AP News: US, Western Europe fret over uncertain Ukraine war endgame
BY MATTHEW LEE — May 11, 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — An interminable and unwinnable war in Europe? That’s what NATO leaders fear and are bracing for as Russia’s war in Ukraine grinds into its third month with little sign of a decisive military victory for either side and no resolution in sight.
The possibility of a stalemate is fueling concerns that Ukraine may remain a deadly European battlefield and a source of continental and global instability for months, or even years, to come.
Energy and food security are the most immediate worries, but massive Western support for Ukraine while the world is still emerging from coronavirus pandemic and struggling to deal with the effects of climate change could deepen the toll on the global economy. And should Russia choose to escalate, the risk of a broader conflict rises.
The U.S. and its allies are pumping a steady stream of lethal weaponry into Ukraine to keep it in the fight. While most analysts say Kyiv is holding its own at the least, those infusions must continue if they are to support President Volodomyr Zelenskyy’s vow to win, or at least continue to match or beat back, Moscow’s advances.
Just as Russian President Vladimir Putin has not signaled a willingness to intensify the invasion with either a general mobilization of troops or the use of unconventional arms, neither has he shown any sign of backing down. Nor has Zelenskyy, who is now asserting that Ukraine will not only beat back the current Russian invasion but regain control of Crimea and other areas that Russia has occupied or otherwise controlled since 2014.
“It’s very difficult to see how you could get a negotiated solution at this point,” said Ian Kelly, a retired veteran diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Georgia, another former Soviet republic on which Russia has territorial designs. He added, “Neither side is willing to stop fighting and probably the likeliest outcome is a war that lasts a couple of years. Ukraine would be a festering sore in the middle of Europe.” Continue reading Seeking a Ukraine “End Game”, and The Divergent Evolution of the Ukrainian & Russian Armies→
AP News:Detailed ‘open source’ news investigations are catching on – in Ukraine & Elsewhere
BY DAVID BAUDER – May 8, 2022
NEW YORK (AP) — One of the more striking pieces of journalism from the Ukraine war featured intercepted radio transmissions from Russian soldiers indicating an invasion in disarray, their conversations even interrupted by a hacker literally whistling “Dixie.”
It was the work of an investigations unit at The New York Times that specializes in open-source reporting, using publicly available material like satellite images, mobile phone or security camera recordings, geolocation and other internet tools to tell stories. Continue reading War Notes: Catching Up→
Washington Post: Hacking Russia was off-limits. The Ukraine war made it a free-for-all.
Experts anticipated a Moscow-led cyber-assault; instead, unprecedented attacks by hacktivists and criminals have wreaked havoc in Russia.
By Joseph Menn — May 1, 2022
For more than a decade, U.S. cybersecurity experts have warned about Russian hacking that increasingly uses the labor power of financially motivated criminal gangs to achieve political goals, such as strategically leaking campaign emails.
Prolific ransomware groups in the last year and a half have shut down pandemic-battered hospitals, the key fuel conduit Colonial Pipeline and schools; published sensitive documents from corporate victims; and, in one case, pledged to step up attacks on American infrastructure if Russian technology was hobbled in retribution for the invasion of Ukraine.
Yet the third month of war finds Russia, not the United States, struggling under an unprecedented hacking wave that entwines government activity, political voluntarism and criminal action.
Digital assailants have plundered the country’s personal financial data, defaced websites and handed decades of government emails to anti-secrecy activists abroad. One recent survey showed more passwords and other sensitive data from Russia were dumped onto the open Web in March than information from any other country. The published documents include a cache from a regional office of media regulator Roskomnadzor that revealed the topics its analysts were most concerned about on social media — including antimilitarism and drug legalization — and that it was filing reports to the FSB federal intelligence service, which has been arresting some who complain about government policies. Continue reading War Notes, Monday Threefer: Hackers Attacking Russia; Ukraine’s female minesweepers; and Sketches from Ukraine’s “International Legion”→
Western powers step up assistance for a confident but battered Ukraine
Gwynne Dyer13:07, Apr 28 2022
Two months ago, when Russian tanks first rolled into Ukraine, every message from Washington or Nato about the invasion included a prominent passage saying what the western alliance would not do.
It would not send Nato troops to help Ukraine. It would give Ukraine some ‘defensive’ weapons but no ‘offensive’ ones, e.g., anti-tank missiles but no tanks.
It would, in other words, allow Ukraine to lose, but only slowly.
And under no circumstances would it do anything that gave Russia reason to fear that it might face military action by Nato.
an journalist and long-time commentator on international affairs.
OPINION: Two months ago, when Russian tanks first rolled into Ukraine, every message from Washington or Nato about the invasion included a prominent passage saying what the western alliance would not do.
It would not send Nato troops to help Ukraine. It would give Ukraine some ‘defensive’ weapons but no ‘offensive’ ones, e.g., anti-tank missiles but no tanks.
It would, in other words, allow Ukraine to lose, but only slowly.
And under no circumstances would it do anything that gave Russia reason to fear that it might face military action by Nato.
How things have changed!
In the past two weeks the United States has declared that some $2 billion worth of state-of-the-art weapons are on the way to Ukraine, including ‘Switchblade’ combat drones and self-propelled howitzers.
Even Germany (which originally offered Ukraine nothing but 5,000 helmets) is sending modern anti-aircraft guns.
Rhetorically, the sky is the limit. In a press briefing at the Polish border last Monday after a quick visit to Kyiv, US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin said: “We want to see Russia weakened to the point where it can’t do things like invade Ukraine.”
It wasn’t even like Joe Biden’s slip of the tongue last month about regime change in Moscow.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was also on the Kyiv trip, chimed in to back Austin up: “I think the Secretary said it very well.” The official US goal is now to reduce Russia to a state so weak that it cannot credibly threaten Ukraine, and keep it there.
This presupposes, of course, that Russia has already suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of the Ukrainian army in the current war. It also implicitly assumes that the devastating economic sanctions that NATO and other countries have placed on Russia will continue after the war ends.
From: How to End the War in Ukraine, by Alfred McCoy
Alfred McCoy is Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of A Question of Torture, and In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books). His newest book, just published, is To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change. Full post at TomDispatch.
As the war in Ukraine heads for its third month amid a rising toll of death and destruction, Washington and its European allies are scrambling, so far unsuccessfully, to end that devastating, globally disruptive conflict. . . . [Their efforts] range from economic sanctions and trade embargoes to the confiscation of the assets of some of his oligarch cronies and the increasingly massive shipment of arms to Ukraine. Yet none of it seems to be working.
So while the world waits for the other combat boot to drop hard, it’s already worth considering where the West went wrong in its efforts to end this war, while exploring whether anything potentially effective is still available to slow the carnage. . . . Continue reading A New Idea to End Putin’s War→
Belarusian exiles watch events in Ukraine with fear but also hope. Could they too fight back?
History is teetering on an edge. No one knows which way it will go. Maybe the Russian empire, the last and most terrible of the European empires, will fall.
Or maybe it will absorb the hit and survive as it has survived and expanded since the 17th century. You’d be a fool to bet against it. The graveyards of Eurasia are full of those who did.
And yet the breathtaking heroism of the Ukrainian resistance and the insane self-delusion of the Putinist regime are allowing Russia’s opponents from Syria to Central Asia, and from Georgia to Moldova, to ask that most revolutionary of questions: “What if?”
What if the empire falls? What if structures that have endured and enslaved for centuries can be blown apart like the creaking trucks in a Russian munitions convoy?
Talking to the men and women engaged in what is – if only the global left could see it – the great anticolonial struggle of our times, you hear them moving through the stages of revolutionary commitment. From peaceful protest to jail sentences to the realisation that civil disobedience will never be enough.
Lives are transformed as the stakes are raised. The story of Timur Mitskievich echoes the anticolonial protests of the 20th century. In 2020, he was a teenager in Minsk when the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, rigged the presidential election as he had crushed every challenge to his rule since he came to power in 1994. Supporters of the opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya took to the streets in the largest popular demonstrations in Belarus’s history.
The paradox of civil disobedience is that non-violent tactics work only against regimes that, however oppressive the protesters think them, are not so oppressive they cannot be persuaded to change. For all their crimes and prejudices, the British imperial authorities in India in the 1940s and the US government of the 1960s had to listen to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
Lukashenko did not listen to his opponents. He terrorised them. He didn’t have to worry about bad publicity when he controlled the media. Nor need he concern himself with the reaction of the “international community” after Vladimir Putin said he would maintain the dictator in power if he gave up what little remained of Belarusian independence. His country became a Russian colony again, which it had been almost continuously since the Russian empire seized control in 1795.
The 17-year old Mitskievich joined the protests. The police beat him so badly doctors put him into a medically induced coma. While he was out, his mother died, leaving nine orphaned children.
Peaceful disobedience works only against regimes with a capacity for feeling shame and the Belarusian and Russian regimes have no shame.
Belarus, like Ukraine before 2014, is a country parochial westerners barely thought about. If its name registers today, it is as Russia’s base for its failed assault on Kyiv. In the glib 1990s, liberal democracy’s triumph was assumed to be so inevitable we called Belarus “Europe’s last dictatorship”. Look at its weirdness, we said. It still clung on to Soviet-style rule, an error that history would surely correct as the ideals of free markets and free societies marched on.
Instead of being an anachronism, Belarus was a model for the future. While it became a Russian client state, Russia became a supersize Belarus, as Putin removed the limited freedoms he had allowed Russian citizens in the 2000s and aped Lukashenko’s dictatorship.
To Belarus’s exiled opposition, Ukraine’s war is their war and a Ukrainian victory would open up the prospect of radical change across territories Russia intimidates and controls. The Ukrainian war has made clear, if clarity were needed, how Russian nationalists view eastern Slavs with the impertinence to reject them.
Russian official media explained that Ukrainians (and by extension) Belarusians were really Russians. If they rejected Russian identity and said they had their own cultures and histories that existed before the Russian empire, they proved only that they were “Nazis”. No form of human life could be lower. The Russian state had a duty to kill them or send them to labour camps; to take their children from them and crush their country and their culture.
When I spoke last week to Tsikhanouskaya’s senior adviser Franak Viačorka, in exile in Poland, he said revolution was the only viable option now. He spoke the language of an officer in an underground war rather than a politician trying to negotiate a settlement. The Lukashenko regime was the “collaborationist state”. The activists who sabotaged Belarusian railway lines, to stop Russian troops and armour reaching Ukraine, were “resistance cells”.
Even in Soviet times Moscow “recognised the existence of Belarus and Ukrainian nations”, Viačorka said. Putin was bringing a “new form of fascism” that denied their very being. The Belarusian opposition was fighting it with covert action. It was attempting to drive the army away from its subservience to Lukashenko and Putin. In Belarus, as in so many other countries, hope depended on a Ukrainian victory offering the “chance to get out of Russian sphere of influence”.
Well, we’ve learned better than to be optimists in the years since the fin de siècle’s silly season. We expect brute power to prevail now. The Russian armed forces are undoubtedly corrupt and inept. But you can see the empire winning, as it has always won, by throwing recruits into battle without a thought for their lives and terrorising civilians. For its part, western intelligence is not predicting a swift Ukrainian victory but a hard, grinding war whose outcome is uncertain.
For all that, there is in the air, if not optimism, then a plausible question. What if the partial collapse of the Russian empire in the 1990s is followed by decisive defeat in the 2020s? What if the whole rotten structure falls?
The doctors released Mitskievich from hospital. He is now fighting in Ukraine in the Belarusian version of the International Brigades of the Spanish civil war. He is one of thousands of Belarusians who volunteered to join the Kastuś Kalinoŭski Battalion, named after the leader of an uprising against the Russian empire in 1863. The battalion has seen action in the battles around Irpin. One day, its members will return to Belarus with highly portable military skills. They will have questions of their own.
Ukraine might yet repel the Putin invasion. Or it may be ground under by Russian forces, then snuffed out as a nation and culture.
Either way, the Ukraine war appears to be redrawing the strategic map of northern Europe, with implications reverberating far beyond Scandinavia.
A double strategic earthquake is underway, without a shot having been fired (yet), in long-neutral Sweden and Russian-tilted Finland. This Nordic pair now appear poised to dump generations of policy and join NATO.
The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour examines this sudden, seismic switch, and weighs its potential impact.
Meantime, we hear also from Gwynne Dyer. An independent Canadian reporter/analyst, Dyer is now based in London. He has a doctorate in military & strategic history, and has served in several military forces, and I have long admired his work.
Here he considers the pause in the war due to the spring thaw (aka Mud Season), and another possible European earthquake, if French president Macron is defeated by a nakedly pro-Putin challenger in next weekend’s electoral runoff.
The Guardian: Putin thought Ukraine war was a missile to Nato. It may be a boomerang Analysis: To turn stolidly non-aligned Finland and Sweden into members would join pantheon of great strategic blunders Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor — Friday, 15 April 2022
It is conceivable that by the end of the year Nato’s land mass, GDP and territorial borders with Russia may expand by nearly as much as they would have if Ukraine had achieved its distant goal of eventual membership of the western defence alliance – if not more.
The brutal manner in which Vladimir Putin has tried to foreclose Ukraine’s security options has led to a sudden change in thinking in Finland and Sweden that has been all the more powerful since it seems to have come from below, as opposed to from the political elites.
It is not yet a done deal. Opinion so volatile, and previously so settled in its opposition to Nato membership, could swing back towards the comforts of semi-neutrality. Russian nuclear threats, already starting, may intimidate voters into having second thoughts.
The process may be fraught. Many brands of Nato membership exist, and have yet to be fully explored by the Finns and the Swedes.
But by Nato’s Madrid summit in June, Nato will be on course to expand its population by 16 million, its GDP by €800bn and its land mass by 780,000 sq km. Ukraine, by contrast, has a population of 41 million, a land mass of 603,000 sq km and a GDP of €155bn. A new 1,300km border with Nato could be formed, the precise opposite of what Putin set out to achieve in the treaties designed to shrink Nato that he ordered the west to accept last year. What is worse for Moscow, Nato could have strengthened itself in the Baltic Sea, right next to Kaliningrad enclave, the strategic Russian naval base.
By invading Ukraine, Putin thought he had hurled a missile at the west. It has emerged to be a precision-guided boomerang. To have turned two stolidly non-aligned countries into Nato members would join the pantheon of great strategic blunders of wartime.
It is all the more extraordinary since the turnaround has been so rapid. Finland, with its brand of semi-neutrality for the past 70 years and emphasis on consensus-building, tends to shift foreign policy with glacial speed. Finland’s tolerance of Putin was so embedded that some on the left claimed it strayed close to collaboration as the Finnish political elite shunned the Russian opposition.
In the government’s annual survey in December, Finnish support for Nato membership stood at 24%.
Four months later, Finnish politics has somersaulted. Support for Nato membership stood at 68%. Surveys now show more than half of the 200 parliamentarians back Nato membership. In the 2015 Finnish parliamentary elections, 91% of SDP candidates were opposed to Nato membership. The Finnish SDP prime minister, Sanna Marin, said everything had changed. Russia is “not the neighbour we thought it was”, she said.
Alexander Stubb, a former Finnish prime minister, said Finland’s membership is based on rational fear, created on the day of the Russian invasion. He predicts the Finnish application will be with Nato HQ by the end of May. “The train has left the station.”
In a speech earlier this month to the council of the largely agrarian Centre party, Annika Saarikko explained that sometimes history moved fast, measured in weeks rather than years: “In the foreseeable future we cannot rely on a mutually agreed to international order or a functioning relationship with Russia for our security.” She added that Nato membership came with obligations. “Finland would not just be buying some fire insurance. It would be joining the central fire brigade.”
Such has been the Finnish turnaround, it has adopted the unusual role of exemplar to the larger Sweden. That requires the two countries respecting the relationship, sensitivities, and different political cultures. The ideal from Nato’s perspective is that the two countries join simultaneously, and polls show support for this. But Finnish diplomats say they cannot be seen to be interfering in sovereign Swedish decisions. Marin stressed at her joint press conference in Stockholm with the Swedish prime minister, Magdalena Andersson, that coordination with Sweden “is sought but is not a prerequisite”, adding: “Finland does not dictate schedules or conclusions to Sweden nor does Sweden dictate to Finland.”
Left: Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson; and Finland PM Sanna Marin, talking about NATO.
It is vital for the ruling Social Democrats, now launching an internal policy review, to be seen to be in charge of its own destiny. After all, last November the party had clearly affirmed its position that it opposed a foreign policy of alliances. Yet four centre-right parties now support Nato membership and two parties to the left are opposed to membership, claiming joining Nato implies coming to the defence of the authoritarians running Turkey and Hungary. With parliamentary elections looming in September, the SDP will want the review completed without the party descending into left-right splits.
One of the difficulties is that given Russia’s behaviour, no plan B such as greater Swedish-Finnish defence cooperation, or the Nato partnership for peace, looks as concrete as full membership. Most Nato countries see Sweden and Finland as huge military and intelligence assets. “It would complete a missing piece of the puzzle of Nato strategic planning”, said Mika Aaltola, the director of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.
But Finland would have to apply for Nato membership not knowing the precise future relationship. In its security document published this week, Finland insisted: “Membership would not oblige Finland to accept nuclear weapons, permanent bases or troops in its territory.
For example, in the early stages of their membership, founding members Norway and Denmark imposed unilateral restrictions on their membership and have not permitted permanent troops, bases or nuclear weapons of the alliance in their territory during peacetime. Nato’s enlargement policy, which took shape in the latter half of the 1990s, has been based on the principle that it will not place nuclear weapons, permanent troops or permanent bases in the territory of any new member country.
But if Finland, or indeed Sweden, did set a mass of limiting preconditions concerning nuclear weapons, permanent bases or forces, the application process might be extended.
A lengthy accession process in turn carries risks since Russia, using the full spectrum of war’s grey zone, will seek to harass, and even paralyse. On the day the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, spoke to the Finnish parliament, Russia was accused of cyber-attacks and invasions of its airspace. Finland has already canvassed Nato members for security guarantees in the four months to a year that it was in the Nato ante-chamber awaiting full acceptance.
So there is an incentive to speed the application without delegitimising the domestic consultation.
For those who fear Nato escalating the conflict inside Ukraine, a sudden extension of article 5 obligations in the north remains alarming, and may make Putin even more convinced he was right to confront a Nato policy of encirclement.
But for all its talk of red lines and the stationing of nuclear weapons, can Russia really open a second front to the north when the primary front to its south-west is proving so costly in lost lives, reputation and treasure?
Ukraine wants more tanks, self-propelled artillery and combat aircraft from NATO countries for its war with the Russian invaders, but it won’t be getting them in the tranche of military aid that is being decided in Washington right now. There is a good reason for that.
Kyiv will be getting bigger and better drones, lightly armoured vehicles like Humvees, and maybe some anti-ship missiles, but Joe Biden’s administration is still playing Mother May I?/Grandmother’s Footsteps with Moscow. He moves one cautious step up on the list of weapons he gives Ukraine, watches for the Russian response, then takes another step.
It doesn’t matter at the moment, because this is the “rasputitsa,” the season of rain and mud in eastern Ukraine when off-road travel for heavy vehicles varies from difficult to impossible. The Ukrainian forces won’t be attempting any grand offensives and the Russians are very likely to get bogged down.
The mud season will probably last for another six weeks. Strict military logic would argue for postponing the Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine until then, but Putin probably can’t wait that long. The defeats and losses he suffered in his first attacks in northern Ukraine will gradually but inevitably leak out to the Russian public, so he needs a quick victory.
He might get lucky, but there is unlikely to be a decisive Russian victory for two reasons. First, the Russians in the east will be attacking the best-trained, most experienced part of the Ukrainian army, well dug into defences that have grown every year since 2014. It can probably stand its ground and inflict heavy casualties on the Russians.
That would not save the main Ukrainian army if other Russian forces can make a “pincer movement” behind it and cut it off, which is precisely what they will now try to do.
The Russian troops now besieging Mariupol on the south coast will advance to the north as soon as it finally falls. Other Russian troops are already attacking south from around Kharkiv.
If they succeed, Ukraine will have to seek a ceasefire, ceding all the lost territory to Russia, and Putin will have his victory. But first, the Russians will have to advance about 150 kilometres on a single, two-lane road that passes through villages ideal for ambushes. And it’s the rasputitsa, so you can’t go around the villages.
This is precisely the task that the Russian army spectacularly bungled in its attempt to seize Kyiv last month. What are the odds that it will do better this time?
Assume that it’s late June, the ground is drying out, and the Russian troops are exhausted, overextended and demoralized. In Kyiv, they will be thinking about taking back their lost territory — at least the territory they have lost since February, but some will also be thinking about recapturing the territories that Russia conquered in 2014.
That’s when the extra tanks and self-propelled artillery that the United States is not giving Ukraine now would come in very useful. But it would also be the moment of utmost humiliation for Vladimir Putin, and it is always wiser to leave your defeated enemy an avenue of retreat.
Perhaps this entire article is an exercise in counting one’s chickens before they hatch, but you may be sure that they are also being counted in Washington and in NATO right now. Nobody will admit out loud that Ukraine is being kept on a leash, but of course it is.
Six weeks ago it had not occurred to anybody that doing that would be necessary, because they all expected Ukraine to lose. You can sympathize with its desire to take revenge if it wins, but for the sake of peace in the future it cannot be allowed to do that.
Gwynne Dyer
GWYNNE DYER on the French Election — April 14 2022:
French President Emmanuel Macron won the first round of the presidential election last Sunday, but he’s still in trouble. He knew he would be. Here’s what he said on Saturday.
“Don’t believe the pundits and the pollsters who tell you that it’s impossible (that the far right will win in the second round of the election). Look at Brexit and so many elections, all that seemed improbable and yet came to pass. Nothing is impossible.”
In fact, it’s not even unlikely. Strategies have consequences, as Macron is now learning.
The strategy that made Macron president last time (2017) has succeeded so well that it may cost him the election in the second round this time, on April 24.
Macron’s strategy has always been to exaggerate the difference between the centre and the rest. If the left was too far left and the right was too far right, then the politician representing the centre (him) was the only rational choice.
It worked for him in 2017, when he waltzed into the presidency with a 66 per cent majority of the vote, despite the fact that he had never held elective office before. Fast forward five years, however, and the fantasy has become the fact.
The traditional moderate left-wing party, the Socialists, has been devoured by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s extreme left La France Insoumise (Rebel France), which advocates withdrawal from NATO and also, in effect, from the European Union.
The Socialists only got 4.8 per cent in the first round of voting on Sunday, which means they don’t even get their election expenses reimbursed. The party may actually declare bankruptcy and disappear.
The traditional centre-right party, the Republicans, is suffering exactly the same fate. It too has fallen short of the five per cent threshold and may go broke. Its place as standard-holder of the right has been taken by Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, which remains ultra-nationalist, racist and anti-immigrant, despite a cosmetic makeover that downplays its uglier policies.
Le Pen also benefited from the fact that an even harder-right candidate, xenophobic television pundit Éric Zemmour, made her look moderate, if only by comparison. She will inherit all his votes in the second round of voting, naturally, but Macron’s problem is that she may also inherit some of Melenchon’s hard-left supporters on April 24.
That sounds crazy, but it’s Macron’s own fault. By occupying so much of the centre ground and driving the moderate parties of the centre-left and centre-right to extinction, he left all those who wanted something more than his pragmatic, unexciting centrism no options except the extremes.
And the two extremes have some things in common.
They have a shared hostility to the European Union, for example, and most left-wing voters can remember that, even though Le Pen has been downplaying it recently. They both have a strong populist tone: Le Pen may be a woman of the right, but she’s promising that people under 30 won’t have to pay income tax and everybody can retire on full pension at 60.
Fully half of France’s voting population has just voted for extremist parties, and according to the polls Le Pen is heading into the run-off still holding most of those votes. The latest numbers say Macron 51 per cent, Le Pen 49 per cent, which is effectively neck-and-neck.
She is much more than Donald Trump in a skirt. She is far more intelligent than he is and not at all corrupt. She is racist and Islamophobic, but much better at dog-whistling her true convictions.
This does not bode well for Macron, especially because it has always been hard for French presidents to win a second term. And, while the other losing parties told their supporters to back Macron in the second round, Mélenchon just told his supporters “You must not give a single vote to Marine Le Pen.” (But you could abstain, if you like.)
Despite Covid, France is actually in good shape after five years of Macron. Investment is up, inflation is low, jobs are plentiful, the country is even opening more factories than it closes. But the French do not feel good about their lot and Le Pen could actually win.
If she does, a great deal will change, and not just in France.
The newfound unity of The West in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will vanish: Le Pen’s campaign pamphlets feature a picture of her with Vladimir Putin, another hard-right icon.
Le Pen & Putin: enchanté
She has stopped talking aloud about Frexit, but it’s still there in the background somewhere, as is the anti-immigrant racism her party has always peddled.
She is much more than Donald Trump in a skirt. She is far more intelligent than he is and not at all corrupt. She is racist and Islamophobic, but much better at dog-whistling her true convictions.
If the League of Authoritarian Leaders ever needs an honorary president, she would be the best candidate for the job.
Despite all this, I think Macron will win, because the French aren’t fools. But it may be a near-run thing.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is The Shortest History of War.
There’s been way too much cork-popping among American pundits about the stunning Ukrainian resistance to the Putin invasion.
Yes, the Russian forces have performed badly, while the Ukrainians have come through horrors to push them back again and again. Their campaign thus far has been the stuff of epic and will be a gold mine for historians and storytellers.
But will it save Ukraine? Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria is here to put a damper on the premature rhetorical parades. He says there’s much horror yet to come in this war, the doughty Ukraine defenders still face steep odds, and the country is still in mortal peril. Let him explain.
Opinion: Putin’s Plan A in Ukraine has failed. We can’t let his Plan B succeed.
Opinion by Fareed Zakaria April 14, 2022
Ukraine’s brave and brilliant response to Russia’s attack is rightly being celebrated across the world. But it might be obscuring a growing danger. While the assault on Kyiv and the surrounding region has failed, Moscow’s strategy in the south and east of Ukraine could well succeed. If it does, Russia will have turned Ukraine into an economically crippled rump state, landlocked and threatened on three sides by Russian military power, always vulnerable to another incursion from Moscow. It will take much more military assistance from the West to ensure that this catastrophic outcome does not come to pass.
. . .[T]here are two distinct wars taking place in Ukraine, one in the north and one in the south, and the latter has been “radically more successful” for Moscow. Russia has been able to move forces and supplies out of its bases in Crimea and capture the cities of Melitopol and Kherson. Mariupol is now encircled and invaded by Russian troops, and Ukrainian forces trapped there cannot be resupplied. Ukraine’s access to the Sea of Azov has been blocked, . . . Russian forces have a contiguous land corridor from Crimea deep into Donbas. They are also trying to move west, from Kherson to Odessa.
Odessa is the prize. As the main port from which Ukraine trades with the world, it is the most important city for Ukraine economically. It is also a city replete with symbolic significance. It was here in 1905 that a mutiny on the battleship Potemkin (made famous by Sergei Eisenstein’s movie) marked the beginning of the troubles of czarist Russia. Were Odessa to fall, Ukraine would be practically landlocked, and the Black Sea would essentially become a Russian lake — which would almost certainly tempt Moscow to extend its military power into Moldova, which has its own breakaway region filled with many Russian speakers (Transnistria).
Russian President Vladimir Putin could present this outcome as a grand victory, liberating Russian speakers, gaining crucial cities and ports, and turning Ukraine into a nonviable vassal state.
This must not happen, and the Ukrainians are fighting ferociously to prevent it. In Ukraine’s east, the Russians are trying to advance from Kherson, through the city of Mykolaiv, but they are being stymied by the extraordinary courage of the city’s inhabitants, who have reportedly blown up the bridge that connects the city to Odessa and blocked the railway tracks. This week, Ukrainian forces claimed they were able to deploy their never-before-used Neptune missiles and sink the Russian missile cruiser Moskva.
Still, it’s important to remember that, before the invasion, Russia had a 10-to-1 advantage in defense spending over Ukraine — and Putin seems determined to press on, no matter the costs.
What can the United States and the West do? Much more of everything they are already doing. Ukraine needs more arms, especially those that give it massive asymmetric fighting power.
Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, who has been farsighted in diagnosing Russia’s weaknesses and Ukraine’s strengths, explained to me that Ukraine needs more equipment that allows it to maneuver quickly around Russia’s rigid forces. That means helicopters, armed Humvees, multiple-launch rocket systems and drones of every kind. Turkish drones have proved to be an amazingly effective weapon in this conflict. Hertling urges that Ukraine be given more of those, as well as American “kamikaze” drones and intelligence drones.
The Russian navy, which has been massing in the Black Sea, continues to pose a great danger to Odessa, threatening either to lay siege to it or to launch an amphibious landing behind Ukrainian lines. Despite the purported success of the Neptune missiles, Ukraine does not have the capacity to stop the Russian navy. NATO should consider doing something similar to what it did during the Balkan wars in the 1990s. It should enforce an embargo around those waters, preventing Russian troops from entering to attack Ukraine’s cities or resupply Russian forces. NATO ships would operate from international waters, issuing any approaching ships a “notice to mariners” that NATO forces are active in the area and warning them not to enter.
Retired Adm. James Stavridis, former supreme allied commander of NATO, supports the actions the Biden administration has taken but urges a more aggressive response from the West on all fronts. Give Ukraine fighter planes and air defense systems, he tweeted, and help it with cyberattacks and give it antiship missiles to “sink Russian ships in [the] Black Sea.”
The United States has dedicated about $16 billion in aid to Ukraine since the invasion. Meanwhile, the world is expected to pay $320 billion to Russia this year for its energy. Economic sanctions will not force Putin to end the war as long as this gaping loophole exists. The only pressure that will force Russia to the negotiating table is military defeat — in the south.
Putin’s Plan A failed, but we cannot let his Plan B succeed.
Fareed Zakaria writes a foreign affairs column for The Post. He is also the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS and a contributing editor for the Atlantic.
It is the biggest naval loss since the second world war
Three years ago The Economist’s defence correspondent was sailing back to Odessa on the Hetman Sahaidachny, then the flagship of Ukraine’s navy. A plaque in its wardroom honoured its former captains. Two names were scratched out—they had defected to Russia when it seized Crimea in 2014. In late February this year, as Russian forces approached once more, the Hetman Sahaidachny was scuttled in Mykolaiv, complete with its 1943-vintage gun.
Now Ukraine seems to have had its revenge. On April 14th Ukrainian officials said they had used Neptune anti-ship missiles to hit the Moskva, a 10,000-tonne Slava-class cruiser which was 60-65 nautical miles (111-120km) south of Odessa. The Moskva, commissioned in 1982, is—or, perhaps, was—the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which has its headquarters in occupied Crimea. Itwas a “venerable, battle hardened, major surface combatant” which participated in Russian wars in Georgia in 2008 and Syria in 2015, notes Alessio Patalano, a naval expert at King’s College London. “This is one of the most severe naval losses since the Falklands war” of 1982, he adds.
Russia’s defence ministry first acknowledged that the Moskva was “seriously damaged”, claiming that a fire had caused ammunition to detonate, but that the ship stayed afloat—a fact corroborated by the Pentagon. But magazine explosions tend to be devastating. Later it admitted that the Moskva had sunk. A Western official was unable to corroborate Ukraine’s claim, but described it as credible: “I am not aware previously of a fire on board a capital warship, which would lead to the ammunition magazine exploding.”
The strike is rich with symbolism. The ship was built in Mykolaiv, then a Soviet city but now a Ukrainian one which has repelled Russian ground assaults over the past month. It was also one of two warships that attacked Snake Island, west of Crimea, on February 24th, the first day of the war. When it ordered the tiny garrison there to surrender, the alleged reply—“Russian warship, go fuck yourself”—became an icon of national resistance, emblazoned on everything from T-shirts to postage stamps. The Moskva’s apparent loss was “a massively important military event”, said Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, on social media. He cast it as the Russian navy’s biggest defeat since the second world war.
Of particular note was the weapon the Ukrainians used. The Neptune, though modelled on the Russian Kh-35 (or Kayak) anti-ship missile, was designed and built in Ukraine. It is not the first time that Neptune has been fired in anger. Oleksandr Turchynov, a former Ukrainian national security council chief, says that the missile was first used to hit the Admiral Essen, a Russian frigate, on April 3rd. The rockets entered the navy’s inventory only in January this year, after corruption scandals delayed their introduction. That the Moskva was parked so close to Odessa, well within the known range of the Neptune, suggests that Russia might have seriously under-estimated its threat. It is not the only example of home-made kit on the battlefield: local innovations in passive radar and helicopter technologies have also surprised the Russians, says Hanna Shelest, a security expert in Odessa.
The strike on the Moskva is more than just a symbolic act of revenge or a demonstration of indigenous prowess. It fits a pattern of bold Ukrainian attacks beyond the frontlines, known as deep strikes. On March 29th an ammunition depot in Belgorod, a key staging point in Russia, was blown up. Belgorod is vital to Russia’s effort to build up forces for an attack on the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, now the focus of its war. A day later Ukrainian helicopters reportedly attacked a fuel depot there and, on April 12th, a railway bridge was destroyed. On April 14th Russia said that more Ukrainian helicopters had attacked its Bryansk region, which neighbours Belarus, causing seven injuries.
Such attacks—by helicopters, missiles and special forces—tie down Russian units that must defend rear areas. They also “add additional short-term strain to Russia’s already stretched logistic chains”, according to British defence intelligence. Russia’s defence ministry is evidently fed up: on April 13th it warned that it would target command centres in Kyiv if Ukraine continued to attack its rear areas.
Though the war’s decisive battles have played out on land, around Kyiv and other cities, the apparent loss of the Moskva is also an important moment in the naval contest. By and large, on the water Russia has had the upper hand. It has cut Ukraine off from the Sea of Azov and maintained a blockade of its Black Sea coastline. That has devastated Ukraine’s economy and choked off grain exports, with wider consequences for global food prices. But Russia’s control of the sea is not absolute. Ukraine has now struck at least four Russian warships, including the Orsk, a landing ship which was hit by ballistic missiles and sunk in the port of Berdyansk on March 24th.
Ukraine’s ability to put Russian warships at risk changes the dynamics of the war at sea, says Ms Shelest. Russia has three Slava-class cruisers but the Moskva was the only one in the Black Sea. Russia cannot replace it because of Turkey’s decision to close the Bosporus strait to warships not already in the Black Sea or based there.
Moreover, the Moskva was not just an offensive platform, but also provided command and control, and air-defence, for a number of other ships. They will now be more vulnerable to Ukrainian missiles or drones; several Russian ships moved away from Ukraine’s coast in the aftermath of the incident on the Moskva, according to an American defence official. The threat of anti-ship missiles already appears to have forced Russia to delay or abandon plans for an amphibious assault on Odessa, which was widely expected in the first phase of the war.
Ukraine only has a division’s worth of Neptunes, says Ms Shelest, probably a dozen or so missiles. The factories where its components are made have been subject to heavy Russian attack. Fortunately for Ukraine, more such missiles may be on the way. After Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, visited Mr Zelensky in Kyiv on April 9th, the British government said it would send anti-ship missiles to Ukraine. British officials will not say which ones, nor how many, but one possibility would be to improvise a coastal version of a ship-based missile—something that Argentina did, with success, with the French Exocet missile in the Falklands war 40 years ago. That would take time, training and ingenuity. But improvisation, it seems, is Ukraine’s strong suit. ■
It’s a Cossack thing Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine is defined by self-organisation
Coming together is what Ukrainians do
All main roads in Kyiv lead to Maidan, the open space at the heart of the city—even if, at the moment, some of them are blocked by concrete barriers and tank traps. The central space is, most of the time, a busy urban miscellany. The metro station and a labyrinthine shopping centre wrestle for space below ground; the Stalinist buildings on the perimeter boast franchises like McDonald’s and one-offs like the jellyfish museum. And sometimes it is the heart of the nation.
It has had many names over the years: Dumskaya Ploshchad (Parliament Square), Sovetskaya Ploshchad (Soviet Square), Ploshchad Kalinina (Kalinin Square). When student protests demanding independence were first held there in 1990 it was still Ploshchad Oktyabrskoi Revolutsyi (October Revolution Square). It was only the year after, in the post-Soviet age, that it took its current name. No longer a Russian ploshchad, or a Ukrainian ploscha, it became a maidan—a Persian term introduced by way of the Tatars of Crimea which enriches the architectural notion of a square with the connotations of a communal meeting place. Specifically, it became Maidan Nezalezhnosti: Independence Square.
But nobody in Ukraine bothers with the qualifier. Since becoming the focal site of the Orange revolution, in 2004, and the revolution of dignity, in 2014, Maidan has not needed it. In the winter of 2013-14 it became a city within the city as diverse as the country itself, a place where tens of thousands of people cooked together on open fires, lived in tents, built barricades, pried loose cobblestones and died when fired on from the surrounding buildings. Today the name Maidan stands for independence in and of itself.
The identification of independence with a place for coming together gets to the heart of something very Ukrainian. Being Ukrainian is not rooted in a particular territorial claim, or a certain ethnic background, or an allegiance to a particular state and its institutions, or the profession of a given faith. It is instead about an ability to come together when you feel that you need to and to get things done. It is a way of depending on each other, rather than on institutions or hierarchies, whether over cold nights of winter protest or when pelting tanks with Molotov cocktails.
When Roman Romaniuk, a journalist for Ukrainska Pravda, declared that “This war against Putin is our final Maidan,” he was saying that, after two previous Maidans against Mr Putin’s placeman, Viktor Yanukovych, a battle against Mr Putin himself provided a fitting boss-level conclusion to the country’s struggle for sovereignty and democracy. But he was also saying that the self-organising spirit of those revolutions is animating Ukraine’s defence of itself. It goes a long way to explaining why a country which, when invaded, was widely expected to fold like a cheap suit has instead fought the aggressors to a temporary standstill.
Ukraine’s gift for rising to challenges in its own way is not without downsides. On neither of the occasions when the people got rid of Mr Yanukovych did they put in place the sort of reform needed to curb the politically powerful oligarchs and pervasively corrupt bureaucracy that made such rulers possible. Coming together only when needs must means letting a lot of other things slide with the oft repeated phrase to sia zrobyt: “it will have to sort itself out”. A flair for self-organisation may, remarkably, allow Ukraine to survive the Russian invasion in something like its current shape. But without something extra it will never make the country as impressive in peace as it has proved itself in war.
Andrei Zorin, a professor at Oxford University, says that the unifying myth behind today’s resistance, the two Maidans and much more is that of the Cossacks of the Zaporozhskaya Sich. The Cossacks were, as Andrew Wilson, a professor at ucl, in London, writes in his book “The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation”, “‘Free men’ who took advantage of the ‘wild field’, the no-man’s-land in the open steppe, to establish autonomous farming and raiding communities beyond the reach of the formal authority of the main regional powers—Poland, Muscovy and the Ottomans.”
The Sich was the self-organised military democracy through which some Cossacks asserted their autonomy in the early modern era. Its capacities have been romanticised and lionised ever since. “[The Zaporozhian Cossacks] were not a standing army,” Nikolai Gogol wrote in “Taras Bulba”, a 19th-century novella. “But in case of war and general uprising, it required a week, and no more, for every man to appear on horseback, fully armed, and in two weeks such a force had assembled as no recruiting officers would ever have been able to collect.” In the 1920s Nestor Makhno, an anarchist who found common ground with peasants who hated all kinds of state control, created a similar army to resist all those who sought to claim the wild field between Donbas and Kryvyi Rih where the Zaporozhskaya Sich had once held sway.
Such tales resonate because, for most of Ukraine’s history, the state has been something foreign for the people to resist, ignore and get by without. When their country acquired a state of its own in 1991, those who ran it were as unscrupulous and divorced from the people as the foreign rulers had been, providing little reason for a change in attitude. Ukrainians continue to have low expectations of the state and rely instead on informal networks of friends, neighbours and relatives. Political reforms since 2014 have recognised this democratic bottom-upness, allowing local communities to amalgamate into larger ones called hromady as they see fit.
Decentralised does not mean divided
Last year Arena, a project based at Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Economics, reported on what united Ukrainians after 30 years of independence. The researchers concluded that the most important things were not attitudes or values, but “shared, near-unconscious behaviours that have been shaped by the many centuries of Ukraine’s pluralistic history.” In his book “The Gates of Europe”, which has become a standard text in Ukraine since its publication in 2015, Serhii Plokhy describes a nation defined not by its people’s pre-existing identities as by its willingness to negotiate them, crossing and recrossing the “inner and outer frontiers” between regions, faiths and ways of life.
As well as distrusting states imposed on them by others, the Ukrainians have not been very keen on states dominated by any one faction within the country. Mr Plokhy, who teaches history at Harvard, points to the way that, after the fall of the Russian empire in 1917, the primacy some nationalists placed on the Ukrainian language and its associated culture lost them allies among Jewish and Polish minorities worried by such ethno-nationalism. In 1991, on the other hand, Ukrainian sovereignty was supported by all the country’s people. Soviet repression had forged an alliance between Ukrainian nationalists and Jewish dissidents, among others.
Attempts to make capital out of the country’s regional and ethnic differences since then have ultimately proved fruitless, whether encouraged by Russian provocateurs or by factions in Ukraine itself. When Viktor Yushchenko, the president who was brought to power by the Orange revolution, hailed the mid-20th-century nationalist, anti-Semite and sometime Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera as a Ukrainian hero he alienated not just the Russian-speaking east but also the liberal intelligentsia across the country.
The war is laying all thought of division to rest: as Sergei Rakhmanin, a journalist and politician, wrote recently, it “has stitched us together without any anaesthetic”. Russian-speakers, Jews, Crimean Tatars and Ukrainian-speakers are fighting as one for survival and their right to be who they want to be on their own land. It is Russian speakers in the south and east who, stalwart in resistance, are paying the heaviest price. The war which Mr Putin launched on the basis of a belief that Ukraine does not exist and should not exist is proving the opposite.
Military improvisation has always been part of Ukrainian self defence. The tachankas—machineguns on horse-drawn carriages—fielded by Makhno’s army were the forerunners of the armed Toyota pick-ups, or “technicals”, now seen in low-intensity conflicts around the world. In a Facebook post Anton Kolumbet, a fighter in Ukraine’s territorial defence force, described the self organisation of the defenders in today’s “wild field”:
In one small forest next to a village being fought over you can see the following: the Ukrainian army, the national guard, territorial defence units, the police, a few glorious patriotic fighters, military intelligence, the secret services, some other strange military professionals and some dodgy types jumping about with weapons…Whenever the enemy tries to enter the village, he is obliterated. When he is obliterated, dodgy-looking guys run under the shelling to get their hands on trophies drenched in blood. Some kick Russian helmets. Some take photos of the corpses. Others write combat reports. Suddenly, a tank appears and goes after three Russian armoured personnel carriers. It destroys them, and then trundles off somewhere else….Where are all these people coming from? How are they armed? Where are they headed? The people don’t know themselves…No military academy anywhere in the world can teach you how to fight such a thing.
“We are a very chaotic nation,” says Andriy Khlyvnyuk, “A nation of musicians and warriors.” The lead singer of a group called BoomBox, which is hugely popular in Russia as well as Ukraine, Mr Khlyvnyuk was on tour in America on February 24th. He immediately cancelled the rest of the tour and returned to Kyiv to join the territorial defence force. A viral video of him singing “Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow”, a protest song from 1914, in front of Kyiv’s St Sofia cathedral, rifle slung over his shoulder, has been embellished in mash-ups by Lithuanian opera singers, a South African producer and satirist called The Kiffness and, in their first new song for 28 years, Pink Floyd.
Volodymyr Zelensky, a television comedian before he was elected president in 2018, fits the same “you do what you can” picture. “The first thing that I understood,” he said in a recent interview with The Economist, was “that we the people have agency. People are leaders and political leaders are losers, some of them.” (The Arena research found that politicians were the group Ukrainians like least.) As with everyone else, his wartime role has been to do what he does best—communicate with his people and with the world. He is not trying to run the country so much as letting the country run itself.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the army, where Valery Zaluzhnyi, a charismatic 48-year-old, enjoys free rein as commander-in-chief. Unlike older officers, General Zaluzhnyi never served in the Soviet army; on taking over last year he told his officers to “turn your face to the people, to your subordinates.” He has allowed local commanders to take a lot more initiative than is normal in post-Soviet armies; he listens to the advice of his senior officers.
How the self-organising spirit will fare after the war’s end will depend a great deal on what sort of end it is. If Mr Zelensky survives in office he is likely to be the most powerful politician for generations. The machinations of the country’s oligarchs, which have held the country back for 30 years, will matter much less. Giving in to the predilection to just let things sort themselves out once the crisis is over will look more culpable. That all argues for the possibility of reform.
But there will be a risk of backsliding on democracy and liberalism in a country which will be focused on its security as never before. “It is unlikely that Ukraine will have political elections in the next few years,” one observer of Ukrainian politics says. That may make eventual integration into the Europe of the eu harder. “Absolutely liberal, European—it will not be like that,” Mr Zelensky told journalists on April 5th. “It will definitely come from the strength of every house, every building, every person…We will become a ‘big Israel’ with its own face.”
The tank traps that have replaced occasional uprisings and everyday bustle on Maidan will in time be taken away. What the Ukrainian people will put in their place remains to be seen. ■
The possibility of a stalemate is fueling concerns that Ukraine may remain a deadly European battlefield and a source of continental and global instability for months, or even years, to come.
Or maybe it will absorb the hit and survive as it has survived and expanded since the 17th century. You’d be a fool to bet against it. The graveyards of Eurasia are full of those who did.
