive in a city where venturing outside meant exposure to being shot, shredded by artillery fire or obliterated in an airstrike.

“They are basically wiping the city from the face of the earth,” said Andriy, 37, who took his chances during a lull in the bombardment on Monday and fled Mariupol with his wife and two children. Andriy, who declined to give his full name, said his ears had yet to adjust to the absence of constant shelling in the city he left behind. “It’s as though I’ve come back to life.”

As Frederick Kagan observes, “The Battles of the Somme, Verdun, and Passchendaele took place in conditions of stalemate. Hundreds of thousands were killed in those battles that moved the front lines a little, but not much.” And so he comes to a grim conclusion:

We published our assessment that this Russian campaign has culminated because it has important, urgent implications for Western policy. If our assessment is correct, then the West must increase efforts to supply Ukraine with all the materials it will need to survive as a country and continue fighting during conditions of stalemate and siege, which will be brutal. The West will have to help Ukraine stabilize a functioning economy in its unoccupied territory that can survive even under constant Russian attack. It will have to move beyond the appropriately rushed effort to get specific high-end defensive systems to Ukrainian soldiers and think about the bigger problem of keeping Ukraine and Ukrainians alive during a long war.

Little Change and a Dissenting Opinion

Yesterday the Institute for the Study of War posted one of its longest-ever, and most optimistic, updates on the Russo-Ukrainian War. The summary paragraph of the March 20th post is more succinct:

Russian forces did not make any major advances on March 20. Russian forces around Kyiv are increasingly establishing defensive positions and preparing to deploy further artillery and fire control assets. Ukrainian forces repelled continuing Russian efforts to seize the city of Izyum, southeast of Kharkiv, and Russian forces did not conduct any other offensive operations in northeast Ukraine. Russian forces continue to make slow but steady progress on Luhansk Oblast and around Mariupol, but did not conduct any offensive operations towards Mykolayiv or Kryvyi Rih.

After ISW’s declaration yesterday that Ukraine has achieved a stalemate (not ideal when the war is being fought on your own soil but better than most observers would have forecast a month ago), I looked around for a more pessimistic view. Bill Roggio of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, offers one:

On the actual battlefield, the Russian offensive has undoubtedly slowed over the past week. But what is being described as a ‘stalled’ takeover may be the result of the Russians taking time to reorganize their forces and improve their logistics.

On the Western side of the information war, we were told from the opening days of the conflict that the Russian military would break due to high casualties and defections, loss of tanks, armored vehicles, artillery and aircraft, and domestic opposition.

Videos of Russian battlefield setbacks abound in the media, and strangely there is little reporting on Ukrainian losses.

And yet, over three weeks into the war, Vladimir Putin remains president and the Russian war machine has not collapsed but in fact continues its plodding, imperfect, and messy advance.

Ukraine certainly has won the war on social media and in the press. This gives the average Western viewer the impression of a lopsided victory in favor of Ukraine. . . . But the West should not delude itself into believing that the Ukrainians will be saved by wishful thinking.

Mr. Roggio highlights two key facts supporting his assessment. One is President Zelensky’s statement a few days ago, “For years we heard about the apparently open door [to membership in NATO], but have already also heard that we will not enter there, and these are truths and must be acknowledged.” That could be a sotto voce acknowledgment of inevitable defeat, though it sounds more like no more than recognition that NATO isn’t enthusiastic about expanding farther to east, whatever the outcome of the current conflict.

Second, and more substantively, Mr. Roggio points out that “Conventional warfare is a time, manpower and equipment consuming effort and quick victories are rare.” He notes “that it took the U.S. military three weeks to take Baghdad and 42 days to conquer Iraq in 2003”, notwithstanding that the American forces were far more proficient than Putin’s and Saddam Hussein’s forces less motivated than Ukraine’s. One can counterargue that Baghdad was farther away than Kiev and that the American advance was slowed by rules of engagement designed to minimize civilian casualties, concerns about encountering chemical weapons and an untimely sandstorm. Nonetheless, the argument makes sense as a generality. Russia remains much stronger than Ukraine and has the resources, if it can find the wit and will, to break the stalemate. We can hope that neither will be in sufficient supply to spare Tsar Putin woe.

“Creating Conditions of Stalemate”

The Institute for the Study of War’s March 19th update leads off with an exceptionally long and detailed summary, the essence of which is that the war appears to have ground to a stalemate. Here are key excerpts, but it’s worth your while to read the whole thing. The final paragraph is particularly important.

Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial Russian campaign of this war. That campaign aimed to conduct airborne and mechanized operations to seize Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and other major Ukrainian cities to force a change of government in Ukraine. That campaign has culminated. Russian forces continue to make limited advances in some parts of the theater but are very unlikely to be able to seize their objectives in this way. The doctrinally sound Russian response to this situation would be to end this campaign, accept a possibly lengthy operational pause, develop the plan for a new campaign, build up resources for that new campaign, and launch it when the resources and other conditions are ready. The Russian military has not yet adopted this approach. It is instead continuing to feed small collections of reinforcements into an ongoing effort to keep the current campaign alive. We assess that that effort will fail.

The ultimate fall of Mariupol is increasingly unlikely to free up enough Russian combat power to change the outcome of the initial campaign dramatically. . . . The block-by-block fighting in Mariupol itself is costing the Russian military time, initiative, and combat power. If and when Mariupol ultimately falls the Russian forces now besieging it may not be strong enough to change the course of the campaign dramatically by attacking to the west.

Russian forces in the south appear to be focusing on a drive toward Kryvyi Rih, presumably to isolate and then take Zaporizhiya and Dnipro from the west but are unlikely to secure any of those cities in the coming weeks if at all. . . .

The Russian military continues to commit small groups of reinforcements to localized fighting rather than concentrating them to launch new large-scale operations. . . .

The culmination of the initial Russian campaign is creating conditions of stalemate throughout most of Ukraine. Russian forces are digging in around the periphery of Kyiv and elsewhere, attempting to consolidate political control over areas they currently occupy, resupplying and attempting to reinforce units in static positions, and generally beginning to set conditions to hold in approximately their current forward positions for an indefinite time. . . .

Stalemate will likely be very violent and bloody, especially if it protracts. Stalemate is not armistice or ceasefire. It is a condition in war in which each side conducts offensive operations that do not fundamentally alter the situation. Those operations can be very damaging and cause enormous casualties. The World War I battles of the Somme, Verdun, and Passchendaele were all fought in conditions of stalemate and did not break the stalemate. If the war in Ukraine settles into a stalemate condition Russian forces will continue to bomb and bombard Ukrainian cities, devastating them and killing civilians, even as Ukrainian forces impose losses on Russian attackers and conduct counter-attacks of their own. The Russians could hope to break Ukrainians’ will to continue fighting under such circumstances by demonstrating Kyiv’s inability to expel Russian forces or stop their attacks even if the Russians are demonstrably unable to take Ukraine’s cities. Ukraine’s defeat of the initial Russian campaign may therefore set conditions for a devastating protraction of the conflict and a dangerous new period testing the resolve of Ukraine and the West. Continued and expanded Western support to Ukraine will be vital to seeing Ukraine through that new period. [emphasis added]

Today’s maps:

Is Ukraine Getting Cocky?

The March 18th update from the Institute for the Study of War quotes assessments by the Ukrainian general staff. If Ukraine’s apparent view is accurate, the war is entering its final stages, and the major question is, how will Tsar Putin extricate his forces? (Accompanying is the worrisome thought that he might choose to go down in some spectacular manner.) One can’t help by suspect, though, that the situation isn’t quite so rosy as one would like to imagine. Recall that plenty of conflicts look far different after three months than they did after three weeks.

Ukrainian forces conducted a major successful counterattack around Mykolayiv in the past several days, and Russian forces continued to secure territorial gains only around Mariupol on March 18. Russian forces face growing morale and supply problems, including growing reports of self-mutilation among Russian troops to avoid deployment to Ukraine and shortages of key guided munitions. The Ukrainian General Staff continued to report on March 18 that Russia has failed to achieve its strategic objectives in Ukraine, including destroying the Ukrainian Armed Forces, capturing Kyiv, and establishing control over Ukraine to the east bank of the Dnipro River—the first time the Ukrainian General Staff included this territorial conquest as an explicit Russian objective.[1] The Ukrainian General Staff additionally stated that Ukrainian forces “continue step by step to liberate the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine in all directions” on March 18, the first Ukrainian mention of conducting counterattacks “in all directions.”

Extra maps today, too:

“Little Territorial Progress”

Another day, another yawner (except, alas, for civilians who are being killed or wounded by decreasingly precise Russian assaults). The summary paragraph of the Institute for the Study of War’s March 17th update reports on the stasis:

Russian forces did not make any major advances and Ukrainian forces carried out several local counterattacks on March 17. Russian forces made little territorial progress and continued to deploy reserve elements – including from the 1st Guards Tank Army and 810th Naval Infantry Brigade – in small force packets that are unlikely to prove decisive. Russian forces continue to suffer heavy casualties around Kharkiv, and Russian attempts to bypass the city of Izyum are unlikely to succeed. Russian forces continued assaults on Mariupol on March 17 but did not conduct any other successful advances from Crimea.

On nonbelligerent countries’ home fronts, meanwhile, anti-Russian sentiment is becoming disproportionate. Essays on the topic by Gary Saul Morson (“The Cancellation of Russian Culture”) and Heather Mac Donald (“Denounce Putin, or Be Blacklisted”) are very much worth your attention. If we want a 21st Century Weimar and its aftermath, our bien-pensants, mostly the same people who denounced any and all criticism of Islam after 9/11, are propelling the world toward them.

“Mounting Difficulties Replacing Combat Losses”

The Institute for the Study of War’s March 16th update portrays a continuing Russian quagmire:

Russian forces face mounting difficulties replacing combat losses in Ukraine, including the possible death of the commander of the 150th Motor Rifle Division near Mariupol. Russian efforts to deploy forces from Armenia, its proxy states in Georgia, and reserve units in the Eastern Military District will not provide Russian forces around Kyiv with the combat power necessary to complete the encirclement of the city in the near term. Russian forces made limited, unsuccessful attacks northwest of Kyiv and did not conduct offensive operations in northeastern Ukraine, toward Kharkiv, or toward Mykolayiv. Russian forces did make limited territorial gains in Donetsk Oblast and around Mariupol and continued to target civilian infrastructure in the city. Russian forces will likely continue to reduce the Mariupol pocket in the coming days, but Russian forces likely remain unable to conduct simultaneous attacks along multiple axes of advance.

Being unusually busy with other matters today, I won’t add my own comments, but commentary isn’t really needed.

Turning Away from Kiev

The Institute for the Study of War’s March 15th update on the Russo-Ukrainian conflict suggests that the Russians, frustrated by lack of progress near Kiev, may be looking for victories elsewhere.

Local company- and battalion-level attacks by Russian forces northwest of Kyiv on March 14-15 likely indicate the largest-scale offensive operations that Russian forces attempting to encircle Kyiv can support at this time. Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations northeast of the city, around Sumy, and only limited (and unsuccessful) attacks southeast of Kharkiv. Russian force generation efforts, including reservist and conscript call-ups and the ongoing transport of Syrian fighters to Russia and Belarus, are unable to change the balance of forces around Kyiv within the coming week. Russian forces have not conducted simultaneous attacks along their multiple axes of advance across Ukraine since March 4 and are unlikely to do so in the next week.

Russian forces in southeastern Ukraine continue to demonstrate the greatest capabilities to date and are steadily advancing in three directions: northeast from Kherson, taking territory in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, and reducing the Ukrainian pocket in Mariupol. Russian forces are unlikely to successfully encircle Mykolayiv and threaten Odesa in the near future but retain uncommitted Naval Infantry reserves that could conduct an amphibious operation or disembark to reinforce Russian ground operations, as Russia has employed Naval Infantry elsewhere. Russia may seek to encircle Zaporizhya by advancing northeast up the west bank of the Dnipro River after failing to break through Ukrainian forces directly south of the city on the east bank. Russian forces are making slow but steady progress against Ukrainian defenders on the line of contact in Donbas and likely seek to force them out of their prepared defensive positions.

With Russian forces likely unable to complete the encirclement of Kyiv or resume mobile offensive operations in northeastern Ukraine in the near future, the Russian capture of Mariupol will likely be the next key inflection in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russian forces have successfully encircled Mariupol and are conducting daily assaults on the western and eastern outskirts of the city. Russian air, missile, and artillery strikes continue to target residential areas and civilian infrastructure to force the city to capitulate. Russian forces have encircled the city to a depth that will likely prevent the defenders from breaking out and prevent Ukrainian efforts to relieve the defenders. Russian forces will likely be able to capture Mariupol or force it to capitulate despite strong Ukrainian defenses. The Russian capture of Mariupol will free up Russian forces, likely including large portions of the 8th Combined Arms Army, to threaten Ukrainian defenders along the line of contact in Donbas with encirclement or alternatively reinforce a Russian offensive toward Mykolayiv and Odesa. This assessment assumes that the defenders in Mariupol will run out of ammunition and/or water at some point in the relatively near future. Mariupol has been heavily fortified for years, however, and it is possible that its defenders secured sufficient supplies in advance to hold out longer. The Russians will likely continue to escalate bombardments to the point of simply destroying the city if that appears to be the case, but the reduction of Mariupol in this way could take considerably longer.

Since gaining ground in the southeast or capturing Mariupol would be trivial sideshows rather than war-winning accomplishments, this change of focus, if it occurs, suggests to me that Tsar Putin is looking for something that he can call “victory”. The war doesn’t have to end in any formal manner. Russia can let it dwindle, crow over slicing off more territory populated by Russian speakers (Putin’s counterparts to the Sudeten Germans) and wait for the West to grow weary of enforcing sanctions. That wouldn’t, from Putin’s point of view, be a glorious outcome, but it also wouldn’t be a defeat.

The Financial Times has published an analysis headed “‘A serious failure’: scale of Russia’s military blunders becomes clear” (paywalled but excerpted here). Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but maybe Putin sees the same thing.