(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook), September 16, 2022; with an excerpt from his article The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt published by Small Wars Journal March 8, 2022, which was featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News; see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 13: How Best to Penetrate Putin’s Media Iron Curtain in Russia? Dead Russian Troops
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin

SILVER SPRING—Going back through some of my earlier work from just before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 24 escalation against Ukraine, I am struck by how little has changed and how much of my work from then explains what is happening now.

My coverage began with two long articles for Small Wars Journal, one published on February 21 (three days before Putin launched his massive escalation of the war) as The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine and the other on March 8 (less than two weeks into this escalation) as The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt.

I broke the first piece from February 21 into four separate articles for my own site here, going into the reasons behind Putin’s timing and how much he miscalculated in thinking U.S. President Joe Biden and the West would not be up to the challenge of supporting Ukraine robustly with a united front; explaining how Russia has no one to blame but itself for why Eastern Europe was so eager to move away from Russia and towards the West; refuting Putin’s whole NATO narrative as nonsense; and about the utter banality of the centuries-old Russian imperialism and colonialism that were the main motivating drivers behind Russia’s military aggression and war crimes against Ukraine.  These themes keep coming up over and over again in the discourses around this war, and these pieces can be considered evergreen as some of the strongest explanations or arguments on these fronts.

When I wrote the first piece, I was dreading the war on behalf of Ukraine, and while I thought they would put up a hell of a fight, I, like many, thought the Russian military would overcome Ukrainian resistance take over Kyiv, with slaughter to follow.

But that was not what happened, and writing my March 8 Small Wars Journal piece was one of the most thrilling pieces I’ve ever written, one I certainly did not expect to be writing as I watched Putin’s escalation first unfold.  But certain things were just so clear from what happened in the first few weeks, even weeks before Russian forces were pushed back from Kyiv and other fronts, that have defined the entirety of the war then and still do now.  This article was highlighted by Real Clear Defense and discussed by The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest.  Though my perspective highlighted therein is now becoming increasingly popular to have now, at the time my article was criticized by the In the Thick of It blog of Russia Matters (a project of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs) and in a report from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft; the latter was written by George Beebe, now the “Grand Strategy Director” at Quincy and years ago an advisor to then-Vice President Dick Cheney and a top Russia person at the CIA (seriously, I am available for hire…).

I broke that second piece into four separate articles for my site here, noting how barbaric and disgraceful the Russian leadership’s treatment of its own soldiers was; remarking on how insanely high Russia’s casualties were and why we could mostly take Ukrainian estimates of Russian casualties as credible while ignoring the lies of the Kremlin; explaining that sending Russian soldiers home in body bags would be the most effective way to penetrate Putin’s propaganda ceaselessly inflicted upon his own people and reveal how he and his war are failures, destroying the social contract Putin has with his supporters; and how all this could unite the Russian people and military with much of the rest of the world in being against Putin, setting the stage for a revolt and a revolution or coup that would overthrow him.

But it was not until now that I realized I never adapted my substantial introduction in this piece for Real Context News.  So, below is that excerpt, which I feel has aged quite well as a frame for the war and still holds up today:

(excerpt from March 8)

After well over a year of isolation induced by the COVD-19 pandemic, it seems Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has become so detached from reality with his wild Ukraine gamble that he may finally have adventured too far, stumbling into a trap entirely of his own making.  Surprising as it is, this time it is distinctly possible his aggression, ultimately, will not provide him with any way to save face: no “offramp,” as the media seems to love to refer to a possible endgame that leaves him comfortable and not in a weak and unstable position at best (for him) or ousted at worst (obviously, the latter would be ideal for us).

I’m not going to speculate on Vladimir Vladimirovich’s health and mental state to the degree that far too many others have (I heard him referred to as “puffy Putin” recently on CNN—amusing—but I’d be remiss in not pointing out I myself have gained fifteen pounds during the pandemic and have certainly had my own mental struggles as a single man essentially living alone the past few years and covering COVID, Trump, and other horrors).

But clearly, Putin is more agitated and emotional than we have been used to seeing him in his more than two decades in power.  As for whether he is suffering from some sort of (terminal?) disease or is literally going through insanity, let’s all take a step back from such diagnoses, as anyone so powerful and cooped up for so long like Putin was bound to exhibit some level of eccentricity mixed with not many (insert a certain curse word in the plural form) to give.

What is clear is that Putin is letting out some long-held frustrations and perceived grievances like we have never heard or seen before, and that does give reason to worry, aside from the actual Ukraine invasion/war itself.  That this behavior has been coupled with his reckless use of force in launching the largest war on European soil since World War II is even more troubling.

And yet, I’m optimistic like never before that Putin’s end is coming and coming soon even as that optimism is surrounded by the dread of an increasingly bloody and lawless conflict.  I truly think this is the last gasp for a very long time of the Great Power conflicts on European soil, of the major wars that have been constant on the continent since the ancient Greco-Persian wars through today, with the two main exceptions being the Pax Romana and the Pax Americana; this war in Ukraine will either be the end of the Pax Americana in Europe or the one great interruption of it for some time to come. 

(end excerpt)

It turns out my optimism was well-founded, well-founded indeed, with the Russian war effort and Putin’s position and domestic support only worsening.  And my record since then has also been one of the most accurate: I predicted the sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, several days before that happened (possibly the only person to do so in an article) in a piece anticipating the near-irrelevance of the Russian Navy, and, later that month of April, I made a strong case that Crimea could very much be retaken by the Ukrainian military (one praised as a “perfect understanding of the situation” by an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, one Mykhailo Podolyak.

After, I outlined key and deeply illuminating similarities and lessons between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War and summarized the long history of Russian and Soviet atrocities in Ukraine, as well as some of the complicated history of Ukrainian resistance against the Soviet Union.  I took on the myopic arguments that arming Ukraine is somehow “escalation.”  More recently, I have explained in detail the dynamics that have Ukraine winning handily and Russia losing badly, that the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south could create opportunities for counterattacks in the east (over a month before Ukraine’s Kharkiv breakthrough now being celebrated). 

Throughout, I have been indebted to some excellent analysis from a number of individuals, the five best of whom—Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.), Trent Telenko, Illia Ponomarenkno, Dr. Phillips O’Brien, and Rob Lee—I highlighted here and all of whom you can follow (along with me) on Twitter.

Stay tuned, there is more to come, and while the war will be won by Ukraine and Russia has already lost, the fighting continues and could drag on for some time; there may, sadly, be much more death and destruction to come.  I just met yesterday with Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois—a stalwart member of the January 6 Committee and one of the only sane Republicans left when it comes to stopping the slow-moving coup attempt by Trump and his cultist followers to overthrow the Constitution, undo a lawful and legitimate presidential election, and replace American democracy with Trumpist fascism (my words and not necessarily his, to be clear)—and he made it clear that he believed it is crucial to continue supporting and to increase support for Ukraine, as the fight may be far from over.  Rep. Kinzinger is fighting to save democracy both here at home in the U.S. and in Ukraine, and we must follow his example, as I have noted for years that Putin’s efforts in Ukraine are just one front in a global war prosecuted by him and his ilk to destroy Western democracy: the fight of Ukraine against Russia and the fight to preserve democracy in America are, thus, one and the same.

Author’s note: I challenge readers to compare my work to the work of other analysts out there; some exceed my work, to be sure, but that is not the case for the bulk of journalistic and “expert” analysis you will find, against which I am confident you, dear readers, will see my work stacks up rather well.

If I come off as rather non-humble, I can understand that impression, but as a one-man show here, I have to promote my own work and achievements since few others do: I do not have the marketing and reach of a major television station, magazine, newspaper, or think tank, and without support from people like you, dear readers—including donations—I would not be able to produce this level of quality work; as it is, I am trying very hard to highlight my work that it may also land me a long-term position with just such a prestigious outlet or institution so that I do not constantly have to (as they say) “toot my own horn” just to get by.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed half-a-million content views on 8/27/22, 600,000 on 9/8/22, and three-quarters of a million on 9/27/22!!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод coming soon) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook), August 9, 2022

SILVER SPRING—Not just from experts, but from many members of the general public are drawing some sharp comparisons between humanitarian efforts for Ukraine on one hand and for other parts of the world outside of the European world on the other.  For many of those pointing out major differences, the Middle East has been a region rife with examples.

With few exceptions, the only discussions comparing aid efforts (mostly centering on admitting refugees) that I have seen or been able to find with moderate effort in article or report form are emotional appeals often based on racial/ethnic/religious/cultural differences and/or that adopt a moralistic tone but are not terribly analytical.  And, to be fair, this is fair ground for discussion and exploration.

But to assume bigotry and racism is the primary foundation for the different approaches without exploring these other dimensions may score some points with certain aggrieved crowds, but it is not a serious exploration of the determining factors behind the different responses.  In the end, it is hard to get into the mindsets of different leaders of NGOs and governments, to be a proverbial fly-on-the wall for their internal deliberations (as opposed to public statements, which are often a mix of public relations efforts and genuine efforts to offer explanations).  But just as it would be reductionist to assume “the reason” for the different response levels is racism, it would also be naïve to assume cultural or worse biases play a minimal or no role: this dimension, too, deserves serious consideration, not just feel-good virtue signaling written from a perspective of (sometimes understandable) moral outrage.

The following exploration will look at some of the broader (and some specific) (geo)political considerations driving some of these differences between humanitarian efforts for the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian war and those for the Iraq in general and, specifically, the battle for Mosul, in 2016-2017 to narrow down a point of reference for that long series of crises in that nation. 

While the most intense fighting and the Mosul campaign are long over, with more finality to those operations, the Russia-Ukraine war is still very much ongoing, so the level of analysis and the finality of that analysis will be very different for the two conflicts.

Still, while in some senses, the two are apples and oranges, their comparison still offers a chance at valuable insights.  In this sense, the small introductory exploration here intends to be a gateway for further exploration.

*****

The “Politics” of Considering Humanitarian Responses in Ukraine 2022 and Mosul 2016-2017

Politics is both messy and complicated, geopolitics even more so since it is broader and transcends national boundaries.  And in this sense, security, logistics, and economic/financial concerns cannot be separated, nor should they.

In an ideal world, every region and culture would have an equally strong, equally experienced professional humanitarian crisis industry (and never have a need to use those skills).  Obviously, that is not the case, and the West, especially European- and North American-based centers of its gravity, have a disproportionate history of creating, organizing, and leading the world’s major international humanitarian organizations and responses.  Indeed, international humanitarianism as practiced today is a Western-originated, Western-developed concept, with even many of the more senior non-Western staff in the sector having some combination of education, work experience, or residency in the West.  Today, it is still largely Western or Western-led organizations backed largely by Western governmental donors that lead and dominate international humanitarian responses (governments by far provide most of the funding compared to private donors and most of the largest government donors are by far Western; of the ten largest donors by governmental organization in 2021, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were the only non-Western countries in the top ten by one accounting for 2021; Japan is not European but is Western in its government, and Turkey’s funding mainly went to refugee camps on its own so it is literally asterisked in a relevant report for 2020).

Of course, this comes with certain inherent problems, not least among them the that there is this very real racial hierarchy that comes from the fact that particular parts of the world dominated by one particular race (Caucasians) are dominating an entire international industry, with all the history that such past and, though in evolving ways, present domination entails.  Certain imbalances, inequalities, and problems “naturally” result from such unequal histories and structures, not least from racism but also not least from the lack of required specialized capacities in many host nations of both host country authorities and available staff hires within the local population—particularly in remote areas—in spite of a very real, robust-though-hardly-perfect effort within the industry towards localization.  Overall, solutions to these issues are generally more easily theorized than specifically developed and implemented and the very safety of aid workers themselves can be an issue.

It is of note, even in Ukraine (a developed, so-called “first world” European country), that the relevant conflict creates zones that are far more accessible to humanitarian workers and those that are far less so; even before the relatively recent February 24, 2022, escalation by Putin, major United Nations (UN) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports noted that “non-Government controlled areas” (NGCAs) were really hurting in terms of needing aid and were not getting it, namely the parts of Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts under control of Russia and/or its separatist proxies, a situation made even worse by COVID-era restrictions.  Thus, even in Ukraine, some places where people needed the most help were less safe for aid workers, and this was the case in 2016-2017 while the Mosul campaign was well underway in Iraq.  During this battle in Iraq, which began in mid-October 2016, it took a month for the first major international-organization-aid convoy to get to the city of Mosul.  Yet even in this current Ukraine war, Russia is routinely blocking and obstructing humanitarian corridors for civilians during some of the worst violence of the conflict.  Thus, access is a problem in both locations.

But not equally so.  As a continent, Europe is the most advanced human development location by far and also has the most advanced logistics network of any continent.  So moving supplies, staff, and volunteers quickly and safely is easier in Europe than anywhere else in the world as far as dealing with a larger regional response, and these problems are usually regional, with people fleeing from one country to others, with humanitarian staging areas and headquarters often needing to be out of harm’s way.  And, as mentioned, many of the most capable, well-funded organizations are Eurocentic in their history and organization, so having a major operation on the European continent has some natural advantages that translate into a much easier-to-run operation just from those cultural leanings and familiarity that come with the territory.

While some of the nations surrounding Ukraine are also problematic (especially autocracies Russia and Belarus), others have been robust democracies for years, with the lowest-scoring democracy by Freedom House’s 2021 methodology (Moldova, 62) still far, far higher than the highest-scoring (by far) of Iraq’s neighbors (Kuwait, at 37).

Along those lines, even though Ukraine has only been a democracy since the end of the Cold War and has been at war since 2014, outside of the Donbas front lines from then until the late-February 2022 escalation by Russia, it was similar to other European countries in terms of freedom of movement and press freedom; the 2021 Reporters Without Borders ranking for Ukraine was 97^th most free for the press (106^th after the war’s 2022 escalation), compared to 163^rd for Iraq in the same year and 172^nd in 2022; in Freedom House’s 2017 rankings (the report has had no new editions since), Ukraine was 111^th compared to 155^th for Iraq; while issues with Ukraine were mostly related to restrictions on Russian media and oligarchic ownership, Iraq was considered one of “the world’s deadliest places for journalists.”  Yes, aid workers and journalists play different roles in conflict zones, but the nature of their work has enough similarities—especially in ways they have to access dangerous areas and multiple parties—that the rankings are at least somewhat indicative of aid workers’ ability to operate.

So the parts of Ukraine not under Russian occupation have, for most of three decades, been a place that operated in a European context where relatively free movement, modern governmental institutions, and safety for international operators all existed; even now, as the recent escalation by Russia has unfolded since the end of February 2022, the heaviest fighting is centered on a few specific fronts now that this escalation seems to have narrowed somewhat geographically, meaning most of the country is now and has for months been relatively safe (save for somewhat random missile strikes) and under the control of the Ukrainian government, which fostered the aforementioned conditions favorable to international actors, including humanitarian workers, for years.

The same cannot be said for Iraq.

For years after the U.S. invasion of 2003, Iraq was and still is a fractured and weak country, without a tradition of Western democracy and in a neighborhood of other Middle Eastern countries that are highly problematic when it comes to freedom, with safety for international actors often an issue in countries that are severely repressive and not places where international actors can operate freely or without considerable challenges (Saudi Arabia is deeply repressive and closed in many ways; Iran is also repressive, restrictive, and very anti-Western; Syria is like both of those but with a civil war raging on top of that).

Within Iraq, a nascent Iraqi government struggling to become a democracy respecting of human rights vied for control with Iraqi sectarian and ethnic militias representing Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, as well as Iranian militias and coalition military forces led by the U.S in addition to various terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda and ISIS and Saddam Hussein regime loyalists.  It was not always clear who could be trusted or even approached when it came to negotiating terms for humanitarian operations, and violence could derail anything at any time (full disclosure:  I was proud to be an extra in director Greg Barker’s Netflix film Sergio, about Sergio Vieira de Mello, the brief leader of UN humanitarian operations in post-Saddam Iraq until he was killed by a terrorist attack in August, 2003, and I highly recommend the film for a window into the perils of humanitarian work).  This was the operating environment for would-be humanitarian service providers, and there is no question that the challenges involving safety, logistics, navigating cultural differences, even Iraq’s extreme climate together mean that the present Ukrainian environment is one in which most large, well-funded aid organizations would find it easier to perform their missions, even allowing for Ukraine’s challenges.

So all those challenges mentioned concerning the Iraqi context still present major real-world, practical reasons that would inhibit not just international Western-dominate aid groups from more robust participation in aid work, but also local aid groups and staff: if anything, there are situation where more internationally recognized organizations employing people with European Union (EU) and other Western passports can afford those workers more protections than local staff, whose families will often be in the conflict zones and, along with the local workers themselves, will be more vulnerable to threats, intimidation, kidnapping, and actual violence than on average anyone coming from a European capital or New York.  The desperation with which so many local aid workers tried to leave Afghanistan during and after the recent U.S. withdrawal is only the most obvious recent case in point.

Local staff can also easily be caught in a dangerous conundrum: one formal report on the situation during the Mosul battle noted that it was so bad inside the city that it was almost impossible for international staff to operate in the city; and while local staff were far more able to operate, it was extremely risky for them to do so.  Going further, the report noted that in situations where it might seem like local aid workers would have an advantage, “perverse consequences” could be the result.  Another Mosul after-action humanitarian report noted that battle demonstrated that there is a lot of work to do to improve performance and safety across a number of major humanitarian dimensions, as did a study from the RAND Corporation.  Even in Ukraine, though, one British aid worker died just a few weeks ago after being illegally taken captive by Russia’s proxy separatist allies in Donetsk and detained for over two-and-a-half months.  Even in what is considered a relatively “better” operating environment, then, the risks are considerable.  Unfortunately, the harder the environment in which to operate and the more different the environment from what is familiar to the major organizations, the less effective and more problematic humanitarian efforts will be.

One controversial WHO-organized program ended up providing front-line medical services during the battle for Mosul since Iraqi and Kurdish forces did not possess certain medical capabilities needed to save lives, but two of the most prominent humanitarian medical organizations—the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)—declined to participate, citing ethical concerns with being seen to be taking sides during the conflict.  The idea that came out of deliberation after the battle was that such efforts could not be considered “humanitarian” and would have to be labeled differently.  Now, ICRC in particular faces criticism for being “too” neutral in Ukraine.  From Mosul to Ukraine, there are often no easy answers for humanitarian efforts to these deeply complex problems and neutrality itself can become an issue, especially when the likes of terrorist ISIS or the barbaric Russian military are involved as combatants.

On Tribalism

We cannot conclude before admitting the obvious, that there is a natural tribalism to humans that has only been exacerbated in our current era, even before Brexit and Trumpism reared their ugly heads in the West.  Even in the twenty-first century, humans are a very tribal species: e.g., though it is increasing, interracial marriage is not the default norm around the world.  Today, as I have noted, we live in an era of increasing tribalism around the world.  Just in recent decades, in less developed parts of the world, from the Balkans and Rwanda in the 1990s to the ethnic and sectarian violence that erupted in Iraq after the U.S. invasion of 2003, from, more recently, Bangladesh, India, Syria, and Israel-Palestine to Ethiopia, and Iraq (again), to name a few, tribalism has gone in far more violent and deadly directions than in the admittedly deteriorating politics of West, which so far has begun hinting at, but is not yet devolving into, the type of violence seen in other parts of the world (the Balkans in the 1990s were a big exception but that was at a moment when the nations of the only-just-former Yugoslavia were not yet truly Western even while they were European).

It should be noted in this context that European racism does not only extend to non-white peoples: bigotry towards Eastern European migrant-workers in Britain was one of the drivers fueling the 2016 UK Brexit vote.  And there is no doubt there has been for years and currently is a significant and growing anti-immigrant, anti-non-European racist sentiment among the populations and politics of Europe (and for those keeping score, it should be noted that Putin’s Kremlin has been a big booster within Europe of both the far-right and anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim sentiment).

In this tribal world, it is natural for Kenyans to generally care more about those in their own historic tribe or region within Kenya, to care about Kenyans more than those from other nearby countries, to care about East Africans more than West Africans, to care about fellow black Sub-Saharan Africans more than Arab or Berber North Africans, and so forth.  This is a natural general rule and can be applied to just about any peoples anywhere and this is confirmed by what we can read in the news and see with our own eyes every day.  Is it really surprising, then, that Europeans care more about Ukrainians, as fellow Europeans with some degree of shared history and culture, than for people trying to come to Europe from continents away?  That is not to suggest that this is “good” or desirable, it is simply acknowledging how humans are built and that different responses are not the default anywhere in the world in majority-proportions, not in Europe nor the Middle East nor anywhere else.

In this vein, attitudes within the Middle East should be examined just as robustly as attitudes within Europe.  I lived over five years in Jordan, and I can tell you that the idea of some wonderful lovefest of pan-Arabism in the Arab world is a fantasy.  I would not call it simmering, but there was an undercurrent of hostility in Jordan towards the many Syrian refugees than ended up in Jordan.  There is also discrimination and decades-long tensions directed from the truly local Jordanian population (originating from the East Bank of the Jordan River) towards the many Palestinian refugees who fled conflict with Israel over the decades and many of whom came from the West Bank of the Jordan River (yes, that West Bank) who now are actually the majority of Jordan’s population.  Also, Jordanians (and most other Arabs) also do not like Gulf Arabs (but mainly because they are incredibly snobby and condescending to Jordanians and non-Gulf Arabs).  There are also levels of serious sectarianism in places like Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, where there is tremendous distrust among these various Arab groups, between not only Sunni and Shiite but between Muslim and Christian and Muslim and Druze within specific countries even leaving aside the issue of refugees, and Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East face discrimination.  I could keep going, but you get the point and the problem: even in the Arab Middle East, Arab refugees are not exactly welcome and, indeed, apart from countries right on Iraq’s or Syria’s borders, other Arab countries have done less to take in Syrian refugees than some European countries, like Germany (Saudi Arabia and and other Gulf Arab nations have literally taken in zero Syrian refugees).  Thus, it strikes me as odd that prosperous European countries could so easily be decried as racist when prosperous Arab countries far closer and more culturally compatible are doing far less than a number of those European countries to take care of fellow Arabs.  In any case, these divisions themselves produce significant challenges to any humanitarian aid operations.

A Response to Inspire More Progress, Less Envy

In conclusion, while it is easy to see racism in the differences between various humanitarian responses, at least in the case of Ukraine compared to other examples (in this case—at least a little, in my small effort—Iraq), I will take a controversial position: in a world where crises within certain regions keep coming (albeit for a complex variety of reasons, some of which can certainly at least be partly blamed on the West), instead of decrying Europe’s response to a European crisis as “racist” for being too good, perhaps a more productive mentality for people from people in other regions would be to ask why their own regions have not responded as enthusiastically to helping people from their own regions.  In some cases, obviously a lack of resources is part of the answer, and yet in the Middle East, we have Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s richest nations, not taking in any refugees.  If other parts of the world learn form Europe’s current example in Ukraine, perhaps fewer people would want to flee from far away to Europe and would find helping hands, open homes, and warm hearts closer to home.

Again, that is not to deny that racism may very well be a serious factor—it certainly is a factor—but note that such bigotry is common everywhere and even within the various distinct regions of the world.  There may be far more applicable lessons in the immediate future from looking at Europe with Ukraine as a positive example, and while Europe, the U.S., and the West certainly have more work—far more work—to do in fighting racism within their societies, it cannot be said that all these other regions in the world do not have a tremendous amount of work to do on that front as well.

In the end, while achieving and awaiting further long-term progress on fighting racism in the West and all around the world along with helping to reform humanitarianism to have less Western-bias and less Eurocentric leadership must be priorities, Europe’s response to the Russia’s massive invasion of Ukraine can at least provide a hopeful model for how people in other regions of the world can come together to take care of their own to address current refugee crises and sadly, the crises inevitably coming in the future.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Ninth Episode on the struggle for democracy and war in Ukraine as Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to destroy Ukraine’s democracy with special guest Oleksandra Matviichuk (Twitter: @avalaina), an ardent human rights defender, Head of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties (English, Russian/Русский, & Ukrainian/Український websites), and recipient of the 2016 Democracy Defender Award from 17 delegations of the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE); she was specifically handed her award by Zhanna Nemtsova, a daughter of famed Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, assassinated by Putin’s thugs in sight of the Kremlin in 2015.

Matviichuk’s Center for Civil Liberties was linked to above; here is the link to the Euromaidan SOS group in which she is also involved

Update April 5th: On April 4th, Oleksandra testified from Ukraine to the Canadian Parliament’s House of Commons for its Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development (SDIR) for a session titled: Current Situation of Human Sights in Ukraine and Russia; here is the video of that session

DONATE TO SUPPORT UKRAINE!!! Слава Украине! Slava Ukraini!

Matviichuk specifically recommended donating to the Ukrainian military, as if its brave fighters cannot win this war, all else is lost, and specifically recommended Come Back Alive, an organization that supports the Ukrainian military.

The government’s central bank, the National Bank of Ukraine, has also opened special accounts for people to donate to both the Ukrainian Armed Forces and for humanitarian assistance for civilians.

Save the Children is one of the premier international aid organizations and, until the end of April, is matching TEN TIMES your donation, so $10=$100 and $25=$250! I highly recommend donating to them to have maximum impact on the humanitarian situation.

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is also an amazing humanitarian organization.

The main UN body to help refugees is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which does amazing work all over the world. Another vital UN agency involved in helping Ukraine is the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), a deeply experienced organization, provides emergency medical services for the wounded in Ukraine.

Notes

Center for Civil Liberties report: Surviving Hell: Testimonies of Victims on Places of Illegal Detention in Donbas

2019 Center for Civil Liberties Annual Report

It was in 2004 when Putin traveled twice to Ukraine to campaign for Viktor Yanukovych, including for three days just before the election

Brian’s other coverage of Putin’s war against Ukraine and background

The article I wrote in which I opened with the quote from the 300-year old poem I mentioned, in which a Ukrainian poet protests against Russian degradations

I also mentioned Manafort as Yanukovych’s point man for his Ukraine comeback: here are my deep dives on this for Newsweek (shared byline is a mistake, other author served as editor and contributed reporting on federal prosecutor’s views) and for my Real Context News

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Consider donating if you appreciate this content. Also see Brian’s deeply related eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here)!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, March 16, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine published by Small Wars Journal the morning of February 21 and featured by SOF News on February 26; see related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 21: Why Is Putin Doing All This Now?
• February 25: How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin
• March 1: Putin’s NATO Narrative Is Bullshit

Also see March 8 follow-up Small Wars Journal piece The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt (featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News) and related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 13: How Best to Penetrate Putin’s Media Iron Curtain in Russia? Dead Russian Troops
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

Great Russia: [i.e., Russia]

Do you know with whom you are speaking, or have you forgotten? I am Russia, after all: do you ignore me?

Little Russia: [i.e., Ukraine]

I know that you are Russia; that is my name as well.

Why do you intimidate me? I myself am trying to put on a brave face.

I did not submit to you but to your sovereign,

Under whose auspices you were born of your ancestors.

Do not think that you are my master:

Your sovereign and mine is our common ruler.

from A Conversation Between Great Russia and Little Russia, 1762
by Semen Divovych, Ukrainian Cossack scribe and poet

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—Underlying Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tired articulation of his rationale for invading Ukraine is the same old, same old in all the bad ways coming from Russia in a totally avoidable crisis wholly manufactured by the Kremlin.

As I noted just before this war’s dramatic late-February escalation, what was then the extremely-likely-to-be-pending invasion of Ukraine by Russia would likely be the largest invasion in Europe in over half a century (since the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and, before that, the final years of World War II) and the largest European war since WWII (since Ukraine’s army today seems quite willing to fight along with many civilians, but the Czechoslovak People’s Army did not resist at all in 1968).  Yet perhaps the most remarkable thing apart from the scale of all this is the predictable, soporific banality of Putin’s game plan, one visible from many miles and many years away.

And perhaps nothing besides Ukrainian icy steeliness better explains the pre-scalation nonchalant, yet defiant refusal of Ukrainians to panic, with others seeming to have been more worried than Ukrainians themselves.  After all, Ukrainians had experienced a smaller Russian troop buildup on their border early last year and this current one has been going on for months, so they shrugged their shoulders and lived their lives, with Ukraine’s government in recent weeks even launching a “Keep calm and visit Ukraine” tourism campaign that hearkens back to the famous domestic British morale campaign from WWII.

At least, that is what we were meant to believe to some degree: in an interview with CNN‘s excellent Matthew Chance, Zelensky made it clear that he had actually accepted U.S. intelligence warning of a Russian invasion but wanted to downplay that so as not to tip off Russia to the fact that Ukrainians were furiously preparing a defense, deliberately trying to throw the Kremlin off so that if/when the invasion came, the Russians would be caught off guard, fall behind schedule, and sustain more casualties from a far more prepared Ukraine than anticipated, a point I have yet to see anyone else make.

Public relations aside, the situation before the escalation was dire, with proxy conventional attacks by rebel separatists in eastern Ukraine and Russian cyberattacks having already been underway (in addition to de facto economic warfare as Russia’s troop buildup and naval “exercises” were already causing major damage to the Ukrainian economy).  I noted at the time that it was incredibly difficult to imagine Russian President Vladimir Putin amassing some 150,000-and-growing ground troops along with heavy military equipment, vehicles, and additional air and naval forces just for a failed intimidation campaign that yields no substantial positive results for him; just tucking his tail in between his legs and sending his forces home while losing face after a costly military buildup throughout harsh winter months is simply not in his nature. I wish I was wrong, but that interpretation turned out to be correct.

A Pathetically Predictable Playbook

Also pathetically predictable are both the rationales Putin regularly spews along with his army of propagandists and his methods, containing absolutely nothing new and going back centuries.

In my graduate studies and again in my journalism, I have researched and noted that the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union made it a decided policy to play with, keep simmering under the surface, and manipulate one way or another whenever convenient various nationalisms both within Russia and the Soviet Union and in their peripheries and near-peripheries.  At some times, it would be convenient to heat to a boiling point the majority ethnonationalism, at other instances, the minority ethnonationalisms in any given part of Russia or a (post-)Soviet Republic, sometimes playing one against the other in one era only to switch sides in the future.  As one scholar I quoted in a graduate school paper noted, the

system of ethnic autonomies [in Russia/the Soviet Union] was ostensibly a means of protecting national minorities, but in reality it was a time bomb that Moscow could blow up at its leisure by pushing the “protected” minorities towards separatism. Thus, this situation gave Moscow a means to weaken and destabilize republics whose nationalistic feelings ran high. (Areshidze 2007, 22)

To be absolutely clear, this a tradition in both the Soviet and Russian historical tradition, going back centuries, and is Putin’s favorite playbook among very few.

Within this context, it is just basic reality that many people of many ethnicities all over the world live outside the boundaries of their ethnicity’s nation-state(s) (if that ethnicity is lucky enough to have a full nation state; Kurds, Uighurs, and Palestinians, just to name three, are not).  Therefore, Russia extending Russian citizenship to ethnic Russians and others in regions with ethnic tensions or regions it has occupied in Georgia (South Ossetia and Abkhazia) and Ukraine (Donetsk and Luhansk, together in eastern Ukraine forming the Donbas area, as well as Crimea) in the cause of ethnonationalist solidarity is absolutely not a legal justification for interference in a sovereign country’s territory, let alone military invasion, occupation, and annexation, regardless of Russia’s and Putin’s longtime policy to award citizenship—complete with Russian passports—to such people in these countries and others, including the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia long wary of Russian schemes to dominate them and undermine their sovereignty.  This Russian policy is part of a longtime strategy to use ethnic Russians and other separatist minorities within the states of the former Soviet Union and that were once part of the Russian Empire at its height to serve the Kremlin’s interests, destabilize any of these states that do not fall in line with Russia’s wishes, and to create a potential fifth column for Putin to incite when convenient for him (just as he is doing with the separatists in Eastern Ukraine). 

While I will not dismiss the idea of genuine concern on the part of Russia and even Putin for their ethnic brethren, it is worth noting that one of Hitler’s main aims in the runup to and also during WWII was to unite ethnic Germans living outside Germany under a “Greater Germany” into which Hitler’s Germany would expand through war, conquest, and annexation (and no, I am not saying Putin is Hitler but it is worth noting what company he keeps in using war for similar ethnonationalist dreams).

Though such tactics have not been very effective in, say, the Baltic states, they have worked extremely well in Georgia and have been key to Putin’s Ukraine policy; indeed, the U.S., UK, Ukraine, and researchers have warned of and called out “false flag” staged or falsely-claimed “attacks” against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine or attacks across the border into Russia as a very possible pretext for a Russian invasion.

But one key difference from the days the czars and Soviets used these tactics is that, in the age of the internet, Russia’s use of hybrid warfare and cyberwarfare enable Putin to use these tactics in an effective and penetrating way far beyond Russia’s periphery in ways of which the czars and Soviets could only dream.  In this way, manipulating nationalism has become Russia’s weapon of choice against the West.  And while this is a multifront war, with cyberwarfare ranging from the U.S. to the UK, Germany, and, indeed, all over Europe, Ukraine is undoubtedly the hottest current front, combining hybrid/cyberwarfare with the kinetic physical warfare of guns, bombs, separatist rebels, and regular Russian forces: the main battlefield of the New Cold War, as I have noted before.

As such, Putin’s current machinations in Ukraine are not only wholly formulaic and predictable, but are so to the tune of a playbook going back hundreds of years, the basic mechanics of which were never terribly original to begin with but quite predictable and hardly unique to Russia (rather common to all nationalistic bullies).  And, to be clear, Ukrainians have endured within living memory such machinations to the degree of a Soviet-made, weaponized famine—the infamous Holodomor (the genocidal nature of which the Kremlin actively and vigorously now denies)—that killed millions of Ukrainians literally by design.  Ukraine also suffered some of the highest casualties of any country both per capita (more than both the Soviet Union overall and Russia specifically) and in absolute numbers during WWII.

Whether the invasion and annexation of Crimea, the intervention in eastern Ukraine, the repeated attempts to corrupt and dominate the Ukrainian political system (to which Ukrainians responded with the 2004-2005 Orange and 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolutions and the subsequent election of two presidents who have refused to bend the knee to the Kremlin), spasmodic cyberattacks (sometimes devastating like NotPetya, the most damaging cyberattack in history), or the current threat of a Russian invasion coupled with very likely further dismemberment of their nation, then, Ukrainians have endured far worse Russian meddling before and essentially live constantly with the prospect and/or the actuality of Russia intervention in one form or another, sometimes in a given period on a daily basis.  Ukraine’s surprising comedian turned president, Volodymyr Zelensky, eloquently said as much in his February 19 interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

In fact, Russia’s imperialist and colonialist adventures, whether overt or the more recently sometimes-covert, have rarely waned in the past several centuries, but just because Ukrainians are used to it does not mean they have not also have found ways, even sometimes in the incredibly repressive Soviet era, of also daily asserting their national character and independence, sometimes more symbolically, sometime with rebellions or even, as today, in short eras of Ukraine being independent from an oppressive empire.

Ukrainians know their history, after all, despite the Kremlin’s attempts to rewrite it: as the selection from 1762 poem that introduced this article shows, Ukrainians have been protesting Russia’s trying to have their way with them for centuries and this quarrel is nothing new.

The Western media and leadership class should also know proper history, specifically, Putin’s and Russia’s (as well as their own history of dropping the ball on handling Russia), so while we may be alarmed at Putin’s warmongering towards Ukraine, we should never be surprised.  Rather, we should call out how blatantly banal, predictable, and repetitive it is.  Putin may think his utterly uninteresting, hackneyed callbacks to an antiquated, zombie brand of pan-Slavic and/or aggressive, imposed Russian ethnonationalism are exciting and inspiring, but they are the most overused playbook coming out of Moscow for the past three centuries and find little appeal outside Russia and some ethnic Russians in former Soviet states.

And by far, most Ukrainians are not falling for it.

“Make Russia Great Again” Without Ukraine

Self-determination for a sovereign Ukraine did not have mean war with Russia, and only Russia initiated this war of choice and only it chose to do so.  Its reasoning for war rests upon the most empty, banal, overused tropes from czarist Imperial Russia that claim Russians are an ethnicity above and apart from others, superior and blessed by Orthodox Christian God while destined to rule over the other Slavs and, at the lowest point in the hierarchy, other groups of people that surround the Slavs.  What any of those people want is irrelevant, for it is Russia’s birthright destiny. 

Without the free will and agency of these various peoples who had endured decades, sometimes centuries of oppression under Russian and/or Soviet rule, nothing NATO did would have resulted in countries formerly under Moscow’s sway becoming NATO members.  But those peoples chose for themselves, and, in the case of Ukraine, Ukrainians actually have a say.  And while the West will not die for their right to have that say, it can still support it all the same as they are now by supporting Ukraine in other ways and teaching Putin and Russians that a united West will not let Russia get away with literal murder (among other things) without paying a steeply heavy price, as seriously harmful to Russia as its rationales for its Ukraine mischief are mindlessly tedious.

Either we live in a world where the idea that a democratic nation has a right to freely choose to enter into alliances and partnerships its leaders and people deem desirable without having to face military attacks as a result or sovereignty with the legitimacy of the consent of the governed has no real meaning and war will become an increasingly preferred political tool.

One thing is for certain: Russia’s resoundingly unoriginal appeals to ethnonationalism, whether beyond its borders or within, whether specifically to Russians or more broadly pan-Slavic, have resulted in centuries of bloody war and conquests, most of which have come undone, rendering these struggles mostly pointless.  The people living under the bloody heel of the czarist and Soviet boots were only too eager to throw off Russian and Soviet imperialism the first opportunity they had, sometimes (as in Ukraine’s case) repeatedly, affirming the shallowness of such aggressive Russian ethnonationalism.  The historically blood-soaked lands of Eastern Europe, and Ukraine in particular—all the way through to today—embody this sad, failed history.  It was such pan-ethnic nationalism that propelled Russia into World War I, to utter disaster and a collapse of the Imperial Russian state along with the deaths of millions.  Unlike then, today, as noted, Russia is facing a united West supporting Eastern Europeans that have resolutely rejected Russian hegemony and influence to align themselves or clearly want to align with the West, choosing freely in democratic systems to do so from an informed position knowing full well what the West offers and what Putin offers.

That man would be far better off focusing on building Russia up at home (its economy is still a relic dependent on fossil fuels), for this misadventure might end up hurting Russia—and even Putin himself—far more than Putin was anticipating and, unlike NATO and the West, his friends are few and far between, chief among the them the dictators Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus (perhaps Xi Jinping of China, too, but I am not so sure they are that close yet: on February 19, at the same Munich Security Conference at which U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris met Zelensky and at which Zelensky spoke and was interviewed by Amanpour, China’s foreign minister reaffirmed his country’s longstanding position on respecting the territorial integrity of all nations, then specifically added “Ukraine is no exception.”).

Putin’s effort to revive this repeatedly failed, absurdly outdated ethnonationalist campaign may be laughably banal, then, but we must also take it deadly seriously since the size and power of the military force involved in supporting that campaign and its manifestation in a war of imperialist expansion against Ukraine unfortunately force us to do so.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) March 13, 2022; excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt published by Small Wars Journal March 8, which was featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News; see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

Also see Brian’s preceding February 21 Small Wars Journal piece The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine, featured by SOF News on February 26; see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 21: Why Is Putin Doing All This Now?
• February 25: How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin
• March 1: Putin’s NATO Narrative Is Bullshit
• March 16: Putin’s Zombie Russian/Slavic Ethnonationalism Is Utterly Banal

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—The focus of my last excerpted article was to show how disgustingly careless, even cruel, the Russian military has been with the lives of its soldiers, how abusive and deceitful they have been to these fighting men of Russia and their families.  And the point of this is to acknowledge that, by such unforgivable conduct towards Russia’s own soldiers and their families, Putin and his cronies may have finally sowed the bittersweet seeds of their own demise.  This was one thing with the hundreds of concealed deaths over eight years with “volunteer” deployments into rebel-held portions of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions (known together as the Donbas) in Ukraine’s east (discussed in more detail earlier); it is already an entirely different phenomenon with thousands of deaths less than two weeks into Putin’s exponential escalation in the whole of Ukraine.

Even allowing for the possibility that some of the images and video coming out of Ukraine are not authentic, there is still (as I have noted recently) a lot of real footage of dead Russian soldiers and destroyed Russian vehicles, evidence of Putin’s lies to his own people and his lack of competence in managing and leading Russia’s army, evidence that increasingly destroys his credibility not only with his own people but his own soldiers and their officers.

The dead collectively are something that is very hard for Kremlin spinmasters and apologists in Russia and around the world to explain away, an undeniable public monument to Putin’s astounding failure.  The truth is enormous, visible even from afar, and death on the scale that the Russian Army is experiencing just across a border where many Russians have friends and family cannot be hidden by Putin from his people forever: Russia is not North Korea, its people not North Koreans.

As more and more Russians take in parts of the horrific picture, they will realize how totally they have been gaslit, how pathetically their army has performed under the leadership of a man so desperate to project strength that he literally rides around shirtless on a horse to pose for photos for public consumption.

The key psychological component here is that the foundation of Putin’s regime rests on the idea of restoring Russian strength.  So when the Russian people realize how totally degraded the Russian Armed Forces are after two decades of Putin’s leadership, only able to beat up on Georgia and Syria and utterly humiliated by its first real challenge under Putin’s Potemkin regime in a war with far smaller and far weaker Ukraine—which Russia has always regarded as a little brother, a former vassal of Russia in recent centuries—and understand that thousands of their boys have been needlessly slaughtered in a needless war as Russia hits its economic nadir and apex of isolation under well-deserved historic sanctions, there is going to be massive public outrage.

For Putin’s whole bargain with his people was “Give me your fledgling democracy to discard and I will raise you up and deliver you from the pit of Boris Yeltsin’s humiliated Russia,” yet Russia finds itself now—after only a matter of days into Putin’s absurd war—precisely where Putin promised to move it away from: the weak laughingstock status of the Yeltsin years, not respected, just tolerated because of its nuclear weapons and natural resources.

As more and more Russians realize this, Russians overall will realize that the bargain it struck with Putin repeatedly over the years is null and void, that they owe him no allegiance or support since the little man delivered (after some stability) mainly illusions and repression: the weakness of the Russian military, state, and international standing has now been exposed in a matter of mere days to the whole world as the Ukrainian people kick the Russian Army’s ass, the U.S.-led international order roars into action to show how defenseless the main institutions of Russian daily and economic life are rendered if America and its allies will them to be so, and the world overall isolates Russia as a pariah as no top-tier state has ever been isolated before. 

This last point bears some spelling out: Germany, Japan, and Italy had each other and numerous vassals during World War II.  Today, Russia could only muster the support of four other pariahs—Belarus (essentially its puppet), Syria (its mass-murdering client-state), the Stalinist/Maoist relic of North Korea, and basket-case Eritrea in a historic 141-5 vote at the United Nations condemning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine (China, Russia’s supposed new “best friend,” wanted no part in the historical record of being seen to be emphatically on Russia’s side here, settling for a cowardly pathetic abstention, a choice shared by 34 others).

According to a major CNN poll conducted shortly before Putin launched his full Ukraine war, when asked “Would it be right for Russia to use military force to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO,” half of Russians said “Yes,” one-quarter “No,” one-quarter “Don’t know;” if the war was framed as one “to ‘reunite Russia and Ukraine,’” that support dropped to only 36% “Yes,” “No” rising to a plurality of 43%, with 21% as “Don’t know.”

It is remarkable that the numbers for war are not higher when one considers the insane media atmosphere inside Russia and how it trickles down throughout public life in Russia.  It is a constant Orwellian bombardment of an alternate universe, one where Russia is a perpetual victim fighting against the whole world.  Ukrainians with relatives and friends in Russia (as well as the pro-Russian separatist parts of Ukraine’s Donbas and a very Russian Crimea controlled by Russia since that region’s 2014 invasion and annexation) are even having inane conversations with these brainwashed relatives and friends, those relatives and friends telling the dismayed Ukrainians laughable fictions about the reality of the war.  So strong is the pull of Kremlin propaganda that these wayward friends and relatives believe fantasy over their own blood as they dare to lecture on the invasion to those actually living through the bombs and shells of the invasion.  Much like America’s Trumpist Capitol insurrectionists in the U.S. believe in an alternate reality bellowed out by Fox News and its ilk, so, too, does Putin’s base in Russia (and the few Ukrainian regions with high-proportions of Putin-loyalists) loyally and enthusiastically consume Russian state-run television networks’ non-stop barrage of the world according to Putin (and it is no coincidence that the American rightist and Kremlin media ecospheres have tremendous overlap, as I have noted in detail before).

As a result, most Russians actually get their news from state-run media, so most Russians, then, simply do not have an accurate understanding of what is currently happening in Ukraine and believe as fact many absolute falsehoods while rejecting actual facts.  Because of the relentless propaganda, lies, and straight-up gaslighting that is the media and government apparatchik public landscape in Russia, they think that this has been a limited humanitarian peacekeeping operation mostly in the Donbas area of Ukraine with few Russian casualties. 

But there are others in Russia who see past the propaganda and disinformation.  And the brittle reality of the Kremlin’s fake news operations can come crashing down like a house of cards in the face of hard realities, none more likely to cause this than thousands of dead Russian soldiers and their enraged families.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) March 9, 2022; *update August 15, 2024: Earlier in February 2024, Ukraine clarified that its numbers for Russian military casualties included wounded as earlier use of the term liquidated led many to believe the running total given included only killed and not wounded; all other updates from 2022: July 1: updated casualty numbers at the end; update April 18: updated casualty numbers at the end; note/update March 20: casualties have obviously increased since March 9 but the point and validity of the analysis still stands; updated casualties given at the end, with a comparison to casualties from the Soviet-Afghan War); updated to add Tolkien content March 11; excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt published by Small Wars Journal March 8, which was featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News; see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 13: How Best to Penetrate Putin’s Media Iron Curtain in Russia? Dead Russian Troops
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

Also see Brian’s preceding February 21 Small Wars Journal piece The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine, featured by SOF News on February 26; see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 21: Why Is Putin Doing All This Now?
• February 25: How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin
• March 1: Putin’s NATO Narrative Is Bullshit
• March 16: Putin’s Zombie Russian/Slavic Ethnonationalism Is Utterly Banal

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—For those willing to search, there are also plenty of videos of Russian soldiers’ dead bodies, abandoned by their comrades and country.

In fact, casualties are clearly very high for the Russians, and by all major indicators, significantly higher than those of Ukraine’s armed forces.  Though precise numbers are impossible to arrive at amidst the current fog of war, there are multiple reasons to believe the higher Russian casualties estimated by Ukraine’s government are far closer to the truth than Russia’s claims.

For one thing, we are talking about Russia, which has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that it has zero credibility on such matters, gaslighting as it has for years about all things Ukraine (as well as other theaters in which it operates militarily, especially in Syria).  But led by President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s democracy is trying to build up its credibility and earn spots in both the European Union and NATO, working hard to overcome the corruption that has long plagued the country (corruption boosted greatly by Putin et al., as I have discussed at length).  Thus, maintaining the distinction in regards to truth-telling between itself and Russia is vital for Ukraine, which has a lot to lose by lying, especially at a time when it is in desperate, existential need of international support.  Zelensky and his government have a far better record than Putin and his Kremlin, then, and should be extended the (slightly cautiously bestowed) benefit of the doubt.  Ukraine also has a “robust,” “free” media landscape and open society relative to Russia where information travels far more freely than Russia, a further point in favor of the Ukrainians’ accounting.

And while, even taking into account the preceding, it is possible that there could be some deliberate exaggeration on Ukraine’s part for propaganda purposes, Ukraine has demonstrated during this conflict an ability to correct more self-serving narratives to more accurate ones when new information becomes available.

In this war, it was the Russians who gaslit the world the first few days of their invasion by claiming they had suffered zero casualties when numerous pictures and videos proved otherwise, while it was the Ukrainians who admitted from the very beginning that they were suffering casualties as well as inflicting them even as they have since declined to specify their losses.  But choosing to not specify so as not to tip off your enemy to the scale of your losses is entirely different from straight-up denying or significantly misrepresenting them.  Such describes the serial approach of the Russians, who obviously and actively hide and grossly downplay their casualties, especially to hide them from their own population, a Russian trend in the earlier low-level conflict in the east of Ukraine going back to its beginning in 2014 (in this earlier conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas that has now blended into the current all-out war, Russia, denying it ever sent soldiers into eastern Ukraine when it most certainly has, even lies to the families of soldiers who have died fighting there about their deaths; the dead soldiers are not given proper combat-death honors and it seems their families are not even given proper combat-death benefits or, if they are paid anything, it can be in exchange for their silence).

There are other reasons Ukraine’s official estimates seem entirely probable.  Given the quality of Western—supplied weapons (including Javelin and Stinger missiles), American training of Ukrainian forces since 2015, and that Ukrainians are playing defense on home soil, it makes sense that they are, more often than not, inflicting more casualties than sustaining them.  The previously discussed sheer amount of evidence of the sheer amount of both Russian combat deaths and destroyed, burned-out Russian vehicles (even some large transport planes)—many of which would have been full of troops—adds even more credibility to the high casualty figures presented by the Ukrainians.  In addition, early in March, several Western officials corroborated Ukraine’s accounting of Russian casualties at the time as quite accurate, at close to 5,800 killed; a (possible hacking and) releasing of a state-run Russian media outlet’s communications also further corroborates the accuracy of Ukraine’s Russian casualty figures with similar numbers around the same time.

As for the current specific estimate, as of the morning of March 8 Ukraine time (note March 20: casualties have obviously increased since March 9 but the point and validity of the analysis still stands), Ukraine’s estimate of *Russian combat deaths and wounded was over 12,000*, with far more precise figures of nearly 2,100 ground vehicles of different specific types destroyed (including over 300 tanks) along with 128 aircraft (helicopters and planes).  Astonishingly and mortifyingly for Russia, even if the estimate is generous by several thousand troops (say, 4,000, a third of the total given), just the troops killed in less than two weeks alone still easily exceed the combined military deaths for the U.S. in Iraq over almost eight years (over 4,400) and Afghanistan over two decades (over 2,400).

UPDATE March 20: Updated casualty estimates from Ukrainian government below, with some 14,700 Russian troops estimated killed and wounded* (a figure that exceeds the official Soviet military death toll of 14,453 for the decade-long 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan War, though over a decade after the war, even the Russian General Staff put that figure at well over 26,000 and other estimates range even higher), nearly 100 planes, over 100 helicopters, over 475 tanks, and well over 2,800 other vehicles destroyed or captured by Ukrainian forces; on March 16, U.S. intelligence gave a “conservative estimate” that over 7,000 Russian troops were killed, while on March 12, Zelensky gave an estimate of 1,300 Ukrainians military forces killed.

Update April 18: In an excerpt released April 15 from an interview with CNN‘s Jake Tapper, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave an estimate of 2,500-3,000 Ukrainian military forces killed and 10,000 injured. Below is the April 18 estimate of Russian casualties from the Ukrainian government:

Update July 2: below is the July 1 estimate of Russian casualties from the Ukrainian government:

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) March 9, 2022; updated to add Tolkien content March 11; excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt published by Small Wars Journal March 8, which was featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News; see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 13: How Best to Penetrate Putin’s Media Iron Curtain in Russia? Dead Russian Troops
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

Also see Brian’s preceding February 21 Small Wars Journal piece The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine, featured by SOF News on February 26; see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 21: Why Is Putin Doing All This Now?
• February 25: How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin
• March 1: Putin’s NATO Narrative Is Bullshit
• March 16: Putin’s Zombie Russian/Slavic Ethnonationalism Is Utterly Banal

…Then suddenly straight over the rim of their sheltering bank, a man fell, crashing through the slender trees, nearly on top of them. He came to rest in the fern a few feet away, face downward, green arrow-feathers sticking from his neck below a golden collar. His scarlet robes were tattered, his corslet of overlapping brazen plates was rent and hewn, his black plaits of hair braided with gold were drenched with blood. His brown hand still clutched the hilt of a broken sword.

It was Sam’s first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace…

—The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: Book IV: Chapter 4: Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit, J.R.R. Tolkien, 1954

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—Going back in history, the greatest leaders and commanders in wartime understand a few basic things, among them, morale and organization can do wonders for winning even when supplies and force size are lacking.  After all, many of the great shocks in military history, from the Spartans at Thermopylae through the Vietcong against the U.S. Military in the Vietnam War, demonstrate this.  And while few would argue (at least up until a few weeks ago) against the idea that Russia has one of the most powerful militaries in the world—several ranking systems have Russia as having the second most powerful military, only behind the U.S.—some of the most powerful militaries in history have fallen into hubris and been surprised by weaker enemies that they did not respect (most relevant here would be the 1939-1940 Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland).  And if a military is going to rely on size and power, but neglects morale and organization while going on the offensive against a smaller but dedicated and well-led foe fighting on his own territory, well, that is asking for trouble.

One thing that is already undeniable here is that Russian soldiers have clearly been treated horribly by their government and commanders.  There is enough anecdotal reporting that has been gathered—especially video, photos, and accounts from Russian POWs and communications—that we can put together a near-certain picture of what is going on in certain respects with the Russian military.

The bulk of the rank-and-file Russian troops seem to have had no briefing or barely any briefing on what they were getting into before they crossed the Ukraine border.  If they were even told there was going to be a “military operation,” this seems to sometimes include that they would be greeted as liberators.

Even before the invasion, while many of the Russian troops were staging across the Ukraine border in Russia, some were left by alone by their officers for days in crowded “nightmare” conditions in the winter cold and with no rations, the soldiers forced to use their own money to buy local food; when they ran out of money, local Russian civilians were forced to provide them with food.

Bored, cold, hungry, and lonely, some even began matching with Ukrainian women on Tinder.

A Russian human rights group focusing on abuses within the Russian military—the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, or Soldiers’ Mothers Committee—is accusing the Russian military of taking brand new conscripts to the border under the pretext of “training.”  The group says they were then pressured heavily with lies and intimidation to take on the status of the more professional contract soldiers, with those speaking against this beaten and having their phones confiscated, their subsequent status unknown.  Some of those whose phones were not confiscated have been calling their mothers in panic to report the abuses.  Many say do not want to fight in Ukraine and do not believe in the war, and it seems only senior officers were briefed ahead of time.  And the government tells the soldiers’ concerned families almost nothing.

It has not gotten better since the hostilities commenced: one video (along with a translation) from a demoralized Russian soldier at an encampment of his uniformed comrades shows the deep neglect, even contempt, Russian commanders have for their soldiers and how dissatisfied and angry these soldiers are at the lack of respect and at the gaslighting (“exercises” is what they were told they were going to).  And it seems quite a few are being given rations by the Russian military that expired years ago, seven years ago, apparently, in at least one case and presumably more.

Additionally, Russian troops have not only not been given enough food as they went into Ukraine, they were also not given enough fuel for their vehicles or anywhere near proper logistical support, many of their vehicles being in disrepair and not properly maintained.  Even worse, many functional vehicles are simply being abandoned by Russian soldiers with low morale who are just giving up and leaving their posts and vehicles.

While Putin (who may  be the world’s de facto richest man) and his infamous oligarchs (key right hand men, along with the Russian mafia, who carry out Putin’s will and often act as extensions of the Russian government) live as literal billionaires (the parody of Orwell’s Animal Farm, but without the communism), this is how the fighting men of Russia are treated.  A tiny fraction of one of Putin’s oligarchs’ wealth—or of Putin’s wealth—could have easily provided for better food and warmer uniforms for Russia’s soldiers, another fraction to repair and better maintain many of the vehicles on which they would depend but that would eventually failed them.

It gets even worse when actual combat is considered.  That there was very likely the aforementioned lack of necessary briefings is reinforced as a likelihood because the very tactics often carried out by Russian ground units in this war show they clearly were not prepared for ambushes and did not expect to encounter serious resistance in smaller towns, alongside roads, etc.  I say this because over and over again there have been examples of small convoys easily ambushed and destroyed by Ukrainians.  It also seems there is not much communication or coordination among (or even within) Russian army units (to fatal effect), or, if there is, it is between medium- or higher-level officers because the lower-level commanders are making mistakes that show ambushes in one area were, at least for some time, not leading to prudent caution in other areas, with the same types of ambushes occurring repeatedly in different areas of operations.  In other words, by walking into the same traps and over again on different fronts, the most logical conclusion is a lack of communication and briefings for the low-level commands leading different individual units forward.

The combined effect of these factors is obvious from an abundance of collected photos and videos from around Ukraine (many of which have been confirmed by independent investigators): the sheer number of successful ambushes carried out by, and other successful engagements of, Ukrainian forces against Russian convoys demonstrates that many Russian soldiers, lower-level commanders, and units have been ill-prepared, not properly briefed, and sent into harm’s way with little forethought or regard for their safety.  This has decimated many units and further destroyed army cohesion for Russia, making their miserable failure of a performance even more a miserable failure of a performance.

In short, wildly irresponsible overconfidence and sloppiness coursed through the planning and execution of this operation.

Ukraine has, apparently, captured hundreds of Russian soldiers, many without food, crying, and desperate to call their mothers who knew nothing of their sons’ whereabouts, as several dramatic videos posted online appear to convincingly show (some of these are difficult to confirm and it is possible they are being coerced to say these things, but a good number seem quite authentic, this remarkably reflective POW in particular).  Along with the clearly high number of dead, other intelligence indicates plummeting Russian morale, too.  Ukraine’s Ambassador to the United Nations even read aloud to the United Nations General Assembly several alleged text messages from a frantic Russian soldier to his mother just before he was killed in combat, seeming to confirm other accounts that Russian soldiers and their families are being kept in the dark and lied to by their government.

Among the most stinging facts to emerge is that while the Kremlin will give Russian families little or no information on their missing sons captured, wounded, missing, or killed in Ukraine, the Ukrainian government has done what Putin’s regime should have: set up a hotline to inform Russians of the fates of their loved ones sent into harm’s way in an unjust, illegal war of revanchist imperialist aggression by Putin (unjustifiable, utterly banal justifications, as I noted here for Small Wars Journal recently).

Sickly, since virtually the whole world now knows of the invasion, it is certain these secrets and silences are not being kept still out of any national security purpose related to the war in Ukraine, but merely to keep Russians in the dark and domestic opinion in Russia from turning against Putin.

In writing this, the text from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings I quoted to open this entire piece kept coming to my mind; it is hard not to feel sorry for these Russian soldiers, in many ways like the men of Harad (including the dead one Samwise Gamgee sees fall near him; for all you movie fans, in The Two Towers film Faramir says aloud what in the book are Sam’s thoughts) and other parts of Middle Earth who came to fight alongside the forces of Sauron in the War of the Ring with little agency as individuals.  These abused and misused Russian soldiers also lack much agency, and we know “what lies or threats had led” them to Ukraine: the lies and threats of Putin and his Kremlin.

Whole other articles can, and should, be dedicated to the shocking incompetence of the Russian military displayed in Ukraine, especially the details of the failures of command-and-control and logistics, but such will not be dealt with in detail here.  Overall, this war on Russia’s part is truly one of the great military blunders by a superpower in world history, but it is the cavalier, disgraceful betrayal of Russia’s fighting men (and their families) by Putin’s regime that I most wish to emphasize here and that should be seized on urgently by Ukraine, NATO, and the world, but not just them: the soldiers of the Russian Army, their families, and the Russian people must seize on it even more so.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981), March 1, 2022 (additional source on NATO expansion added March 3); excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine published by Small Wars Journal the morning of February 21 and featured by SOF News on February 26; see related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 21: Why Is Putin Doing All This Now?
• February 25: How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin
• March 16: Putin’s Zombie Russian/Slavic Ethnonationalism Is Utterly Banal

Also see March 8 follow-up Small Wars Journal piece The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt (featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News) and related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 13: How Best to Penetrate Putin’s Media Iron Curtain in Russia? Dead Russian Troops
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—The mistreatment of peoples living under Moscow’s oppression in the Soviet era led most of Eastern Europe to vigorously pursue NATO membership in recent decades.  After the Soviet Union’s collapse, many Eastern European states lined up for NATO about as fast as they could; they came to NATO asking for membership, not the other way around; NATO was not imposing anything on any of these countries against their wills, let alone even pressuring or pushing them in any direction they had not firmly decided to pursue because they wanted to or were very much willing to pursue in exchange for NATO membership.  Other than the special case of East Germany, NATO did not rush states into the Alliance; it did not rapidly surround Russia or come to its border.  Instead, NATO considered membership slowly for these countries, waiting, drawing out, even delaying that process over many years; some countries even had their bids for membership rejected at first.  The process was transparent, even to Russia, and contingent on each country establishing civilian control over the military and, along with requirements for joining the European Union, involved becoming a stable democracy that respected human rights and made lasting legal and economic reforms.  These states made it a top priority to join the NATO Alliance and organized their national priorities for years to meet these obligations before any were admitted, each country having a decent democracy and having its voters and leaders clearly choose this path as sovereign nations before becoming members. 

We will not include East Germany in the coming list because of the special case of German reunification in 1990, but aside from it, before the fall of the Soviet Empire in Europe, with East Germany there were five additional communist Soviet satellite states that formed, with the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact (the Soviet-led communist counteralliance to NATO) and would eventually become NATO members along with three European republics within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR/Soviet Union).  One of the Warsaw Pact countries, Czechoslovakia, would become two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, so that means that were eight countries (five Warsaw Pact states and three former Soviet republics) that were dominated by the Soviet Union that would become nine NATO members after the end of the Cold War.

These countries joyfully threw off Soviet and communist party control from 1988-1991, but it was not until 1999 that any were granted NATO membership (just three: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic) and it was only in 2004, close to a decade-and-a-half after these countries had achieved independence, that the former Soviet socialist republics that would join NATO (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) did along with the rest of the Warsaw Pact (Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia).  Each one of these countries and peoples made clear national long-term choices of their own free will to do this, only too happy to turn away from Russian oppression and towards being a part of Europe and the West, NATO giving them the security of being able to preserve their new democratic gains free from Russian invasions (two that did not, Georgia and our topical Ukraine, have proven the need for NATO after being attacked militarily and dismembered by Russia).  And quality, repeated polling shows these new NATO members are generally very confident today that their nations’ prior decisions to abandon Russia for the West and a Western democratic system were the right ones.

Other NATO expansion has been with countries that were independent actors and not in the Soviets’ sphere of influence when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.

Another dimension to this is that Russia in this case believes—as an article of faith of Russian grievance victimhood mythology because of a “misunderstood” (or misrepresented) comment made decades ago—that it was “betrayed” by the West, stabbed in the back by a U.S. that “promised” NATO would not expand to the east after German reunification, even though this was based on one informal exchange in early 1990 throwing ideas around and not making any guarantees between then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, but the topic was about deployments of troops in the territory then comprising Eastern Germany, not NATO expansion to other states.  And even Gorbachev’s himself, in his most recent comments on the subject, denies this narrative driven by Putin and the current Russian government, though this shifted somewhat from an opinion offered years earlier.

Remove Russian rhetoric and take in reality and you realize that NATO was not part of the discussion around Ukraine at this particular moment in time until Russia forced this issue, Ukraine has not been extended any kind of a formal invitation to NATO, this is not even being seriously discussed as a present or near-future option, and NATO—including, specifically and most importantly, the U.S. and Biden—has made clear Ukraine does not currently meet NATO’s qualifications for membership and is not even close.  Keep in mind, too, as you are asked to understand the Russian “perspective,” that it is millions of Ukrainians and their legitimately elected leaders who have expressed a clear preference for the West over Russia and a desire to join NATO along with that: this is what they want, so much so they enshrined that goal formally into their constitution in early 2019.

A Natural Reaction, a Vital Principle of International Law and the Twenty-First Century

It should be no surprise that it turns out when Russia treats countries horribly, they do not want to enter in alliances with it and will, instead, eagerly break away from Russian domination when they can and just as eagerly join with NATO, as is their right as free and independent nations (the natural consequences of imperial collapse all throughout history, from which Russia is not immune).

Self-determination for a sovereign Ukraine does not have mean war with Russia, and only Russia will initiate that war of choice and only if it chooses.  Its reasoning for war rests upon the most empty, banal, overused tropes from czarist Imperial Russia that claim Russians are an ethnicity above and apart from others, superior and blessed by Orthodox Christian God while destined to rule over the other Slavs and, at the lowest point in the hierarchy, other groups of people that surround the Slavs.  What any of those people want is irrelevant, for it is Russia’s birthright destiny. 

Without the free will and agency of these various peoples who had endured decades, sometimes centuries of oppression under Russian and/or Soviet rule, nothing NATO did would have resulted in countries formerly under Moscow’s sway becoming NATO members.  But those peoples chose for themselves, and, in the case of Ukraine, Ukrainians actually have a say.  And while the West will not die for their right to have that say, it can still support it all the same as they are now by supporting Ukraine in other ways and teaching Putin and Russians that a united West will not let Russia get away with literal murder (among other things) without paying a steeply heavy price, as seriously harmful to Russia as its rationales for its Ukraine mischief are mindlessly tedious.

Either we live in a world where the idea that a democratic nation has a right to freely choose to enter into alliances and partnerships its leaders and people deem desirable without having to face military attacks as a result or sovereignty with the legitimacy of the consent of the governed has no real meaning and war will become an increasingly preferred political tool.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, February 25, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine published by Small Wars Journal the morning of February 21 and featured by SOF News on February 26; see related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 21: Why Is Putin Doing All This Now?
• March 1: Putin’s NATO Narrative Is Bullshit
• March 16: Putin’s Zombie Russian/Slavic Ethnonationalism Is Utterly Banal

Also see March 8 follow-up Small Wars Journal piece The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt (featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News) and related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 13: How Best to Penetrate Putin’s Media Iron Curtain in Russia? Dead Russian Troops
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—Most Ukrainians are not falling for Putin’s playbook.

Instead, they are emphatically rejecting Putin’s bankrupt ethnonationalist chauvinism, with Putin’s and Russia’s standing among Ukrainians falling sharply in recent years.  There is a drop in enthusiasm for this program even among the ethnic Russians of Ukraine.  Ultimately, in the face of Putin’s boring bluster (and that of his stooge, the now-overthrown and disgraced former president Viktor Yanukovych), Ukrainians over the past decade have only moved more towards a Ukrainian and European identity after years of intense Kremlin hostility towards Ukraine.

Putin has few others to blame but himself for this with all his interfering in and treating Ukraine horribly for far too long: instead of years ago building on his then-higher support and higher levels of pro-Russian sentiment with good-faith, mutually beneficial policies that would prove Russia a true friend to Ukraine (as I argued he should years ago), it is war, corruption, and lies that have characterized Putin’s Ukraine policy and his foreign policy in general, carried out using a trifecta of government, oligarchs, and the Russian mafia that can be hard to separate into its component parts, so deep is the corruption.

When those efforts fail for Putin, he has not been shy in using his military or, it seems, in attempting assassination: Russia is a prime suspect in a poisoning attempt that almost succeeded in late 2004 against then-soon-to-be-President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko, the hero of the Orange Revolution that prevented the corrupt Yanukovych from being corruptly imposed on Ukraine per Putin’s plan, at least until Yanukovych’s 2010 comeback at the direction of Trump’s future campaign manager, Paul Manafort; it was Yanukovych’s betrayal of the Ukrainian people to Putin—who still harbors him in Russia from Ukrainian prosecution and jail—that sparked the 2013-2014 (Euro)Maidan revolution that saw Yanukovych driven from power, precipitating the hostilities in Crimea and Ukraine’s east, the latter of which are still ongoing. 

In essence, Russia’s outstretched hand progressively offers corruption, submission, intimidation, and brute force, but nothing better.

All this is now only too painfully obvious to most Ukrainians, more and more of whom are turning away from Russia and toward the West, including the EU and NATO.  This shift is dramatically accelerated further by Putin also in that by illegally annexing Crimea and promoting a separatist war in Ukraine’s far east, he has essentially removed parts of two of the most ethnically Russian, pro-Russian parts of Ukraine out of the country’s political equation, helping Ukraine to move even more forcefully than it already was in a Ukrainian nationalist, anti-Russian, pro-Western/NATO direction.

This all may even be prompting a shift in thinking in non-NATO states like Sweden and Finland, both near (and the latter on the border of) Russia, about their non-membership.  A new invasion by Russia would, at the very least, increase their current security relationships with the Alliance, and Finnish President Sauli Niinistö even just said on Sunday that the thinking on this in Finland has already changed for some and that Russia invading Ukraine would further increase sentiment for joining NATO.

Putin’s standing in the world even before this crisis was at something of a nadir, and this will further damage his reputation and the Russia he is leading, especially in Eastern Europe where he hopes to gain, not lose influence.  In short, Putin’s murderous bullying has driven those he seeks to dominate into the arms of his enemies, counterproductive to Russian interests. 

Oops.

Putin is certainly a crafty leader, but we must stop assuming that everything he does is some kind of genius move and part of a coherent master plan.  Yes, his cyberwarfare has been incredibly effective, but he is also perfectly capable of making bad decisions that set him and Russia back, as his actions toward Ukraine amply demonstrate.

Russia, that Abusive Ex Who Will Not Let Go

It should be no surprise that it turns out when Russia treats countries horribly, they do not want to enter in alliances with it and will, instead, eagerly break away from Russian domination when they can and just as eagerly join with NATO, as is their right as free and independent nations (the natural consequences of imperial collapse all throughout history, from which Russia is not immune).

Yet this concept seems unable to enter Putin’s understanding of the world such that he refuses to accept Ukraine became an independent country decades ago.  This makes him much like an abusive ex-husband who somehow feels entitled to control his fully-divorced-from-him, now-dating-someone-else ex-wife.  Here, that ex-wife is Ukraine and is dating the West, and Putin thinks that in showing up at his ex’s house, smashing things up, and slapping and hitting her, he will somehow reimpose his control.  Instead, having agency as a free woman, she will seek the protection of her far more powerful new boyfriend, seek engagement and marriage.  And yet, the new boyfriend will feel nervous about this crazy ex.  Here, Ukraine is hoping this new love interest and his family, who all treat her better than her ex, can perhaps just gang up and say “Bruh, she’s moved on.  You’re yesterday’s news.  You and her, it’s over.  Move on!” and to some degree, that is happening, but also to some degree, Russia is scaring this boyfriend away from getting more serious with Ukraine and entering into a more firm and meaningful commitment.

That is because, contrary to Russia’s claims, the West does not want confrontation, let alone war, with Russia.  NATO is a defensive alliance and in its entire history has never attacked Russia.  They are holding up on getting more serious with Ukraine precisely because of this crazy ex-boyfriend routine Putin is pulling. 

And if you are wondering why I am using this analogy, I am not trying to be funny or treat violence against women or spousal abuse lightly: Putin even earlier this month crassly addressed Ukraine as a woman in a relationship who should submit to her man (“Like it or don’t like it, it’s your duty, my beauty,” he said aloud).  And a stalker-abusive relationship that is long past divorce in which the abusive party has no authority over or right to demand anything from the victim is a very apt comparison to the situation at hand.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, February 21, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine published by Small Wars Journal the morning of February 21 and featured by SOF News on February 26; see related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 25: How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin
• March 1: Putin’s NATO Narrative Is Bullshit
• March 16: Putin’s Zombie Russian/Slavic Ethnonationalism Is Utterly Banal

Also see March 8 follow-up Small Wars Journal piece The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt (featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News) and related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 13: How Best to Penetrate Putin’s Media Iron Curtain in Russia? Dead Russian Troops
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—If Russian President Vladimir Putin thought when he began this military buildup that any major concessions would be forthcoming from the by-far-stronger U.S. or NATO as a result of reckless Russian military provocations, U.S. President Joe Biden—unlike his unfit predecessor—has made it crystal clear Putin will get nothing of the sort from a Western alliance now invigorated by Russia’s own acts, acts that have united Europe against Russia in tandem with Biden’s firm leadership in the face of Russian aggression, aggressively countering every move and statement by the Kremlin.

It was only several months ago when many a pundit pundited that NATO and the Western and other U.S.-led alliances were somehow in “tatters,” along with Biden’s credibility, because of the military withdrawal from Afghanistan that, taken out of larger military, humanitarian, and historical contexts, was proclaimed by said punditry as a “disaster” and a “fiasco,” pronunciamentos that may very well been a major factor in Putin’s decision to vastly overplay his hand on Ukraine, a hand far weaker than he seems to realize.  I discussed the reality of the larger picture of Afghanistan and the U.S. war there several times during and after the withdrawal, with one key takeaway that, despite the tragic crises in Taliban-run Afghanistan itself, to read any tectonic shifts in the global balance of power or U.S. relationships was to overreach one’s mental and predictive limits (hardly a concern for so many “experts” and the press, more myopic and short-term focused than ever).

This would actually help precipitate the current drama in Ukraine.

Leading into 2021, Putin and his top advisors’ hubris only was only growing in recent years with the spectacular success of Russian cyberwarfare/hybrid warfare against the West—especially the U.S. and the UK (and why I have called for NATO’s Article 5 collective defense provision to explicitly add cyberwarfare in writing, including disinformation).  In the wake of the January 6 Trump Capitol insurrection, this hubris only greatly intensified, Trump serving his Kremlin enablers’ purposes even when he managed to lose.  And during the summer’s Afghanistan withdrawal, the aforementioned typical Western media coverage that oversold divisions within the Western alliance would only significantly add to Putin’s sense of American and Western fragility and disunity (never mind that the coverage blew entirely out of proportion a few tragic days at the very end of an otherwise nearly bloodless, remarkably successful withdrawal from Afghanistan—including the Kabul Airlift that evacuated some 124,000 people, the vast majority Afghan civilians, in just 17 days under incredibly chaotic and fraught conditions).

All these factors combined as 2021 dragged on with Biden’s flagging poll numbers, a brand-new and untested German chancellor in Olaf Scholz saddled by the pressures of Nord Stream 2 (the massive gas pipeline project that would connect Russian gas directly to Germany and behind which Russia’s massive state-owned Gazprom is the main force), a U.K under a Boris Johnson beset by scandal, an upcoming (and uncertain) French national election, and a general level of protest-inspiring dissatisfaction (justified or otherwise) with COVID-19 policies in the West to give Putin the impression that Biden, the U.S., and the West in general were weak and ripe for division.

For Putin, his inner circle, and Russian intelligence, the caricature of a hapless West—which, admittedly, the West had been playing into for years with its generally weak responses to Russia’s unabated aggression, hostility, gaslighting, and general bad-faith behavior—that was appearing to Russia with this unique combination of recent issues and events effectively fed into their confirmation bias and hubris and, thus, has led Putin to make his big gamble now.

Yet, as already noted, Biden has stood strong and rallied NATO and the West quite well and quite rapidly, proving that the doom-and-gloom assessments of the health of NATO after Afghanistan were way off; even Germany, often regarded as the weakest NATO link when it comes to Russia, just Friday indicated Nord Stream 2 is “on the table” to be involved in German economic retaliation for a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And part of the reason, again, is just how pathetically predictable Putin’s screen of smoke and mirrors here has been, unable to hide over 150,000 Russian troops amassing on Ukraine’s border along with their planes, helicopters, tanks, artillery, naval warships, and other heavy equipment.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 27, 2021; Also see my subsequent article “Why is Putin pulling all this crap now?“, published February 21, 2022, and excerpted from my Small Wars Journal article from the same day, “The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine“

SILVER SPRING—As the West increasingly faces a Russia dealing out far more damage to the West than it suffers in response, the United States has a unique capacity to weaponize its oil and natural gas and oil sectors to alter the dynamics of the corresponding European markets in ways that can seriously weaken Russian power and influence in Europe, damage the Kremlin’s economic strength that has been itself weaponized against the West, and increase Western unity and economic ties.

A New Cold War

There was optimism as Putin stabilized a chaotic post-Soviet Russia, but towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, that optimism quickly gave way to dread as he plunged Russia into cyberwarfare against NATO-member Estonia in 2007 and, even worse, invaded and annexed parts of Georgia in the middle of the 2008 Summer Olympics.  Cyberwarfare against the West (as I chronicled recently), military adventurism, brazen political interference, bad-faith behavior, and gaslighting have been Russia’s norms ever since, from invading and annexing parts of Ukraine to helping to install Trump in the White House and from routine bombing of hospitals and other civilian infrastructure in Syria to pushing coronavirus disinformation.

The U.S. has staked much of its blood and treasure over decades to ensure military security, political stability, and economic prosperity throughout the continent.  Conversely, Russian President Vladimir Putin has increasingly staked many of his efforts as the twenty-first century has unfolded to undermine all of this.  Simply put, Russia usually does not treat diplomacy or international law with respect and has not shown itself amenable to changing course through good-faith engagement; rather, it continues to behave as a hostile, bad-faith actor vis-à-vis the U.S., Europe, NATO, and the West.  The impunity that Russia has enjoyed under Putin is enabled by a lack of consequences and punishment for Russia’s bad behavior that itself enables further destructive behavior in a geopolitical negative feedback loop.  Thus, relatively consistently weak responses from the West have succeeded not in deterring Putin, but in emboldening him.

Clearly, a much tougher approach is warranted, as I have argued for some time.

While imposing sanctions—in particular through Magnitsky legislation and going after Putin regime finances—derailing the nefarious Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and expanding Western military alliances and deployments are obviously crucial ways Russia can be punished and countered, good-old-fashioned economic competition can be as effective as more traditional political and military statecraft, perhaps even more so.

And on this front, America and Europe can work together to hit Russia where it is particularly vulnerable.

An Economic Geopolitical Arms Race with Europe As the Proving Ground

Perhaps most surprising among all of Putin’s achievements in recent years has been the extent to which Russia has infiltrated Europe.  Using Europe’s openness against it, Putin and his allies have used a “firehose” of disinformation to affect public opinion throughout Europe to its advantage (part of why I recently proposed major reform to NATO’s founding charter when it comes to cyberwarfare and disinformation) while also finding allies among major European political figures through financial corruption, appealing to far-right nativism, or a combination of the two.

Indeed, for years Putin has funded far-right (and sometimes far-left) extremist parties and figures in his constant quest to weaken the European center and destabilize the continent, sometimes even forming formal alliances through his own thoroughly banal political party, United Russia, with other similarly inclined revanchist chauvinistic right-wing parties in Europe, including in NATO heavyweights Italy, Germany, and France.

The issue of financial and economic infiltration in Europe was an especially sensitive and worrisome one as presented by a report on Russia authored last year by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) of the UK Parliament, which noted systemic infiltration of Britain’s economy and society by Russia through Russian businesses, noting “it is widely recognized” that Russian businesses are “completely intertwined” with “Russian intelligence” (in fact, as I have noted repeatedly, it is often difficult to distinguish between the Kremlin, Russia’s infamous oligarchs, and the Russian mafia, which often act together as one towards the same purposes, a Holy Trinity in Putin’s religion of realpolitik raw power).  The infiltration is at such deep levels that the report (which I discussed in detail) states “this cannot be untangled and the priority now must be to mitigate,” a disheartening official admission that Russian malign influence is currently too big to be defeated outright, with the report also noting similar mechanisms of influence spreading throughout Europe. 

Simply put, one of the main weapons in this overarching campaign against Europe is Russia’s economic might.  Particularly weaponized by the Kremlin for geopolitical aims are Russian oil and natural gas, with taxes on the oil and gas sectors in Russia accounting for 39.25% of the Russian federal government’s revenue in 2019 (leaving the aberrant 2020 pandemic year aside) and the two industries accounting for a huge part of the oil-and-gas-dependent Russian economy.

Logically, the U.S. targeting Russia’s share of those commodities’ markets in Europe can advance collective Western interests and unity while weakening and punishing Putin in ways long overdue.  It would only be fitting since Russia has long used its oil and gas exports and other economic ties to Europe as a geopolitical club, bribing and bludgeoning nations and politicians throughout Europe to bend them to its will or otherwise expanding its influence.  The most dramatic example of this is clearly Ukraine, which I have chronicled in detail for years.  But apart from Ukraine, most of Europe is heavily dependent on Russian oil and natural gas, while Russia itself is dependent economically on its exports to Europe, as the below tables I created demonstrate along with America’s ability to push its way into Russia’s European market share (click on each chart to see the full-size version; also available all together as a single image or in one Excel file):

In fact, it is the U.S. that has become the world’s top oil and natural gas producer ever since the Obama Administration, and in the decade before 2019, the U.S. increased its oil production at almost six-and-a-half times the pace per year on average as Russia and increased natural gas production at almost five times the rate per year on average compared with Russia.

Until recently, the United States was not even a player in the European gas market, dominated by neighboring Russia.  But the last decade has seen an explosion of both U.S. and Russian exports of liquified natural gas (LNG), which can be transported without pipelines, with the U.S. increasing its LNG exports by nearly 370 percent to Russia’s roughly 200 percent in 2019.  U.S. entry through LNG has meant a dramatic increase in its overall gas presence in Europe in recent years while Russia’s gas exports to Europe only increased 3.9 percent in 2019, the lion’s share of that through its vast pipeline network. 

So while Russian gas exports to Europe dwarf those of the U.S. (well over 1,000 percent more), the U.S. has demonstrated far more ability to grow its European market share in recent years and will be able to keep doing so in the years soon to come, its European gas exports only amounting to about 15 percent of all its gas exports while Russia’s gas exports to Europe are over 81 percent of its total gas exports.  Similar dynamics are at play when it comes it comes to oil, with the U.S. sending a bit under 18 percent of all its oil exports to Europe while Russia sends 57.5 of all its oil exports to Europe.   

And though U.S. oil and gas exports are well under 7 percent of all its exports and are not even 1 percent of its GDP, for Russia, oil and gas exports account for over 56 percent of all exports and 13.5 percent of its GDP.  Taken together, it is clear that oil and gas trade with Europe is huge portion of Russia’s economic trade and a significant portion of its GDP and that it would be fairly easy for the U.S. to weaken Russia’s economy profoundly by simply displacing big portions of Russia’s vital European oil and gas trade with oil and gas from the U.S., a prospect that Europe seems eager to make a reality.

While Russian exports are utterly dominated by massive state-owned companies (like Gazprom and Rosneft, among others) following Putin’s will, the U.S. has its own long tradition of subsidizing its oil and gas industries, so subsidies to make U.S. oil and gas exports to Europe more profitable and desirable would hardly be anything dramatic.  Costs of taxes, tariffs, and transportation could all be mitigated through various government initiatives and, indeed, the U.S. has a number of provisions currently in place, though those subsidies may not be required since U.S. market share in Europe has been booming.  Still, even as new U.S. President Joe Biden seems keen (for good reason) on eliminating such subsidies for oil and gas, giving the U.S. oil and gas sector incentives to focus much more of their business on Europe could further justice in punishing Putin and it would be a good idea here to view the economic and foreign policy goals as going hand in hand.  Pursuing each without view of the other may weaken the payoff of each policy, but combining them would align with a host of Biden Administration and traditional U.S. priorities, such as promoting human rights and transparency, strengthening transatlantic relations and traditional alliances, invigorating the rules-based international order, holding bad actors accountable, promoting European unity, and furthering U.S. economic interests.

Of particular note from recent history is that the U.S. under Obama may have coordinated with Saudi Arabia to work to manipulate oil markets to drive down prices and hurt Russia economically for its dismembering of Ukraine and supporting the murderous regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad in Syria, giving potential inspiration for the U.S. to get creative and ambitious concurrently when it comes to Russia and energy geopolitics today.

A Relatively Easy, Risk-Averse Way to Strike a Blow for the West Against Russia

In concert with Europe, the U.S. has the ability to deal a well-deserved punishing blow to Putin and his rogue government by exporting significantly more oil and natural gas into Europe, weakening the Kremlin economically and reducing its growing stormcloud of influence in Europe in a manner that strengthens transatlantic relationships at the heart of the Western-led global international order and promotes the interests of the U.S. and Europe alike.  While President Biden has clearly shored up the West’s diplomatic front against Russia at the recent G7 and NATO summits in Europe, the economic front discussed herein is another timely opportunity for robust, efficient, and lucrative action.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my subsequent article “Why is putting pulling all this crap now?“, published February 21, 2022, and excerpted from my Small Wars Journal article from the same day, “The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine“; see my other related article on the UK Parliament’s singularly excellent Russia report, and my discussion as a member of a panel with author and Senior International Correspondent for The Guardian, Luke Harding, on Russia’s bad behavior

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  December 24, 2020 (updated December 24-27 with additional sourcing); see June 7, 2021 follow-up special report Already in a Cyberwar with Russia, NATO Must Expand Article 5 to Include Cyberwarfare

SILVER SPRING—A note on terminology before proceeding: obviously, cyberwarfare consists of cyberattacks.  But cyberattacks can also very much be carried by criminals, hacking groups, or even a mischievous high school student against his own school district.  Cyberwarfare goes far beyond such attacks, and large-scale cyberattacks backed by governments or terrorist organizations might better be termed cyberassaults than cyberattacks, though both terms will be used herein since cyberattack is still by far the most common term, even if problematic for the reason just outlined.

A Brief, Selective, General History of Modern Cyberwarfare, Russia, and NATO

There have been no armed attacks against the territory of any North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Alliance member states by hostile governments since the inception of NATO in 1949, thought terrorists have carried out numerous armed attacks, 9/11 by far being the largest and most others being small in scale.  Thus, 9/11 is the only instance in NATO’s history in which its founding treaty’s Article 5 was invoked, which compels all member states to consider “an armed attack” against one state to “be considered an attack against them all” and for them all to come to its aid up to and “including the use of armed force.”

The NATO Alliance has served for over seventy years not only as a foundation of preventing armed attacks from Russia and other major powers against most of Europe and North America, but also a foundation of one of the most peaceful and prosperous eras in world history.  But there is one major type of warfare that has been hitting NATO member states intensely for years and increasingly so: cyberwarfare.  And virtually all cybercampaigns of this cyberwarfare have been waged by Russia, part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s overall war against the West, especially NATO but also even Western democracy.

Apart from some Chinese hacking/cyberespionage known to have begun at least by 2003, the first two serious cyberassaults (in these cases carried out much more so as part of geopolitical cyberwarfare campaigns) were Hezbollah’s and Israel’s surprising cyberattacks against each other during their 2006 war and Russia’s less-surprising but far larger cybercampaign against NATO-member Estonia in 2007, just three years after it had joined the Alliance.  It was not long after that when it became clear Russia was absolutely a bad-faith actor with which we have needed, since the last years of the George W. Bush Administration and through the Obama and Trump Administrations, to take a much tougher stance, as I have argued before. 

Unsurprisingly, then, the two countries that have led in cyberwarfare since are Russia and China, the first being the weaker of the two but also NATO’s (and America’s) clearest top state enemy and the second being the overall stronger of the two, but more restrained and America’s clearest top state rival for global power and influence.  Though China has conducted its own massive hacking and espionage operations (not uncommon among major powers) and has its own influence operations, it is Russia that has without question been the dominant aggressor with acts far more hostile than hacking operations focused mainly on espionage.  In fact, Russia is unique among major powers in carrying out significant acts of hostile cyberwarfare beyond espionage ever since its Estonia campaign.  And while espionage against NATO states is bad for any of those states, espionage has long been viewed as separate from acts of war and should remain in a different category from acts of war in all but the most extreme of cases, a select level in which the latest Russian cybercampaign (detected to be only espionage so far even if at a historic level) seems begging to be included.

Since the Estonia campaign, Russia become dramatically more aggressive against NATO, often skillfully manipulating nationalisms (as I discussed recently) and flooding NATO member states with cyberwarfare, with election interference and boosting secessionism as common features.  Notable cybercampaigns have been directed at the United States, the United Kingdom (including the Scottish independence and Brexit referenda), Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Canada, Turkey, Denmark, Romania, Poland, Slovakia, Montenegro, and even (North) Macedonia, unsurprisingly focused there on preventing its recent accession to NATO (and these do not even get into campaigns carried out beyond NATO territory). 

These cybercampaigns involve thousands of Russian government paid-trolls and Kremlin-created bots operating thousands of fake accounts that create millions of Tweets, comments, and posts.  And the way these operations tend to work is by promoting politicians and political parties coopted or compromised by or even favorable to Russia and Putin’s agenda and slamming their opponents or anyone critical of Russia and willing to stand up to Putin.

Many of the parties getting the most help (including funding) from Russia exhibit the same hackneyed brand of thoroughly boring right-wing ethnonationalism of the type embraced by Putin’s own United Russia party, which has in recent years forged alliances with several major political parties in Europe, including in major NATO states Italy, Germany, and France (and there are suspicions about the UK, where details of this remain redacted in the recent British parliamentary Russia report).  Similar political interference efforts are known to extend beyond  NATO countries.

Using its primary hybrid mix of disinformation, hacking, and propaganda, and with a network that combines top Kremlin figures, shadowy Russian government operatives, oligarchs in Putin’s pocket, and various state-linked media “outlets,” these operations have had far more effect than most people in NATO countries realize: helping to sway the views of many millions and dramatically distorting public discussion, politics, and policies in countries on everything from Ukraine (see the Hunter Biden “story,” for years a Russian disinformation campaign) and Syria to sanctions and even the current coronavirus pandemic. This model is skilled at preying on ignorance and confirmation bias to turn media outlets and citizens alike in these NATO states into Kremlin allies, whether as unwitting “useful idiots” or witting Fausts.  From Donald Trump and France’s Marine Le Pen and Brexit champion Nigel Farage to Fox News’ all-stars and “contrarian” journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, for a variety of reasons, extremists not only on the right but also on the left embrace or parrot Kremlin talking points and narratives after years of these effective influence operations, shaping debate from both within the halls of government power and newsrooms, corrupting and bending the debate to Russia’s ends.  Russian disinformation is thus vastly amplified and passed on further as misinformation by the duped and again as disinformation by the corrupted so that public opinion, media, and even laws and policies become more anti-NATO, more anti-EU, more anti-American, more pro-secession, more pro-Russia, more pro-Putin as a result.  And when the Kremlin’s candidates win, they and their allies may spout Russian disinformation to suit their ends, as former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa explains is the case with the Trump Administration.  They can also can move to obstruct efforts to both investigate Russian infiltration and hold Russia accountable for its cyberwarfare, with clear and indisputable examples of late from the Trump Administration and Boris Johnson’s UK government as illustrated clearly in the Mueller report and the aforementioned British parliamentary report, respectively.  Even when the Kremlin’s chosen do not win, these Russian operations still manage to weaken their victorious opponents and skew political atmosphere.

All this has been the case to varying degrees from Washington to Rome, from London to Berlin, weakening NATO and its ability to collectively defend itself.  Over time, the degree to which the pendulum has swung to more pro-Russian positions and people has been nothing short of remarkable and very much in part because of Russia’s concerted cyberwarfare effort.  And all this further divides the Alliance and even member states’ own societies internally, which itself is also a major goal of Russia’s.

Time to Adapt NATO’s Article 5 for the Cyberwarfare Era

Thus, what Russia and the Soviet Union before it had been unable to do for decades with conventional armed forces Putin is now to a significant degree accomplishing through cyberwarfare.  And while the NATO Allice had been incredibly effective in preventing and deterring armed attacks, it has had a dismal record at preventing and deterring cyberattacks, a trend that is only increasingly so as Russia’s cyberassaults become more and more brazen, with Russia’s only-just-detected massive months-long and ongoing cyberespionage campaign (and perhaps much more than cyberespionage, we may discover over time) making this only pathetically more obvious.

While NATO’s Article 5 does not exclude cyberwarfare from being considered a pretext for a collective response, it has not been one in practice and the extreme lack of clarity or cohesion from NATO only has Russia acting on the cyberwarfare front with impunity.

To this end, cyberwarfare—including information warfare—must be explicitly included in Article 5, with “or cyberattack” added after the three instances of “armed attack” in the Article.

I will elaborate much more on how this will work in the future, but for now, even this brief historical overview of the intersection of NATO, Russia, and cyberwarfare makes obvious the dire need for a new approach for NATO to reinvigorate a domain of warfare that has been nothing but a grand embarrassment for the Alliance in the face of sustained Russian aggression.  Only with a new, clear, and bold policy that make cyberattacks as off limits as “armed attacks” can NATO continue to secure its members states as it has for most of its history and reverse its loss of power, prestige, and effectiveness Russia’s relentless cyberassaults have already initiated and inflicted.

See my June 7, 2021 follow-up special report Already in a Cyberwar with Russia, NATO Must Expand Article 5 to Include Cyberwarfare and my related article on the UK Parliament’s singularly excellent Russia report and my discussion as a member of a panel with author and Senior International Correspondent for The Guardian, Luke Harding, on Russia’s bad behavior

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) September 10, 2020; see related article: Republic of Georgia Shows Trump & His Fans Depressingly Normal: Just Another Ethno-centric Nationalist Movement

SILVER SPRING—When I was in graduate school, in one class I took at a very difficult time in my life taught by the worst professor I have ever had (and I have had many great ones), I nonetheless had some interesting experiences and produced some interesting papers.  One of these papers involved either picking out of a hat or from a list (my memory is a bit weak on this detail), one person after another, a country that we would have to write about in terms of conflict.  It was the fall of 2009, and I ended up with Georgia, barely a year after the war that had erupted on one level within Georgia between different groups and regions, namely and primarily Abkhaz in Abkhazia and Ossetians in South Ossetia on one side and Georgians and Georgia’s central government on the other.  On another level, it erupted between Georgia, a former Soviet Republic, and Russia, its former overlord. 

This war was Russia’s first foreign military intervention under Vladimir Putin, who had been in power for nearly a decade without intervening militarily outside of the Russian Federation and was hardly viewed as a serious threat to Europe or the West even as he pursued a brutal war against Chechens within the Russian Federation.  Yet by 2008, the hope in the West with which Putin had been greeted as someone who could both bring order and prosperity to Russia’s new democracy and be a more competent, stable partner with the West was quickly fading.  But it was the 2008 war, launched by Putin against Georgia amidst its own civil conflict and while the world was focused on the Olympic Games, that would wake the West up to the internationally aggressive tendencies of Putin, for whom the Cold War had never really ended.  In retrospect, the 2008 war with Georgia was a watershed, the beginning under Putin of repeated bold Russian interventionism beyond its borders.  Five-and-a-half years later saw the beginning in 2014 of Russian dismemberment of, and conflict instigation in, Ukraine.  A year-and-half later saw Russia’s dramatic entry into the Syrian Civil War in 2015.  By 2018, Russian “mercenaries” from the Wagner Group, led by Yevgeniy Prigozhin (a.k.a. “Putin’s chef”) and acting as an extension of the Kremlin, were conducting combat operations in Libya against its Western-backed government, in the Central African Republic, and, in 2019, in Mozambique. 

Yet beyond use of military force, Russia would be even bolder with different approaches.  The year 2014 saw Russian “active” hybrid measures support the 2014 Scottish secession campaign in the UK; 2016, the Brexit campaign, a failed coup attempt in Montenegro designed to thwart its entry into NATO, among other aims; the campaign to weaken and destabilize the U.S. by installing Donald Trump as the U.S. president in what I called back in December, 2016, the First Russo-American Cyberwar, which involved major efforts by Prigozhin in one of his other major capacities: helping to run Russia’s cyberwarfare (indeed, as I have written before, he is a real nexus of Russian international aggression).  Since then, Russia has interfered with Catalonia’s secessionist campaign and German, French, Austrian, Italian, British, Dutch, Swedish, (North) Macedonian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Moldovan, and, even now in 2020, American votes.  Also currently, Putin may be prepping for a military intervention in Belarus to crush a democratic uprising there, and we should not forget more general cyberattacks on Finland and the steady stream of cyberattacks against the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

There seem to be even still more countries that have been the target of Russian political interference and cyberwarfare.

With a large portion of these Russian campaigns, Putin has expertly manipulated what czars and comrades alike had often skillfully manipulated throughout Russian and Soviet history both within Russia and throughout is periphery: nationalism.  And many of these campaigns are part, as I have noted before, of a larger Russian war against the West mean to destroy, NATO, European unity, and even Western democracy as we know it.

In his 1931 book Conversations with Oscar Wilde, A. H. Cooper-Prichard presented the following exchange with the book’s namesake: “’How is it,’ I once asked him, ‘that people who are not possessed of a single other virtue should come out at times as patriots?’ ‘Exaggerated patriotism,’ he answered, ‘is the most insincere form of self-conceit.’ And at another time he said, ‘Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.’”  And in his “Notes on Nationalism,” Orwell—who would use the term “nationalism” as Wilde used “patriotism,”—wrote that “nationalist thought” could be characterized primarily by “obsession,” “instability,” and “indifference to reality,” that one of the great dangers he saw for nationalism was that it “may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty.”  Orwell here famously defined nationalism as

first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’.  But secondly – and this is much more important – I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.

As Putin acts as a maestro conducting an orchestra of nationalism on a global scale to his ends in 2020 in ways most of us could have hardly imagined back in 2008, it is useful to look at how the Georgia war—this first great foreign campaign of Putin’s—can be a window into the world of nationalism, showing how banal and, sadly, normal ethno-nationalism can be.  This is true globally, and I used excerpts from my 2009 graduate school paper that discussed nationalism in Georgian history to shed light—just weeks before his socking victory in the United States—on the rise of the similarly thoroughly unoriginal, bland, and boring nationalism of then-candidate Trump.

That exploration of my older 2009 work—which in important ways was especially enriched by Ronald Grigor Suny’s deconstruction of nationalism as a very much consciously constructed phenomenon with two main sides: inclusion and exclusion—in a 2016 context has only increased in relevance thanks to what President Trump and Trumpism have become: the largest force in American politics since George Wallace to be built so nakedly on inclusion and exclusion.  The president does not even attempt to hide that white ethno-nationalism is what will be included in, and other identities excluded from, the top position in the national hierarchy.  This white, exclusionary ethno-nationalism, which he fanned and flamed into the White House with substantial Russian support, has only gotten more extreme and more powerful since then and today has plenty of sensible people worried about the prospects of both civil war and the death of true American democracy.

That look at how Russians long manipulated various nationalisms in Georgia is only too chillingly relevant to our current situation, in which our domestic divisions exploited by foreign enemies and domestic demagogues alike have brought America, in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic that has only intensified our divisions, to its knees, leaving it more vulnerable and weaker that at any time since the Civil War.  Ultimately, laws, elections and government reform can only go so far in rescuing us from our current nationalistic disaster: it will take many millions of Americans taking a hard look at their credulity and hardened exclusionary hearts and realizing that it is only a tempered, informed, inclusive nationalism that can save us from ourselves.

See related article: Republic of Georgia Shows Trump & His Fans Depressingly Normal: Just Another Ethno-centric Nationalist Movement

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s new podcast and his related eBook: A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia.

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 26, 2020

SILVER SPRING—The seventy-fifth anniversary of V-J Day—Victory over Japan Day, the day the Allies, including and mostly America, beat the Imperial Japanese Empire into announced surrender and submission to end World War II—should have been a true moment of somber yet hopeful reflection.  And yet, in the American press, overwhelmed by extremes of economic fallout, what feels like daily unprecedented political shenanigans (e.g., our own government sabotaging the U.S. Post Service), and deadly coronavirus antics that have exceeded the absurd and flirted with the dystopian—there was scant coverage.  I checked in on CNN—in some ways the flagship of American television news coverage—on and off throughout the day, and did not see one minute of coverage of the anniversary of the end of Pacific War and World War II overall.  There was not much online or social media either, at least, not much that was featured.  I will not say there was nothing on The New York Times homepage, but I did not notice any stories if there were and if so, they were not featured terribly prominently.

This felt even worse than the dearth of coverage for the one-hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I in Europe, on which I have previously written for the Modern War Institute at West Point.

It is, perhaps, sadly fitting that an American leadership that places little stock in international cooperation and alliances and has put the nation in such dire straits that its ability to pause and reflect on such a pivotal historical moment—one that was the forge of a nearly unprecedented era of alliances, peace, and cooperation—was compromised, but it is not at all surprising.  Leaders tend to be one of the major forces characterizing their nations’ culture while they lead, and the idea that America as a whole—its media overall, its people—would have been particularly reflective on this moment was, sadly, not realistic.

And yet, here we are, living in 2020 under an international order that in many ways is still defined by the final denouement of World War II in Japan, the immediate aftermath of that, and the “Long Peace,” to cite historian John Lewis Gaddis, that humanity as a whole has been extremely fortunate to live under since the end of the war.  On any day, then, it would be wise to reflect on the events and legacy surrounding V-J Day, but the passing of the seventy-fifth anniversary is an excuse to call for, and hopefully hold, the public’s attention on the subject.

Below are my own top takeaways as someone who has studied and written about history, policy, politics, security, and international affairs for two decades.

End Big for Better, and Long(er)-Term, Results

One of the more recent trends in armed conflict is that conflicts do not seem to end.  War has essentially been ongoing in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, Somalia, the Maghreb, and even with Mexico’s far-more-deadly-than-you-think drug war continuously for years.  War has been on-and-off in Libya, between Israel and various terrorist movements, in Iraq, in Colombia, between Turkey and Kurds, and in numerous other places on lesser scales throughout the world, conflicts that if are not active now have been recently and could be any day again; they may swing between civil war and insurgency and terrorism or any combination of these, and, increasingly, such conflicts seem intractable.

One of the many complex driving forces behind these dynamics is that the far-more connected and globalized world makes it much easier for extremists, weapons traffickers, and those wanting to join in a common cause in some way to have more ability than ever to come together.

A major related driver is the internet, which fuels this connectivity and extremism in general, both through the ease of the use of and accessibility of it and the way in which it and major tech companies foster extremism, division, hate, and violence along with a proliferation of misinformation and disinformation; both state and non-state actors further these extremist trends still more so.

Another major force behind longer-lasting conflicts is that the end of the Cold War, which suppressed many long-simmering conflicts from erupting, has allowed a good number of these conflicts to boil over.  Furthering this trend is the American and overall Western reluctance to intervene in foreign conflict after the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan under the Bush Administration.  The lessons of the possibilities of competently executed interventions, like those seen in Bosnia and Kosovo and East Timor in the last few decades in the wake of the world’s failure to act in Rwanda to prevent genocide there, seem to have currently been lost, as if there is not a sound middle ground between doing little-to-nothing, as in Rwanda, and in doing far too much, as in the case of Iraq in 2003.

What we are seeing now, more than anything else, is conflict in which both sides find some sort of foreign support—ranging from random volunteers identifying with the conflict to formal state support and intervention from foreign militaries—but in which the outside forces generally do not intervene forcefully enough or with enough resources to end the conflict; conflict in which the natural course of the conflict—if there is an imbalance of power, and in which one side would triumph enough over the other to end the conflict—seems to never take hold but where, instead, though foreign backers do not want to be terribly involved, they stay involved enough to keep the factions they support just powerful enough to keep on fighting, to keep either hope for their fighters alive or at least a sense they if they keep fighting they will be better off than capitulating or seeking peace.  And, as I have noted recently with Afghanistan, even if there is a short-term surge of forces, its effects will usually be limited and the enemy knows to simply wait it out until your surge of forces does what it will and leaves.

There are different ways to end a war big, but ending small or with lukewarm support and effort or with a short-term mentality, as has often been the case in the recent conflicts mentioned above, seems to almost invariably lead to further conflict in the future, unless one is dealing with the happy experience of a very limited conflict with very limited hatred and very limited goals where each side can walk way with a sense of success.  In contrast, ending a war big can often produce much more lasting results: in Bosnia, a massive Western bombing campaign essentially forged peace that still holds throughout the states of the former Yugoslavia, with the exception of Kosovo, where the subsequent bombing campaign not only took care of that issue, but also brought about the downfall of the main instigator of genocide and ethnic cleansing throughout the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.  In Balkan cases, there was robust support from the international community after the war, with troops on the ground, and there is still peace there today.

We can say this model was even more robustly implemented in Japan, Germany, Italy, and other places at the end of World War II, perhaps none more forcefully or successful than in Japan.  That is not to say we should be ending most wars with a pair of atomic bombs and a massive occupation (nor to suggest accepting without question the use of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, cities filled with civilians), but without a doubt, there was a massive commitment in 1945 to rebuilding Japan as a nation of peace and as a partner and an ally.  And the planning for the postwar world, including Japan, began almost as soon as the war started: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tasked top officials with postwar planning at the end of 1941 and it began seriously in early 1942.

Today, Japan is one of America’s closest allies, has experienced peace and mostly prosperity since the end of World War II, and currently has the world’s third-largest GDP, only losing the second spot to China a decade ago.  Japan did not turn out this way by accident: it was a result in many ways of long-term commitment and planning as well as considerable resources, and there are today still many U.S. troops—many thousands on multiple bases—in Japan, even seventy-five years after its surrender and the war’s end.  The same can be said for Germany, South Korea, Italy, and the UK, all still U.S. allies and some of the most prosperous, peaceful nations on earth since 1945.

Essentially, you get what you put in when it comes to ending conflicts and creating a new order. 

Peace Is a Result of Equal Parts Politics and Security

Von Clausewitz’s maxim that “War is the continuation of policy [or politics] by other means” was true long before his time, is true today, and should be true forever.  Before the Bush Administration took out Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime in 2003, there was a famous lack of both respect for and implementation of prewar postwar planning when it came to the top Bush Administration officials calling the shots for Iraq in the first few years of the war, notably Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other top political appointees loyal to him.  While not everything was smooth in postwar Japan, there were comparatively robust military and political efforts in Japan at the beginning of its occupation and a well-resourced, consistent effort and leadership for years after the war ended, so that the formal occupation did not end until almost seven years after the war ended (and then the troops hardly all went home). 

There was also a unity of leadership under Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who, for all his flaws he would (especially soon) display, was a source of stability and strength for both America and Japan during the occupation, with MacArthur having the wisdom to make serious adjustments when necessary, most notably during the so-called “reverse course.”  In contrast, Sec. Rumsfeld had essentially run Iraq into the ground and anything like a “reverse course” only occurred after he was replaced.  And while Gen. MacArthur may have been a military man, he displayed a keen understanding of the local needs and sensibilities, prioritizing sweeping political, legal, social, and economic reform, hardly content to view his mission as just a security or military one.  For Clausewitz, as Clayton Dennison notes in the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, public opinion is the key to managing counterinsurgency, but where MacArthur was sensitive in key ways to local public opinion, Rumsfeld and his ideologically kindred spirits carrying out his will in Iraq and Afghanistan were not.,

Such a comprehensive approach was incredibly successful in the end, bringing about sweeping reform and, while hardly perfect and certainly complicated, overall made remarkable progress for both American interests and the Japanese people, who formed a genuine, serious alliance with the American people that persists until this day.  In the end, American planners—MacArthur hardly the least among them—realized that security did not exist in a vacuum, that any military planner who wanted to achieve success could not ignore politics or leave it to others as some sort of unrelated phenomenon.  Military occupations that ignore politics on the ground end on one of a narrow number of possibilities, if not utter failure, then a level of violence and resistance that requires such overwhelming force it often leads to massive destruction, depopulation, war crimes, or massacres to break the population or requires such a revolutionary change of course (and that often comes so late) that the damage can take a generation to undo, with the occupier (eventually) simply giving up and going home.

Dennison quotes Clausewitz’s line that “Wwr is no pastime; it is no mere joy in daring and winning, no place for irresponsible enthusiasts,” then promptly labels Sec. Rumsfeld and his crowd as “irresponsible enthusiasts.”  On the same page, Dennison agrees with Clausewitz’s observation that war is a “serious means” and politics is its serious “goal,” and that war “can never be considered in isolation from” politics.  Thus, war cannot be carelessly entered into or carelessly exited from, only approached seriously, and any serious approach understands that equally serious political efforts must both precede and follow any military action.  We clearly understood this with our approach to World War II and Japan within it and clearly failed to take this approach with our launching of the Iraq War in 2003.  The lessons from V-J Day presented themselves then and in recent decades, yet for most of the twenty-first century, the United States has engaged in most of its military actions in ways that seem to forget Clausewitz’s keen understanding of the relationship between war and politics, much to our detriment and that of our allies and the world, much to the delight of our enemies.  But it was different in 1945, and we are still reaping the rewards of the V-J Day approach today.

Hate Never Has to Be Forever; Any Enemy Can Become a Friend

A strain of thought has become prominent in some influential circles in the West (especially among conservatives) ever since political scientist Samuel Huntington’s essay The Clash of Civilizations? was published back in 1993.  This was, overall, a regressive, backwards, reductionist view, and journalist Thomas Friedman and others would later recognize that “the real clash today is actually not between civilizations, but within them.”  The real takeaway from this debate is that there are no distinct civilizations with which we are wholly incompatible, destined for perpetual conflict and eternal hatred, but that, instead, we can make peace—and become friends and even allies—with anyone, that no conflict is so intractable that it cannot be transcended.  And in all of American history, there is no greater testimony to these ideas and ideals than our conflict and subsequent friendship and alliance with Japan.  In this tale, V-J Day is the seminal moment on which all those ideas and ideals hinge.

A pair of books by historian John Dower is essential, here: his 1986 War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War—which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was an American (now National) Book Award Finalist—and his 1999 Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II—which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize, among others.  In his work, Dower takes us from the darkest depths of racial and religious hatred, atrocity, and mass murder to respect, friendship, and alliance.  For anyone born after the war who has experienced Japan or the Japanese in recent decades, it is almost impossible to imagine this world or this conflict between our peoples as it was then.  But it was as real, vicious, hate-filled, and blood-soaked as just about any conflict in world history, as Dower shows, and the relationship today between Japan and America is living proof that, no matter the depths of hatred and killing, there can always be a light at the end of the tunnel if we allow ourselves to look for, and eventually see, such a light.  Our current conflicts—whether the cold war between Republicans and Democrats or the real war between our nation and the likes of ISIS—could most certainly benefit from understanding what Dower catalogs. 

For Dower, writing in his preface to War Without Mercy,

…race hates and merciless fighting…had been so conspicuous in the war in Asia and the Pacific…The war hates themselves, however, seemed to disappear almost overnight–so quickly, in fact, that they are easily forgotten now.

In a world that continues to experience so much violence and racial hatred, such a dramatic transformation from bitter enmity to genuine cooperation is heartening, and thus the fading memories of the war pose a paradox. It is fortunate that people on all sides can put such a terrible conflict behind them, but dangerous to forget how easily war came about between Japan and the Western Allies, and how extraordinarily fierce and Manichaean it was. We can never hope to understand the nature of World War Two in Asia, or international and interracial conflict in general, if we fail to work constantly at correcting and re-creating the historical memory. At a more modest level, the significance of the occupation of Japan and postwar rapprochement between the Japanese and their former enemies can only be appreciated against the background of burning passions and unbridled violence that preceded Japan’s surrender in August 1945.

He elaborates on the inspiration we can take from this moment in history in Embracing Defeat: “The ease with which the great majority of Japanese were able to throw off a decade and a half of the most intense militaristic indoctrination…offers lessons in the limits of socialization and the fragility of ideology that we have seen elsewhere in this century in the collapse of totalitarian regimes.”

Indeed, it is hard to dispute MacArthur’s 1951 claim that “the Japanese people, since the war, have undergone the greatest reformation recorded in modern history,” and while America certainly is responsible for much of this reformation, so, too, are the Japanese.  For Dower, “the ideals of peace and democracy took root in Japan—not as a borrowed ideology or imposed vision, but as a lived experience and a seized opportunity.”  He adds soon after that “what matters is what the Japanese themselves made of their experience of defeat, then and thereafter; and, for a half century now, most of them have consistently made it the touchstone for affirming a commitment to ‘peace and democracy.’  This is the great mantra of postwar Japan.”  And it is a huge part of the crucial legacy of what V-J Day still means as a historical moment.

This tradition of turning enemies into true friends and allies is a hallmark of some of the most successful societies to inhabit the earth, and most notably before us among these—as I have noted in multiple publications—was the ancient Roman Republic, which measured against we are only the second-most successful republic in history.  Thus, the most successful societies in history know when to fight and when to make peace, and that making the best possible peace involves turning one’s enemies into friends and allies.  The example of Japan and the pivotal moment that was V-J Day shows that even the bitterest of foes can soon become friends.

Alliances are the Best Form of Defense

As the failed vision and tyranny of Soviet Communist swiftly collapsed, all the European Soviet-“allied” satellite states and half the European former Soviet Republics—allies and part of the Soviet Union only through sheer military domination, totalitarian state terror, and attempted indoctrination—ran away quickly from Russia and have since of their own volition joined the EU and NATO, the military alliance that has been the bane of much of the Soviet Union’s and current Russian President Vladimir Putin’s existence.  In fact, of the members of the Warsaw Pact—the military alliance founded by the USSR in response to NATO’s formation—all except non-formally-Soviet states are now NATO members, and three of the six European Soviet Republics—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania—are in NATO and the EU.  Of the other three, Ukraine has been trying to hard get into the EU and NATO, though dramatic, massive Russian interference in Ukrainian politics—which I have detailed in an eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics—has considerably delayed and jeopardized these aspirations; Moldova has expressed strong interest in joining the EU; and, while until recently, it seemed Belarus was pretty safe from leaning towards the EU or NATO and away from Russia, a possible revolution unfolding there now trying to oust longtime dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko may change this.  Even in the Caucuses, the former Soviet Republic of Georgia has been eager to join the EU and NATO—two of the causes of the 2008 war with Russia—and is technically on track do so with NATO, though a dormant track.

Thus, recent history proves that the strength of many of the Soviet Union’s alliances were little more than skin deep.  And that is a major reason why the U.S. won the Cold War, in contrasting parallel with America’s alliances, the strength of which has been bone-deep, as also proven by recent history.  And while NATO often gets credit for being “the“ linchpin of the post-World War II international system set up by the United States, a strong argument can be made that the U.S.-Japan alliance is just as important a component of the postwar order and is even more impressive in that it was made between two countries that were very different culturally in ways that were not the case with America’s European allies.  Whereas the Soviets’ and Russia’s most important alliances crumbled at the end of the Cold War, America’s have remained strong, intensified, and only grown more numerous, even through the disastrous 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and still intact after nearly a full-term of, by far, the most anti-alliance, anti-NATO, anti-EU American presidential administration since NATO and the EU came into existence.

These arrangements—the security, political, and economic ties that were forged during and just after World War II by America and most of its wartime allies and defeated enemies—have defined the modern world and have become the bedrock of much of what has made the world a better place than the world that saw two world wars almost within two decades.  Despite some myopic neo-Marxist critics referring to this achievement derisively as the “neoliberal” world order, this world order produced a level and duration of peace, prosperity, and stability not seen since before the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the late fourth and early fifth century C.E.  Not only are we living under one of the longest periods of relative peace in world history, but, literally, billions of human beings have been raised out of poverty as a result of this system.  And in the immediate years after World War II, with so much uncertainty and turmoil confronting the world, the establishment of such a firm alliance between the U.S. and Japan became a steady yet inspiring rock on the world stage, fairly unique in world history.

While Russia seems incapable of understanding that it is better to be loved (or at least liked) and feared than to be just feared, the U.S. realizes that, through our historic network of global allies, we are stronger than we could ever be alone and stronger than any enemy nation who would stand against our collective might.  The ancient Roman Republic owed much of its success to what Arthur Eckstein, in his groundbreaking Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome, termed its “skill at alliance management,” which, for Eckstein, was the distinguishing feature of Rome’s over the “fearsome” “militarism” it shared with most rivals.  He expanded on this theme:

In part it meant extraordinary Roman skill at managing an ever-increasing network of non-Roman (i.e., foreign) allies. But the ability to assimilate and integrate non-Romans in one way or another into a Rome-centered state structure meant in turn that Rome eventually came to possess an exceptional competitive advantage over other polities in the ferocious struggle for security and power ongoing in the ancient Mediterranean—namely the ability to mobilize very large-scale social resources at a great level of intensity.

No other state before or after would practice as well, or owe so much of its success to, this skill until the modern United States in World War II and the postwar era.  Today, like the case with ancient Rome, America’s foes face insurmountable odds when it activates its worldwide network of deep, longstanding relationships, of which our alliance with Japan is one of our oldest and strongest.

Disregarding V-J Day’s Precious Legacy

In his final sentence of War Without Mercy, Dower puts it as well as anyone can: “…World War Two in Asia has become central to our understanding not only of the past, but of the present as well.”  The legacy of V-J Day is as much a foundation of the modern world as anything, and in by far mostly overwhelmingly positive ways.  Misguided, short-sighted action by the Trump Administration threatens to destroy this precious, unique system supporting the modern world, of which the legacy of V-J day is so central, a lasting legacy such leaders would do well to consider more thoughtfully before abandoning the values on which it was built, has lasted, and still presently defines so many aspects of our daily lives for the better.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)  February 26, 2020 (title modified to include Putin/Bernie angle March 30, 2020)

WASHINGTON — As the wounded, screeching animal that is the collective of the Democratic 2020 presidential hopefuls and, indeed, the Democratic Party itself, limps forward after the Nevada caucuses, I am filled both with a deep sense of dread but also have reasons for reasonable hope.

The Bad and the Ugly

First, the dread.

One almost has to admire the near-total lack of self-awareness of Bernie Sanders and so many of his followers.  Yes, countries are unique, but they do not exist in a vacuum, and as they march confidently forward, Bernie and his followers act as if they are not at all aware of the some fairly overwhelming global trends that are affecting Western democracies in particular but hardly Western Democracies alone.

The most prominent example is just from a few months ago, when a blithely confident Labour Party chief Jeremy Corbyn and his army of young and diverse Corbynistas were happy to condescend to all those questioning them as bad-faith, corrupted actors and never really prepared any serious answers to the valid concerns of those not on board as they sought to foist an ideology and scale and pace of change most Britons were nowhere near ready to accept.  The result was the worst electoral show for Britain’s Labour Party since 1935.  More than the following cases, the case of Corbyn and Labour in the UK should be a warning to Democrats, just as Brexit should have been a warning for Trump’s prospects in 2016, as I cautioned at the time.

Still, there are many more cases to consider.  We can look to Israel’s politics over the past two decades, which has seen its once mighty Labor Party fall to near political irrelevance, the same journey of the overall Israeli left.  Now, Israel is just days away from a third election this cycle in which, it seems, Israel’s left will be yet again be part of a failed effort to oust a rightist coalition.

The long-powerful French Socialist Party has likewise seen a crushing of its power recently.  In fact, all across Europe and beyond in places like Brazil, once popular leftist parties in democracies have crumbled and the far-right has risen.  While there are certainly some brighter spots for leftists electorally of late (e.g., Mexico, Canada), this collapse is stark and widespread, and not unrelated to Trump’s rise and current American political dynamics.  The collapse is also accompanied by a collapse of long-standing societal institutions—or at least a collapse in the public’s confidence in them—everything from government and organized religion to journalism and marriage to political parties and financial entities, even our faith in each other.  Such things had been stable for some time (sometimes a very long time), but in many ways now, we live in an era of dangerous declines in the very fabrics of society (in such a context, it is understanding, though still disturbing, that so many people have fallen on nationalism, ethnic identity, and/or fundamentalist religion).

It is within these contexts that Sanders’s would-be Sandernista revolutionaries have approached a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party.  And let us make it clear that we are talking about a hostile takeover: in 2016, Sanders only won about one-third of registered Democrats running against Clinton, who was the preference of about two-thirds of registered Democrats.  The reverse was the case for their performance among independents who voted in the primaries and caucuses.

Again with the lack of self-awareness, they seem not to know in what “good” company they traverse.  For there is a massive international campaign—the primary mover behind which is none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin, including Russian military forces and intelligence—designed to destroy democracy by destroying the political center (including the center-right and center-left) throughout the Western democracies, particularly the United States and within the EU.  This is not by just attacking mainstream political parties, but by boosting many far-right and far-left parties and candidates as well as secessionist movements (Brexit, California, Texas, Catalonia, Scotland, and Ukraine are among the most prominent).  The idea with the former is to help far-right ethno-nationalist parties (espousing politics similar to Putin’s own nationalist brand inside Russia) take power; in this context, boosting the far-left parties, which are almost universally unviable today, serves to weaken the center in the face of the far-right. With the latter secessionism, the idea is to literally break apart key European nations and alliances, destabilizing Europe and weakening its unity and that of NATO in the face of a Kremlin eager to expand its influence on the continent.  Especially with Trump’s anti-European and anti-NATO views—whereby the U.S. before Trump had been Europe’s biggest supporter against Russia—Putin’s support of him and others is helping to systematically weaken the post-WWII system set up by the U.S. that has brought about the greatest level of peace and prosperity in Europe since the height of the pax-Romana over one-and-a-half millennia ago.  This war on the political center contributes to a goal long-held by Putin: an overall global decline in democracy and the rule of law, happening right now to his delight.  And neither Bernie, nor his people, never, ever seem to stop to ask how things they say and do are advancing Putin’s exact agenda in their own quest to destroy the center.

So, basically, the world does not revolve around Bernie Sanders at all for the Kremlin, he is just one of many far-left “useful idiot” candidates the Kremlin favors not at all as an end, but as a means to a destabilizing end, whether in 2016 or now, as was just revelated to little surprise to those who have been following (Jill Stein is simply another, just less prominent, example).  Unlike Trump, with Sanders I do not believe that he solicits or accepts such interference (though, quite unhelpfully, he seems to be blaming the media for making a big deal of this when this is a serious issue, and he did, rather astounding and infuriatingly, also seem to blame Russia for the Bernie bro phenomenon; sure the Russians amplify, but Bernie bros are real).

What is even more remarkable is that nearly all of his supporters with whom I have interacted with online or in-person are “useful idiots” for the Kremlin, a term popularly attributed, perhaps incorrectly, to Lenin himself used to describe those who unwittingly propagate Kremlin propaganda because, simply, the believe in it.  These Bernie people basically dismiss the idea that Russia is boosting Bernie as “fake news” in spite of the detailed evidence for this (and much in the way Trump and Republicans do along with the Kremlin itself).  They deny it in spite of the obvious reality that a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” who honeymooned in the Soviet Union, is an apologist for Fidel Castro and the 1979 Iranian hostage-takers, who broadcast Sandinista propaganda as mayor of Burlington, and seems to hate capitalism has close to zero chance of being elected president of a conservative, capitalist country with Electoral College and gerrymandered congressional voting district systems that strongly favor conservatives, that the Kremlin clearly wants Bernie to run against Trump so Putin can keep his favorite useful idiot in office.

These Bernie Supporters (I know these are not all of them, but still do represent a big chunk) do not like anything that does not fit the narrative that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party are entirely to blame for the 2016 loss to Trump, so they are also usually all-too-quick to dismiss the clear reality that Russia interfered in 2016 at all to help Trump (journalistically, the incredibly selective, irritatingly myopic, and downright nasty Glenn Greenwald and his fellow Intercept folks Jeremy Scahill and Aaron Maté also fall into this useful idiot category).  They could care less about their role in the wider world or even the country: all that matters is their agenda and their crusade to see the center-left be obliterated by the Bernie left, they are not willing to even entertain the idea that they should adapt to add a larger spectrum of people to their camp, no, everyone else needs to join them and that is the only way they can see meaningful progress happening.  The very idea that they might do anything to appeal to people to their right, be they less liberal Democrats, independents, or even Republicans, offends then.  Sanders exudes this style from the top.

They do not care about the Democratic Party other than its utility to them as a vehicle to power; their aims are to hijack and destroy it from the inside out, not mold or remake, but to totally take it over and “bern” it down hence, they demand while offering no compromise.

And Sanders has practically won all three of first three states (technically two in terms of actual delegates so far but all three when looking at the popular vote in Iowa).  He is the overall leader in delegates and has all sorts of positive press coverage that comes along with winning.  He is the frontrunner by the main standards that count (delegates and votes), and his opposition for the nomination is fractured and far too numerous.  If Super Tuesday were held with the latest polls as the results, in many cases Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar would dilute the moderate vote so much so that Bernie would walk away with by far the most delegates and many of the moderates would be so weak individually they would not even receive any delegates (a candidate must get 15% statewide and in a state’s congressional districts to get any statewide or district-level delegates, respectively, and it is delegates that award the nomination).  A look at the current weighted polling averages in California, the state with the most delegates by far (415) at stake, makes how dire the situation of the non-Bernie Democrats is very clear:

So Bernie could be on a march to the nomination in what would be certain, barring some unforeseen calamity like an economic collapse orchestrated unwittingly by Trump, to hand Trump four more years in the White House, which could lead to the destruction of the American republic as we know it, as I have warned for years.

For this to sink in, ponder the actual distribution of political ideology in America:

Gallup has self-identified liberals at only 25%, while moderates are 35% and conservatives 37% of the population, and only six out of fifty states have more liberals than conservatives; Pew still has moderate and conservative democrats combined slightly outnumbering liberal Democrats in real life, though not in Twitter’s cesspool.

In other words, given the Electoral College and the fact that liberals are greatly outnumbered by moderates and conservative in general and even more so by states, it is truly madness to run Bernie Sanders in a national election.  Hypothetical polling should be ignored, as both Democrats and Republicans have avoided throwing the mountains of negative opposition research against Sanders because Democrats want to win over Sanders’ supporters and have Bernie play nice if they beat him, while Republicans want to see him do well against other Democrats so they can then fire point-blank at him during the general election, when they can see the whites of his eyes.

The signs so far are more or less that this will happen, that we are stuck with Bernie… until now.

The Good

For those Democrats reasonable, not myopic, and self-aware enough as to their relative strength and position in the overall Democratic and national electorate, and for other non-Democrats who dread Bernie as a choice against Trump, there are still reasons for hope.

1.) There are signs Bernie still is not winning many Democrats and his performance thus far gives ammunition to this idea

Looking at where contests have been held to far, it is important to note that the Iowa caucuses allowed same-day registration (meaning you did not need to be registered before you went to the caucuses), the New Hampshire primary was open (meaning you did not have to be a registered Democrat to vote in it), and the Nevada caucuses also allowed same-day registration.  In Iowa’s caucus entrance polls, only 20% of people identifying as Democrats were saying they were going to support Sanders.  In New Hampshire’s exit polls, only 26% of Democrats voted Sanders, and Democrats were only 52% of voters.  And in Nevada, only 30% of Democrats said they were supporting Sanders in entrance polls (and nearly one-fifth of voters were not Democrats).

The open quality of these contests, however, is not representative of the overall situation going forward, as a large chunk of upcoming contests have closed primaries in which only Democrats can participate, including New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania, the states with the second, fourth, and fifth most delegates up for grabs.  Most states also will not have same-day registration available, though a decent chunk will.  For Bernie supporters who are not loyal Democrats and disdain the party system, this means that unless they register early as Democrats in many places (a thought that would make a fair number of them sick), they cannot vote in the nomination contests.  Considering how at least 70% of Democrats in each of the first three states have not voted for Sanders, that is not a good sign for Team Bernie.

State registration deadlines

2.) From South Carolina forward, the overall territory of the contest is far less favorable to Bernie

Bernie does well and, in 2016, did well in three types of states: a.) states with open primaries, as noted above b.) very white states

Highest percent-white-alone states, 2019 U.S. Census data

and c.) caucus states (lots of overlap in b and c).  Sanders’ message in 2016 and his approach just did not resonate with voters of color, who overwhelmingly supported Clinton over Sanders; she easily won the most diverse states, which are also the most populous states.  So far this year (as before), the first two states were also two of the whitest: Iowa and New Hampshire are almost 91% and over 93% white, respectively, the sixth and eight-whitest states in the country (Bernie’s Vermont is the second-whitest state).

That gave Sanders quite a boost and hurt, say, Biden, going into Nevada.  But Iowa and Nevada are also caucuses, which are undemocratic abominations (as I have noted before) that, overall, dramatically depress turnout and favor certain privileged and enthusiastic groups over others and introduce social pressure by forcing caucus-goers to cast their votes publicly in front of their neighbors and force lobbying during the voting process.  The system is so chaotic, bad, and unrepresentative that in 2016 (besides this year’s obvious mishaps), when Washington State and Nebraska held non-binding primaries after the binding caucuses, Clinton beat Sanders in contests with dramatically higher turnout even though Sanders won the caucuses and, therefore, most of the delegates.  This year, mercifully, half the states with caucuses have already gone over to primaries, and only two states—North Dakota and Wyoming, tied for the least delegates of any state—and three U.S. territories are holding caucuses going forward, whereas fourteen states had caucuses in 2014 (twelve of which Bernie won by large margins and two of which Clinton won rather, and relatively, narrowly). Basically, in 2016, Bernie outperformed and dominated in caucus states.

In summary, this year the first two states were states with built-in advantages for Bernie, where he only won barely with the popular votes with about 26% support, and in Nevada, where he did far better, that was still a caucus state that inflated his support.

But Bernie will find South Carolina and the more populous Super Tuesday States a whole different ballgame, with far more diverse populations bestowing bountiful delegates in primaries.

3.) Dynamics are generally setting up to favor Biden and hurt Bernie and others

Apart from the aforementioned structural, geographic, and demographic reasons, other things are coming together to help elevate former Vice President Joe Biden and stall Sanders.

For one thing, apart from Sanders not having a terrible debate, everything else went about as well as Biden could have hoped for in the Nevada debate.  Biden easily had his best performance to date.  Yes, Sen. Elizabeth Warren stole the show, but she is competing mainly for other “progressive” voters with Sanders, not with Biden voters.  And she did Biden a huge favor by eviscerating the hapless former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has taken a lot of support from Biden within the moderate lane.  The other two moderates, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, tore into each other.  Warren also tore into each of them and even Bernie, and Pete went after Bloomberg, too.  Biden needed Klobuchar and Buttigieg and especially Bloomberg to take hits, and they did in dramatic fashion.  He needed Warren to do well to siphon off votes from Sanders and she performed better than anyone else.

In part as a result of these dynamics, Biden did far better in Nevada than in Iowa or New Hampshire, and though he came in far behind Sanders, he also came in far ahead of third-place Buttigieg in terms of delegates, with Klobuchar being shut out.  This was just what Biden needed going into South Carolina: a strong debate performance; a solid and clear second-place performance, a reminder of his relative potential strength compared to Buttigieg and Klobuchar in more diverse states; Warren hanging tough and keeping some “progressive” votes from going to Sanders; Bloomberg scaring the hell out of his supporters (some of the least committed in the race, along with Buttigieg’s voters) with that awful performance; and with businessman Tom Steyer—a virtual one-hit-wonder with high polling in South Carolina and nowhere else, except for some polls in Nevada but, encouragingly, he was a dud there—not even on stage, a reminder of his lack of a national profile.

Then came the South Carolina debate, in many ways a repeat of Nevada’s.  Bloomberg did not look as awful but still did not look good, and Warren was good but not as dominant.  Joe, though, had another of his best debates, the best one yet—a far more assertive and dominant Joe than we have seen—in which he was often the center of attention, and, helpful for Biden, everyone focused most of their fire on Sanders and kind of ignored Bloomberg for much of the debate.  Sanders was consistent as usual but also responded poorly and angrily—even to the audience!—when confronted.  For the most part Klobuchar and Buttigieg were fine but also non-factors other than solid attacks against Sanders, as was Steyer, who looked pretty bad when Biden brought up his $90 million investment into for-profit prisons.  This was an even more ideal debate, then, for Biden.

As if all this was not good enough for Biden’s chances, the legendary South Carolina politician, U.S. Rep. and House Majority Whip (the number-three Democratic leader in the U.S. House of Representatives) James Clyburn, endorsed Biden today, the next morning.  This was expected but is still quite welcome, as Clyburn is a titan of South Carolina politics, where he fought for civil rights in the 1960s and was arrested and jailed for his efforts.  Clyburn is a revered figure for many African-Americans, elected to Congress in 1993 and selected for the number-three leadership position for House Democrats back in 2006, which he has held in both majority and minority roles since.

When Hillary Clinton got his endorsement in 2016, Clyburn helped her to exceed her polls and beat Sanders by an even far larger margin than Obama beat her in 2008.

So just about everything Biden could reasonably hope for (save for Steyer dropping out) has happened in the run-up to South Carolina.  If Biden win and wins convincingly there, some Democrats who have flocked to Bloomberg and Buttigieg (who are, relatively, uncommitted to them in polling) would easily flock back to a winning Biden. Buttigieg has no path going forward without any serious black support and the weaker Klobuchar even more so for the same reason has no path forward, and after they are very likely crushed in South Carolina, pressure on them to drop out will be overwhelming.  If they are not myopic or narcissistic, they will heed the call and back their fellow moderate Biden to prevent Sanders form having a high chance of piloting the Democratic Party like the Hindenburg.

Only three of fifty states have weighed in, and there are also the District of Columbia and various U.S. territories to vote, too.  A candidate needs to win 1,991 delegates to win the nomination on the first-round ballot at the convention, and Bernie Sanders so far has a whopping total of… forty-five, 2.2% of the total he needs.  Biden is just a mere thirty delegates behind, which is nothing, an easily surmountable lead that Biden has a decent chance to overtake in South Carolina.

Even if Biden does not become the frontrunner with a delegate lead immediately after South Carolina, in big Super Tuesday states, Biden is already polling well or ahead (though far lower with Bloomberg’s rise) even before the events in South Carolina impact those numbers.  Bernie is doing as well as he is in Super Tuesday polls in part because of Bloomberg’s previous surge chipping support away from Biden and Bernie’s Nevada bounce.  But Bloomberg is falling and, if Biden does well in South Carolina, we can expect his numbers to go up at the expense of Bloomberg and also Buttigieg and Klobuchar.  If one or more of them can be convinced to drop and out and endorse Biden before Super Tuesday—just three days after South Carolina, when over one-third of all pledged delegates will be awarded—that would go even farther.  On that day, two of the four states with over 200 pledged delegates up for grabs—California, with the most, and Texas, with the third-most, of all states—vote.

As in 2016, Bernie may have peaked in February in 2020.

The Moment of Truth for Non-Sanders Democrats Is Now

Until recently, Biden was ahead in most of the larger Super Tuesday votes and was competitive, as we saw above, in California, but Bernie built up a lead that could drown Biden out in California (again, if candidates do not get at least 15% statewide and in individual congressional districts, they do not get any delegates), however, this is at Bernie’s current peak.  And Biden is still neck-and-neck or ahead in Texas.

A strong South Carolina performance could seriously stop and reverse the gains Bernie has been making in these states, but it may come down to California: if too many other moderates take away enough support from Biden so that he is below 15% and gets no delegates out of the whopping 415 delegates at stake there, that could be an advantage for Bernie that might be very difficult, maybe even impossible, for Biden to overcome.  However, Bloomberg is doing tremendous damage to Biden there in current polling and in many of the larger states, and if he keeps fading, this prospect could be mitigated.  Conversely, in Florida, (voting later on March 17^th) Bernie is flirting with not being viable delegate-wise at all, so that, too, with that state’s fourth-largest delegate haul of 219 delegates, could offset to some degree a poor Biden showing in California.

But if Biden beats Sanders in Texas and take fare more delegates than him, combined, in other Super Tuesday states—something that would require Biden gaining a lot in California in the short time after South Carolina—then he would be the frontrunner.

I would argue this scenario is the hardly to be dismissed, and I would bet on him being viable there, given that Biden’s main competitors in the moderate lane have a good chance of continuing to fall or may even drop out after South Carolina, but it certainly is a serious possibility that they will not fall enough and Biden could be shutout in California.  If that scenario happens it will remain to be seen whether Biden or Bernie gets the nomination, and it will come down to a long fight over each remaining state, much like Clinton vs. Obama in 2008.  However, Biden will need the resources to compete and do respectably against Bernie in less populous, rural, and whiter states, and, currently, Sanders is way outpacing Biden in fundraising, yet, if other candidates give way to Biden, it is reasonable to think a lot more fundraising will come to Biden.  If Biden clearly outperforms Bernie on Super Tuesday, just like with Clinton, it would be hard to see Bernie overtaking Biden.

Still, rather than Bernie running away with it on Super Tuesday, South Carolina should significantly alter the dynamics of this race to give Biden a huge boost and pressure his moderate rivals to clear the way for Biden to take Bernie on mano a mano.  It is very likely that this boost will make Biden competitive for most of the rest of the nomination process, but the main question is if dynamics before Super Tuesday will boost Biden enough in California to be competitive and take a big chunk of delegates from there—which would almost surely make Biden the frontrunner—or if Bernie will dominate California to the degree of shutting or almost shutting Biden out of delegates, which could lead to a protracted, scorched-earth campaign and maybe, perhaps likely, a Bernie win.

However, Bernie Sanders being Bernie Sanders, even if Biden is the clear frontrunner, I fear, just like in 2016, Bernie and his Bernie bros will fight tooth and nail even when it is clear Bernie would not be the nominee.  Either way, the party will likely be torn apart, but apart from Bernie being the nominee and getting crushed by Trump—by far the most likely outcome with nominee Sanders—the worst outcome would be Bernie dominating in California but still losing to Biden in a very tight race, thus making Biden’s challenge of uniting the Democratic Party that much more difficult.  Still, if Biden can limit Bernie’s delegate advantage in California or even beat him there (the latter of which looks unlikely unless several people drop out), he should be a clear favorite to clear the 1,991-delegate threshold.

So I would say, roughly, there is probably a one-third chance that Biden will be a clear frontrunner, a one-third chance it could be pretty unclear until the end (I would still favor Biden then), and a one-third chance Bernie could get enough delegates on Super Tuesday, especially in California, that he would be a clear frontrunner.  But with so many x-factors—especially the behavior and performance of Bloomberg, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Warren (whom we have not discussed much, but her exit would help Sanders significantly)—in the mix, it is hard to narrow things down to one most likely scenario.  In contrast, in 2016, polling made it clear even after New Hampshire that Clinton was a heavy favorite in South Carolina and, as I noted at the time, Nevada was Bernie’s last chance to win over the type of non-white voters he needed before South Carolina and Super Tuesday to be viable going forward.  It was clear with her win in Nevada that Clinton would be the nominee and that Sanders had failed to dent Clinton’s formidable majority coalition.  But, since there are so many more candidates in this 2020 race, the outcome could remain in doubt for some time.

Democrats who want to win in November who are currently backing Bloomberg, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Steyer need to realize that all they are doing is helping Sanders and to switch as quickly as possible to Biden.  In theory, with his fantastic ad campaign, Bloomberg could have been a viable alternative if Biden had continued to tank in Nevada and was more vulnerable in South Carolina.  Reality punctured that finely crafted image and possibility of Bloomberg’s with two far-from-good debate performances by Bloomberg.  If Biden had tanked, there would also have been a case for Buttigieg and Klobuchar remaining in the race, but with Biden poised for a clear South Carolina win, history will remember Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar for not getting out of the way and handing the nomination to Sanders if they persist in way that kneecaps Biden’s chances to overtake Sanders.  Sanders has a decent theoretical chance in South Carolina, but it seems very unlikely given the dynamics I have mentioned.

If there is one thing the anti-Sanders crowd can count on, it is the abilities of Sanders and his supporters to keep their high floor and low ceiling, sticking to their messianism, and doing little to nothing to win over those not already persuaded. Thus, Bernie will be easy to defeat if the moderate candidates consolidate quickly around Biden, but if Sanders is the nominee winning mostly 20-to-30-something % throughout, it will be because the other main non-Biden candidates could not put the country and the party before themselves even when it was clear they had virtually no chance to be the nominee, and it may be too late after Super Tuesday. At stake is not just the soul the Democratic Party, but the soul of the nation and its survival as a democratic republic.

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981.  He also just recently authored A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia.

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