(Russian/Русский перевод; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) January 14, 2023; updated March 7, 2023, to include new 6-month map of Russia’s Bakhmut-area “progress;” because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

SILVER SPRING—Dear readers, many of you may have seen my latest article from (very early) yesterday, Russia’s Pyrrhic Advances at Soledar Near Bakhmut Setting Up Ukrainian Counteroffensive, Not Russian Victory, the featured image of which was a map collage of two maps from the superb series put together the by the Institute for the Study of War in partnership with Critical Threats: one from the latest available when I was writing, setting the scene for Ukraine’s Donetsk battle lines and zones of control, along with much of the rest of Ukraine’s east, from the data known and estimated for (update) September 7, and another half-a-year later for March 7 (previously January 12, and another map from exactly four months earlier, by the calendar date, for September 12; older map at end of article).  Here is my collage putting the two maps side-by-side, for clarity over time:

If you’re trying to find signs of Russian progress, it ain’t easy.  You almost have to squint (and you can zoom in by clicking on the collage).  Near Bakhmut, at best there are single-digit-mile gains west here and there over the course of these (update) six months (previously four months, more than 120 days), but very few; and Ukraine has taken far more territory in the northeast of the map than Russia taken anywhere else on this map combined.

Looking at this map, you only have to keep in mind four things to have a solid understanding of Russia’s Bakhmut campaign:

• This is Russia’s main effort, its main geographic area of focus
• Russia has suffered horrendous, staggering levels of casualties trying to take Bakhmut and its environs (like Soledar), with many thousands killed and who knows how many wounded
• Bakhmut and its suburbs (including Soledar) are strategically insignificant
• Russia literally has not made any territorial progress anywhere else outside this map, but sure has lost territory to the north and southwest, thousands of square kilometers in each theater

The words of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his minion Yevgeniy Prigozhin (whose private Wagner Group, generally an extension of the Russian military, is leading the Bakhmut/Soledar assault), of the Kremlin and its apparatchiks, are meaningless; they break like “water on rock” against the reality presented by these two maps, much like the Russian troops are breaking like “water on rock” against Ukraine’s defenses day after day, week after week, month after month, dead Russian after dead Russian, dozens of dead Russians after dozens of dead Russians, hundreds of dead Russians after hundreds of dead Russians, thousands of dead Russians after thousands of dead Russians.

The Russians in this Bakhmut campaign have captured virtually nothing of significance and, let’s be clear: Soledar is not significant, a small-town suburb of a small city, which itself is also insignificant other than that Putin has been decided he wants the Russian military to take it at any cost, which these maps make crystal clear it has failed to do.  What is unclear is if Russian troops fully control Soledar or will even be able to hold what they have taken there over time, but, as I argued in my last article that introduced my map collage, it does not really matter much at all, due to its aforementioned strategic insignificance.  Feel free to read that piece in full, which elaborates and sources everything discussed herein.

Also feel free to check out the individual ISW maps that comprise my collage below, clicking on them to zoom if you wish.

See Brian’s previous map collage article from July 14, THE THREE MAPS SHOWING WHY UKRAINE IS WINNING AND RUSSIA IS LOSING (and why is isn’t even close), and see all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2023 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 one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

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; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook), September 27, 2022, the same day Real Context News surpassed three-quarters of a million all-time content views; *update 11:09 PM; adapted October 2 for Small Wars Journal as Putin’s Ukraine War Had Doomed Him; Mobilization Only Weakens Him More; *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; see follow-up October 6 article This Is the Beginning of the End of the War and related September 16 article I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March; also, since the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on October 7 to Ukrainian activist Oleksandra Matviichuk and her organization the Center for Civil Liberties, listen to my April podcast with her here discussing war, Russian war crimes, human rights, and democracy in Ukraine.

SILVER SPRING—Before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s massive February 24 escalation of the war in Ukraine, few people who follow the conflict gave Ukraine much of a chance against Russia.  I myself felt Ukraine would put up quite a fight but still felt Russia would be able to take most of Ukraine, with a best-case scenario being Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would survive a Pyrrhic Russian victory in Kyiv and lead a robust insurgency that would succeed partially over time (years) with Western help.

But not even two full weeks after February 24, I was experiencing one of the most dramatic surprises of my life: during the second week of the war, it was clear to me that Russia’s leadership, government, and military were not only systemically failing in their approach to the war, but were, collectively and institutionally, incapable of any grand adjustments that would change their failure to success, that even if they adjusted their strategy, their tactics doomed them to a poor performance.

Russia and Its Military: Dysfunction Exposed Early in War Persists

Ukraine had performed as well as possible, Russia as poorly as possible in any realistic sense, and the consequences of this would only explode exponentially over time as the war would drag on.  Even less than two weeks in, it was clear:

• Russian tanks and vehicles had no defense against Javelin missiles and other Western-supplied anti-tank weapons the Ukrainians were receiving or would receive
• Russian troops were poorly supplied, without enough food, water, or fuel, with a terrible logistics system that was highly vulnerable (follow Trent Telenko on Twitter and you will understand just how bad the Russians are at logistics)
• Russian troops were poorly led, lied to by their superiors and unprepared for the resistance they encountered, their lives wasted in repeating disastrous tactics time and time again, with little proper coordination between different branches, leading to horrific casualties, while Ukrainian troops were much better led and protected by their leaders and had far higher morale
• Russian equipment was inferior, poorly maintained, and thus performed poorly at high rates
• Russian hubris led Russia to attack on many axes, spreading their troops thin, and Russian losses in the early days included some of their best troops and equipment
• Russia had virtually no international support or aid, while Ukraine has tremendous international support and aid that would only grow parallel to Russia’s isolation and depletion
• Russia could not economically withstand Western sanctions or support this war over long periods of time (unsustainable short-term measures and myopic analysis notwithstanding)

If you put these on one side of a mathematical equation and add to it Putin’s dogged determination to persist, on the other side of the equals sign, you end up with not only Ukrainians victory, but the end of Putin and his regime: Putin, proud man that he is, would be unwilling to admit defeat and would double down on failure until it brought him down, destroying most of the Russian Army in the process unless it or his people revolted against him first.

Hence, I could posit in my article for Small Wars Journal published March 8 that this war would be “the beginning of the end for Putin.”  Many analysts and pundits would be dismissive of such claims, including specifically of my own argument (among them George Beebe, an advisor to Dick Cheney when he was vice president and a former top Russia specialist at the CIA) but all of those dynamics have persisted, and indeed, increased since then, exploding (literally) in disaster after disaster for Russia.  And while I recently briefly revisited how I thought back then that Putin would doom himself with his hubris, now is a good time to do a full reexamination of that notion.

From the total collapse of Russia’s Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy fronts to the sinking of the Mosvka, from Crimea becoming vulnerable to Ukrainian forces—the last two of which I predicted in April—from the counteroffensive in Kherson to the total collapse of Russia’s Kharkiv front, it has simply been one disaster after another for Russia since late March, with only minimal, gradual gains for Russia (some of which are already being reversed) alongside numerous sudden, dramatic victories for Ukraine.  In fact, the totality of the conflict since February 24 has seen Russia initially make quick but often costly gains up to the gates of Kyiv, then saw that and other fronts in north-central Ukraine to collapse suddenly with catastrophic losses beginning by the end of the fifth week of the war, and, in the nearly half-year since then, Ukraine has taken far, far more territory than what Russia has gained (and that was true even before Russia’s dramatic collapse on the Kharkiv front).

All the while, Moscow’s body count has continued to grow, astoundingly all throughout, perhaps as high as 57,000 killed and wounded*, with that number set to only increase and increase dramatically.  These dead Russians have friends and family, and it is hard to hide such death; even without official notification, official silences reveal much.  And those friends and family are growing increasingly dissatisfied with the conduct of the war, the war itself, and Putin himself; with more combat deaths comes more people with more anger.

Russia’s military is so desperate to bring in new recruits to bolster its beleaguered force that its de facto extension, the Wagner mercenary group run by Putin henchman Yevgeniy Prigozhin (known as “Putin’s chef”), is recruiting inmates from prisons, with predictably pathetic results for Russia.

Mobilizing Myopia and More of the Same (Dysfunction)

And no dysfunctional mobilization—“partial” (as just announced by Putin) or otherwise—on the part of Russia can alter these dynamics anytime soon, especially rushing to train and deploy old or untried troops still operating as part of this exceptionally ineffective system as describe above.  Protests are now erupting in reaction to Putin’s “partial” mobilization announcement (which he has already lied about), and authorities are arresting many people, some of whom they are forcing into the military; that is hardly the way to build a motivated fighting force.  As it is and as noted earlier, the Russian government has been unable to properly train, equip, supply, and lead its existing military, and there is nothing whatsoever from what we have seen thus far that should lead anyone to think it can competently so now for an additional 300,000 troops.  Thus, while there are no rational reasons to think that the troops-to-be-mobilized will perform or be treated any better that the already poorly-performing Russian military currently operating in Ukraine, we have multiple reasons to conclude rationally that they are likely to perform and be treated even worse.  And there is the further conundrum that the longer the Kremlin waits to deploy these troops-to-be-mobilized, the worse a losing situation they will be thrown into, but also that the faster they are deployed, the less-trained, less-prepared, and more poorly equipped they will be.

Part of me feels as if “partial” mobilization of Putin’s is half a public relations attempt to show that he is doing something to respond to the obvious fact that Russia is losing and he, as leader, must be seen to do something while also being half an actual attempt to actually do something that would, in theory, help the war effort, but that, in the end, it is a half-assed approach to each, a move that will fail to restore the approval and stature he has lost and is losing in the eyes of the Russian people and will not appease hardliners even as it angers nearly everyone else, a sorry measure that will not actually reverse the tide of overall failure Russia has been experiencing for almost the last six months of this seven-month war.

Because more and more, the failures outlined above are going to be obvious to all but the most credulous of Putin’s supporters and sooner rather than later (if they are not already); the rest of Russia might be going through stages of grief when it comes to their support for Putin (those that still do support him enthusiastically).  Through the acts of defiance of municipal politicians to the plea from queen of Russian pop music Alla Pugacheva, from the cracks in the normally-solid wall of Russian state television propaganda to the increasing refusal of Russian soldiers to fight in the war, it was clear earlier this month clear that Putin was losing support among the Russian people and losing it dramatically. 

Now, as hundreds of thousands of young Russian men flee their country to avoid serving in a military that will mistreat them and throw their lives away carelessly in a war they do not want to fight, Putin’s hold on power has never been weaker.  Russia’s FSB (one of the successors to the dreaded Soviet KGB) apparently counted over 260,000 men fleeing Russia from just this past Wednesday to Saturday; prices of flights out of the country are skyrocketing and flights are selling out; and traffic leaving Russia is backed up in gridlock for some ten miles on the border with Georgia, with a long line of cars also building up on Russia’s border with Mongolia and even Kazakhstan offering sanctuary to Russians fleeing Putin’s mobilization.

Mobilizing Resistance

There appears to even be something of an insurgency—or “partisan” movement—breaking out as I write this in Dagestan and perhaps elsewhere, with people resisting security forces coming to conscript men into the military and even some attacks against recruiters and recruiting centers.  Unrest, protests, and even resistance are growing particularly in regions with large non-Russian ethnic minority populations, especially Dagestan: in a sick sense, Russia is focusing disproportionately on recruiting and conscription from these communities within Russia as well as from Tatars in Russian-occupied Crimea as a way to ethnically cleanse Russia and Crimea of “undesirable” non-Russians, acts that are nothing new in the history of the Russian and Soviet Empires, as I noted some time ago.  This should not be surprising, as Putin’s ideology and system, like that of the tsardom of the Russian Empire and the worst practices of Stalin, is heavily imbued with white Slavic Russian-supremacist racism, this being a big part of the reason why Russia is by far the most violently racist country in Europe.  The disproportionate use of ethnic minorities in the military in this war is also an attempt to shield Putin’s supporters among better-off ethnic Russians in Moscow and St. Petersburg from the war’s effects. 

These dual aims expose the parasitic colonialist and imperialist nature of the Russian Federation towards its own citizens, especially in regions remote from its two aforementioned largest cities.  But these efforts come at a cost, causing unrest throughout the constituent parts of the Russian Federation, unrest that is spreading rapidly.  Even Putin’s local ally, Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, seems to be refusing to comply with the new mobilization following recent public criticism on his part of Kremlin.

*Update 11:09PM: I have been trying to wrap my head further around why the Russian mobilization is proceeding as it is, and came to an additional conclusion that also, in part, these are not only are punitive—meant to take men who would form a more liberal opposition (active protesters) and more traditional insurgents (sometimes ethnic minorities, though this is also a Russian prejudice against minorities much like the heinous “dual-loyalty” accusation anti-Semitic bigots hurl at Jews and also reminiscent of Stalinist purges of largely innocent minorities like the Crimean Tatars)—not only to see these people somewhat politically purged or ethnically cleansed, but is also preventive, to put such people under government control and take them away from their home regions where they could form the core of any rebellion or insurgency, either to overthrow Putin directly or to carry out a separatist movement on behalf of some of the largely non-Russia republics within the Russian Federation; credit to Dmitry (@wartranslated) for pointing this out. But yes, this is also Putin showing he is afraid of the people, afraid or rebellion, separatism, and being overthrown, and thinking he is somewhat preempting such movements, though, like so many of his recent decisions, its effect may have the opposite one from what he intended.

(end update)

The rapid decline of support for Putin and his war is because the social contract he made with Russians who supported him is now null and void.  “Give me your freedom, your democracy,” he winked and nodded, “and, under me, Russia will be respected and feared again, powerful at home and abroad, strong economically and stable, and reversing the collapse of the Russian Empire.”

But now, Russia is less respected than at any time in living memory.  The Potemkin Russian military has been severely degraded and roundly humiliated by the far smaller Ukraine, until recent decades a vassal of Russia’s.  States deeply under Russian influence not long ago—Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Armenia—are now distancing themselves from Moscow, defying Russian peacekeepers, or seeking American support, respectively, while other former Soviet states Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan just saw a deadly military flare-up between them.  Even though China told Russia their friendship “has no limits” early in February, the opposite is increasingly becoming the case.  And the Russian economy is already now bringing back memories of the nadirs of the Yeltsin days, with only far, far more economic pain for Russians—elites and masses—to come in the ensuing months.

These are all the things Putin essentially promised he would keep from ever happening again if Russians surrendered their freedom to him, yet here they are, happening again.  Instead of pride, now, all Russians can feel is humiliation; most of the them know this, and the whole world sees this.  And, as this has clearly been Putin’s Russia for decades, though there may be some “It’s Rasputin fault, not the tsar’s”-syndrome, most Russians will know Putin is responsible, blame him, and blame him harshly.

It is clear that the Russian military—rank-and-file and officers alike—are more aware of Putin’s failures than anyone as they wade through their own blood.  But this war is not just affecting them and regular Russians: the lifestyles of the elites—powered by luxury goods and lavish vacations—are also suffering; nobody in Russia is benefitting from this war and nobody will.  And nobody knows how bad things are going more than the very people surrounding Putin in the Kremlin, not just those closest to Putin, but the layers of bureaucracy underneath them.  When those types of mid-level government officials gave up on the Soviet system, they were happy to dismantle it from within to find some power to grasp onto amidst the system’s collapse and did not work to preserve it but to preserve themselves, one of the fatal five reasons Stephen Kotkin gives for the Soviet Union’s collapse.  Thus, the spawn of the crisis of legitimacy in Moscow that Gorbachev faced in the late 1980s and early 1990s is ready to return with a vengeance, this time targeting Putin and his regime.

Revolt, rebellion, revolution, resistance, whatever you want to call it, its smell is in the air.

See related 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; also 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
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

And see all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

Brian’s Ukraine journalism has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 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 one million content views on January 1, 2023.

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 (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook), July 26, 2022; a slightly expanded version of this article was published July 24, 2022, by Small Wars Journal as Helping Ukraine Not “Provoking” Russia But a Proper Response to Years of Global Russian Aggression

SILVER SPRING—Since even before the February 2022 massive escalation by Russian President Vladimir Putin of the eight-year-long war in Ukraine, there has been a chorus of voices—each and every single one myopic, ridiculous, and not worthy of serious consideration—saying that, we, the United States/NATO/the West should, to some degree or another, not help Ukraine militarily (too much) and/or not increase Ukraine’s aid (too much) because, somehow, if we do, that would be a “provocation” against Russia.

At first this was just the typical “useful idiots” crowd: the hard-/far-/alt-left—often Noam Chomsky/Antonio Gramsci acolytes who think of themselves as the “Anti-Imperialist Brigade” but are more like the “Anti-West-to-the-Point-of-Siding-with-Dictators Brigade” very much in the Orwellian sense, as in, George Orwell’s views he expressed at the height of World War II on the “pacifists” of that time—aligned with Putin’s far more numerous right-wing allies in the West, whose numbers have been steadily growing for years.  These mentalities have been cultivated by a “firehose” of propaganda, information warfare, and support for figures like Trump in the U.S., the recently-defeated Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and for the Brexit campaign in the UK.

But the foolishness has extended beyond that usual strange nexus of the far-left and far-right: we now have the New York Times Editorial Board, Henry Kissinger himself, otherwise respectable experts, and even Pope Francis spouting dangerous false premises that, if only some sort of “reasonable” “peace” deal could be arrived at, the war could end (so we should pressure Ukraine into negotiating with Russia!), or that Russia was somehow “provoked” into war, that war could have been “prevented” if only folks were nicer to Russia, or more accommodating, or tried to “understand” the Russian “perspective,” or some other such embarrassing naïveté.

Thankfully, the most powerful nation in NATO, the West, and on earth—the United States of America—has a leader in President Joe Biden and a government that are firmly not buying into any of this nonsense.   Even so, the simply astounding blindness, myopia, and selective readings of history mentioned above must still be swiftly swatted away.

To the credit of the sensible people with real consciences defending Ukraine publicly, the solid response often given to this ridiculousness is that, clearly, Russia is the aggressor here, the one trying to chop off territory from a sovereign state and committing war crimes en masse against an unprovocative neighbor that posed no threat to Russia.

All this is true and obvious.

The Bigger Picture

But still just as true and what should also be obvious (if perhaps slightly less obvious since people seem to have incredibly short attention spans) is that Russia has been an explicit aggressor—the primary one as far as nation-states—against the West since 2007.

I have outlined some of this Russian aggression in depth elsewhere, that Russia’s establishing itself as a predominantly and consistently bad-faith actor began in 2007 with a massive cyberwarfare campaign against NATO-member Estonia followed not long after by the Russian invasion and dismemberment of Western-ally and NATO aspirant Georgia in 2008.  Cyberwarfare and political interference against NATO and the West have been clear constants since then, and there has also been a steady stream of military interventions and other hostile actions, including, but not limited to:

• massive propaganda, disinformation, and hacking campaigns, including active weaponization of hacked materials in these campaigns
• obvious artificial boosting of extremists—including violent ones—as well as bad-faith operations to damage leaders and parties in power and out that are willing to stand up to Russian aggression
• active political interference in specific elections and referenda
• clear efforts to foster nationalist and sub-nationalist secessionist movements to literally break up European countries and the EU itself, with a heavy focus on xenophobic, racist sentiment
• constant brinksmanship with regular airspace and sea-space violations
• carrying out multiple assassination missions with chemical weapons on European/NATO soil
• militarily attacking Western partners and allies in Syria and Libya
• attacking, invading, (de facto) annexing, and fostering separatism in the territory of NATO-aspirants Georgia and Ukraine

While my previous work—linking the findings of many other researchers and agencies—has documented all this in detail, what is important to note here is that what this amounts to, in the end, is a war to destroy both Western democracy itself and the Western-led international order in place since the end of World War II.

Overdue Retaliation

Once you realize this, once you understand the sum total of the parts of Putin’s malfeasance, all of a sudden, not only can you argue that just about any aid to Ukraine and punishment for Russia is essentially justified, firm and forceful pushback against Russia’s aggression is long overdue and warrants even more pushback than we are giving now.

By looking at the big picture, it is easy to call out Russian malign aggression that has been by far the more grave set of actions, not Western moves or responses, and only a fool would equate voluntary, peaceful decisions of democratic countries in Eastern Europe joining NATO of their own free will with Russia invading and annexing parts of its neighbors or interfering with such heavy hands through illicit means in the politics of its non-threatening neighbors.  One set of behaviors is free nations exercising their free will democratically, the other is naked imperialism.

And, yes, while during the Cold War and in centuries past the West has obviously engaged similar aggressive imperialism, we live in different era today, one where Russian dismemberment of other nations’ territory and politics is not a norm practiced by all other great powers but a unique behavior characteristic of Russia alone among major world powers.  While today, the West uses the possibility of benefiting from the global institutions it leads, trade, technology, economic and humanitarian aid, and security alliances to entice cooperation and alignment—to persuade rather than conquer—Russia is still living in the past, wielding only corruption and terror: indeed, Putin is living mentally in Tsar Peter the Great’s late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, which is—as Stephen Kotkin, one of the great modern historians on Russia, loves to point out—long before NATO ever existed.

The very arguments being applied by the aforementioned fools in terms of trying to limit or halt Western aid to Ukraine can and should have been applied to Russia, where they are far sounder, to caution Putin against further aggression because of the possibility that the West would respond.  While the silly in the West were worried about Russia’s response if the West stood up for Ukraine, it is Russia who should have been more worried about what the West would do in response to its insane invasion.

Robustly standing by Ukraine to aid it in pushing out all Russian forces from every inch of Ukrainian territory Russia has occupied—not just in 2022 but since 2014—is a fitting and wholly justified response on moral, practical, and legal grounds to Russia’s arc of behavior in recent years, an arc of transgressions that is so great that Ukraine should neither have been the beginning nor be the end of the West’s decisive and forceful response.

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, June 7, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); this is one of a series of articles excerpted and/or adapted from Brian’s May 23 Small Wars Journal article, Bungling the Prewar and First Moves in Finland 1939 and Ukraine 2022: A Comedy of Errors for Stalin’s Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, Respectively, his deep-dive analysis on the parallels between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War that was inspired by his reading the beginning of one of the definitive English accounts of this war—William Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991, 283 pages; for sourcing, assume all uncited information comes from Trotter’s book but quotes will be given a page number or numbers in parentheses and anything from another source an external a link; in some instances, when I have written in detail about something, I may link to my own work, in which you can find many external sources backing up what has been stated). This conflict is especially timely as Finland seeks to join NATO in light of Russia’s recent imperialist aggression.

Other articles excerpted and/or adapted from the May 23 Small Wars Journal article:

• May 23: A Terrifying Comparison Between Putin and Stalin
• May 25: A Brief History of Russian and Soviet Genocides, Mass Deportations, and Other Atrocities in Ukraine
• May 31: “Banderites”: What Russia Really Means When It Calls Ukraine Nazi and Fascist
• June 2: How Delusions of Phantom Fascists Duped Stalin in 1939 and Putin in 2022
• June 5: Moscow’s 1939 Finland Hubris Repeats Itself in Ukraine in 2022

SILVER SPRING—Apart from the main themes I have already discussed in this series (hubris and delusions about “fascists”), there are a number of other noteworthy similarities between the two conflicts apparent from Trotter’s early chapters.

One major parallel involves command and control, combined arms coordination, and communication.  Notes Trotter:

Nor did the Red generals appreciate the amount of trouble the Wehrmacht [i.e., German Military] had taken to perfect tactical coordination between the component arms, to ensure a reliable and redundant network of communications, and to instill in its frontline commanders a sense of drive and individual initiative.  Those very qualities, if displayed in the Red Army, were more apt to earn a man a trip to the gulag than a pat on the back.  Many of the battalion and regimental commanders who would lead the Russian attacks were by this time little more than groveling flunkies whose every battlefield decision had to be seconded by a political commissar before orders could go to the troops. (36)

As for the Ukraine war today, it has been amply noted (including by me) that these elements have been a resounding disgrace for the Russian military: troops using easily trackable sim cards in their cell phones, thus revealing their positions/relative strength; troops communicating with totally unsecured and easily monitored methods, such as those cell phones; a general getting killed because Ukraine could track his phone calls; command posts getting hit regularly by Ukraine; a lack of coordination overall and between different military branches, including air support that does not arrive; poor, mercurial, and unclear command structures (if a recent report that Putin may be micromanaging things on the battlefield, this only makes this last problem exponentially more insurmountable); and the list could go on…

For another similarity, Stalin was fairly isolated, having not-too-long-before committed a series of massive purges of the Soviet military, intelligence, political, and bureaucratic leadership.  To say that the survivors and replacements were hesitant to tell Stalin something that he did not want to hear would be a massive understatement.  In particular, his main diplomatic man in Helsinki, Vladimir Derevyanski, was a constant source of wildly rosy, inaccurate views of the real mood and situation on the ground in Finland.

Putin, too, especially in this pandemic era, is a pretty isolated leader: his long meeting tables with himself and the guest sitting on opposite ends and the vast separation from his council at major government meetings are only the most obvious representations of this isolation.  Along with this isolation, it is almost certain that he has been getting from advisors afraid to tell him the truth a fantastical version of the situation on the ground on Ukraine on which he based his plans and adjustments and on which much of the massive failure of Russia during the early phase of the war can be blamed.  His senior advisors, like Stalin’s inner circle after the purges, nervously fear being imprisoned or worse (as is already happening) and very likely adjust what they tell Putin accordingly; the same can be said for many of their sources.

For Stalin’s man in Helsinki, Derevyanski, we can substitute Ukrainian Viktor Medvedchuk as Putin’s man in Kyiv, whom I have profiled before.  Like Stalin’s Derevyanski, Medvedchuk is thought for years to have been providing Moscow with bad information that is far from the reality on the ground, contributing to the gross misjudgments of Putin’s that have the world in the situation with Ukraine that it is now.  Medvedchuk is so close to Putin that the Russian president is even godfather to the man’s daughter; her godmother is the wife of Putin’s temporary successor to the Russian presidency from 2008-2012, Dmitry Medvedev, now the top official on the Russian Security Council after Putin himself (notably, Medvedchuk’s wife—Oxana Marchenko—seems to have had financial ties through a super-shady Ukrainian “businessman”—Igor Anopolskiy—who was seriously involved with the scandal-plagued, ill-fated Panama City, Panama, Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower, a hub of money laundering for the Putin-allied Russian mafia and Latin American drug cartels alike).

One of the longtime leaders and orchestrators of the pro-Russian political faction in Ukraine, Medvedchuk has been trying to hand Putin influence in Ukraine through his corrupt politics and media operations, most recently in Ukraine’s parliament as the main opposition figure to Zelensky.  The coalition party he leads—Opposition Platform—For Life—runs multiple disinformation television stations in Ukraine that are like a mix of Fox News and RT (one of the Russian government’s top disinformation/propaganda outlets), on a mission to undermine his political foe Zelensky and the West while boosting Putin and Russia.  U.S. intelligence has said Medvedchuk is part of a plot to overthrow Zelensky, and he has been charged with treason in Ukraine.  Unsurprisingly, he fled his house arrest, only to be captured by Ukrainian forces last month, after which Zelensky’s Instagram account displayed this photo of Medvedchuk in handcuffs:

If people spend so much time creating an alternate reality, they might actually just believe in it, and while it is impossible to tell from the outside to what degree Putin and his minions believe what they profess even as it changes so often, reality has certainly to a significant degree eluded them.

A further interesting parallel, this one between Finland then and Ukraine today, involves their preparations for war.  The political leadership of both nations professed publicly that they did not take Moscow’s threats entirely seriously, that it was bluffing as a negotiating strategy more than actually preparing for a serious war.  In the case of the Finns, this mentality very much characterized the actual beliefs of Finnish Prime Minister Aimo Cajander, President Kyösti Kallio, Foreign Minister Eljas Erkko, and the rest of the Finnish leadership team, with the main exception being Gustav Mannerheim, the man who would actually lead Finland’s military effort during the war.

With Ukraine today, at least one telling interview with CNN’s excellent Matthew Chance convincingly supports the idea that while Zelensky publicly downplayed the threat of a Russian invasion, he was privately deeply worried one was coming and did not only downplay the threat to help Ukrainians keep calm, but by design to bait the Russians into a sloppy, rushed, overconfident approach to their invasion (I would say this claim of Zelensky’s is well-supported by how events have played—and continue to play—out).

In the cases of both countries, though, the military leaders were planning meticulously what to do in the event of an invasion launched by Moscow, well aware of their relatively small size and fewer resources available (in contrast, the Soviet planners never thought they might be fighting a war against only Finland; their planning had envisioned much grander conflicts, ones in which Finland was quickly co-opted or occupied itself by a major Western power and used as a staging area for invasion).  Whatever Finnish or Ukrainian politicians were saying, whatever they meant, then, the military folks in both Finland and Ukraine took the opportunities to plan, train, and prepare during the years in the run-up to the actual invasions very seriously and to incredibly good effect; to quote Mark Hertling, Commanding General of U.S. Army Europe and the Seventh Army in 2011-2012, “during my assignment as commander of U.S. Army Europe, I also spent a significant amount of time with the Ukrainian Army and was amazed as I watched them grow in professionalism and effectiveness.”  He had also seen them over the years in other capacities, which makes that already considerably weighty statement carry even more weight.

Sill another situation where commonalities are present is a related similarity involving how both Finland and Ukraine would explain their position to the rest of the world.  In this vein, the following passage of Trotter’s on Mannerheim’s and his subordinates’ strategy struck me powerfully:

In the long run, Finland’s only real guarantee of continued existence was the conscience of Western civilization.  Finland, it was hoped, would be regarded as a vital outpost of everything the Western powers stood for, and as such the country would not be allowed to vanish from the map.  Thus was born a strategy designed to enable Finland to hang on long enough for outside aid to reach it. (39)

Both Finland and Ukraine had plans, too, for continuing to fight against Russia even under occupation and/or if the West did not come to its aid or aid came too late to prevent the fall of the country to the invaders.  But it is the overlap from Ukraine today with the above-quoted themes that is most striking, not least in terms of the rhetoric we are hearing today from Ukraine matching Finland’s characterization in 1939-1940 of itself as the defender of Europe and the West and its values—the defender of freedom and democracy—in the face of rampant aggression from Moscow.

A final key parallel involves how the wars began.  Ever the propagandists, the Soviets even went through the trouble of a false flag attack (an attack committed by one party but blamed on another for propaganda purposes), firing artillery barely into their own territory—perhaps some 800 meters from Finland’s border—on November 26, 1939, then claiming it was the Finns who fired to start the war:

The…shots, [Khrushchev] claimed, were set up by Marshal of Artillery Kulik, a brutal and cretinous NKVD general whose military incompetence would cost the Soviet Union terribly during the first weeks of the German invasion.  It is logical to assume that Zhdanov and Stalin both knew of the fabrication and condoned it.  Khrushchev deals coyly with the question of who fired first at whom: “It’s always like that when people start a war.  They say, ‘You fired the first shot,’ or ‘You slapped me first and I’m only hitting back.’  There was once a ritual which you sometimes see in opera: someone throws down a glove to challenge someone else to a duel; if the glove is picked up, that means the challenge is accepted.  Perhaps that’s how it was done in the old days, but in our time it’s not always so clear who starts a war.” (22)

This seems to be similar in spirit to how Putin started his massive late-February 2022-through-the-present escalation against Ukraine: shelling from his Russian military and the pro-Russian separatists Russia supports in the Donbas all across the main lines there, coupled with (nearly-certain-to-be) disinformation that Ukrainian forces were initiating escalation by firing intensely into separatist territory or even sending “saboteurs” into Russian territory (among other inane claims).  The Ukrainians, far more credibly accusing Russia of lying and even carrying out a false flag attack, denied the relatively absurd claims that they as the far-smaller and far-weaker party—the one that wanted to avoid war—somehow managed to deliberately start the war and provoke the far more powerful party of Russia, to whatever inconceivable ends.  After all, Zelensky has shown himself to be no fool and Moscow is the party here with a history of false flag attacks and gaslighting about its own roles in participating in various conflicts.  The Biden Administration along with Boris Johnson’s British Government has rather deftly publicly called out Russia’s disinformation and false flag efforts preemptively and consistently, further undermining the Kremlin’s game plan to make the world think Ukraine was the aggressor and one-upping Putin on the information war front with an unprecedented, bold approach to releasing and sharing intelligence.

Moscow over the years seems to do far more than most nations to prove the old saying that “truth is the first casualty in war.”

Dumfounding Déjà Vu

What is crazy about all this is that this article and others in this series simply arose out of reactions to just the beginning of Trotter’s book on the Winter War.

One thing that is clear: in trying to understand the events between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939, for Trotter:

Motives, true feelings, and lines of responsibility are not very clear at this level of the Soviet command even today. The whole Finnish campaign was an embarrassment to the officer caste, and even half a century later there is little discussion of it in print on the Russian side. (34)

Three decades after Trotter’s book was published, Putin’s pathetic execution of his war in Ukraine demonstrates clearly that there has been little serious high-level discussion or understanding of any sort in the Kremlin of the First Soviet-Finnish War.

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, June 2, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); this is one of a series of articles excerpted and/or adapted from Brian’s May 23 Small Wars Journal article, Bungling the Prewar and First Moves in Finland 1939 and Ukraine 2022: A Comedy of Errors for Stalin’s Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, Respectively, his deep-dive analysis on the parallels between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War that was inspired by his reading the beginning of one of the definitive English accounts of this war—William Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991, 283 pages; for sourcing, assume all uncited information comes from Trotter’s book but quotes will be given a page number or numbers in parentheses and anything from another source an external a link; in some instances, when I have written in detail about something, I may link to my own work, in which you can find many external sources backing up what has been stated). This conflict is especially timely as Finland seeks to join NATO in light of Russia’s recent imperialist aggression.

Other articles excerpted and/or adapted from the May 23 Small Wars Journal article:

• May 23: A Terrifying Comparison Between Putin and Stalin
• May 25: A Brief History of Russian and Soviet Genocides, Mass Deportations, and Other Atrocities in Ukraine
• May 31: “Banderites”: What Russia Really Means When It Calls Ukraine Nazi and Fascist
• June 5: Moscow’s 1939 Finland Hubris Repeats Itself in Ukraine in 2022
• June 7: A Flurry of Telling Parallels Between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War and Russia’s 2022 Ukraine War

SILVER SPRING—Distorting the Soviets’ pre-planning for the Soviet-Finnish Winter War, among other factors I explain elsewhere, was the issue of a fringe fascist movement in Finland, known as the Lapuans, that tried to have a coup in 1932 but never was competent or numerous enough to pose a real threat and would fragment into even smaller fringe groups, some of which agitated for the part of Karelia on the Soviet side of the border that still was home to ethnic Finns.  One of these groups even created maps of a “Greater Finland” including Soviet territory.  Writes Trotter:

One can easily imagine the impact such documents had when they fell, as several specimens did, into the hands of Stalin’s intelligence operatives.

[Soviet Premier Joseph] Stalin was unrealistically influenced by the headline-grabbing antics of the Lapuans, the grotesque fantasies of the Karelian irredentists, and the exaggerated reports of agents who were eager to tell the Kremlin what they thought the Kremlin wanted to hear. From remarks made during his later negotiations with the Finns, it seems clear that Stalin really did believe that the interior of Finland seethed with class antagonism and fascist plotters and that all of Finnish society was undercut by smouldering grudges left over from the civil war days. Ill feeling persisted, of course—the conflict had been too bloody for all the scars to have healed in just two decades—but Moscow’s estimate of its extent, importance, and potential for outside exploitation was wildly inaccurate. In fact, the old wounds were healing faster than even the Finns themselves realized; with the onset of a massive contemporary threat from the Soviet Union, those old enmities looked remote and historic. (9-10)

The outsized effect of these tiny, fringe groups, with almost no power base and even less political support, are instructive for both what would transpire in 1939-1940 between Finland and the USSR and what is happening now between Ukraine and Russia and the whole absurd “denazification” talk of Putin’s Kremlin, as will be explained.

Official Soviet publications and news services referred to the Finnish government and leaders as “the Fascists” and emphasized the supposedly oppressive conditions of the Finnish working class and their readiness to ally with the Soviet would-be “liberators.”

Soviet official publications and news also trumpeted that “’the Imperialists” (i.e., the West) were already in motion to use Finland as a base for an invasion of the Soviet Union.  Writes Trotter:

This was, and to a certain extent still is, the official justification given to the Soviet Public for why the war was fought.  It permitted the Kremlin to rationalize the apparent lunacy of a nation of 3.5 million souls attempting to invade a nation of 171 million.  These claims also laid the groundwork for later explanations of the failed offensives and staggering casualties suffered by the Red Army.  These could be explained away as being the result of Imperialist aid to the treacherous Finns.  (19)              

Russia’s playbook today clearly draws from the same themes the Soviets used in the Winter War, as nearly 83 years later, the same hubris, the same assumptions of their own popularity in a foreign country, the same lack of due diligence and willingness to subscribe to self-serving narratives—falling for their own propaganda—infested the decision-makers in Moscow planning another war against a far-weaker, far-smaller neighbor without any formal allies, only this time in Putin’s Kremlin, rather than Stalin’s.

Putin and his folks seemed to have really believed that many Ukrainians would not only sympathize with Russia, but would actually join Russia and collaborate.  For Putin, Ukraine is Russia and the Russian speakers in Ukraine are not Ukrainians, they are Russians who have tragically been wrested from the Motherland.  Even ethnic Ukrainians speaking Ukrainian as their primary language are not really Ukrainians to him, just a different kind of Russian.  At Russian gunpoint, these people would feel very differently than he did; in the past, those ethnic Russians especially had voted for the pro-Russian faction in Ukrainian politics, but Putin’s military aggression against Ukraine since 2014 has turned vehemently against both him and Russia the very Ukrainians who used to view both favorably, as I have noted before.

For Finland’s Lapuans, today in Ukraine we can substitute the much-blown-out-of-proportion, glibly-over-simplified Russian hyperbole on the (somewhat formerly far-right) Azov Battalion of Ukraine; anecdotal evidence suggests Russian soldiers are obsessed with ferreting out the unit’s fighters (real or imagined) and supporters as well as other “Nazis” (amounting to “denazificaton”).

As I have noted at great length before, Putin’s brands of revanchist ethnonationalist colonialism and imperialism are utterly banal and thoroughly unoriginal, always playing on old themes from the past.  On May 8, 2022, just before Russia’s grand celebration of its Victory Day commemorating the defeat of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Putin accordingly remarked: “Today, our soldiers, as their ancestors, are fighting side by side to liberate their native land from the Nazi filth with the confidence that, as in 1945, victory will be ours,” that, “today, it is our common duty to prevent the rebirth of Nazism.”  On Victory Day itself, Putin devoted much of his speech in the Kremlin’s Red Square to similar themes, calling the opposing leadership in Kyiv “neo-Nazis and Banderites” (I have gone into detail on the history, context, and importance of that very specific latter term, on Stepan Bandera and his nationalist movement, in my last excerpted article as well as the original deep-dive from which both these pieces are excerpted).

Putin then went on to portray the current fighting as “unavoidable” because of the West’s support for Ukraine and supposed plans for aggression, condemning that support and NATO.  He falsely blamed NATO and the West for instigating and orchestrating the current conflict, claiming his decision was “timely and the only correct decision.  A decision by a sovereign, strong, independent country.”  When the moment of silence for the fallen was called for, Putin invoked the memory of two groups: those who died fighting Hitler’s Nazi regime long ago and those whom he referred to as “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine today, explicitly linking both the Ukrainian government and current fighting to Nazi Germany and World War II, respectively, something the Kremlin has done ever since Putin’s favored stooge, the now disgraced Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown from Ukraine’s Presidency in the 2013-2014 (Euro)Maidan Revolution.  “Neo-Nazis,” “fascists,” and “Banderites” are terms that have been used to describe both post-Yanukovych presidential administrations in Kyiv, that of Petro Poroshenko and his successor, the now-legend-in-his-own-time Zelensky.

So it is that in the crudest of ways, Putin is trying to link the Great Patriotic War—Russia’s term for its fight in World War II against Nazi-led fascist armies—with the war against “Nazi” Ukraine today.  And he and his crew made similar mistaken assumptions about fascists in the country he was about to attack in early 2022 that Stalin and his crew did in 1939 with Finland.  Putin failed to learn from history, and the results are similarly humiliating for Moscow as they were in the beginning of the Soviet Finnish Winter War.

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; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg, April 24, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook); *update July 27; discussed in an SOF News update for April 25 and excerpted in Brian’s April 30 article, A Super-Short Guide to Why Ukraine is Kicking Russia’s Ass in Putin’s Ukraine War; a different version with a bit more content published by Small Wars Journal on April 26, titled Why and How Russian-Occupied Crimea Can Fall to Ukraine and, in turn, cited by the Ministry of Defense of Brazil; see see follow-up October 6 article This Is the Beginning of the End of the War that goes into more detail on how Crimea may fall and precursor article from April 10, Ukraine Will Easily Destroy or Sideline Russia’s Navy with Game-Changing Anti-Ship Missiles; also, since the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on October 7 to Ukrainian activist Oleksandra Matviichuk and her organization the Center for Civil Liberties, listen to my April podcast with her here discussing war, Russian war crimes, human rights, and democracy in Ukraine; and see all of Brian’s coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine here; Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

*Update July 27: In response to my tweeting this article, Mykhailo Podolyak, an official advisor to the office of President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, responded with the following tweet:

SILVER SPRING and WASHINGTON—Weeks ago, we saw Russia’s fronts around Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy collapse into full routs, and Ukrainian forces have been successfully counterattacking outside of Kharkiv, preventing any major Russian advances towards Mykolaiv, and should be able to move to retake nearby Kherson in the not-too-distant future.  And, oh, yeah, Ukraine destroyed Russia’s most prized and powerful warship, the Slava class cruiser Moskva (as far as I can tell, I was the only person to predict days before it happened that Ukraine would soon destroy the Moskva or other ships that did not withdraw from Ukraine’s coast out of range of whatever missiles were about to be deployed).

Russia is already spread thinly and has sustained horrific casualties—not even two weeks into Putin’s massive escalation, perhaps (even likely, as I argued) more Russians killed than all U.S. military deaths in eight years in Iraq and two decades in Afghanistan combined, now more than the official (admittedly underestimate) Soviet toll from a decade in Afghanistan from 1979-1989, and, as of April 24, maybe (likely) over 21,000 Russian military personnel killed; the U.S. Department of Defense estimates that, as of April 20, Russia has lost one-quarter of its combat power (combined troops, weapons, & equipment).  Simply put, Russia’s military is not in prime condition. 

As such, it is not likely there are large formations of troops south of Kherson not already being used on the frontlines that are ready to defend the rest of the territory Russia has gained in between Crimea and Kherson or even Crimea itself, so if the Russians are defeated on the Kherson front, there will likely be very little in between advancing Ukrainian forces and Crimea itself, and not a large number of defenders in Crimea, since Russia invaded from there and was expecting to be conquerors, not defenders.  If Russia has to move troops to try to stop any Ukrainian advance if Ukraine destroys or breaks through Russian formations around Kherson, those will likely have to come from other fronts where those troops are needed and Russians are desperate, but generally failing, to advance, and, as the Russians aren’t particularly well-fueled or well-led, such a rapid adjustment of their troops’ positions cannot be counted on to be competently executed or even happen at all.

In other words, it shouldn’t be terribly difficult for Ukraine to take Crimea once it starts experiencing success on the Kherson front, which it already is: even as I am writing this, Ukraine announced that it destroyed the Russian command post for the Kherson region, with some fifty military officers inside at the time, claiming to have killed two generals and badly wounded another.  If true, this would be a devastating blow to the command-and-control dimension of Russian operations in the region and we may be witnessing a momentum shift on this front as I write this.

Why Ukraine Can Pull This off

Looking beyond Kherson, here are the main reasons why Ukraine can take Crimea and end the Russian occupation that has been in place since 2014.

Russian Hubris

We have already seen Russian defenses of Russian and Belarusian territory on the border of Ukraine are weak: multiple successful (apparently Ukrainian) raids have been carried out in Russia close to the Ukrainian border against targets that include a fuel depot and a key rail bridge, while a Belarusian resistance of sorts has helped cripple Russian logistics in Belarus, the country led by the laughable Alexander Lukashenko, Putin’s stooge and the last real dictator in Europe.

This was because Putin did not anticipate any serious resistance from Ukrainians (let alone Belarusians).  As such, there has for much of the war been no strong presence inside the Russian border near Ukraine as Putin has committed nearly all troops initially allocated for this war to the fighting already.  As some of the main axes of advance for Russia, the fronts that moved north from Crimea have also met stiff resistance and taken high casualties, and it is unlikely, with the same type of hubris in effect throughout Russian areas of operations, that much caution was taken in keeping healthy reserves of high-quality forces in Crimea.  And even if Russian combat performance improves significantly (and for reasons that are deeply institutional and cultural this is unlikely), it would be improving from such a low level that performance would still leave oh-so-much to be desired.

Crimea Is Isolated

The Crimean Peninsula is isolated and not easily reinforceable or resupplied.  Reinforcements and supplies can only come by land from one bridge over the Kerch Strait—the Crimean Bridge, or Kerch Strait Bridge—as everything to the north is Ukraine and Crimea is surrounded by sea on its other three sides.  In part to combat this isolation, Russia constructed the Crimean Bridge through the Kerch Strait to join Russia and Crimea by land (this isolation is also one of the reasons the Kremlin wants to carve a land corridor from Russia to Crimea through Ukraine).

Work began on the bridge in early 2016 and it was completed in mid-2018, Putin personally opening it with much fanfare (the railway part was completed at the end of 2019) as the longest bridge built in Russian history and the longest in Europe (12 miles).  But its construction was illegal as well as rushed, its quality and ability to stay intact in its harsh environment questioned by experts.  It is still quite a source of Russian pride, a symbolic and substantive achievement that brings military and economic benefits to Russia.  All this only makes a ripe target even more ripe, one that will probably be easier to destroy because of the rush-job.   

Destroying the Crimean Bridge, then, in multiple locations across its span so that it would take a long time to become serviceable again should be a primary and immediate goal of Ukraine, one that should not be too difficult to accomplish, be it with missiles, maybe low-flying drones coming in over the waters to the south of the bridge, or perhaps even a special operations team.  Indeed, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, recently noted while I was writing this very piece that the bridge would very much be a target (much to the anger of the Kremlin).

True that, for now, Russia controls some of Ukraine north of Crimea and sort of has a land corridor to Donetsk (one of the two regions of the Donbas in Ukraine’s east that Russia has partially controlled since 2014) and Russia, but I doubt that will be the situation for long, given Russia’s track record of abysmal combat performance and that, as far as supplying or reinforcing Crimea by sea, Russia needs to soon withdraw or keep withdrawn Russian surface warships out of range of Ukraine’s anti-ship missiles or soon see them destroyed…

Russia’s Navy Has Been Exposed As Weak and Vulnerable

But, as I noted in my last piece predicting that Ukraine would take out the pride of the Russian Navy—the Black Sea Fleet flagship, the Slava class cruiser Moskva, Russia’s most powerful surface ship—counting on the Russian Navy for supplies, and most other forms of meaningful support, is something that cannot happen for much longer, and may even already be a thing of the past.  The selective use of Ukraine’s own Neptune cruise missiles—two of them connecting on April 13 to destroy the Moskva—suggests, as I noted was a distinct possibility in my aforementioned piece, that the Russian invasion has disrupted the general deployment of Ukraine’s Neptune anti-ship missile program, scheduled for this very month.  But whether more Neptune missiles or the anti-ship missiles promised by the West, plenty more anti-ship missiles are coming if they are not already there.  The days of the Russian Navy operating freely by the coast of Ukraine, including Crimea, are about to be over and, already, Russia has apparently moved whichever of its nineteen remaining large surface ships in the region were still operating off the Ukrainian coast much farther away from the coast in the wake of the Moskva’s sinking

Russia cannot reinforce its combined fleet with any of the ships it has in the Mediterranean—some brought from fleets stationed far away in the run-up to the war—because Turkey has closed its Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits to incoming military vessels in a sign of solidarity with Ukraine (this has left more than a few key Russian ships unable to join their Black Sea-deployed brethren as planned). Only ships from the Caspian Sea Flotilla can reinforce, which has to be done through the Volga-Don canal (and wow, if Ukrainians could engage in a covert mission in Russia to damage the canal and put it out of commission, that would be amazing and would also do significant economic damage to Russia by halting shipping traffic between the Caspian and Azov/Black Sea regions).  And, even if it does bring in ships from the Caspian Sea, like Russia’s other surface ships, they will just be prime targets for Ukrainian anti-ship missiles—on track to join the Moskva on the seafloor—if they don’t stay far away from Ukraine’s coast, all but negating their presence.

The Ukrainian Military’s Clear Advantages Over the Russian Military

Versus their Russian foes, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are in a much better overall position and of a much higher quality even though Russia has more and heavier weapons platforms such as tanks, artillery, planes, helicopters, and naval ships (I have explained away that last one already).

Ukraine actually has more troops.  Far more.  There is no shortage of Ukrainians willing to fight for Ukraine; at some points, there have been more volunteers than Ukraine has been able to accommodate, and large numbers of Ukrainians living abroad have been returning home to fight.  So Russia is trying to carry out an offensive against what is actually a numerically superior force.  Not a good strategy at all.

Ukraine’s individual troops are by far better equipped and supplied. They often have weapons that can easily knock out any Russian vehicles (and even, sometimes, Russian aircraft), more body armor, more night-vision goggles.  No wonder the Russians are constantly getting beat when they engage in firefights.

Ukrainian forces have far higher morale.  I have discussed how insanely poorly led, ill-equipped, ill-supplied, ill-trained, and ill-informed Russian soldiers in this war generally are.  They are losing or stagnating everywhere they are fighting.  And many of them have died, many more seeing their comrades die.  Instead of “leaving no man behind,” the Russians frequently abandon their dead and wounded, so disorderly are many of their retreats.  In contrast, it seems Ukraine has suffered far fewer losses, but while the Russians have died for just about nothing, Ukrainians are sacrificing for a very successful effort thus far.  Their morale is high and they are passionately willing to freely defend their homes and families and fellow Ukrainians, which cannot be said to be the same for the Russians.

Ukrainians are fighting on home turf.  Often, units in a particular area are from that area.  They often know the terrain intimately, whereas the Russians do not.  The advantages that play out on the battlefield from this are numerous, resulting in better intelligence and fewer losses for Ukrainians, more losses for Russians, more efficient operations for Ukrainians, slower operations for Russians. 

Ukraine’s logistics and far better and far simpler.  Unlike Russia, which has terrible logistics and needs to resupply or reinforce from Russia or the parts of Ukraine it occupied before February 24, Ukrainians are fighting often where they can easily bring in fresh supplies, new equipment and weapons coming in from the West, and their own reinforcements and new recruits.  As they are often supplying themselves with interior lines, their supplies and troops need to traverse far smaller distances than Russian supplies and troops.  In part as a result of that, those Russian supplies and troops are exposed to Ukrainian units that know their own home turf, resulting in those Russian supplies and convoys often being destroyed or ambushed before they can reach their final destination.  And the next point greatly enhances this point…

Ukraine has a lot of help coming in, increasing help, from the rest of the world (Russia does not).  Recently, this has included MiG aircraft parts that are significantly increasing the number of planes Ukraine can get into the sky.  But it is also increasingly including heavy weapons like tanks (better than what the Russians have) and artillery (also better than what the Russians have), so much so that U.S. defense officials at the Pentagon now estimate Ukrainians actually have more operable tanks in Ukraine than the Russians, and these newest heavy weapons are already having an impact.

How to Take Crimea: The (Coming?) Siege of Crimea

So given all this, how should Ukraine proceed?

Well, first and foremost, they should find a way to take out the pride of recent Russian infrastructure achievements, the Crimean Bridge.  This would make it far more difficult to supply Crimea and Russian forces that have invaded further into Ukraine from Crimea; with the anti-ship missile threat looming for the Russian Navy, that leaves the treacherous land corridor from the Donetsk, subject to Ukrainian partisan attacks and Ukrainian military raids, counterattacks, and air, drone, and missile strikes.  The destruction of the bridge will also further weaken Russia’s low morale, not just its pathetic logistical efforts.

Then, it could be possible for Ukraine, now getting reinforced by heavy weapons and troops that were victorious to the north, to launch an attack to break through the Kherson front and advance to the Crimean border, cutting it off from other Russian forces.  Yet, as Russia seems keen on an offensive in the area, it would be wise to first allow Russian forces to smash themselves into pieces as they have with their offensives elsewhere.  Unlike, say, the situation in Mariupol, where a small number of Ukrainian defenders have held on heroically despite the odds and inflicted outsized casualties on Russian forces, the Russians will find far more, better-rested, better-equipped, and better-supplied Ukrainian troops near Kherson.  If the Russians are stupid enough to attack and repeat their failures near Kyiv and elsewhere in the north, the Ukrainians can play defense and inflict heavy casualties before launching their own counterattack.

But if Russia is slow to attack or is bluffing around Kherson to focus more on the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of the Donbas, Ukraine may be able to catch Russia off-guard and still launch an offensive from around Kherson that could cut off Crimea from Russian positions to its north and roll back many of the gains Russia has made in south-central Ukraine.  Such a move might prompt Russia to weaken its support for the Donbas offensives to meet the Ukrainian offensive.

Whether it waits for the Russians to mash its battalion tactical groups (BTGs) against better equipped Ukrainian troops or takes the initiative and launches an assault first, Ukraine will be able to seriously threaten Crimea sooner rather than later if it can knock out that Crimean Bridge and destroy or drive off the Russian Navy with anti-ship missiles; indeed, both of these are well-within Ukraine’s capabilities.

With most forces that were in Crimea taking part in the invasion to Crimea’s north, again, we can expect a not terribly strong troop presence in Crimea.  Adding support to the idea that Crimea is not the best-supplied area at the moment is that the Russians are looting grain from granaries in Kherson and elsewhere and moving the plundered grain into Crimea, along with vegetables.

Thus, it would be relatively easy to put Crimea under a form of siege.  With its one bridge to Russia destroyed and Russian naval vessels either sunk from anti-ship missile or fleeing out of their range and into irrelevance, land and sea routes to resupply and reinforce Crimea will be cut off, and, as noted, it is unlikely large numbers of quality troops will have been left behind in Crimea.  Air drops would be possible but aircraft will also be at risk from stinger missiles and Ukrainian air defense systems Ukraine could move to the border of Crimea, including air defense systems recently sent by NATO’s Slovakia.  Russia has its own advanced air-defense systems in Crimea, so airstrikes would be difficult and risky for Ukraine.  Thus, a siege to soften up the Russians before a ground assault would make the most sense, as the Russian troops will begin feeling it over the course of the siege, which would further weaken morale and combat effectiveness before that assault would come.  If Ukraine can neutralize Russian air defenses during the course of the campaign, it could then utilize aircraft with far less risk to help finish the job.

The Siege of Crimea would weaken whatever resistance the Russian troops there—unable to be reinforced or resupplied by land or sea and not able to get much from the air if anything—would be able to offer, and when Ukraine does attack, it can use its more advanced, more precise, and heavier weapons it is now getting or about to get from the West.

It is true that most Crimeans are ethnic Russians who supported Russia’s illegal annexation, with those disagreeing having been mostly silenced, suppressed, “disappeared,” arrested (even for displaying the flag of Ukraine), tortured, or even killed, especially journalists, activists, and Crimean Tatars (who have a long history of persecution and oppression at the hands of Russia).  But contrary to the expectations of many of those supporting Russia in Crimea, prosperity did not come to Russian-occupied Crimea; rather, stagnation, isolation, and sanctions did, along with a collapse of the tourism industry and an overall deterioration in the quality of life.  The population would have declined were Russia not moving in large numbers of military, security, and intelligence personnel and their families from Russia to Crimea.  Morale among those living in Crimea would likely have been much higher right after the 2014 takeover than it is now.  Ukraine will almost certainly be far more careful than Russians in avoiding civilian casualties, as Russia engages in indiscriminate bombings (or, more accurately, deliberate) of civilian areas.  The people there, already suffering under a depressed economy for years, will likely see a further drop in morale during a siege.  Many will try to leave, and, unlike the Russians, Ukrainians are near-certain to allow them to do so.  For the above reasons, it is doubtful that many Crimean civilians will want to fight Ukrainians in the way Ukrainians rose up to resist Russians.  If Ukraine were to invade, Russian troops weakened by the siege and suffering from low morale and the ubiquitous poor Russian leadership, knowing no reinforcements are coming and having nowhere to retreat to, would likely be defeated relatively quickly.

Losing Crimea Would be Russia’s Most Devastating Loss of the War

The loss of Crimea would be a devastating blow to not only morale for the Russian military, it would be quite substantive: one of its main bases in the region, including the main base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol, would be in Ukrainian hands.  Perhaps even more importantly, it would shatter Russians’ confidence in their incompetent Putin: the retaking of Crimea was a great source of pride and their faith and confidence in him, and, regardless of what nonsense, mindless propaganda is thrown at them by Russian state television, losing Crimea would make it painfully obvious that Russia is losing the war and losing it badly, even more than the high casualties, even more than the sinking of the Moskva.  It might not even occur to Russians that Ukraine could retake Crimea, but with the approaches I have laid out here, it is a distinct possibility, one that would devastate Russia’s war effort and wake up many Russians with a shock to the simple fact that Russia is failing in its insane war against the people and government of Ukraine, against democracy, and against reality itself.

Note added October 8, the day the bridge was hit by Ukraine: Since the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on October 7 to Ukrainian activist Oleksandra Matviichuk and her organization the Center for Civil Liberties, listen to my April podcast with her here discussing war, Russian war crimes, human rights, and democracy in Ukraine 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; Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

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 19, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); excerpted and slightly adapted from his March 8 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
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

Also see his earlier 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
• March 16: Putin’s Zombie Russian/Slavic Ethnonationalism Is Utterly Banal

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—I noted before that the betrayal of Russian soldiers and their families was being weaponized by Ukraine and should be weaponized by the U.S.-led international community, including NATO.  But most importantly, these injustices must all be seized upon by the Russian soldiers and the Russian people themselves.

The Time Is Ripe for the Russian Army and the Russian People to Reject War, Reject Putin, and Rebel

Despite Putin’s totalitarian-ish crackdown on media and the flow of information, social media (ironically so often the vehicle for the dissemination for Russia’s own disinformation) and, especially, certain messaging apps (e.g., Telegram), are too powerful to be easily silenced fully, and it is hard to stop text exchanges.  Especially among the country’s young people, information will keep trickling in past Putin’s Media Iron Curtain through these means, and with enough holes emerging, the truth will light the way for more and more inside Russia as time marches on.

As this far more accurate and convincing information reaches the Russian people, we can expect some of the “yes” to war and most of the undecideds of the CNN poll mentioned earlier to switch to “no.”  With many of their lives being ruined under sanctions and international isolation, Russians will turn to the people they should blame most of all: introspectively, themselves for being duped by Putin’s propaganda and empowering him, and externally, Putin and his inner circle themselves, who made themselves monstrously wealthy and treated Russia, its resources, its industries, and its military as their personal playthings.  Protests will erupt in Russia in ways not seen since the fall of Soviet Union.

All the devastating Ukraine revelations have happened incredibly quickly, and it will take time for things to filter into enough Russian minds, so expect a gap, but when at least some of the truth does become apparent to a certain critical mass of Russians, expect Russians to revolt from within.

In response to understanding the precariousness of its standing with its own people, in the crackdown alluded to above, Putin’s regime is censoring, (partly?) blocking, banning, or even criminalizing the work of major Western news outlets, independent Russian news outlets, protests, and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter: reporting the truth inside Russia of Putin’s war in Ukraine is now illegal.  Other platforms—such as YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, and text messaging—remain.  It is inevitable, then, that word of what is happening in Ukraine and the awful treatment of Russian soldiers will continue to spread among the Russian population, members of which are increasingly taking to the streets in protest despite at least some 4,600 protesters being arrested throughout Russia just on Sunday, March 6, according to the Russian human rights organization OVD-Info, with about 13,000 arrested in total since February 24, some of them tortured.  Among those arrested was Yelena Osipova, a nearly-eighty-year-old woman who survived Nazi Germany’s epic Siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) during World War II.  The protests have the backing of that perennial political martyr and thorn in Putin’s side, Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent dissident opposition leader and anti-corruption activist, currently jailed himself for ridiculous fake “crimes” and facing new state-initiated indignities.

Russian people, businesses, and celebrities (even Elizaveta Peskova, the daughter of Putin’s main spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov) are speaking out and warning their countrymen, customers, and fans of the mendacity and killing that is afoot because of their government and its autocratic leader holed up in the Kremlin.  A Russian senator even complained publicly during a Federation Council meeting that conscripts were being coerced into signing contracts and that, in one unit, only four survivors out of 100 soldiers total returned alive from fighting in Ukraine.  Such acts knock chunks out of the wall of Putin’s Media Iron Curtain.

Soldiers, indeed, whole military units disgusted with their mission—being forced to become murderers and war criminals—will get wind of the massive outrage and civil unrest at home as protests in Russia grow in number, frequency, and intensity.  And these protests will include these soldiers’ mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, romantic partners, children, and friends hitting the streets, even leading the protests.

Hopefully, enough of these troops, their officers, and commanders will realize and collectively decide as whole military units that there is a more important mission than destroying and subjugating Ukraine: to march on Moscow, join the people for whom they should be fighting, and realize that when the military and people are united, Putin is defenseless.  Russia can end an era of gaslighting, delusion, criminality, and kleptocracy through the actions of the Russian people themselves.  Russian soldiers wising up to their abuse and taking a stand, sometimes a stand that echoed throughout history and helped bring down the Russian government at the time, is not unheard of in Russian history, especially in the twentieth century.  Thus, this would hardly be unprecedented.

It is already occurring to Ukraine’s government that Russian soldiers and their families are very much worth engaging, as it is already appealing directly to them and has set up that aforementioned hotline to help reunite Russian soldiers with their families, but there should be a concerted information warfare campaign to coopt Russian soldiers and citizens directed not just by Ukraine but by the entire NATO Alliance and the rest of the democratic world.  The prolific hacking group Anonymous has already gotten into the action, including with a major hack March 6 of all Russian state television stations and several Russian streaming services that put footage of Russia’s Ukraine war, suppressed in Russia, on screens for the whole of Russia to see.  Other hacking groups and tens of thousands of volunteer cyberwarriors from around the world are engaging in similar efforts on behalf of Ukraine (perhaps even including U.S. Cyber Command).  Such acts will do much to lift the veil of gaslighting draped by Putin over many a Russian’s eyes, and should dramatically increase opposition to the war and Putin’s regime over time.

As I have noted time and time again, Putin’s information warfare against the West has been relentless.  Now, let us turn the tables on him, but use truth as our weapon instead of the disinformation so favored by Putin as we give him a coordinated taste of his own medicine.  In turning the tables of cyberwarfare on the Kremlin, NATO should even explicitly add cyberwarfare—including disinformation—to NATO’s collective defense Article 5 in addition to engaging in this targeted information warfare offensive.  And if NATO states adjust Article 5 in this way—as I formally recommend last year—they can even collectively declare Article 5 in response to Russia’s years-long sustained cyberwarfare against NATO and carry out this offensive information warfare campaign as the first cyberwarfare-related invocation of Article 5 and just the second-ever invocation in the Alliance’s history, the only one so far being a response to the 9/11 attacks.

History Has Its Eyes on All of Us

Barely a fifth into the twenty-first century, Great Power autocracy in Europe has reared its ugly head again, ready to destroy Western democracy and the precious post-World War II order of European—and relative global—peace and stability, sometimes referred to as the “Long Peace,” or Pax Americana.  I must admit, when I wrote almost exactly six years ago an article warning of Western democracy being tested like no time since World War II, I did not imagine a major land war in Europe in 2022.  But make no mistake about it, Putin at the helm of Russia has forced this upon us and seeks to drag Europe and the world centuries backwards, with China watching, waiting, and taking notes.

Let’s make sure we provide China a clear set of lessons by encouraging and demonstrating the high cost of actions like Russia’s and encouraging a Russian soldiery at its breaking point, abandoned in so many ways by its Kremlin, to march on Putin in Moscow in support of the Russian people and their shared Motherland.  Not through NATO military forces, but through the Russian people themselves—soldier and citizen joined together—can Russia, now more than ever, seize the moment and rid itself of Putin and Putinism.

And then, having freed themselves from tyranny, Russians would find—should they want to reach out—open arms and extended hands from the West.

Should a Russia free of Putin clasp hands with and embrace the West, the future will be a world in which there is no challenge that Russia, Europe, and the United States working together cannot overcome.  And in such a world, China will not want to be left out.

But for such an era to come about, the first and necessary step is for Putin to be gone and for Russia to no longer be a menace on the periphery of Europe and the free world but to be a partner of both as part of both.  For NATO to attempt to do this itself is the path to World War III, perhaps nuclear war and the destruction of humanity and the world; it is for Russians to remove Putin, but if they do, they will find the same level of global support Ukraine has found.

Under the threat of Putin and the leadership of U.S. President Joe Biden, the West and the free world have awoken and realized they are strong, stronger than Putin and in a position to stare down his challenges to freedom, democracy, and that singular international order set up in the wake of the Second World War.  And they will gladly support the Russian people of a post-Putin Russia in a quest to rejoin the family of nations as a good-faith constructive partner for an era of unprecedented global cooperation.  This support would match the amazing energy present in the current solidarity being expressed for Ukraine, but it is up to Russians to decide if they are willing to fight for a better future for themselves as Ukrainians clearly have.  And by far the best way for this to happen is for the Russian Army—the weakest link in Putin’s current imperialist plans—to become Putin’s worst nightmare.

Putin began his reckless campaign by dangerously overplaying his hand in Ukraine, and now we see him dangerously overplaying his hand at home in Russia.  At the heart of this all are some of the people most wronged not just by his regime in general, but most especially during his Ukraine fiasco: the rank-and-file Russian soldiers fighting—and dying—on the front lines and their families back home in Russia.  The Russian people owe nothing to this orchestrator of the betrayal of those soldiers and their families, but they owe a great deal to the Russian soldiers and Ukrainians being treated as disposable pawns for the geopolitical ambitions of the dictator they empowered.  Only by removing Putin themselves can they restore Russia, in time, to true greatness, but going along with their Dear Leader’s insane playbook will only result in the opposite.

For too long, Russians have fed Putin’s maniacal, anachronistic ambitions; now is the time for them to act—for soldiers to inspire citizens and citizens to inspire soldiers—to free the world of a madman; waiting may prove fatal for the Ukrainian state and far too many Ukrainians and Russians fighting in the current tragedy created by Putin.  This war in Ukraine is not the first tragedy foisted upon the world by Vladimir Vladimirovich, but let us all—especially the Russian Army and people—ensure it will be his very last.

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, 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; 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!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) July 31, 2021; see related June 7, 2021, article: Already in a Cyberwar with Russia, NATO Must Expand Article 5 to Include Cyberwarfare, cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence; condensed rewrite for Small Wars Journal September 24 also cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence and featured by Real Clear Defense.

SILVER SPRING/WASHINGTON—New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth’s groundbreaking This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends is one of the most important books I have ever read.  Truck bombs and missiles and massacres are hard to shut out and miss (though Americans were famously and shamefully able to shrug off and ignore death and destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan even while American troops were fighting and dying there), but Perlroth’s book tries to shock Americans into caring deeply about an invisible war in an invisible battlespace that American citizens and policymakers have been all too content to ignore, but one which Perlroth makes clear is more of a clear and present danger to us than conventional or even nuclear weapons.  Such an undertaking is undeniably a tall order, but she is more than up to the challenge.

Invisible Weapons, Invisible Threats, Invisible Vulnerabilities

The main focus of this book is the black market for cyberweapons: how that fits into the history of cyberwarfare, the U.S. government’s role in fostering that black market, and how the proverbial cat is very much out of the bag as far as our rivals, adversaries, and a host of other bad actors are concerned.  Perlroth did not have a background in cybersecurity before joining The New York Times (she did have some Silicon Valley beat reporting) but quickly teamed up with the recently-retired-from-the-Times Scott Shane—then still with the Times and one of the top national security reporters in the country—and, among covering other major national cybersecurity stories, they were the Times’s pointwoman and pointman on the Snowden/NSA saga.

Rather counterintuitively, this makes her ideal for this book, as the relevant topics are very poorly understood by the public and politicians alike and she is better able to communicate as something of a non-expert recently turned expert to other non-experts—you and me, the lay-folk—which is exactly what this pressing topic requires.

Her descriptions are methodical and in direct but riveting and colorful language (she compares bar crowds at hacker conventions to the patrons of the Star Wars Mos Eisley cantina), painstakingly going step-by-step in explaining everything from the concept of “zero-days” to the Stuxnet attack, often using colloquial analogies and the occasional well-placed expletive.

From the start, it is clear this book consumed years of her life and not always in healthy ways, that researching this topic was a massive undertaking because it has essentially not been covered before, certainly not like this or in this depth.  In fact, the zero-day/exploit market was still essentially secret when Perlroth began trying to uncover it, and it took her two years of poking, prodding, snooping, and being rebuffed at every turn before she really got anywhere in terms of solid information from an insider on the nature of the secret government market for zero-day bugs and their exploits, bugs that were defined by their being wholly unknown both by the companies that made the affected software and the customers who used and relied on it, bugs that allowed hackers to take total, undetected control of the entire software package and often many others tied to it (and, yes, if you want to know, the latest mass ransomware cyberattack from Russia’s at-the-very-least-tacit ally REvil utilized a zero-day).

That initial breakthrough source for Perlroth only involved a player long-retired from the scene, and it would take her another five years of intrepid research to answer many of the main questions she set out to answer when she first started covering the Snowden revelations fallout, when she saw sign after sign of some massive secret government market for hacking vulnerabilities but no details beyond these hints of its existence.

As you read her book, you get the sense that she is overwhelmed and not really sure how to feel about what she has been discovering, let alone know precisely how to solve these daunting problems.

But this is itself wisdom: Perlroth is trying to raise awareness about just how crazy and complicated all this is, to make the public and leaders unnerved, upset, prepared to engage far more on these issues, to demand answers to weighty questions.  And for anyone rational and reasonable reading this book, in this she succeeds wildly.

Even if Perlroth is one of the only people attempting to put all this together—her book is essentially a first draft of history—if the best companies in Silicon Valley, the best minds at the NSA, CIA, DoD, and White House (let’s not even include Congress) and those of our foreign allies and adversaries have no seriously good, deep answers for these issues, how can we expect Perlroth?  Of all the experts on this topic, she is probably the only person right now who could write a coherent narrative accessible to a wider audience and actually be allowed to publish it (the vast majority of the folks involved are off-radar or offer no comment, often tied by government non-disclosure agreements or in fear of worse, as Perlroth makes clear).

Her book is messy, all over the place, and overwhelming: which is precisely what it needs to be, precisely how to characterize these problems, and precisely the way in which they must be presented.  Anything less would sell these terrors short, giving the false impression that these threats can somehow be compartmentalized or isolated; the reality is that this really is a giant, all-encompassing asteroid hurtling at us incredibly fast, and trying to pretend it is not a mess will do a disservice to any serious attempt to defend against it.

For these reasons and Perlroth’s skill at storytelling, Perlroth’s messy narrative more than works and engages and accurately—more than anything else I have seen penetrate major news coverage—alerts us to the scope of the messy threat we face.  She chronicles how, for so long, we have been flying blind, willfully ignoring or downplaying these threats, whether in government or in business, and, even today, critical infrastructure like our power grid, dams, and nuclear reactors are running insanely outdated, highly vulnerable software.  As she puts it:

We were plugging anything we could into the internet, at a rate of 127 devices a second. We had bought into Silicon Valley’s promise of a frictionless society.  There wasn’t a single area of our lives that wasn’t touched by the web.  We could now control our entire lives, economy, and grid via a remote web control.  And we had never paused to think that, along the way, we were creating the world’s largest attack surface.

At the NSA—whose dual mission is gathering intelligence around the world and defending U.S. secrets—offense had eclipsed defense long ago. For every hundred cyberwarriors working on offense, there was only one lonely analyst playing defense…

The biggest secret in cyberwar—the one our adversaries now know all too well—is that the same nation that maintains the greatest offensive cyber advantage on earth is also among its most vulnerable.

As just one example, she notes how a bipartisan group of top former energy, intelligence, and national security officials were secretly warning Congress all the way back in 2010 that a major, successful attack on just the U.S. power grid “would result in widespread outages for at least months to two years or more, depending on the nature of the attack” (yes, that is years, plural).  Penning much of her book during the heights of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, Perlroth notes COVID-19 pushing us even more online as a society means that, now, “our attack surface, and the potential for sabotage, has never been greater.”

At no time does her narrative feel hyperbolic (if anything, the threat could be said to be so dire as to have language fail to do it justice, but Perlroth succeeds quite well in creating appropriate levels of tension of dread even in a non-fiction book; perhaps her deal with the FX television network to produce a TV series based on her book may succeed at further penetration through a different media platform that can reach an even wider audience).  Her readers will come away with the sense that there is a near-certainty that something terrible will happen soon enough—either intentionally or unintentionally—unless a drastic global effort is undertaken and a paradigm-shift occurs.

And similarly as I have noted when discussing a 2020 UK parliamentary report on Russian designs against the UK, with Russian (and other) cyberwarfare, so, too, both must American society within itself unite on these issues and America unite with its allies (through NATO, as I have argued).  Much like the COVID-19 pandemic response in the era of Trump, everyone and everything are pretty much on their own in fighting cyberwarfare; this cannot be the approach of free nations any longer.  Furthermore, these cyberweapons’ development and their sale and spread happen almost entirely in the shadows, those making the decisions facing little accountability, let alone any public scrutiny; while the cloak-and-dagger realm of spycraft, secret weapons, and cyberwarfare can hardly simply be made anywhere near fully transparent, this modus operandi, too, cannot continue as is.

No Easy Answers

Yet there are no easy solutions to these problems, and you would be right to distrust Perlroth if she claimed to have them (she wisely does not).  But her recommendations that we start coordinating among the different parts of our society—utilities, government, private sector, communities—start having serious public conversations, feel out some baseline international consensus, and that individuals in their personal and professional lives take basic cybersecurity steps (like two-step authentication) are as decent places to start as any.

So do not expect Perlroth to give detailed solutions; that is not her role.  But in raising crucial questions that are simply not properly being addressed in the public or private sectors, by leaders or by citizens, she may yet play the role of a Cassandra who, rather than be doomed to have her warnings ignored, instead helps frame a crucial long-overdue discussion at a time when there is little time to spare.

The questions are not just weighty and challenging policy-wise, but also philosophically.  How do we balance security and freedom, openness and security in the internet age?  How do we balance offensive and defensive cyber-capabilities?  To what degree and when can governments justify capabilities based on keeping vulnerabilities in widely-used, critical software secret from the software vendors and clients (including many major companies and institutions)?  How on earth can a measure of transparency, security, and trust be injected into the lucrative zero-day black market?  How can we punish cyber-transgressions even as we maintain the same or similar capabilities?  How can we deal with hackers operating in a grey zone of principles of freedom utilizing illegal intrusions?  How can we make sure cutting-edge cyberweapons we develop, use, and share with allies will not be used to oppress or even come to be used against us? 

No easy solutions, indeed.  But Perlroth repeatedly asks and muses on these questions and wants us all to do the same.

As you read the book, you will also appreciate how much Perlroth’s narrative is very much present with us day after day, week after week, month after month as the topics, events, and figures she covers demonstrate how their effects still reverberate today and keep popping up in unfolding events.  This has the effect of making her book concerned with and relevant to the past, present, and future, and her work and insight will stay with you long after you finish her book and keep forcing their ways back into the front-and-center of your brain (and should do the same for leaders and policymakers around the world).

Since her book’s publication, we have already seen the Colonial Pipeline, JBS, and Kaseya ransomware cyberattacks from Russian-based (and Russian-tolerated) hacking groups along with rampant coronavirus disinformation magnifying an already terrible pandemic and “killing people” (to quote President Biden); all these topics have been covered for the Times by Perlroth.  And Perlroth was all over the Israeli firm NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware being used for nefarious purposes long before the recent stories and a report from Amnesty International from just these past few weeks that have garnered a lot of attention with what are less-novel revelations and more confirmations of Perlroth’s fine investigative work on that topic for her book, with any reader of it hardly being surprised by any of the latest NSO information now being discussed.  And these bigger stories do not even touch upon many, many lesser-reported cyberattacks.

All in all, this is a groundbreaking book that not only towers above other cybersecurity works as the only current somewhat-full history of cyberwarfare and the cyberweapons black market mixed in with appropriate security policy concerns, it is a clarion call for the world that business as usual is taking us down something of a cyber-Guns of August path.  Whether nations and the world and, ultimately, the general public are up to the challenge in demanding a far less risky and far less dangerous cyber-domain, it will be to the degree that they understand the issues so excellently presented by Perlroth and prioritize them as she tells us we must.

Issues? (Or Why This Book Could Not Have Been Written by a Techie)

Some tech experts have brought attention to what they claim are technical inaccuracies with particular details in the book.  I am not qualified to weigh in on those, but of the few criticisms I have examined, with some, Perlroth has responded convincingly and seems to have successful challenged her critics’ framing of the issues or even their reading comprehension of her work (indeed, some seem to have easily fallen into their own errors of mansplaining—in spite of the general overuse of that term—which is not surprising given the notoriously male-dominated and toxic nature towards women of the tech, Silicon Valley, and cybersecurity worlds, as well as of social media.  While correcting reviewers’ misunderstandings in some cases, in others, Perlroth has taken some constructive criticism and worked to include corrections and even to give frustrated credit to some less-constructive criticism.

I even found one example of an individual—cybersecurity researcher Kevin Finisterre—who was mad that he was not included or credited in her narrative when he feels he should be, but no narrative ever includes everyone and in this case Perlroth retorted that one of her sources apparently left out Finisterre for, perhaps, self-serving purposes, and in a secretive, reclusive world with all kinds of bruised egos like the one Perlroth is covering, some omissions are going to be inevitable (in this case she has apologized and pledged to include the Finisterre in the next edition).  The fact of the matter is that no history book ever includes all relevant names and when sifting through research, data, and information, there must always be material, people, and events that are sifted out of inclusion to make books manageable.  Especially with first drafts of history, completeness is hard to come by, but a work can still be definitive if it is practically the only game in town and still makes a solid effort to be thorough, well-researched, and coherent, and, even allowing for some errors, Perlroth excels in all three areas.

In such narratives of living history, the individuals presented often do not like how they are portrayed or lower- and mid-tier folks balk at not being included or included more, many in these categories often choking on their egos and unable to see their blind spots, but that is why a journalist and storyteller is there: not to portray the individual as he wants to be portrayed but to put him in the wider context and show how his self-perception lines up with the bigger picture.  That hardly means Perlroth’s choices are above criticism or that Finisterre specifically is unreasonable at feeling left out (I am unable to conclusively judge either way), but to characterize her errors as particularly egregious or the book in total as sloppy just seems unfair and inaccurate.  Given the high quality of her overall narrative and the dizzying array of events, characters, and locations involved, I am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt in most of these contested cases as a rule of thumb.

Not so others: things got so toxic for Perlroth on social media that she felt compelled to quit Twitter not long after her book came out, but thankfully she eventually returned.  Her book’s harshest non-social-media reviews seem to come from obscure techie blogs almost no one outside of the tech field would know (and many within would not) and Perlroth seems to have credibly pushed back against a good number of these worst detractors.  Adding credence to her defense is that most major new outlets that have reviewed her or mentioned her book have done so quite favorably, even if a few of these had their qualms and quibbles, which begs the question: if the obscure techies are right, why aren’t some of the biggest outlets in the news business echoing these framings and criticisms when they clearly have access to experts with similar pedigrees?  Never known collectively for their wonderful people skills or temperaments, the angry hardcore techies and their takes on Perlroth’s book serves as a reminder as to why it took a non-techie like Perlroth to produce this narrative that her antagonists never were able to before her book was published (skills like gaining access to important and secretive folk and making them like and trust you are crucial).

Regardless, neither individually nor collectively do any of these alleged and/or admitted errors take away from the most important thrusts, revelations, themes, or messages of the book and none reduce its singularity, urgency, or overall considerable strength.  Most readers will not know or understand these technical aspects (and most of the time Perlroth is dumbing down extremely complex phenomena with fun analogies because that is the only way the vast majority of us could even approach a worthwhile understanding), but they will still get the same overall big-picture sense of how government, business, society collectively, and individuals individually are all caught up in this and how urgent these problems are with or without adjustments related to these possible or actual technical errors.

Conclusion: Putting the Must in “Must-Read”

These seemingly minor admitted and potential technical issues, some distracting typos, and a perplexing decision (and confounding for policy wonks and researchers like myself) to have a sources/notes section at the end presented in narrative form—as opposed to footnotes where it is easy to tie a factoid to a source or note—aside, this book is a monumental achievement, one that both should change, further spark, and guide a debate that should be front and center in our present national agendas.

Perlroth has indeed presented a remarkable first draft of a living and unfolding history, the questions now are “Do we learn from it and heed its warnings?” and “What do we do armed with this indispensable knowledge?”  Trying to figure out the answers to those questions makes the technical spats discussed above seem like schoolyard squabbles, and how we rise—or fall—to the key challenges posed by Perlroth are likely to define much of our world for the rest of this century and beyond.

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

Also see my related article on the UK Parliament’s singularly excellent Russia report, my proposal to reform NATO’s Article 5 to explicitly include cyberwarfare, 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 see related June 7, 2021, article: Already in a Cyberwar with Russia, NATO Must Expand Article 5 to Include Cyberwarfare, cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence; condensed rewrite for Small Wars Journal September 24 also cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence and featured by Real Clear Defense and 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!

A Real Context News Special Report also available as a PDF file

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 7, 2021; updated June 15, 2021, to take into account the June 14 NATO summit in Brussels; cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence; condensed rewrite for Small Wars Journal September 24 also cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence and featured by Real Clear Defense; see Brian’s related review of one of the most important books on national security to come out in years, Nicole Perlroth’s groundbreaking This is How They Tell Me the World Ends; see his related articles: December 24, 2020, The History of Russia’s Cyberwarfare Against NATO Shows It Is Time to Add to NATO’s Article 5; February 17, 2017, Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II; and December 7, 2016, The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

SILVER SPRING—Alliances between nations must adapt to retain power over time, and in no area has warfare evolved more in recent years than in cyberwarfare.  Article 5 of NATO’s founding 1949 North Atlantic Treaty mandates that if an “armed attack” is carried out against a member state, all member states (currently thirty, including the most powerful Western nations) “shall” consider that attack and any armed attack on even just one member state “an attack against them all” and “will assist” it, up to and “including the use of armed force.”  As the centerpiece for over seventy years of the West’sPax Americana, global military power, system of alliances and collective defense, and ability to project combined strength anywhere on the planet, NATO must adapt to the present by adding cyberwarfare—including information warfare—to Article 5.

Cyberwarfare As Modern Warfare

An obvious point in favor of including cyberwarfare in Article 5 is that, by far, the most effective, damaging, and destabilizing attacks against NATO countries since 9/11 have been cyberattacks, most carried out by Russia.  The term “information warfare” (“a new face of war,” quoting a RAND Corporation report) refers to a key element of this cyberwarfare and includes the word warfare to indicate these are hardly benign, normal influence operations and are, indeed, the types of operations that have always been part of any serious conventional war in modern times.  Even in the nineteenth-century, von Clausewitz wrote that “War is…an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”

The ever-evolving concept of warfare in our digital age, then, does not have to include shots being fired from guns, and it is naïve to not consider cyberwarfare as simply another form of war in the twenty-first century that uses force in the digital realm to achieve results in some of the same spirit as traditional armies: attack, defense, deception, sabotage, destruction, and to pressure actors to change behavior.  Clausewitz most famously wrote that “war is merely the continuation of policy [or politics] by other means” and would have well understood cyberwarfare (sometimes just termed cyberwar) to be war and well within that “other means” category.

The two countries that have led in cyberwarfare are Russia and China, the first (and weaker, but bolder) being NATO’s (and America’s) clearest top state enemy (even if unofficially but clearly in a de facto sense), the second (and stronger, more reserved) being America’s clearest top state rival in a holistic sense, as China has engaged and led in much non-weaponized hacking and espionage (admittedly common among major powers), but has not, say, brazenly released stolen information or disinformation in a way timed to significantly interfere with NATO member states’ elections (as Russia has).  And though China has its own sophisticated influence operations, Russia undisputedly has led by far in acts more hostile than espionage (uniquely so among major powers) since its watershed 2007 Estonia cybercampaign (such campaigns might better be termed cyberassaults than cyberattacks, the latter a broader, far more common term which can even apply to a single high school student’s cyberattacks against his own school district).

Russia officially views NATO as a “threat,” and since that 2007 Estonia cybercampaign, has become far more aggressive and threatening towards NATO, often playing with internal NATO nationalisms and blanketing NATO nations in cyberattacks, including election interference and bolstering of secessionist campaigns, with notable cybercampaigns being carried out against over twenty NATO member states (leaving aside its campaigns waged against non-NATO states). 

Furthermore, de facto, non-declared wars are the most common type of war in the modern era even if the term “war” is not specifically used.  America, for example, has a long history of undeclared war going all the way back to the Articles of Confederation and the early days of the Washington Administration involving conflict with Native Americans and also the John Adams Administration’s 1798-1800 Quasi-War, then popularly termed “The Undeclared War with France.”  Furthermore, as one scholar notes, “the legal state of war is possible without actual fighting.”

Taking all this into account, then, it is hardly unreasonable to consider Russia and NATO in a state of undeclared cyberwarfare and, therefore, a state of undeclared war.  One of NATO’s flagship publications, NATO Review, even published analysis in 2017 acknowledging that Russia was waging “non-kinetic political war on the West.”

In fact, as I have argued for some time, a truly deep look would expose Putin and his Kremlin conducting a clear de facto war to destroy NATO, the West, the EU, and Western democracy; to fracture trans-Atlantic and European unity and even the unity of individual Western nations; and to foment, fund, and favor the rise of far-right ethno-nationalists and secessionists friendly to Russia and hostile to the U.S. and NATO in NATO countries and elsewhere, all while savaging those in the center and mainstream left not preferred by Putin.  The parties Putin helps usually have much in common with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s banally nationalist United Russia party, which has struck up mixes of formal and informal alliances with several significant European political parties in major NATO states. 

Though there have been military moves by Russia in Ukraine and Georgia—two NATO aspirants—the main weapons in its undeclared war on NATO are not tanks, bombs, or jets; rather, they are bots, trolls, and fake news.

The Nature of Russian Cyberwarfare Confronting NATO 

Through hacking, disinformation, propaganda, and other cyber-methods, Russian campaigns that advance this war have been able to affect political outcomes in numerous NATO countries to suit (or, at least, more suit) Putin’s agenda.  These efforts are coordinated through powerful branches of the Russian government and close Putin allies in and out of the Kremlin, often using thousands of fake accounts to artificially bolster the reach of their lies, which, in turn, are augmented within the target countries by native agents and allies (with unwitting true believers long being dubbed “useful idiots”).  In many NATO countries—including the U.S.—Putin is even popular with far-rightists, no doubt in part because of Russia’s robust information cyberwarfare.

Reigning as the supreme disruptor on social media, Russia spews a “firehose of falsehoods” that has been massively effective, distorting and gaslighting the public discourse so that Russia’s preferred narratives are wildly amplified beyond their natural organic reaches, influencing many millions, thus helping to create an atmosphere where disinformation is sometimes consumed even more than actual news and doubt about even basic truths becomes widespread.

Domestic media outlets can be crucial instruments to this end of Russia’s, not only enthusiastic right-wing media outlets, but also far-left media outlets and figures (Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi being two of the most prominent examples); as long as the Russian narratives further their narratives—usually attacking more mainstream and/or moderate parties and figures—these more extreme domestic outlets are often happy to unquestioningly parrot the Russian-projected “information,” and whether it is illegally hacked or not even vetted matters little to them.  The distortions, lies, and unsubstantiated claims then become such a large part of the conversation that mainstream media latches onto this disinformation—sometimes echoing it, other times critiquing it yet still amplifying it—and the Russian narrative itself then becomes mainstream, as I have previously explained in detail.

And once Putin’s favorites are in office in part because of Russian disinformation, they in turn further spout Russian disinformation from the highest levels of the government and even copy Russian tactics (as former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa illustrates with the U.S. case).  They also pursue policies favorable to the Kremlin (e.g., weakening anti-Russian sanctions or creating geopolitical power vacuums for Russia to fill) and obstruct investigations into Russia’s cybercampaigns, making it all but impossible to effectively fight back.  Terrifyingly, both America’s 2019 Mueller report and the British Parliament’s Intelligence & Security Committee’s exceptional Russia report released last year note damning examples of obstruction in their respective governments.

With such additional feedback loops, Russian cyberwarfare is thus a gift that keeps on giving, with domestic news outlets and coopted politicians doing Russia’s dirty work for and alongside it.

The Big One: Targeting America

The revelations of Russia’s devastatingly far-reaching months-long government and corporate espionage hacking, known as the SolarWinds attack, and the Russian cyberattack against the third-party-run e-mail system of America’s main international aid agency, USAID (a multipronged attack that used access to that system to hit some 150 government agencies, think tanks, non-profits, and human rights groups that have been critical of Putin and Russia)—both carried out by the S.V.R., Russia’s equivalent of the C.I.A. and one of the main successor agencies of the notorious Soviet K.G.B.—highlight recently exposed Russian cyberwarfare against the U.S., NATO’s largest pillar.

The same can be said for a recent significant attack on major U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye, almost certainly also carried out by the Russian government, and for two recent ransomware attacks—one on the Colonial Pipeline and one on meat plants of JBS, the largest fuel pipeline and meat producer in America, respectively (in the latter, plants in Canada and Australia were also hit).  These ransomware cyberattacks were carried out by DarkSide and REvil, respectively, two criminal hacking groups thought to be based in Russia or former Soviet-dominated states and that are widely understood to have tacit approval and protection from the Kremlin (to put some perspective in an aside here, it should be noted that after al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks—the only time NATO ever invoked Article 5—Afghanistan’s Taliban regime was overthrown by the U.S. because it gave harbor to al-Qaeda and did not hold the terrorist group to account, refusing to comply with American demands to shut down its camps, hand over its leaders, and arrest the rest of its members).

Much like Russia farms out parts of its aggressive foreign policy to Russian oligarchs, the Russian mafia, and Russian mercenaries in playing a sordid, cynical game of “deniability,” (something I have noted many times before), so too does it work similarly with hackers outside the Russian government.

Prior to the recent discovery of the activities outlined above, Russian cyberwarfare efforts against the U.S. have included clearly and repeatedly promoting unrest and division, pushing both disinformation about the coronavirus and illegitimate conspiracy theories of coordinated massive fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.  Before the election, the Russians’ cyberwarfare effort was all-in on attacking the main political rival (Joe Biden) of their preferred top candidate (Donald Trump).

Of course, division and brainwashing in America have hardly been created by Russia, but it is and has been obvious that these efforts are hardly in vain: multiple credible surveys and any casual examination of social media show that vast swaths of the American public—even many in senior leadership—are buying into this disinformation, believing nonsense about both coronavirus (including millions doubting coronavirus vaccines) and the 2020 presidential election.  All this undermines effective public health measures (literally helping kill Americans) and confidence in the very foundations of our electoral democracy.  In addition, all this Russian content and its fallout obviously does not stay confined to America: international populations’ opinions of America and its political system along with their own views on coronavirus and vaccines are being affected, too.

In the words of journalist George Packer, “antisocial media has us all in its grip.”

The new Biden Administration, then, has its greatest initial challenge—the coronavirus—made even worse by this Russian cyberwarfare even while it will face an unprecedented (excepting Lincoln) crisis of legitimacy in the eyes of millions of misinformed (and disinformed) Americans.

Cyberwarfare a Larger Threat Now to NATO than Terrorism

Russian cyberwarfare focused on election interference in the U.S. in 2016—what I called back in December of that year the First Russo-American Cyberwar—has already caused damage to America, its democracy, and its reputation that is hard to exaggerate, with effects not only still being felt by the U.S. but guaranteed to still be felt for some time.  In contrast, physical terrorist attacks in NATO countries since 9/11, while tragic, have still had comparatively limited effects.  Even Russia’s own 2018 Novichok chemical weapon attack on British soil against Russian military intelligence officer turned spy for the UK Sergei Skripal in Salisbury had more symbolic an effect than anything else, dwarfed by the damage from Russian efforts to tip the 2016 Brexit vote in the direction of Leave or the effect of Russia’s campaign to amplify Scottish secessionism (now increasingly likely and sooner rather than later, an outcome that would obviously fracture and devastate a UK already severely weakened by Brexit). 

As I explained in my analysis of the aforementioned excellent British parliamentary committee report on Russia, Britain’s own official self-reflection made it clear that the solid response (and solid effort to bring in allies to take part in this response) to the Salisbury attack needs to be replicated when it comes to other Russian hostile actions, the clear implication being to include Russia’s cyberwarfare, especially political interference.

The same idea can be applied to NATO as a whole, which does have a Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence located in Tallinn, Estonia.  Yet even today, one-sixth of NATO—Canada, Luxembourg, Albania, Iceland, and North Macedonia—are not members of this Centre, though, encouragingly, the first two are in the process of joining, new members have recently been added, and non-NATO states Austria, Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland are “Contributing Participants,” a status available to those outside of NATO; other non-NATO states Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Ireland also intending to join in that capacity.  There are also plans for a new military cyberdefense command center to be fully operational in 2023 at the main NATO military base in Belgium.

Overall, NATO considers “cyber defence…part of NATO’s core task of collective defence” and has since 2014, when the Alliance first explicitly laid out the theoretical possibility of invoking Article 5 in response to a cyberattack (though only “on a case-by-case basis”).  Since then, NATO has “pledge[d] to ensure the Alliance keeps pace with the fast evolving cyber threat landscape and that our nations will be capable of defending themselves in cyberspace as in the air, on land and at sea,” repeatedly reiterating the possibility of Article 5 being invoked in response to a cyberattack, including just this past September.

Update June 15: A communique issued by NATO from its Brussels summit on June 14, 2021, is heralded by some, including the White House, as a “new” cyberdefense policy but actually reiterates already vague and repeatedly articulated positions discussed above, namely, that NATO states “reaffirm that a decision as to when a cyber attack would lead to the invocation of Article 5 would be taken by the North Atlantic Council on a case-by-case basis,” hence, nothing much really new in actual policy and note the use of “reaffirm.”

Falling Short 

Official working papers, conferences, interviews, statements, and raising possibilities on the subject are one thing, but a concrete, clear policy is another, and NATO has nothing of the sort.

The vague idea seems to be that if a cyberattack was “serious” enough, Article 5 would be invoked, but there is no definition of what this threshold would be, and, frankly, this idea seems rather myopic: death by a thousand cuts is still death and has the same effect as decapitation, so tolerating many smaller attacks and sending a clear signal that there will not be a collective Article 5 response to them is simply bad policy.

Consider, too, that Russia would never be able to get away with flying over NATO skies and dropping leaflets of hostile disinformation by the millions onto NATO populations.  It could never get away with doing so once or once in a while, let alone consistently and during sensitive times of pivotal political decisions or unrest in the targeted countries, and yet this is exactly the cyber-equivalent of what Russia is getting away with against NATO’s most significant member states and many of its smaller ones, too.  And while Russia sending in Spetsnaz special forces to steal sensitive information from U.S. bases in Alaska or use physical weapons to sabotage or destroy government computer systems in Lithuania would be viewed automatically as an Article 5-triggering act of war, the same results over and over again from several years of unrelenting cyberwarfare are not, even though this has done more damage to NATO than any Soviet Army did throughout the decades-long Cold War.  This is, in part, because of NATO: the USSR and then Russia did not dare use armed force to attack any NATO state for fear of that explicitly guaranteed Article 5 collective response (even when NATO-member Turkey shot down a Russian military jet over Syria in 2015).

Yet when it comes to cyberwarfare, NATO is practically inviting Russia to attack and get away with it, with the Alliance quite consistently demonstrating its inability and unwillingness under its current framework to respond collectively to Russian cyberaggression.  As noted in the aforementioned UK Russia report, “Russia is not overly concerned about individual reprisal” against its aggressive acts, most certainly including its cyberattacks, with even the U.S. clearly inspiring no fear.

Language can often be tricky, and terms like “war” should never be thrown about lightly.  But with the advent of the internet and the realities of the modern world, NATO cannot become complacent with preventing traditional warfare while failing to adapt to cyberwarfare.  Pretending cyberwarfare is not war and allowing cyberwarfare in real-world practice to be kept out of NATO’s Article 5—leaving individual members states flailing independently and ineffectively against a determined, capable, and organized de facto enemy content to stand down its conventional forces against NATO while unleashing its cyberunits upon it with impunity—has not discouraged Russian cyberwarfare against NATO, it has encouraged it.  Article 5 makes no exception for smaller armed attacks, and any serious collective cybersecurity defense should make no exception for smaller cyberattacks.

An Urgent Need for Drastic Reform

Throughout New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth’s recent book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends—the indispensable, terrifying, definitive account of the development of cyberwarfare and the mess in which we currently find ourselves: a true must-read for anyone hoping to understand how grave is the danger we are facing at this very moment—a constant theme is that we need paradigm shifts in the way we approach cybersecurity, whether the private sector, government, or individual citizens collectively.  You can tell she was having trouble sleeping while researching and writing her book, and we should be, too.

At several points in her book, Perlroth notes that the U.S. in the past rebuffed attempts to discuss some sort of international cyberwarfare convention or treaty, feeling it was the undisputed champion in the cyberarms race and not wanting to give up that advantage.  That ship has long sailed, and just in the last few years a number of rival and hostile governments have greatly managed to shrink, maybe even close, that gap, and with Western countries far more wired than their main rivals and enemies, they are far more vulnerable—with far more to lose—to cyberwarfare.

As FBI Director Christopher Wray recently lamented, the threat cyberwarfare poses to the West has “a lot of parallels” to the threat of terrorism after 9/11.  Echoing Wray, former CIA director and secretary of defense for President Barack Obama, Leon Panetta, warned in a recent interview conducted by Perlroth that he fears we will not do what needs to be done before a “Cyber Pearl Harbor” may cripple us.

Perlroth warns at the end of her book’s epilogue that “many will say” that “these…critical assignments of our time” to deter and defend ourselves from cyberwarfare “are impossible, but we have summoned the best of our scientific community, government, industry, and everyday people to overcome existential challenges before.  Why can’t we do it again?…We don’t have to wait until the Big One to get going.”

How to Revise Article 5 and the NATO Treaty Overall

Considering that the West’s main advantage over Russia is that people like the West a lot more than Russia—manifesting itself in close diplomatic, military, and economic ties about which Russia can only fantasize—the easiest way for the West to face and counter this dire and worsening cyberthreat from Russia is by leveraging its alliances, and, more than anything else, this means involving NATO and involving it in a big way. 

U.S. President Joe Biden himself penned a recent Washington Post op-ed in advance of his upcoming trip to Europe for a NATO summit and to confront Putin face-to-face, writing: “In Brussels, at the NATO summit, I will affirm the United States’ unwavering commitment to Article 5 and to ensuring our alliance is strong in the face of every challenge, including threats like cyberattacks on our critical infrastructure.” 

He can do that by proposing to strengthen Article 5 itself.

With Russia’s rampant cyberwarfare only intensifying and its clear pattern as a bad-faith hostile actor, a paradigm shift in the international system for deterring cyberattacks is absolutely necessary.  Since NATO is the premier defensive alliance of the West, formalizing cyberwarfare’s relationship to Article 5 is a necessary leap forward on this much-needed path and the only way forward for NATO to maintain credible collective defense as the twenty-first century progresses. 

To this end, “or cyberattack” must be added after each instance of the words “armed attack” in Article 5 (e.g., “The Parties agree that an armed attack or cyberattack against one or more of them…” [emphasis added]).

As other Treaty articles have (sometimes subsequently) modified the scope of Article 5, I propose the following definitions of cyberattack are added in a new Article 15:

This crucial definition of cyberattack allows more traditional espionage to stay out of discussions of cyberwarfare for collective defensive purposes while making clear the singular degree of the SolarWinds operation or anything like it will not get such a pass.  It also means there will finally be a way to effectively counter and deter the massive weaponized disinformation campaigns conducted by Russia while also protecting citizens, including journalists and cybersecurity staff, who are on the front lines of this war.

While the Alliance is free to decide how it wants to respond when using Article 5, in many of the situations, appropriate coordinated cyberattacks coming from all of NATO’s member states would be the most conceivable and likely response except for far more serious cyberattacks.

Conclusion: Expanding Article 5 Is Necessary and Overdue

The early twenty-first century’s second decade has been something of a Wild West, with Russia emerging as the biggest beneficiary in terms of cyberwarfare as defined above.  While China has also benefitted in terms of massive espionage and acquisition of Western intellectual property, it is Russia that has used the lawlessness of the cyber domain from a collective security standpoint to engage in the most egregious acts (most recently and most notably with the unprecedented SolarWinds) and ransomware attacks), acts that could easily be defined as hostile acts of war.

The time for lawlessness is over, and, with no statute of limitations on cyberattacks and the just-proposed framework not precluded by the current NATO treaty, NATO would be in its full rights (and is overdue) to invoke Article 5 against Russia now for its cyberwarfare so that Russia’s cyberwarfare will cause Russia far more pain than any damage it inflicts.

This has not been the case, but it must be.

Revising NATO’s Article 5 as suggested herein (leaving aside invocation) will not only clarify the rules for NATO enemies and rivals, but also for the members of a NATO Alliance itself that is in desperate need of clarity and strength on this issue.  It will also make NATO once again an alliance that instills fear in the minds of Russian leaders (as it did with Stalin and subsequent Soviet leadership) who would engage in reckless acts of aggression against NATO or its states, even if “just” through cyberwarfare.

Member states recognizing that they are in a state of war—cyberwar, but still war—with Russia and unambiguously making cyberwarfare a key plank of the Alliance’s main collective defense mechanism is essential, then, to keeping NATO the force for deterring aggression it has been for many decades.

Projecting such strength, both on paper and in practice, will serve as a real-world check against further Russian cyberattacks when inaction and lack of clarity has not, enhancing the security of every NATO member state and perhaps even eventually forcing Russia to a point where productive engagement, not adventuristic brinksmanship, is its chosen priority.

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

See Brian’s related review of one of the most important books on national security to come out in years, Nicole Perlroth’s groundbreaking This is How They Tell Me the World Ends; Also see 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 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, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  November 3, 2020

SILVER SPRING—To call the report of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) of the United Kingdom Parliament on Russia long-delayed would be far too charitable, as the report itself and its authors make clear.  We have the long-suppressed report now available to the public, and it is so embarrassing for the UK and its leaders that the motive for suppression may be understandable if not the gall of the effort to carry out said suppression.  The old adage “better late than never” surely applies here, and this report is many welcome things in spirit that present many terrifying things in substance, with lessons applicable often not only to the UK but to America (especially) and other democracies under cyberassault from Russia.

Not All Reports Are Equal

The report acknowledges publicly what we Russia-watchers have known for some time that Putin is a genius at leveraging not only both his country’s strengths and weaknesses to his agenda’s advantage, but those of many other nations, too, as I have noted for years.  Yes, the Mueller report and other U.S. official reports, not to mention multiple books and news reports, have made this clear for years now, but the terse boldness in the relatively short report, which says so much in such a condensed space, is truly remarkable.

It is also fair in many ways to compare this to the Mueller Report, mostly because for each country, we have the most in-depth official document detailing Russian interference.  But the hot-take that Special Counsel Robert Mueller “failed” or that he didn’t go “far-enough” misses the point: as I explained even before his full report was released, Mueller was setting up Congress to be able to take down, impeach, remove, and investigate a sitting president because the Constitution empowers Congress to be able to do this, not the Department of Justice or any Special Counsel.  And while the Senate Intelligence Committee Report did an admirable job of detailing Russian interference, it avoided going into Team Trump’s culpability on accepting, soliciting, and using Russian interference (i.e., collusion, as I noted) leaving that for readers to conclude, much like Mueller.  Democrats rightfully took the obvious unstated conclusions Mueller’s report set up (while Republicans gaslighted the public that the Mueller report was “exoneration” for Trump), yet  the Democrats’ impeachment effort remained focused on a narrow set of issues surrounding an attempt and coverup by President Trump to use powers of the presidency and the U.S. government to extract political favors from Ukraine’s government to damage his main political opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, on (as I have noted before) entirely misleading, unsubstantiated, and false premises.  While in content we may compare the Mueller Report and the UK ISC report, then, in purpose and role it would be more apt to compare the ISC report to the Senate Intelligence Committee Report.

The UK’s Parliament’s ISC report has many redactions, but in a manner involving the dropping hints that seems to reveal far deeper indications of what is redacted than many U.S. government reports I have seen, throughout the reader is exposed to subtle hints that give tantalizing, pointed indications of the nature and level of what is redacted in ways that quickly raise eyebrows for those with background and familiarity with the topics being discussed, but would also raise eyebrows for the even the general public.

The report opens with one of the best short summaries of the strengths, weaknesses, intents, and capabilities of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin regime.  In fact, as The Economist can be said to be the standard-bearer of the English language in terms of style, with a brevity that carries tremendous weight with each word, so, too, this ISC report is the standard-bearer of the English language for style as far as government reports go.  Even among British reports—admittedly I have not read too many  of those—it would seem to stand out, not to just to non-Brits but also for informed British readers, and it is certainly far better-written, far-more succinct, and far more enjoyable (can one even imagine using this word this about a government report?) a read than any U.S. Government report I have ever read, its pithy smoothness most impressive.

Coming to Grips with That Which Had Not Been Spoken

Just after my own country’s 2016 election, I was one of the first people—particularly as Democrat and a supporter of the Obama Administration—to recognize and come to grips with the fact that the Obama Administration had catastrophically failed in historically unique senses to protect the U.S. from hostile foreign intervention during the 2016 election cycle, the president being a victim of (among other things) a sensibility of wanting to appearing above the electoral fray.

Had President Obama and his people been able to peer into the future, they might have found this damning, astonishing line from the report helpful: “Overall, the issue of defending the UK’s democratic processes and discourse has appeared to be something of a ‘hot potato’, with no one organisation recognising itself as having an overall lead.”  For Americans not familiar with British understatement, this translates as “organizationally, no took responsibility, no one led, and no one protected us.”  Immediately after in the report, the redress is clear: “Whilst we understand the nervousness around any suggestion that the intelligence and security Agencies might be involved in democratic processes – certainly a fear that is writ large in other countries – that cannot apply when it comes to the protection of those processes,” later calling such an attitude of “extreme caution”—the report noted MI5 only provided six brief lines to the Committee’s for its inquiry as to whether the UK government had intelligence backing up multiple open-source studies that the Russians had worked to influence the UK’s Brexit vote—“illogical.”

(As a related aside, there is a tantalizing yet spare discussion in Footnote 50 of when “Arron Banks became the biggest donor in British political history when he gave £8m to the Leave.EU campaign,” which provided grounds for the UK’s Electoral Commission to refer its own inquiry on this highly suspicious activity to Britain’s National Crime Agency [NCA].  There are some glaring and telling redactions, and thirteen months after that submission it was announced NCA did not find laws had been broken by Mr. Banks or others referred by the Commission, but the context and redactions suggest serious malign influence from suspect money was involved and that the scandal here is that the UK’s legal system does not criminalize such activity, especially since this is one of the key conclusions of the whole report, along with recommendations to create new laws to make such operations involving foreign bad actors illegal).

Shockingly, later the report notes that “We have not been provided with any post-referendum assessment of Russian attempts at interference,” followed by a mysterious redaction and, following that, a contrast to U.S. efforts to produce such formal assessments and to do so quickly (one of our few favorable contrasts).  But take that in for a minute: no formal written assessment looking at overall Russian election interference in the UK was presented to the ISC over the course of its thorough investigation, which speaks for itself, and there is a clear implication that no such report makes it difficult to assure the public that British democracy was or is safe from major foreign interference operations.

Social (Media) Responsibility

The report’s initial expression of frustration of the lack of engagement of intelligence and security agencies in protecting British democracy is followed by sound criticism, echoed by a great many others, that social media companies have done a shameful job through their lack of regulation of their platforms and allowing the Russian government and other bad, even unwitting, actors—many of them domestic—to hijack their platforms quite easily to create targeted, destabilizing information warfare, even chaos, through a deluge of disinformation (on everything from our elections to the coronavirus and even both at the same time, as I have noted somewhat recently):  “we note that – as with so many other issues currently – it is the social media companies which hold the key and yet are failing to play their part.”

In just a few paragraphs, the report hits the nail on the head with a hammer in terms of core issues of responsibility spread across both government and social media companies.  Another succinct sentence comes after noting that British media during Brexit and other votes was not coopted in ways that the U.S. media has been and, as I have noted, still is, so in the U.S., we can add corporate media (mis)coverage as also bearing a huge amount of responsibility.  The report notes that the government has developed a relationship with social media companies to fight terrorism and that such a relationship should “be brought to bear against the hostile state threat,” and adds, in the report’s typically blunt yet understated (i.e., delightfully British) fashion: “indeed, it is not clear to us why the Government is not already doing this.”

Indeed.

In America, too, government- and social media company-synergy in fighting terrorism can be characterized as a serious effort, but similar combined efforts to fight hostile state action have been pathetic when they even have existed, with far more action being long- and inexcusably-overdue.  In fact, their sheer failure begs for regulation over “cooperation,” both of which there has been next to none.  As former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa has noted, “platforms like Facebook and Twitter have little incentive to help counterintelligence beyond their own goodwill.  But Congress could pass legislation that requires social media companies to cooperate with counterintelligence in the same ways they do with law enforcement.”

The Russian Bear Runs Amok in Britain’s Backyard

The report notes that even before Brexit and the 2016 U.S. election, attempts to encourage a secessionist vote in Scotland’s 2014 independence-from-the-UK referendum may have been “the first post-Soviet Russian interference in a Western democratic process.”

The report also reveals that the UK is awash in both Russians and Russian money: a post-Cold War foreign investor system was introduced in 1994, in part, to draw Russian money in the UK economy, with at least some of the impetus being that the UK’s business standards would rub off on the Russians and Russian companies taking advantage of them.  This failed miserably, as the report notes that today, “what is now clear is that it was in fact counter-productive, in that it offered ideal mechanisms by which illicit finance could be recycled through what has been referred to as the London ‘laundromat’” and so much so that “Russian influence in the UK is ‘the new normal.’”

A lot of the massive Russian investment into the UK economy was about “extending patronage and building influence across a wide sphere of the British establishment – PR firms, charities, political interests, academia and cultural institutions were all willing beneficiaries of Russian money, contributing to a ‘reputation laundering’ process.”  This money has bought wealthy Russians close to Putin legitimacy and a home in Britain’s elite business and social scenes.  The report is also incredibly blunt that the problem is beyond fixing any time soon: “This level of integration…means that any measures now being taken by the Government are not preventative but rather constitute damage limitation” and “broad Russian influence in the UK…cannot be untangled.” 

Terrifyingly, UK authorities can only hope to mitigate the problem and do not even hope to neutralize it, a shocking sign of the degree to which Russia has successfully infiltrated and corrupted British business and society.  And all along the way, the report notes that the Russians have had help from a local “industry of enablers – individuals and organisations who manage and lobby for the Russian elite in the UK.  Lawyers, accountants, estate agents and PR professionals have played a role, wittingly or unwittingly, in the extension of Russian influence which is often linked to promoting the nefarious interests of the Russian state.”  The depths of these links are so embarrassing that the report actually redacts the degree to which the UK has been infiltrated by Russians, Russian money, and Russian businesses, a giant liability since Russian businesses are “completely intertwined” with “Russian intelligence.”  But the cooperation of Russian businesses with the Russian government goes far beyond that: the oligarchs who Run Russia’s big businesses often operate hand-in-hand with the Russian government and the Russian mafia (in some ways, the real trinity of branches of the Russian government) to advance Putin’s agenda at home and abroad, so that with many of these people—including Putin himself—it might be hard to distinguish their roles in these three overlapping worlds, as I have noted many times before.

These financial infiltrations have extended to charitable and political organizations, including political parties, and it even seems the report is strongly hinting that members of the House of Lords (the UK’s weakened version of the U.S. Senate) have been compromised, with this classically British quip appearing in the discussion: “It is important that the Code of Conduct for Members of the House of Lords, and the Register of Lords’ interests, including financial interests, provide the necessary transparency and are enforced.”  This is equivalent of a British official screaming “The House of Lords has been infiltrated and there is barely any effort at enforcing the rules.”

If you think this might be exaggeration, consider that right after this report was published, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Tory government, which had opposed releasing this ISC report, named Russian-born British immigrant and dual Russian-British citizen Evgeny Lebedev to the House of Lords.  As a prime example of Russian infiltration into British society, he owns the prominent UK media outlets The Independent and The Evening Standard and is the son of Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB spy who worked in the UK during the cold war.  The father co-owns his son’s UK papers, and while Alexander additionally owns a Russian newspaper critical of Putin’s domestic actions, the elder Lebedev he has been personally supportive, even lobbied for, Putin’s aggressive foreign policy towards the west, as has the younger Lebedev. 

The report also notes that the UK has no law on the books like America’s Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires agents in America working on behalf of the political (or “quasi-political”) interests of foreign governments to register and disclose their related finance sand activities.  However, since the last election cycle on, the old, outdated FARA has been shown to have been woefully inadequately for its mission in the modern digital age.

What is clear is that in light of all these developments, the authors of the report view “economic crime as a national security issue” that is not nearly prioritized enough, and American lawmakers and officials would do well do to the same.

The report also notes a Buzzfeed investigation into the deaths of fourteen deaths of “Russian business figures and British individuals linked to them,” with the ISC getting evidence on these deaths.  This evidence and any commentary on it is redacted, most likely meaning that effort is ongoing.  Perhaps most troublingly, the report indicates the police involved may be compromised, as the report quotes the UK Parliament’s Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, in an again-characteristically understated British style, that the Buzzfeed piecepresented “considerable concerning evidence [that raises] questions over the robustness of the police investigations.”

Much Room for Improvement

After the discussion of the Buzzfeed report, what follows is an important discussion of resourcing and info-sharing within the government, much of which is redacted, but it is still fascinating to read anyway, though it may be of less interest to non-policy wonk-types.

In reading this report, it is no secret that, as mentioned, Boris Johnson and other Conservative Tory governments have hardly been eager about its compilation or release.  In a remarkable section, the ISC argues for taking responsibility for the “Hostile State Activity” portfolio away from the National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office, right under Boris Johnson as Prime Minister; for the report’s ISC authors, “this appears unusual: the Home Office might seem a more natural home for it;” given the overt politicization of the process surrounding this report, its authors are essentially calling for a depoliticization of these responsibilities by taking them away from the people directly working under and for the Prime Minister and to have them given to a government department (albeit one that still reports through its head to the Prime Minister) that is seen as less political, a department that includes MI5 and the NCA (Americans can think of this as taking something away from a White House task force and entrusting it to one of our cabinet agencies like the Departments of Defense or Justice, something which I have argued needs to be done for pandemics in the future given the Trump Administration’s perhaps-singularly pathetic response to the coronavirus outbreak).

And as noted at the beginning of the report, Putin has an advantage in being able to autocratically combine whatever forces he wants to further his ends as far as political interference.  Thus, the ISC recommends that the mechanisms needed to respond to such Russian efforts should be unified and coordinated in such a way as to make the overall effort more robust, less redundant, and more able to plug any gaps.  Quite tellingly, under a headline “Less talk, more action?,” the ISC report authors feel that, as to the various bodies’ “plethora of plans and strategies…it has taken some time to understand the purposes behind each one and how they interlink: this suggests that the overall strategy framework is not as simple as it might be,” and they concludes these comments with a stinging “time spent strategising is only useful if done efficiently, and without getting in the way of the work itself.”  The U.S. should take a similar approach, with an interagency task force being formed as soon as possible to specifically handle the threat of Russian interference in America’s domestic political affairs, one that compels individual states to coordinate and be involved with it.

In related criticism right after, the report notes that its government Agencies (as opposed to Defence Intelligence) do not seem to have clear or useful performance measurement mechanisms when it comes to their evaluation of their success in fighting Russian political interference in the UK.  In a sharp rebuke of the Agencies’ transparency, the report notes that “We remind the Government that the Justice and Security Act 2013 does not oblige it to withhold information relevant to ongoing operations but merely provides the option of doing so… it is disappointing that in relation to a subject of such public interest this option has been exercised quite so broadly.”  Indeed, some of both the Obama Administration’s and (certainly more of) the Trump Administration’s secrecy on these matters were/are highly questionable, so such a sentiment is more than applicable to the U.S.

Lessons, Problems, and Solutions

In a section detailing why Russia is such a challenging adversary (“All witnesses agreed that Russia is one of the hardest intelligence challenges that there is.”), the ISC report notes that in some of its operations, Russian operatives have been rather clumsy, even seeming to be incompetent.  But the authors note, and I would wholly concur, that “whilst these attacks demonstrate that the RIS [Russian Intelligence Services] are not infallible, it would be foolhardy to think that they are any less dangerous because of these mistakes.”  I would make the case further that, while some of the more comical operatives or heavy-handed approaches have led to various Russian efforts being exposed, it is the smoother operators that were not caught (or not caught until much later) and whose attacks and effects are not even known that should be far more troubling.  Indeed, while the uncommonly bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee released a much-redacted report in late July, 2019, revealing that all fifty U.S. states’ election systems were the objects of a Russian infiltration campaign in 2016, earlier assessments had a much smaller number of states affected (in late 2016 and early 2017, only some 21 states were determined by U.S. officials to have been targeted).  This means that, in the words of The New York Times, the Russian “effort [was] more far-reaching than previously acknowledged and one largely undetected by the states and federal officials at the time.”  The Senate report did not include many details on which states were compromised and actually masked the identity of which states were most heavily compromised.  A Democratic dissent added to the Senate report was deeply concerned that “there are currently no mandatory rules that require states to implement even minimum cybersecurity measures. There are not even any voluntary federal standards.”  In other words, we have no serious standards, who knows what we do not know about what we do not know, and who knows if whatever measures have been taken to defend our election systems—differing and spreading among fifty states as they are—are appropriate or will be effective.  We must assume, then, that there are other efforts and other successes on the part of the Russians beyond those of which we have become aware, whether thinking of the UK or U.S.

Because of Russia’s virtually non-existent check-and-balances, the ISC report notes that Putin and his inner circle can make and implement substantive decisions far more quickly than most Western governments in most situations can respond, lamenting that the UK and its allies “have yet found an effective way to respond to the pace of Russian decision-making.”  In a section that is heavily redacted in terms of explanations and specifics, it also notes the West faces a gap with Russia in terms of how it can use new technology to augment its intelligence capabilities, especially in recruiting and implementing human intelligence operatives to carry out operations on the ground.  Russia is also relatively likely to escalate because of the famous Russian paranoia coupled with Putin’s viewing virtually any challenge to him as an effort to delegitimize and overthrow him (as he famously viewed then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s criticism of Russian elections in 2011, a perceived slight he certainly never forgot). 

The UK is also at a disadvantage because it does not have enough people working to recruit personnel to work on countering Russian malign influence, and certain redacted areas of work regarding Russia are not given enough attention, either.  This means that not only are there not enough people working on these issues, but that their areas of focus even when focusing on Russia are also not properly balanced.  A further weakness the report notes is that appropriate countermeasures require more care than the terrorism operations that have been of such focus in recent years because, while those operations seek to destroy and dismantle terrorist organizations, that cannot be an option with Russia.  As in the U.S., there has been something of an irrational reluctance to aggressively and publicly name and shame Russian malign actors, and the ISC would like to see a more aggressive stance taken by the UK.

As in the also case with the U.S., there is vast room for improvement in drafting and passing legislation to counter these Russian threats.  The MI5 chief is quoted as saying that “there are things that compellingly we must investigate, everybody would expect us to address, where there isn’t actually an obvious criminal offence because of the changing shape of the threat and that for me is fundamentally where this doesn’t make sense.”  To paraphrase, there are things the Russians are doing that are known to be bad and harmful but are not illegal, and the laws must be strengthened to include such activity and enable authorities to investigate and prosecute those carrying out these hostile acts, which is very much the situation in the U.S., too.  The same MI5 Director-General also noted that the current framework was “completely out of date” and “makes it very hard these days to deal with some of the situations we are talking about today in the realm of the economic sphere, cyber, things that could be, you know, more to do with influence.”  As happened earlier in the report, the lack of an ability to legally counter foreign agents seeking to “obfuscate” their missions and backers is noted as an obvious area of weakness.

Additionally, despite some recent new options (Unexplained Wealth Orders) to crack down on malign and foreign financing of such activities, the report notes that since so many Russians have had longstanding financial ties and investments in the U.K., they work around this new tool.  Furthermore, because these Russians are so wealthy, they are able to tie up government actions and lawyers in costly, lengthy litigation that the UK government does not have the resources or personnel with which to compete to the degree that the NCA said “we are, bluntly, concerned about the impact on our budget.”  That the UK government is nervous about taking on Russian agents because they have better resources and can outspend and outlast British officials using Britain’s own legal system is an incredibly disturbing revelation.

In discussing sanctions, the report notes that because the Russians merge organized crime and businesses into their government’s influence and interference operations, sanctions meant to stop hostile state actions must be broadened to be able to include not just government officials but also these other actors who are not officially in the government but are still working to further the Russian regime’s agenda.  The world has seen a number of countries adopt so-called Magnitsky legislation to go after government officials who perpetrate human rights abuses in response to a high-profile case involving Russian officials’ murder of a whistleblowing Russian lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky, including laws passed in the U.S. and the UK, but clearly, Russian campaigns against the West routinely include Russian businessmen and Russian organized crime, so rethinking sanctions is absolutely necessary.  This is likely one of the most effective ways to combat Russian hostile activity, as even the Magnitsky sanctions have enraged Putin and lobbying against them has been one of his top priorities, even to the point of Russian agents meeting with top Trump campaign officials—including campaign Chairman Paul Manafort, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner—on this issue at the height of the 2016 election, as I noted in a piece that was censored by a Russian government-linked think tank for which I previously wrote (free of any compensation), so sensitive are the Russians about this issue.  Reform in the area of sanctions is surely crucial for the U.S., then, too.

In an obvious suggested move with which few reasonable people would disagree, the ISC report also remarks that election laws in our new, digital era need a major update to cover how the internet is used in campaigns, one that expands the ways in which online and especially targeted advertising and outreach is regulated.  Obviously, this is needed in the U.S., too.

When discussing the issue of working with allies to counter Russian hostile acts, there is an interesting redaction in a section discussing the working relationship with the U.S. (“In responding to the Russian threat, the UK’s long-standing partnership with the US is important…However, there remains a question as to whether ***.”), and while there are many possibilities as far as the redaction, U.S. President Donald Trump’s odd relationship, history, and behavior in relation to Putin and Russia are of major concern for all U.S. allies and it is not without some foundation that one might think this redaction relates to this concern.

Of at least equal, perhaps even more concern, to the UK is, as the report notes, division within Europe over Russia, and France, Austria, and Italy are called out by name, as is Israel as an example outside of Europe.  Far earlier in the report, Footnote 25 is interesting because it references knowledge that France’s Marine Le Pen’s far-right nationalist party is either the subject of UK surveillance or that it has unwittingly produced hard evidence of some sort of quid pro quo involving the promise of cash transfers in exchange for supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea.  Either way, it strongly suggests that UK intelligence has pretty deep knowledge on the degree to which Russia has infiltrated political parties, figures, and systems in continental Europe and the clear implication is that it is quite bad (infiltration and manipulation about which I have written for years).

One positive development is noted several times in the report: that not only was the UK government’s response to Russia’s attempt to murder a Russian defector, Sergei Skripal, (an attempt that he and his daughter survived but a local woman inadvertently exposed to the chemical weapon did not) on UK soil in Salisbury with a military-grade chemical weapons nerve agent, Novichok A234 swift and forceful, but so were a number of the responses of allies countries.  Sadly, this type of response is the exception and not the norm, but demonstrates that such type of coordinated action is possible.

Finally, the ISC report calls out the British government for placing too much effort in good-faith engagement of Russia:

Whilst it is possible that an improved relationship between Russia and the UK may one day reduce the threat to the UK, it is unrealistic to think that that might happen under the current Russian leadership.  It would have to be dependent on Russia ceasing its acts of aggression towards the UK, such as the use of chemical weapons on UK soil.  The UK, as a Western democracy, cannot allow Russia to flout the Rules Based International Order without there being commensurate consequences.  Any public move towards a more allied relationship with Russia at present would severely undermine the strength of the international response to Salisbury, and the UK’s leadership and credibility within this movement.

Such a lens should be applied to Trump’s nonsensical efforts to improve America’s relationship with Russia, as even now, Russia is actively interfering in the U.S. election.  There is only reason to believe that Donald Trump has improved his personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, not America’s with Russia.

Conclusion: The U.S. Needs to Take Massive Inspiration from This Exceptional British Report

To conclude, there is a certain level of brilliance that I have not seen in American government reports at work here.  Whereas most American reports are presented as a narrative, usually piece-by-piece and step-by-step, and analysis is usually presented at the end, here, it is presented throughout.  And this makes a big difference when it comes to redactions: with the commentary provided (sometimes itself redacted), we are actually being given hints by the committee as to the nature of the redacted material and the Committee’s views on this material and thus the degree to which we should be worried, and I would say this seems quite deliberate from the tone.  So it is, then, that while this report is much briefer than most American reports, it says so much more per page than its American counterparts.  Where the American equivalents often do not connect the dots on sensitive issues but leave that for the public, the media, and members of Congress, here the authors very much wish to guide the debate, even to the point of raising serious credibility issues of certain actors, pointing fingers, sometimes in the dark or hinting at names and institutions without naming them, other times being more direct but still with characteristic British blunt understatement.  And in this way, the report is so much more damning and valuable as a single document.  A typical American will not read the Mueller report and understand the big-picture in the same way or as deeply without expert commentary and additional analysis as a typical Brit reading this report can take away insight without such interpretative assistance.  As an example, one section header simply reads: “Did HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] take its eye off the ball?”  in big, bold lettering, something unimaginable in a U.S. Government report.

The bottom line is, this major UK report gave a succinct, highly-readable, even fun-to-read report that most Brits could go through relatively quickly and feel better informed on a key national security issue, taking away bold understandings on the drastic failings of the UK to protect the integrity of its democracy from Russian interference and able to see where a good chunk of the blame lay even if fingers are pointed in a somewhat indirect, terse, and understated manner.  Conversely, few Americans would be able to make it through the long, extremely detailed, and highly technical U.S. government reports that are actually bipartisan and credible, and whether the Mueller Report or the Senate Intelligence Committee reports, they mostly dance around anything sensitive politically and avoid laying much out directly or even indirectly as far as conclusions that would actually hold those who failed and fail to protect American democracy accountable, especially at the top of the current Trump Administration.  The typical U.S. citizen would be both overwhelmed by so much information and unable to draw appropriate conclusions from many of the complex, detailed segments, if they even managed to read the full reports, which few likely have.

That is not to say that such highly technical reports are not necessary—they certainly are, and are still extremely valuable—but America’s government must take a page from this praise-worthy UK ISC report and find a way not only to improve our defenses against Russian interference, but improve its ability to inform its citizens about threats and have them understand both our failures and the actions that must be taken to address those failures.  Executive summaries as we have done them are not enough, and, despite Americans not being British, we must find a way to produce momentous reports in the manner both the substance and style of the UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee.  That means, too, something of a lesson on the English language from the British, which this report also refreshingly offers.

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!

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