Tag: Kremlin

Biden wants Poland’s opinion — but he still has the power

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MUNICH — NATO’s eastern flank has found its voice — but Joe Biden’s visit is a reminder that Western capitals still have the weight.
After Russia bombed its way into Ukraine, the military alliance’s eastern members won praise for their prescient warnings (not to mention a few apologies). They garnered respect for quickly emptying their weapons stockpiles for Kyiv and boosting defense spending to new heights. Now, they’re driving the conversation on how to deal with Russia.
In short, eastern countries suddenly have the ear of traditional Western powers — and they are trying to move the needle.

“We draw the red line, then we waste the time, then we cross this red line,” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda said over the weekend at the Munich Security Conference, describing a now-familiar cycle of debates among Ukraine’s partners as eastern capitals push others to move faster.
The region’s sudden prominence will be on full display as U.S. President Joe Biden travels to Poland this week, where he will sit down with leaders of the so-called Bucharest Nine — Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.
The choice is both symbolic and practical. Washington is keen to show its eastern partners it wants their input — and to remind Vladimir Putin of the consequences should the Kremlin leader spread his war into NATO territory.
Yet when it comes to allies’ most contentious decisions, like what arms to place where, the eastern leaders ultimately still have to defer to leaders like Biden — and his colleagues in Western powers like Germany. They are the ones holding the largest quantities of modern tanks, fighter jets and long-range missiles, after all.
“My job,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said in Munich, is “to move the pendulum of imagination of my partners in western Europe.”
“Our region has risen in relevance,” added Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský in an interview. But Western countries are still “much stronger” on the economic and military front, he added. “They are still the backbone.”
They’re listening … now
When Latvian Defense Minister Ināra Mūrniece entered politics over a decade ago, she recalled the skepticism that greeted her and like-minded countries when they discussed Russia on the global stage.
“They didn’t understand us,” she said in an interview earlier this month. People saw the region as “escalating the picture,” she added.
Latvian Defense Minister Ināra Mūrniece | Gints Ivuskans/AFP via Getty Images
February 24, 2022, changed things. The images of Russia rolling tanks and troops into Ukraine shocked many Westerners — and started changing minds. The Russian atrocities that came shortly after in places like Bucha and Irpin were “another turning point,” Mūrniece said.
Now, the eastern flank plays a key role in defining the alliance’s narrative — and its understanding of Russia.
“Our voice is now louder and more heard,” said Romanian Foreign Minister Bogdan Aurescu.
The Bucharest Nine — an informal format that brings together the region for dialogue with the U.S. and occasionally other partners — is one of the vehicles regional governments are using to showcase their interests.
“It has become an authoritative voice in terms of assessment of the security situation, in terms of assessment of needs,” Aurescu said in an interview in Munich. NATO is listening to the group for a simple reason, he noted: “The security threats are coming from this part of our neighborhood.”
Power shifts … slowly
While the eastern flank has prodded its western partners to send once-unthinkable weapons to Ukraine, the power balance has not completely flipped. Far from it.
Washington officials retain the most sway in the Western alliance. Behind them, several western European capitals take the lead.
“Without the Germans things don’t move — without the Americans things don’t move for sure,” said one senior western European diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.
And at this stage of the war, as Ukraine pushes for donations of the most modern weapons — fighter jets, advanced tanks, longer-range missile systems — it’s the alliance’s largest economies and populations that are in focus.
“It’s very easy for me to say that, ‘Of course, give fighter jets’ — I don’t have them,” Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas told reporters earlier this month.
Asked if his country would supply Kyiv with F-16 fighter jets, Morawiecki conceded in Munich, “we have not too many of them.” | Omar Marques/Getty Images
“So it’s up to those countries to say who have,” she said. “If I would have, I would give — but I don’t.”
And even some eastern countries who have jets don’t want to move without their Western counterparts.
Asked if his country would supply Kyiv with F-16 fighter jets, Morawiecki conceded in Munich, “we have not too many of them.” He did say, however, that Poland could offer older jets — if the allies could pull together a coalition, that is.
Another challenge for advocates of a powerful eastern voice within NATO is that the eastern flank itself is diverse.
Priorities vary even among like-minded countries based on their geographies. And, notably, there are some Russia-friendly outliers.
Hungary, for example, does not provide any weapons assistance to Ukraine and continues to maintain a relationship with the Kremlin. In fact, Budapest has become so isolated in Western policy circles that no Hungarian government officials attended the Munich Security Conference.
“I think the biggest problem in Hungary is the rhetoric of leadership, which sometimes really crosses the red line,” said the Czech Republic’s Lipavský, who was cautious to add that Budapest does fulfill NATO obligations, participating in alliance defense efforts.
Just for now?
There are also questions about whether the east’s moment in the limelight is a permanent fixture or product of the moment. After all, China, not Russia, may be seizing western attention in the future.
“It’s obvious that their voice is becoming louder, but that’s also a consequence of the geopolitical situation we’re in,” said the senior western European diplomat. “I’m not sure if it’s sustainable in the long run.”
A second senior western European diplomat, who also spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal alliance dynamics, said that the eastern flank countries sometimes take a tough tone “because of the fear of the pivot to China.”
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has also reiterated that western alliance members play a role in defending the eastern flank | Johannes Simon/Getty Images
Asked if the war has changed the balance of influence within the alliance, French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna said: “Yes and no.”
“We have to defend our territories, it is as simple as that,” she told POLITICO in Munich. “In order to do so we had to reinforce the eastern flank — Russia is on that part of the continent.”
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has also reiterated that western alliance members play a role in defending the eastern flank.
Asked whether NATO’s center of gravity is shifting east, he said on a panel in Munich that “what has shifted east is NATO’s presence.”
But, he added, “of course many of those troops come from the western part of the alliance — so this demonstrates how NATO is together and how we support each other.”
And in western Europe, there is a sense that the east does deserve attention at the moment.
“They might not have all the might,” said the second senior western European diplomat. “But they deserve solidarity.”

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 16, 2023
Elon Musk goes to war with researchers

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When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he promised an era of openness for the social media platform. Yet that transparency will soon come at a price.
On Thursday, the social-networking giant will shut down free and unfettered access to reams of data on the company’s millions of users. As part of that overhaul, researchers worldwide who track misinformation and hate speech will also have their access shut down — unless they stump up the cash to keep the data tap on.
The move is part of Musk’s efforts to make Twitter profitable amid declining advertising revenue, sluggish user growth and cut-throat competition from the likes of TikTok and Instagram.

But the shift has riled academics, infuriated lawmakers and potentially put Twitter at odds with new content-moderation rules in the European Union that require such data access to independent researchers.
“Shutting down or requiring paid access to the researcher API will be devastating,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, who has spent years relying on Twitter’s API to track potentially harmful material online.
“There are inequities in resources for researchers around the world. Scholars at Ivy League institutions in the United States could probably afford to pay,” she added. “But there are scholars all around the world who simply will not have the resources to pay anything for access to this.”
The change would cut free access to Twitter’s so-called application program interface (API), which allowed outsiders to track what happened on the platform on a large scale. The API essentially gave outsiders direct access to the company’s data streams and was kept open to allow researchers to monitor users, including to spot harmful, fake or misleading content.
A team at New York University, for instance, published a report last month on how far wide-reaching Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election had been by directly tapping into Twitter’s API system. Without that access, the level of Kremlin meddling would have been lost to history, according to Joshua Tucker, co-director at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics.
Twitter did not respond to repeated requests to comment on whether this week’s change would affect academics and other independent researchers. The move still may not happen at all, depending on how Twitter tweaks its policies. The company’s development team said via a post on the social network last week it was committed to allowing others to access the platform via some form of API.
“We’ll be back with more details on what you can expect next week,” they said.
Yet the lack of details about who will be affected — and how much the data access will cost from February 9 — has left academics and other researchers scrambling for any details. Meanwhile, many of Twitter’s employees working on trust and safety issues have either been fired or have left the company since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October.
In Europe’s crosshairs
The timing of the change comes as the European Commission on Thursday will publish its first reports from social media companies, including Twitter, about how they are complying with the EU’s so-called code of practice on disinformation, a voluntary agreement between EU legislators and Big Tech firms in which these companies agree to uphold a set of principles to clamp down on such material. The code of practice includes pledges to “empower researchers” by improving their ability to access companies’ data to track online content.
Thierry Breton, Europe’s internal market commissioner, talked to Musk last week to remind him about his obligations regarding the bloc’s content rules, though neither discussed the upcoming shutdown of free data access to the social network.
“We cannot rely only on the assessment of the platforms themselves. If the access to researchers is getting worse, most likely that would go against the spirit of that commitment,” Věra Jourová, the European Commission’s vice president for values and transparency, told POLITICO.
“It’s worrying to see a reversal of the trend on Twitter,” she added in reference to the likely cutback in outsiders’ access to the company’s data.
While the bloc’s disinformation standards are not mandatory, separate content rules from Brussels, known as the Digital Services Act, also directly require social media companies to provide data access to so-called vetted researchers. By complying with the code of practice on disinformation, tech giants can ease some of their compliance obligations under those separate content-moderation rules and avoid fines of up to 6 percent of their revenues if they fall afoul of the standards.
Yet even Twitter’s inclusion in the voluntary standards on disinformation is on shaky ground.
The company submitted its initial report that will be published Wednesday and Musk said he was committed to complying with the rules. But Camino Rojo — who served as head of public policy for Spain and was the main person at Twitter involved in the daily work on the code since November’s mass layoffs — is no longer working at the tech giant as of last week, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions within Twitter. Rojo did not respond to a request for comment.
American lawmakers are also trying to pass legislation that would improve researcher access to social media companies following a series of scandals. The companies’ role in fostering the January 6 Capitol Hill riots has triggered calls for tougher scrutiny, as did the so-called Facebook Files revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen, which highlighted how difficult it remains for outsiders to understand what is happening on these platforms.
“Twitter should be making it easier to study what’s happening on its platform, not harder,” U.S. Representative Lori Trahan, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement in reference to the upcoming change to data access. “This is the latest in a series of bad moves from Twitter under Elon Musk’s leadership.”
Rebecca Kern contributed reporting from Washington.
This article has been updated to reflect a change in when the European Commission is expected to publish reports under the code of practice on disinformation.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 8, 2023
EU to launch platform to fight Russian, Chinese disinformation

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The European Union will launch a new platform to counter disinformation campaigns by Russia and China amid growing worries, EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said today.
A so-called Information Sharing and Analysis Center within the EU’s foreign services —the European External Action Service (EEAS) — will seek to track information manipulation by foreign actors and coordinate with the 27 EU countries and the wider community of NGOs.
“We need to understand how these disinformation campaigns are organized … to identify the actors of the manipulation,” said Borrell.
One EEAS official said it would be a decentralized platform to exchange information in real-time with NGOs, countries and cybersecurity agencies, enabling better understanding of emerging disinformation threats and narratives and quicker action to tackle such problems.
Almost a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU continues to fend off Russian attempts to manipulate and distort information about the war. Kremlin-led propaganda seeking to blame the EU for a global food crisis due to its sanctions has also spread to countries in Africa and the Middle East.
Borrell also warned of a “new wave” of disinformation of fabricated images, videos and websites posing as media outlets spreading “five times the speed of light across social networks and messaging services.”
The EU’s existing disinformation unit, the Stratcom division, in a first-ever report, noted that most of the foreign information manipulation in 2022 had centered on narratives supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russian and Chinese diplomatic channels were particularly involved.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 8, 2023
UK to train Ukrainian pilots as ‘first step’ toward sending fighter jets

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WAREHAM, Dorset — Ukrainian fighter pilots will soon be trained in Britain — but Kyiv will have to wait a little longer for the modern combat jets it craves.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy left the U.K. Wednesday with a firm British commitment to train fighter jet pilots on NATO-standard aircraft, along with an offer of longer-range missiles.
U.K. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has now been tasked with investigating which jets the U.K. might be able to supply to Ukraine, Downing Street announced — but Prime Minister Rishi Sunak fell short of making actual promises on their supply, which his spokesman said would only ever be a “long-term” option.

Speaking at a joint press conference at the Lulworth military camp in Wareham, southern England, Sunak said the priority must be to “arm Ukraine in the short-term” to ensure the country is not vulnerable to a fresh wave of Russian attacks this spring.
Standing alongside Zelenskyy in front of a British-made Challenger 2 tank, Sunak restated that “nothing is off the table” when it comes to provision of military assistance to Ukraine, and said fourth-generation fighter jets were part of his conversation with the Ukrainian president “today, and have been previously.”
These talks also covered the supply chains required to support such sophisticated aircraft, Sunak said.
But he cautioned a decision to deliver jets would only be taken in coalition with allies, and said training pilots must come first and could take “some time.”
“That’s why we have announced today that we will be training Ukrainian air force on NATO-standard platforms, because the first step in being able to provide advanced aircrafts is to have soldiers or aviators who are capable of using them,” Sunak said. “We need to make sure they are able to operate the aircraft they might eventually be using.”
The first Challenger 2 tanks pledged by Britain will arrive in Ukraine by next month, Sunak added.
President Zelenskyy ramped up the pressure on Rishi Sunak joking that he had left parliament two years earlier grateful for “delicious English tea”, but this time he would be “thanking all of you in advance for powerful English planes” | Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images
Describing his private conversations with Sunak as “fruitful,” Zelenskyy said he was “very grateful” that Britain had finally heard Kyiv’s call for longer-range missiles.
But he warned that without fighter jets, there is a risk of “stagnation” in his country’s battle against Russian occupation.
“Without the weapons that we are discussing now, and the weapons that we just discussed with Rishi earlier today, and how Britain is going to help us, you know, all of this is very important,” he said. “Without this, there would be stagnation, which will not bring anything good.”
Rolling out the red carpet
The U.K. had rolled out the red carpet for Zelenskyy’s surprise day-long visit, which alongside the visit to the military base included talks with Sunak at Downing Street, a meeting with King Charles at Buckingham Palace and a historic address to the U.K. parliament in Westminster.
Only a handful of leaders have made such an address in Westminster Hall over the past 30 years, including Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama.
“We have freedom. Give us wings to protect it,” Zelenskyy told British lawmakers, after symbolically handing House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle a helmet used by one of Ukraine’s fighter pilots. The message written upon it stated: “Combat aircraft for Ukraine, wings for freedom.”
Zelenskyy’s call was backed by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who urged Sunak to meet his request.
“We have more than 100 Typhoon jets. We have more than 100 Challenger 2 tanks,” he said. “The best single use for any of these items is to deploy them now for the protection of the Ukrainians — not least because that is how we guarantee our own long-term security.”
Western defense ministers will gather to discuss further military aid to Ukraine on February 14, at a meeting at the U.S. base of Ramstein in southwest Germany.
Sunak’s spokesman said that while Britain has made no decision on whether to send its own jets, “there is an ongoing discussion among other countries about their own fighter jets, some of which are more akin to what Ukrainian pilots are used to.”
Training day
Britain’s announcement marks the first public declaration by a European country on the training of Ukrainian pilots, and could spur other European nations into following suit. France is already considering a similar request from Kyiv.
Yuriyy Sak, an adviser to Ukrainian Minister of Defence Oleksii Reznikov, praised the U.K.’s decision and said allies “know very well that in order to defeat Russia in 2023, Ukraine needs all types of weaponry,” short of nuclear.
“A few weeks ago, the U.K. showed leadership in the issue of providing tanks to Ukraine, and then other allies have followed their example,” he said. “Now the U.K. is again showing leadership in the pilot training issue. Hopefully other countries will follow.”
The British scheme is likely to run in parallel to an American program to train Ukrainian pilots to fly U.S. fighters, for which the U.S. House of Representatives approved $100 million last summer. In October Ukraine announced a group of several dozen pilots had been selected for training on Western fighter jets.
The first Ukrainian pilots are expected to arrive in Britain in the spring, with Downing Street warning the instruction program could last up to five years. Military analysts, however, say the length of any such scheme could vary significantly depending on the pilots’ previous expertise and the type of fighter they learn to operate.
The U.K. announcement is therefore of “significant value” but “does not suggest the provision of fighter jets is imminent,” said Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow for airpower at the British think tank RUSI.
The British program is likely to involve simulators and focus on providing training on NATO tactics and basic cockpit procedures to Ukrainian pilots who already have expertise in flying Soviet-era jets, Bronk said.
The new training programs come in addition to the expansion in the numbers of Ukrainian early recruits being trained on basic tactics in the U.K., from 10,000 to 20,000 soldiers this year.
‘Unimaginable hardships’
Wednesday’s visit marked Zelenskyy’s first trip to the U.K. since Russia’s invasion almost a year ago and only his second confirmed journey outside Ukraine during the war, following a visit to the United States last December.
The Ukrainian president arrived on a Royal Air Force plane at an airport north of London Wednesday morning, the entire trip a closely guarded secret until he landed.
Recounting his first visit to London back in 2020, when he sat in British wartime leader Winston Churchill’s armchair, Zelenskyy said: “I certainly felt something — but it is only now that I know what the feeling was. It is a feeling of how bravery takes you through the most unimaginable hardships to finally reward you with victory.”
Zelenskyy travelled to Paris Wednesday evening for talks with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. In a short statement, Zelenskyy said France and Germany “can be game-changers,” adding: “The earlier we get heavy weapons, long-range missiles, aircraft, alongside tanks, the sooner the war will end.”
Macron said Ukraine “can count on France and Europe to [help] win the war,” while Scholz added that Zelenskyy expected attendance at a summit of EU leaders in Brussels Thursday “is a sign of solidarity.”
Dan Bloom and Clea Caulcutt provided additional reporting.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 8, 2023
Can Putin win?

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“I am wicked and scary with claws and teeth,” Vladimir Putin reportedly warned David Cameron when the then-British prime minister pressed him about the use of chemical weapons by Russia’s ally in Syria, Bashar al-Assad, and discussed how far Russia was prepared to go.
According to Cameron’s top foreign policy adviser John Casson — cited in a BBC documentary — Putin went on to explain that to succeed in Syria, one would have to use barbaric methods, as the U.S. did in Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. “I am an ex-KGB man,” he expounded.
The remarks were meant, apparently, half in jest but, as ever with Russia’s leader, the menace was clear.
And certainly, Putin has proven he is ready to deploy fear as a weapon in his attempt to subjugate a defiant Ukraine. His troops have targeted civilians and have resorted to torture and rape. But victory has eluded him.
In the next few weeks, he looks set to try to reverse his military failures with a late-winter offensive: very possibly by being even scarier, and fighting tooth and claw, to save Russia — and himself — from further humiliation.
Can the ex-KGB man succeed, however? Can Russia still win the war of Putin’s choice against Ukraine in the face of heroic and united resistance from the Ukrainians?
Catalog of errors
From the start, the war was marked by misjudgments and erroneous calculations. Putin and his generals underestimated Ukrainian resistance, overrated the abilities of their own forces, and failed to foresee the scale of military and economic support Ukraine would receive from the United States and European nations.
Kyiv didn’t fall in a matter of days — as planned by the Kremlin — and Putin’s forces in the summer and autumn were pushed back, with Ukraine reclaiming by November more than half the territory the Russians captured in the first few weeks of the invasion. Russia has now been forced into a costly and protracted conventional war, one that’s sparked rare dissent within the country’s political-military establishment and led Kremlin infighting to spill into the open.

The only victory Russian forces have recorded in months came in January when the Ukrainians withdrew from the salt-mining town of Soledar in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. And the signs are that the Russians are on the brink of another win with Bakhmut, just six miles southwest of Soledar, which is likely to fall into their hands shortly.
But neither of these blood-drenched victories amounts to much more than a symbolic success despite the high casualties likely suffered by both sides. Tactically neither win is significant — and some Western officials privately say Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy may have been better advised to have withdrawn earlier from Soledar and from Bakhmut now, in much the same way the Russians in November beat a retreat from their militarily hopeless position at Kherson.
For a real reversal of Russia’s military fortunes Putin will be banking in the coming weeks on his forces, replenished by mobilized reservists and conscripts, pulling off a major new offensive. Ukrainian officials expect the offensive to come in earnest sooner than spring. Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov warned in press conferences in the past few days that Russia may well have as many as 500,000 troops amassed in occupied Ukraine and along the borders in reserve ready for an attack. He says it may start in earnest around this month’s first anniversary of the war on February 24.
Other Ukrainian officials think the offensive, when it comes, will be in March — but at least before the arrival of Leopard 2 and other Western main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. Zelenskyy warned Ukrainians Saturday that the country is entering a “time when the occupier throws more and more of its forces to break our defenses.”
All eyes on Donbas
The likely focus of the Russians will be on the Donbas region of the East. Andriy Chernyak, an official in Ukraine’s military intelligence, told the Kyiv Post that Putin had ordered his armed forces to capture all of Donetsk and Luhansk by the end of March. “We’ve observed that the Russian occupation forces are redeploying additional assault groups, units, weapons and military equipment to the east,” Chernyak said. “According to the military intelligence of Ukraine, Putin gave the order to seize all of the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.”
Other Ukrainian officials and western military analysts suspect Russia might throw some wildcards to distract and confuse. They have their eyes on a feint coming from Belarus mimicking the northern thrust last February on Kyiv and west of the capital toward Vinnytsia. But Ukrainian defense officials estimate there are only 12,000 Russian soldiers in Belarus currently, ostensibly holding joint training exercises with the Belarusian military, hardly enough to mount a diversion.
“A repeat assault on Kyiv makes little sense,” Michael Kofman, an American expert on the Russian Armed Forces and a fellow of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank. “An operation to sever supply lines in the west, or to seize the nuclear powerplant by Rivne, may be more feasible, but this would require a much larger force than what Russia currently has deployed in Belarus,” he said in an analysis.
But exactly where Russia’s main thrusts will come along the 600-kilometer-long front line in Ukraine’s Donbas region is still unclear. Western military analysts don’t expect Russia to mount a push along the whole snaking front — more likely launching a two or three-pronged assault focusing on some key villages and towns in southern Donetsk, on Kreminna and Lyman in Luhansk, and in the south in Zaporizhzhia, where there have been reports of increased buildup of troops and equipment across the border in Russia.
In the Luhansk region, Russian forces have been removing residents near the Russian-held parts of the front line. And the region’s governor, Serhiy Haidai, believes the expulsions are aimed at clearing out possible Ukrainian spies and locals spotting for the Ukrainian artillery. “There is an active transfer of (Russian troops) to the region and they are definitely preparing for something on the eastern front,” Haidai told reporters.
Reznikov has said he expects the Russian offensive will come from the east and the south simultaneously — from Zaporizhzhia in the south and in Donetsk and Luhansk. In the run-up to the main offensives, Russian forces have been testing five points along the front, according to Ukraine’s General Staff in a press briefing Tuesday. They said Russian troops have been regrouping on different parts of the front line and conducting attacks near Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region and Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Novopavlivka in eastern Donetsk.
Combined arms warfare
Breakthroughs, however, will likely elude the Russians if they can’t correct two major failings that have dogged their military operations so far — poor logistics and a failure to coordinate infantry, armor, artillery and air support to achieve mutually complementary effects, otherwise known as combined arms warfare.
When announcing the appointment in January of General Valery Gerasimov — the former chief of the defense staff — as the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine, Russia’s defense ministry highlighted “the need to organize closer interaction between the types and arms of the troops,” in other words to improve combined arms warfare.
Kofman assesses that Russia’s logistics problems may have largely been overcome. “There’s been a fair amount of reorganization in Russian logistics, and adaptation. I think the conversation on Russian logistical problems in general suffers from too much anecdotalism and received wisdom,” he said.
Failing that, much will depend for Russia on how much Gerasimov has managed to train his replenished forces in combined arms warfare and on that there are huge doubts he had enough time. Kofman believes Ukrainian forces “would be better served absorbing the Russian attack and exhausting the Russian offensive potential, then taking the initiative later this spring. Having expended ammunition, better troops, and equipment it could leave Russian defense overall weaker.” He suspects the offensive “may prove underwhelming.”
Pro-war Russian military bloggers agree. They have been clamoring for another mobilization, saying it will be necessary to power the breakouts needed to reverse Russia’s military fortunes. Former Russian intelligence officer and paramilitary commander Igor Girkin, who played a key role in Crimea’s annexation and later in the Donbas, has argued waves of call-ups will be needed to overcome Ukraine’s defenses by sheer numbers.
And Western military analysts suspect that Ukraine and Russia are currently fielding about the same number of combat soldiers. This means General Gerasimov will need many more if he’s to achieve the three-to-one ratio military doctrines suggest necessary for an attacking force to succeed.
Ukrainian officials think Russia’s offensive will be in March, before the arrival of Leopard 2 and other Western tanks | Sascha Schuermann/Getty Images
But others fear that Russia has sufficient forces, if they are concentrated, to make some “shock gains.” Richard Kemp, a former British army infantry commander, is predicting “significant Russian gains in the coming weeks. We need to be realistic about how bad things could be — otherwise the shock risks dislodging Western resolve,” he wrote. The fear being that if the Russians can make significant territorial gains in the Donbas, then it is more likely pressure from some Western allies will grow for negotiations.
But Gerasimov’s manpower deficiencies have prompted other analysts to say that if Western resolve holds, Putin’s own caution will hamper Russia’s chances to win the war.
“Putin’s hesitant wartime decision-making demonstrates his desire to avoid risky decisions that could threaten his rule or international escalation — despite the fact his maximalist and unrealistic objective, the full conquest of Ukraine, likely requires the assumption of further risk to have any hope of success,” said the Institute for the Study of War in an analysis this week.
Wicked and scary Putin may be but, as far as ISW sees it, he “has remained reluctant to order the difficult changes to the Russian military and society that are likely necessary to salvage his war.”

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 8, 2023
Russia is planning coup in Moldova, says President Maia Sandu

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Russia wants to stage a coup d’état in Moldova, the country’s President Maia Sandu said Monday.
Sandu called for heightened security measures in Moldova after the pro-EU government resigned last week, following months of pressure from Moscow which is waging an all-out war on neighboring Ukraine.
“The plan included sabotage and militarily trained people disguised as civilians to carry out violent actions, attacks on government buildings and taking hostages,” Sandu told reporters at a press conference Monday.
She added that citizens of Russia, Montenegro, Belarus and Serbia would be among those entering Moldova to try to spark protests in an attempt to “change the legitimate government to an illegitimate government, controlled by the Russian Federation to stop the EU integration process.”
Moldova was granted candidate status to the European Union last June, together with Ukraine.
Sandu’s remarks come after she nominated a new prime minister on Friday to keep her country on a pro-EU trajectory after the previous government fell earlier in the day.
“Reports received from our Ukrainian partners indicate the locations and logistical aspects of organizing this subversive activity. The plan also envisages the use of foreigners for violent actions,” she said, adding that earlier statements from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about Russia’s plans to stoke unrest have been confirmed by Moldova’s authorities.
Zelenskyy told EU leaders during Thursday’s European Council summit in Brussels that Ukraine had intercepted Russian plans to “destroy” Moldova, which Moldovan intelligence services later confirmed.

The Moldovan government has long accused Russia, which bases soldiers in the breakaway region of Transnistria in the east, of stirring unrest in the country, including protests in the capital, Chișinău.
Sandu on Monday asked Moldova’s parliament to adopt draft laws to equip its Intelligence and Security Service, and the prosecutor’s office, “with the necessary tools to combat more effectively the risks” to the country’s security. “The most aggressive form of attack is an informational attack,” she said, urging citizens to only trust information they receive from the authorities.
“The Kremlin’s attempts to bring violence to Moldova will not work. Our main goal is the security of citizens and the state,” Sandu said.
Russia dismissed Sandu’s accusations as “completely unfounded and unsubtantiated,” and denied it had plans to destabilize the country, a spokeswoman to the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement released Tuesday.
Ana Fota and Nicolas Camut contributed reporting.
This article has been updated.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 8, 2023
Putin has never threatened me, Germany’s Scholz says

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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Russian President Vladimir Putin has never threatened him or Germany, following claims by Boris Johnson that Putin threatened the former U.K. prime minister with a missile strike.
“Putin didn’t threaten me or Germany” in the phone conversations the chancellor has had with the Russian leader, Scholz told German newspaper Bild in an interview published Sunday.
In a British documentary that aired last week, Johnson revealed that Putin threatened him in a long phone call in February 2022 just before Russia invaded Ukraine. “He said ‘Boris, I don’t want to hurt you but, with a missile, it would only take a minute’ — something like that,” Boris said in the documentary, referring to Putin.
Johnson said he took the Russian leader’s threat to be “playing along” with attempts to get him to negotiate over Ukraine. The Kremlin has denied any threat.
Pushed in the Bild interview on whether Scholz had also received similar threats during phone calls with the Russian leader, the chancellor said “no.”
In his phone calls with Putin, “I make it very clear to Putin that Russia has sole responsibility for the war,” Scholz said. “In our telephone conversations, our very different positions on the war in Ukraine become very clear,” he said.
The chancellor also denied that Germany’s decision to deliver Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine was a threat to Russia.
He said that Germany is delivering battle tanks to Ukraine, along with other allies including the U.S., so that Kyiv “can defend itself.”

“This joint approach prevents an escalation of the war,” Scholz said.
Scholz’s comments come as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that “the situation is getting tougher” on the front lines of the war in the east of the country. Moscow is throwing in “more and more of its forces to break our defenses. Now, it is very difficult in Bakhmut, Vuhledar, near Lyman, and other directions,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly address late Saturday.
The U.K. Ministry of Defense said on Sunday that Bakhmut “is increasingly isolated” following Russian advances in the area. “The two main roads into the city for Ukrainian defenders are likely now both threatened by direct fire, following the Russian advances,” the ministry said in a tweet.
As battles rage in eastern Ukraine, an early mediator between Russia and Ukraine at the start of the war — former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett who served for just six months last year — revealed that Putin early in the invasion had promised not to kill Zelenskyy. In an interview with the Associated Press published Sunday, Bennett said that during a visit to Moscow in March 2022 he asked Putin if the Kremlin was planning to try to kill the Ukrainian leader.
“He said ‘I won’t kill Zelenskyy.’ I then said to him ‘I have to understand that you’re giving me your word that you won’t kill Zelenskyy.’ He said ‘I’m not going to kill Zelenskyy,’” Bennett told the AP. Bennett said that after his meeting, he called Zelenskyy to inform him of Putin’s comments.
The Kremlin has previously denied Ukrainian claims that Russia intended to assassinate Zelenskyy.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

January 31, 2023
Manpower will be crucial for Russia to mount a spring offensive

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Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
It appears it’s only a matter of time before the Kremlin orders another draft to replenish its depleted ranks and make up for the battlefield failings of its command.
This week, Norway’s army chief said Russia has already suffered staggering losses, estimating 180,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in Ukraine since February — a figure much higher than American estimates, as General Mark Milley, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, had suggested in November that the toll was around 100,000.
But whatever the exact tally, few military analysts doubt Russian forces are suffering catastrophic casualties. In a video posted this week, Russian human rights activist Olga Romanova, who heads the Russia Behind Bars charity, said that of the 50,000 conscripts recruited from jails by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s paramilitary mercenary outfit, the Wagner Group, 40,000 are now dead, missing or deserted.
In some ways, the high Wagner toll isn’t surprising, with increasing reports from both sides of the front lines that Prigozhin has been using his recruits with little regard for their longevity. One American volunteer, who asked to remain unnamed, recently told POLITICO that he was amazed how Wagner commanders were just hurling their men at Ukrainian positions, only to have them gunned down for little gain.
Andrey Medvedev, a Wagner defector who recently fled to Norway, has also told reporters that in the months-long Russian offensive against the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, former prisoners were thrown into battle as cannon fodder, as meat. “In my platoon, only three out of 30 men survived. We were then given more prisoners, and many of those died too,” he said.
Of course, Wagner is at the extreme end when it comes to carelessness with lives — but as Ukraine’s deadly New Year’s Day missile strike demonstrated, regular Russian armed forces are also knee-deep in blood. Russia says 89 soldiers were killed at Makiivka — the highest single battlefield loss Moscow has acknowledged since the invasion began — while Ukraine estimates the death toll was nearer 400.
Many of those killed there came from Samara, a city located at the confluence of the Volga and Samara rivers, where Communist dictator Joseph Stalin had an underground complex built for Russian leaders in case of a possible evacuation from Moscow. The bunker was built in just as much secrecy as the funerals that have been taking place over the past few weeks for the conscripts killed at Makiivka. “Lists [of the dead] will not be published,” Samara’s military commissar announced earlier this month.

To make up for these losses, Russia’s military bloggers, who have grown increasingly critical, have been urging a bigger partial mobilization, this time of 500,000 reservists to add to the 300,000 already called up in September. President Vladimir Putin has denied this, and Kremlin press spokesman Dmitry Peskov has also dismissed the possibility, saying that the “topic is constantly artificially activated both from abroad and from within the country.”
Yet, last month, Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu called for Russia’s army to be boosted from its current 1.1 million to 1.5 million, and he announced new commands in regions around Moscow, St. Petersburg and Karelia, on the border with Finland.
Meanwhile, circumstantial evidence that another draft will be called is also accumulating — though whether it will be done openly or by stealth is unclear.
Along these lines, both the Kremlin and Russia’s political-military establishment have been redoubling propaganda efforts, attempting to shape a narrative that this war isn’t one of choice but of necessity, and that it amounts to an existential clash for the country.
General Valery Gerasimov — the former chief of the defense staff and now the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine — said that Russia is battling “almost the entire collective West” | Ruslan Braun/Creative commons via Flickr
In a recent interview, General Valery Gerasimov — the former chief of the defense staff and now the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine — said that Russia is battling “almost the entire collective West” and that course corrections are needed when it comes to mobilization. He talked about threats arising from Finland and Sweden joining NATO.
Similarly, in his Epiphany address this month, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church said, “the desire to defeat Russia today has taken very dangerous forms. We pray to the Lord that he will bring the madmen to reason and help them understand that any desire to destroy Russia will mean the end of the world.” And the increasingly unhinged Dmitry Medvedev, now the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, has warned that the war in Ukraine isn’t going as planned, so it might be necessary to use nuclear weapons to avoid failure.
As Russia’s leaders strive to sell their war as an existential crisis, they are mining ever deeper for tropes to heighten nationalist fervor too, citing the Great Patriotic War at every turn. At the Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad, which commemorates the breaking of the German siege of the city in 1944, a new exhibition dedicated to “The Lessons of Fascism Yet to Be Learned” is due to be unveiled, and it is set to feature captured Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles. “It’s only logical that a museum dedicated to the struggle against Nazism would support the special operation directed against neo-Nazism in Ukraine,” a press release helpfully suggests.
In line with Putin’s insistence that the war is being waged to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, Kremlin propagandists have also been endeavoring to popularize the slogan, “We can do it again.”
At the same time, there are signs that local recruitment centers are gearing up for another surge of draftees as well.
Rumors of a fresh partial mobilization have prompted some dual-citizen Central Asian workers — those holding Russian passports and who would be eligible to be drafted — to leave the country, and some say they’ve been prevented from exiting. A Kyrgyz man told Radio Free Europe he was stopped by Russian border guards when he tried to cross into Kazakhstan en route to Kyrgyzstan. “Russian border guards explained to me quite politely that ‘you are included in a mobilization list, this is the law, and you have no right to go,’” he said.
In order to prevent another surge of refuseniks, Moscow also seems determined to put up further restrictions on crossing Russia’s borders, including possibly making it obligatory for Russians to book a specific time and place in advance, so that they can exit. Amendments to a transport law introduced in the Duma on Monday would require “vehicles belonging to Russian transport companies, foreign transport companies, citizens of the Russian Federation, foreign citizens, stateless persons and other road users” to reserve a date and time “in order to cross the state border of the Russian Federation.”
Transport officials say this would only affect haulers and would help ease congestion near border checkpoints. But if so, then why are “citizens of the Russian Federation” included in the language?
All in all, manpower will be crucial for Russia to mount a spring offensive in the coming months. And Western military analysts suspect that Ukraine and Russia are currently fielding about the same number of combat soldiers on the battlefield. This means General Gerasimov will need many more if he’s to achieve the three-to-one ratio military doctrines suggest are necessary for an attacking force.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

January 24, 2023