(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, May 25, 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). 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 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
• June 7: A Flurry of Telling Parallels Between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War and Russia’s 2022 Ukraine War

SILVER SPRING—In trying other times to convey the emotion and time-span of the struggles highlighted herein, in the past I have used a particular excerpt from a particular poem and will reuse it here because it is terribly apt and revealing, especially when noting the date:

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.

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

As the above quote demonstrates, for centuries, Ukrainians have fought for their freedom and to preserve their identity against an expansionist, imperialist, colonialist Russia (something I have discussed at length before). Below is a brief (not by any means comprehensive) history of Russian and Soviet mass atrocities carried out in what are now the modern borders of Ukraine.

Imperial Russia had control over Ukraine’s east for far a longer time than its west (part of that not even coming under Russian control until the mid-twentieth century), and the tsarist era saw systematic top-down suppression of Ukrainian as a language and identity (some Ukrainians even adopting Russian to suffer less discrimination) as well as suppression of the Muslim Crimean Tatars that was so bad that a large majority fled Crimea, leaving the Tatars who remained a minority in the face of colonialist settling of Russians and others in Crimea and other areas within Ukraine’s current borders (especially the Donbas), just some of the tsarist policies collectively known as “Russification.”

A free Ukrainian state finally emerged from the collapse of Imperial Russia at the end of World War I, only to be caught up in a number of conflicts, including the Russian Civil War; when the fighting was over after years of killing in Ukraine, Ukraine’s brief independence had been snuffed out by the time it was integrated as a Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or Soviet Union, in 1922 (and far from willingly).

The Soviet era would see even more dramatic demographic shifts. 

A decade after being forcibly integrated into the USSR, in the face of both maintaining Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian resistance to Moscow’s policy of collectivization of farming, Stalin took what was a terrible situation with a regional famine and specifically directed and aggravated that famine towards Ukraine, killing millions of Ukrainians in 1932-1933 through starvation and its accompanying diseases in the man-made genocidal disaster that has come to be known as the Holodomor (the most detailed estimate approximates 3.9 million dead).  During this genocidal famine, Russians were resettled into some areas where Ukrainians had been starved to death or sent off to gulags, particularly in the east and south, so that the land could still be worked and yield harvests.  As the Donbas area in particular was a center of major industrialization, Russian and other Soviet migration to that region was considerable in this period. 

Understandably, when German armies came rolling through Ukraine in 1941, many Ukrainians with little love for Stalin, Russia, or the Soviets and their Union saw an opportunity in a classic “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” situation.  But the Nazis were uninterested in Ukrainian nationalism, so, not long after their invasion of the Soviet Union, they turned on their Ukrainian allies after some of them—Stepan Bandera’s OUN-B—proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state.  Bandera some of his Ukrainian nationalists were caught up in the crackdown, but some of the rest fought the Nazi invaders, even as their old enemies, the Soviets, eventually came back during their great counteroffensive against Hitler’s armies.

Thus, the OUN-B fought the Nazis and Soviets at once (until the former were driven out), eventually forming alongside others the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and fighting a bitter guerilla war against the Soviets that lasted until 1954, the same year Khrushchev symbolically gifted Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, though some tiny numbers of insurgents continued resistance for years after.  Not even including the fighting with the Nazis, some 150,000 Ukrainians—insurgents and civilians—were killed in combat by the Soviet counterinsurgency campaign against—as the Soviets blanketly called all insurgents—the “Banderites,” after Bandera (more on that by me here). 

There was so much killing and depopulation during World War II by the Nazis and Soviets in Ukraine that the people of the Ukrainian SSR suffered one of the highest casualty totals of the war both in proportionate terms and absolutely (about 6.85 million dead, some 16.3% of the total population in the relatively recent accounting of one Russian historian).  Additionally, the Germans deported some 2.4 million people from within Ukraine to work in Germany as forced slave labor (of whom, by some estimates, 400,000-450,000 died from the brutal conditions).  Then, when the Soviets retook Ukraine and other Soviet territory occupied by Hitler’s forces, large parts of populations that had collaborators in their midst or were merely suspected by paranoid authorities of having collaborated or harbored collaborators (or even just because they were seen as troublesome “foreign” elements) were deported to Soviet Central Asia or Siberia under appalling conditions that saw many of those deportees perish.  The deported included all of the Crimean Tatars (estimates range, but quite roughly 200,000) in just a few days in 1944 on the grounds that they had, en masse, collaborated with the Nazis.  In reality, only a small percentage actually had, and the Soviet government even admitted in 1967 that the accusations were false (I did not even realize I was writing this section on the anniversary of the beginning of this genocidal deportation, May 18).  Many ethnic Ukrainians were also deported by the Soviets from Ukraine (over 200,000 from western Ukraine alone, where UPA was most popular).

Few Russians are likely aware of the supremely sick irony of Putin pushing an expansionist, imperialist, colonialist war on Ukraine to reintegrate ethnic Russian populations back into Russia considering those populations mainly came to be in Ukraine’s south and east because tsarist and/or Soviet-engineered oppression, genocide, famine, mass killing, and mass deportations of Ukrainians and Tatars occurred alongside colonialist population transfers of Russians into Ukraine, settled often on the literal blood and bones of the previous inhabitants. 

Apparently true to its horrific legacy, Russian in this the current war has been accused by Ukraine of forcibly deporting some 1.2 million Ukrainians, including well over 200,000 children, to Russia, actions that can only bring back nightmare memories of the past horrors described above (on May 23, Ukraine updated the accusation to a total of 1.4 million Ukrainians, including over 240,000 children).

Thus, Ukrainians’ resistance to Russian imperialism, whether in the past or today, is not inspired by Western support or American manipulation into becoming “proxies” of the U.S., but a deep, lived experience passed on from generation to generation of being at the receiving end of a long history of atrocities that, sadly, in part defines what it means to be Ukrainian.

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, May 23, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); this is the first of a series of articles excerpted and/or adapted from Brian’s same-day 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 Small Wars Journal article:

• 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
• June 7: A Flurry of Telling Parallels Between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War and Russia’s 2022 Ukraine War

Location, Location, Location: Geopolitics in Eastern Europe for Stalin (and Putin)

Setting the Stage

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—On the first page of the first chapter, geography is, appropriately, discussed.  Like Ukraine’s plains, the Karelian Isthmus that connects Finland historically to St. Petersburg—the tsarist capital since the time of Peter the Great, but renamed Petrograd during World War I, then Leningrad in the Soviet era, after Vladimir Lenin’s death—has been a pathway for invaders from both directions.   In the case of the isthmus, this path was into and out of Russia and Asia on one side and Europe and Scandinavia on the other, and controlling such pathways was deemed vital to Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin in the late 1930s as it is also by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the twenty-first century.  Even in the 1930s, driving across the Isthmus from Finland’s border to Leningrad was simply a matter of a few hours (just thirty-two kilometers to its limits).

With Hitler’s outright and frothing hostility to the ideology of communism and to the Slavic people as a whole, and, to Russia’s West there being Imperial Japan (also intensely hostile to communism and expanding near Russia’s Far East), Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin eyed ostensibly neutral Finland quite nervously: though the Russian tsars ruled over Finland for a little over a century after the Napoleonic Wars, in the waning days of the Tsarist Russian Empire, Finns looked to overthrow an increasingly repressive Russian rule during World War I, some 2,000 Finns collaborating with Kaiser Wilhelm’s Imperial Germany during the war I and serving in their own unit in the Kaiser’s Imperial German Army.  Just days after the 1917 October/Bolshevik Revolution began in Russia—in which Lenin and his communists seized power in Petrograd—Finland declared independence and Lenin was too distracted by bigger problems to not acquiesce three weeks later.  Despite the efforts of Finnish communist with newly-Soviet Russian help to hold and expand power in Finland, during the Finnish Civil War of 1918, the Finnish communists were crushed by the opposing Finnish Whites with the help of forces from Imperial Germany.  Not long after, the Finns would allow anti-Bolshevik Russian and British forces to launch attacks against Russian communists during the Russian Civil War, though the communists under Lenin would prevail in the conflict.  He and his regime were bitter about losing Finland, and felt at some future point it could be brought back into the fold with little effort.

Some two decades later, with Stalin firmly in power and Lenin long dead, the new Soviet leader and his circle were concerned about another German threat: Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and that the Nazi Führer would be able to coerce a weak, unaligned Finland into being a base for a German invasion of the Soviet Union (Soviet Russia had coerced other parts of what was Russia’s disintegrating Empire into a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: the USSR) aimed at nearby and very vulnerable Leningrad, one of the USSR’s indispensable urban centers.  The World War I-/Russian Revolution-/Russian Civil War-era multiple direct collaborations between Finnish and German forces against Tsarist Russia and both Russian and Finnish communists only made this concern more acute in the eyes of the communist Soviets.

Rather than some obsession with dominating and controlling Finland, Stalin seemed mostly concerned with looming Nazi expansionism (hardly an unfounded threat, as history would prove) and saw Finland’s geography in relation to Soviet territory and especially the all-important Leningrad as an unacceptable risk under the status quo in 1938.

Aggressive Negotiations

Thus, in April of that year, Stalin had his agents approach Finland with his security concerns.  Unlike in 2022 with Putin and his “concerns” about Ukraine and NATO, Nazi Germany was one of the most evil regimes in world history and extremely expansionist as well as warmongering.  And today, we know in hindsight (and, indeed, many at the time felt this too, including Stalin, who was off by just a few years) that Hitler very much had designs of conquest and subjugation for the Soviet Union and the Slavic peoples.

Considering all this, public professions of neutrality from Finland, even if sincere by the Finns, did little to comfort Stalin; he knew if Hitler were to try to force Finland into the Nazi German Reich, Finland would not be able to put up much resistance and Hitler could use Finland, then, as a base from which to attack the USSR, or, even without formal conquest, could compel Finland into an alliance with Germany and force it to support an attack or join in an attack against the Soviets.

But Finland possessed a number of worthless, unpopulated islands—used only by Finnish fisherman during summer—that provided excellent defensive positions for the naval approaches to Leningrad, and Stalin’s folks inquired about the possibility of Finland ceding or leasing the islands to the Soviet Union in order to expand its security perimeter.

Finland flat-out rejected the idea.

Almost a year later, in March 1939, the Soviets came back, offering some slightly-disputed Karelian borderlands in exchange for a thirty-year lease of five Islands near Leningrad.  Considering the climate of 1939, this was quite a reasonable offer, based on realistic, pressing security concerns on the part of Stalin in light of a massive threat coming from, of all people, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Reich (again, contrast today with NATO’s defensive alliance led by U.S. President Joe Biden: needless to say, nowhere near equivalents; and Ukraine’s borders with Russia now are nowhere near as close as Finland’s was to a one of the largest and most vulnerable cities of concern for the Soviets, meaning there is nothing like a Leningrad-equivalent less than three-dozen kilometers away or even close to that distance).

The man who would come to lead Finland’s military through the war, Gustav Mannerheim, felt this deal was entirely reasonable, knowing how weak and ill-supplied his Finnish Army was (it did not have a single working anti-tank gun at this time).  He was already a legend at the time: a distinguished veteran of high rank during World War I, the culmination of his service for the tsar in the last few decades of the existence the Russian Empire of which Finland was then still a part; the leader of the anticommunist Finnish Whites who led them to victory in their brief civil war against the Finnish Reds; and at this point in 1939, the head of the Finnish government’s Defense Council.

But Mannerheim was ignored by the Finnish political leadership, along with the Soviet Union’s offers.  Still, the Soviets kept pressuring Finland over the ensuing weeks and felt themselves pressured in this spring of 1939, eyeing Nazi Germany nervously.

Hitler was indeed hostile, but was more focused for the moment on Central Europe, so the two enemies were able to come to the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in in August 1939, Hitler gobbling up western Poland soon after followed by Stalin gobbling up eastern Poland.  Seeing the writing on the wall, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—each responding to invitations from late September through early October from the Soviets—soon after arrived in Moscow and would sign separate agreements making them de facto vassal satellite states of the Soviet Union, their freedom reluctantly signed away to avoid bloodshed faced with what they saw as a foregone conclusion.

Now, it was Finland’s turn.  On October 12, Stalin put forward his demands to a high-level Finnish delegation that had been summoned to Moscow, explaining he could not tolerate Leningrad being so vulnerable by land and sea in the current climate.  Therefore, he insisted on: a relatively large cessation of territory in the Karelian Isthmus approaching Leningrad; the destruction of all of Finland’s considerable fortifications on the Isthmus; four of the Finnish islands in the Gulf of Finland near Leningrad; most of the Rybachi (or Rybachy) Peninsula jutting out into the Barents Sea in the Arctic Ocean; leasing mainland Finland’s southernmost point, the Hanko peninsula, and its port there, where the Russians would establish a base manned by some 5,000 troops and supporting forces.  In exchange, the USSR would give Finland some 5,500 square kilometers on Russia’s side of Karelia north of Lake Ladoga.

Compared to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—which de facto had to cede their entire sovereignty to the Soviet Union—Finland was getting off easy.  And yet, the Finns also realized that the Karelian Isthmus demands meant essentially the eradication of Finland’s strongest and primary lines of defense against the Soviet Union.  In addition, nearly all of Finland’s government leaders felt this was only the first series of demands before what they saw as the inevitable coming of later pre-hatched demands, which, after giving in on these first ones, the Finns would be powerless to resist.  Some top Finish politicians and officials thought Stalin was bluffing or just setting a high position for haggling purposes, but Mannerheim, almost alone, thought the Soviets were quite serious and opined it would be wise to accommodate them.

As negotiations unfolded over the rest of October and into November, the Finns agreed to cede some of the Islands and a bit of the Karelian Isthmus, but rejected the Hanko proposition.  Yet Stalin’s list of demands was no ploy and it was likely Stain was genuinely frustrated by weeks Finnish intransigence during negotiations.  That the Finns were so stubborn over so many weeks actually led Stalin to believe that there was a distinct possibility they had already made some sort of backroom deal with the Nazis.  For Trotter, lending credence that Stalin’s real and full aims were most likely what had been put openly to the Finns in October was that, years later in the final years of World War II and the early Cold War—when Stalin could easily have conquered all of Finland—he chose not to do so.  But for Trotter, too, also clear was what the Soviets were demanding at gunpoint of Finland

came back to an irreducible case of right and wrong.  Finland was a sovereign nation, and it had every legal and moral right to refuse any Russian demands for territory.  And the Soviet Union, for its part, had no legal or moral right to pursue its policies by means of armed aggression.  Even [Stalin’s successor] Nikita Khrushchev admitted as much, decades later, although in the next breath he rationalized the invasion in the name of realpolitik: “There’s some question whether we had any legal or moral right for our actions against Finland.  Of course we didn’t have any legal right.  As far as morality is concerned, our desire to protect ourselves was ample justification in our own eyes.” (17)

A final meeting in Moscow took place on November 9 between Stalin alongside his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, and the Finnish delegation in Moscow, Stalin reiterating his position and the Finns responding with the same small concessions they had put forward earlier.  A yet-again surprised Stalin continued to plead with the Finns for an hour for further concessions, but to no avail.  All seemed frustrated, but he bid the Finns a respectful farewell with handshakes and an “All the best.”  It seems not with grandiose ambition, fury, or outrage, but a worn-out resignation to a regrettable yet necessary endeavor, that Stalin went from those almost cordial goodbyes to planning for a war to take his rejected demands by force.

A Disturbing Difference

I have already briefly mentioned a difference that I have found quite disturbing, one which I will now revisit in this conclusion.  Looking at the precipice in 1939 just before Stalin invaded Finland, it is quite striking and unsettling for us today to realize that what Stalin was demanding—and apparently genuinely—of Finland pales in comparison to what Putin is demanding of Ukraine today.  And this was even at a time of exponentially greater external security threats facing Stalin when compared with what Putin faces today in our present time of essentially no clear, present, imminent external security threats to Russia.  To be fair, Stalin was far more brutal to Ukraine in his day, as noted herein, and Putin is not attacking Finland, but that is not the comparison I am making.

Still, again, let this sink in: Joseph Stalin, of all people, and at a time of terrible danger to the Soviet Union that he more or less foresaw, seems more rational and measured in 1939 than Putin does in 2022 at a time of far more security and stability.

I am not yet prepared to say what this means, but this reality makes me, to say the least, extremely uncomfortable.

At the same time, the First Soviet-Finnish War had an astonishingly good outcome for Finland, and, as I have explained in other work, Ukraine today is—to use the technical military term—kicking Russia’s ass, so there are also those two points to consider…

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!

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

• 2-America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus
• 3-Why the Coronavirus Pandemic and America’s Disastrous Response Will Inspire Future Use of Bioweapons
• 4-The Harsh Truths Coronavirus Has Exposed
• 5-Coronavirus and History, Russia and Italy, the War for Reality, and the Nexus of It All
• See also my proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR)

Bernard Lowe: We retired the two hosts in question.  You taught me how to make them, but not how hard it is to turn them off.

Dr. Robert Ford: You can’t play god without being acquainted with the devil.  There’s something else bothering you, Bernard.  I know how that head of yours works.

Lowe: The photograph alone couldn’t have caused that level of damage to Abernathy, not without some other, ah, outside interference.

Ford: You think it’s sabotage?  You imagine someone’s been diddling with our creations?

Lowe: It’s the simplest solution.

Ford: Ah, Mr. Ockam’s razor.  The problem, Bernard, is that what you and I do is…so complicated.  We practice witchcraft.  We speak the right words.  Then we create life itself…out of chaos.  William of Ockam was a 13th century monk.  He can’t help us now, Bernard.  He would have us burned at the stake.

—Westworld, “Chestnut,” Season 1, Episode 2 by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (2016)

SILVER SPRING—As the world witnesses the terrifying spiraling effects of the gaping void in competent early-intervention leadership in what looks to potentially and likely be the worst global pandemic since the misnamed 1918 “Spanish” flu killed as many as 100 million people (up to six percent of the world’s population at the time), perhaps the biggest fear we should harbor has little to do with actual coronavirus. 

Part of why this virus and its disease is so terrifying is that it is new and confounding, with varied effects.  It might roughly be thought of as a megaflu/superpneumonia-like whole body virus, but even that description does not do justice to the novel (i.e., new) coronavirus, also known as SARS-CoV-2, about which there is quite a lot (so much) we do not know and for which there is currently no vaccine and against which no vetted medicine has yet proven in rigorous testing to be effective, nor even safe to use (remdesivir, the antiviral drug seems to speed recovery from the virus and has just been given a special exception by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration [FDA] for emergency use, still has not been properly tested, has not been formally approved by the FDA, and may damage the liver).   Even with a viable vaccine in the future, this is a rapidly branching, evolving, and mutating virus, and the coronavirus family of viruses has proven exceptionally difficult for vaccines, with the FDA never having approved an effective human-use vaccine for any type of coronavirus.  In short, there is no guarantee that such an initial vaccine or any vaccine would provide mass protection anywhere near the degree to which we would hope.

Yet just imagine that the current disease rapidly spreading was actually far worse and far deadlier than COVID-19, the sickness brought about by coronavirus and now creating so many fatal complications for so many people and hospitalizing so many others all around the world. 

Such a mental exercise would hardly be just an act of imaginative fiction: Richard Preston—author of the famous 1990s bestselling seminal book The Hot Zone that awoke the national consciousness of America to the threat of emerging infectious diseases—and other numerous experts and public figures have raised the alarm about potential pandemics for years, with Preston himself just recently warning that the next pandemic could easily be worse than this current coronavirus one.

Going back to our thought experiment, now imagine this even worse disease ravaging humanity was no act of nature, but a deliberate act of war or terrorism.

The horrible reality is there are, in fact, far worse things out there that mother nature has in store for us than this coronavirus, and, even scarier, as is always the case, is man’s perversion of nature.  As Iain Pears wrote in his poetic novel The Dream of Scipio: “…we are worse than beasts. Animals are constrained by their limitations and their lack of imagination. We are not.”

And in this case of perverting nature, we are talking about the weaponization and modification of infectious diseases by humans—as servants of governments or terrorists—to kill people, many people, in no way discriminating between military and civilian, adult and child, strong or weak, healthy or sick.  And in a world where such a threat exists, and where a natural pandemic has exposed glaring weaknesses that must be addressed, a dramatic change in policy is warranted.

We do not have to even try hard imagine such malintent: as one example, the FBI has found that American white supremacists want to pass on this very coronavirus deliberately as a bioweapon to target groups they do not like, a clear form of terrorism.  U.S. defense and intelligence officials are also worried about a more organized potential effort to weaponize coronavirus.

Yet the biological threats that have been and could be used as deliberate weapons against us are hardly limited to our currently omnipresent SARS-CoV-2 strain of coronavirus.

And so, as with understanding any issue, a little history is in order, as biowarfare and bioterrorism does not begin or with the above example, nor, sadly, will it end with it.

Like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world any more.  Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent.  Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating.  But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live.  Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it.  Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it.  And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways-air, and water, and land-because of ungovernable science.  This much is obvious to everyone.

—Dr. Ian Malcolm, in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

Premodern Biowarfare

The weaponization of disease goes back to the ancient world.  The behavior of modern primitive tribes dabbing their arrows in decaying biological matter (animal or human), in part, indicates that even before recorded history, humans were likely deliberately trying to infect other humans as a tactic.

The first recorded example is in the fourteenth century B.C.E. with the ancient Hittites—the scourge of ancient Egypt—sending sick animals (rams) to their enemies’ lands the hopes of spreading sickness there.

Ancient Romans and Persians sometimes poisoned the wells of their enemies by dumping dead animals into the water, allowing sickness to spread.

The bubonic plague came to Europe because a Mongol-led army that had been suffering from plague in its siege in the mid-1340s of a Genovese-settlement in Crimea decided to turn their disadvantage to their advantage by catapulting their plague-riddled dead into the city.  When some of the Genovese, fearing the mysterious disease that was afflicting their city under siege, fled to Italy, they brought the plague with them and the rest is history, the history of the Black Death, which spread to all of Europe and had killed at least a third of the continent’s population, some twenty-five million people at a minimum).  The Mongol-led army using artillery to hurl those dead plague-ridden bodies at enemy forces in Crimea was “a landmark in the history of” biowarfare, a technique for which we have decent evidence of repetition a few subsequent times, including 1422 in by the Lithuanians in Bohemia and by the Russians against the Swedes in 1710 and 1718.

Another fairly unique historical example is closer to home.  Besieged by Chief Pontiac’s Native American warriors, it seems a British-led garrison defending Fort Pitt (now Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) in 1763 gave blankets infested with smallpox as “gifts” to the Native Americans with the intention of infecting them with the highly deadly disease for military purposes.  British forces apparently did something similar in 1789 in Australia with that continent’s Aborigines.

At the height of the U.S. Civil War, one rebel Southern agent (and future Kentucky governor)—Dr. Luke Blackburn, a medical doctor with serious expertise and experience in treating fellow fever—hatched and set in motion a plot to infect Union military positions, Northern cities, and even President Abraham Lincoln himself with the deadly disease by trying to pass on clothing and bedding of people who had suffered and perished from the disease.  The plot was unsuccessful since, at the time, it was not known that people’s fluids did not spread the fever and that mosquitos were the vehicle of transmission.  It seems smallpox may also have been involved, and that aspect might have killed one Union soldier.

Despite suspicions of other similar incidents, evidence is mainly scant for other deliberate uses of biological warfare from this period and the centuries just before and after, with suspicious incidents more often than not seeming to be natural in origin and not deliberate, despite accusations to the contrary.

Modern Biowarfare

Dr. Robert Ford: I don’t think God rested on the seventh day… I think he reveled in his creation knowing that someday it would all be destroyed.

—Westworld, “Les Écorchés,” Season 2, Episode 7 by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (2018)

It is in the twentieth century that we see the first large, organized, national-level government biowarfare programs.  Scientific advances in the late nineteenth century gave humans far more knowledge and ability to combat human disease but also to manipulate potential bioagents, including for military use.  Seeing what was to come, there were two international declarations coming out of Brussels in 1874 and 1899 banning the use of poison weapons on the battlefield, but there were no enforcing or inspections mechanisms. 

Germany during World War I by far had the biggest biowarfare program, though not much was put successfully to use as their culmination was in small and ineffective covert attacks targeting mainly animal populations crucial to war efforts in enemy nations using glanders and anthrax (a bacterial agent that can infect both people and animals but that is not contagious, i.e., able to spread person-to-person, so its spread is limited by where those using it as a weapon deploy it).  France engaged in research but did not attempt to implement any of it.

The use of chemical weapons on the battlefield during World War I—such as mustard gas, chlorine gas, and phosgene—produced a revulsion that led to have their use banned on the battlefield, along with that of bioweapons, with the 1925 ratification of the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, though their research and production were not banned.  The Protocol also had no binding enforcement or verification provisions, but still, here, we had the first explicit ban on the use of bioweapons in war for signatories.

All the major powers in World War II would engage in bioweapons research programs, the Western Allies, in particular, investing energy into anthrax research and production.  These programs often focused more on targeting beasts of burden and livestock, which were still so crucial to both the transportation and feeding of armies.  The efforts were not a top priority, and a joint U.S.-UK-Canadian anthrax program was never finished.  Despite concerns of a German bioweapons program, it seems the Nazi regime never prioritized such weapons.

It was Imperial Japan’s government that, by far, had the most extensive program during the war, led by Imperial Army Units 731 and 100 and one that ran for years, staffed by thousands of people in twenty-six centers and performing live experiments on prisoners that killed thousands of them, testing twenty-five different bioagents to see the effects of diseases on both prisoners and even, without their knowledge, Chinese civilians.  Up to 600 prisoners were killed per year in bioagent testing at just one of these facilities.  Outside of the biowarfare facilities, the Japanese Imperial Army dumped cholera and typhus into over 1,000 wells in Chinese villages to study the effects of the diseases.  Japanese planes dropped plague-carrying fleas onto Chinese cities or had agents spread the same to Chinese rice fields and roads.  The effects were so devastating that plague outbreaks were still killing tens of thousands of Chinese several years after World War II had ended.  The Japanese also used bioagents against Soviet troops, but available information on the effects of these attacks are inconclusive and these attempts may have been ineffective.  At the very end of the war, Japan was exploring a plan to spread plague into California using submarines and Kamikaze pilots, but the war ended before the plan’s start date of September 22, 1945.  One major member of the program even published scientific articles on his “research” in respectable journals and just referred to the human victims as “monkeys” to hide the atrocities.  While the Soviets convicted some Japanese biowarfare program personnel of war crimes, the U.S. offered amnesty and freedom to all the relevant staff under their jurisdiction in exchange for the data on their experiments.

This bring us to the U.S. program, which became much more robust after World War II, though its main beginnings were at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in 1943.  Activity increased in response to the Korean War and grew rapidly over the next few decades, becoming quite robust, producing many tons of bioagents and weapons systems to deliver them.  This reflected the Cold War-era shift from bioweapons being conceived of more as tools of sabotage to weapons of mass destruction (WMD).  In particular, the U.S. Air Force would have some of its aircraft equipped with highly sophisticated aerosol delivery systems such that a single B-52 bomber attack run could spread a biological agent over some 10,000 square miles while other systems for fighter-bomber aircraft could disperse bioweapons over 25,000-50,000 square miles in a single run.  Besides lethal bioagents, incapacitating and anti-crop agents were also major priorities.  Production capacity at just one major facility—the Pine Bluff Arsenal—would be 650 tons of bacterial agent a month, though that level of production never occurred.

Though the U.S. program worked on a wide variety of bioagent research and weaponization, it seems to have focused more on bacterial agents.  In the 1950s and 1960s, mass tests were conducted on unsuspecting American civilian populations, and while the intention was to use harmless agents, sometimes complications produced casualties.  One of the largest examples of this involved the U.S. Navy dispersing into the air off the coast of San Francisco enormous quantities of what it though was a harmless bacteria—Serratia marcescens—over the course of nearly a week in September 1950.  The idea was to see the degree to how an enemy bioweapon might disperse and be spread by releasing it into the air off the coast of a major U.S. city.  The bacteria spread with and into San Francisco’s famous fog and saturated the whole metro area, exposing some 800,000 people heavily to the bacteria unbeknownst to them.  At least eleven people were hospitalized with major urinary tract infections and another man, recovering from prostate surgery, died from heart complications when the bacteria infected his heart valves.  The public would not learn of this test until 1976.  Another major test involved the New York City subway system in 1966.  These were only two of the largest out of hundreds of similar secret U.S. tests carried out on domestic public populations without their consent in the 1950s and 1960s.

Alarmed by the real possibility of biowarfare and the relative ease with which non-superpowers could develop and engage in it, American President Richard Nixon halted the U.S. offensive bioweapons program in 1969 and had the U.S. sign the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction (BTWC or BWC) in 1972.  The Convention banned the use of biological and chemical weapons and bioweapons research.  Signatories also committed to destroying their existing bioweapons stockpiles and were prohibited from researching offensive dispersal technologies, though there were no enforced verification or control mechanisms.  Over 100 other nations initially signed along with the U.S., including the Soviet Union, and today, almost every nation in the world is a signatory.

But even as the Soviet Union signed the treaty, it was secretly ramping up its own biowarfare program into overdrive.  The Soviets had had an offensive biowarfare program going back to the 1920s, which greatly expanded in the 1930s and may have approached the Japanese program in scale, but it seems Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s purges disrupted it.  There is a small number of unverified claims of Soviet use of bioweapons in World War II as well as similar theories that Soviet-backed partisan guerrillas that used bioagents against occupying Germans obtained their bioweapons from the Soviets.  Additionally, it seems some Soviet agents spread typhus-carrying lice in a German-occupied Ukrainian town.  These operations killed dozens of Germans, but, still, in general and certainly compared to the Japanese, Soviet use of biological weapons during the war seems extremely rare and of minimal impact.

The USSR took biowarfare experts from Japan (like the U.S.) and industrial equipment from Germany as booty from the Second World War to help advance their program.  As the Korean War approached and unfolded, Stalin worried that the increasing U.S. bioweapons program would be a real threat to the Soviets, and they continued to lag behind the U.S. likely until the 1970s.  In early post-Cold War years, the Soviets developed weapons programs targeting crop and livestock and even developed sophisticated assassination methods with bioagents.  There was even a plan to assassinate Yugoslavia’s leader Josip Broz Tito using plague, but Stalin died before the plot was carried out.  During this period, fear of the U.S. bioweapons program motivated the Soviets to create a robust system to help spot and stop outbreaks of infectious diseases.

Still, in part because of its subscribing to incorrect biological scientific theories and a stifling bureaucracy, not much seemed to have progressed with the Soviet biowarfare program in the decades after World War II.  Soviet leaders, aware they were lagging behind the U.S., finally deferred to scientific experts (with correct, Western scientific theories backing their thinking) and decided to launch a major new biowarfare program, Biopreparat, that would take off just as the U.S. was winding its program down.  Thus, beginning in the 1970s, Biopreparat became the largest, most advanced biowarfare program in the history of the world, employing up to 60,000 people at its height; the civilian side of the program alone would end up having “10 research and development institutes, 14 production and mobilization plants, and 8 special weapons and facility design units,” and, combined with its military facilities, Biopreparat was capable of producing several thousand tons of biological agents per year.  The program developed technology to have plague, anthrax, and smallpox placed in intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBSMs)—with smallpox, maintaining a constantly refreshed egg-incubated stockpile of twenty tons—keeping some weapons loaded with agents and ready to be deployed or launched, and had the capacity to produce 1,800 tons of anthrax annually.  Overall, Biopreparat worked with about fifty different bioagents, including the highly deadly Ebola-like Marburg virus. 

Perhaps most disturbingly, the Soviet biowarfare program even engaged in genetic engineering to create new strains of existing diseases that would be stronger and resist known treatment—man-made super-strains of anthrax, plague, tularemia, smallpox, and others—as well as new agents altogether, combining some of the worst aspects of multiple diseases; by 1991, the program was researching adding genes from Venezuelan equine encephalitis, Ebola, and Marburg into smallpox.

The highly secretive Soviet Biopreparat program was unknown to U.S. intelligence until a member of the program defected to the West in 1989, two others following in 1992, the third being the second-in-command of Biopreparat, who had become terrified of what his program could unleash on the world.

After these revelations, Russia (the Soviet Union was now in the dustbin of history) admitted it had carried out a program in violation of the 1972 BWC treaty and President Boris Yeltsin pledged to end the program, but his pledge was quite controversial within Russian power circles and he faced stiff opposition.  Just a few years later, Russia was backing off some its admissions, and after Vladimir Putin ascended to the Russian presidency in 1999, he changed the official policy of Russia to one that actively and specifically denied that the Soviet Union or Russia has ever had an offensive biowarfare program. 

Russia, then, simply has not come clean on its biowarfare program.  Putin himself even publicly called for developing “genetic” weapons in 2012, and, since then, there has been a frenzy of construction activity at over two dozen old biowarfare program sites, which still remain as secretive and sealed-off as they were during Soviet times.  To this day, little is known about what became of the massive Biopreparat program or its enormous stockpiles.  Even in 2016, the Obama Administration was noting that Russia still had not come clean about what it had done with its biological stockpiles and delivery systems, and it is hard to believe that Russia is not violating the 1972 BWC treaty even today.  Furthermore, with serious security issues at Russian installations and with the immediate 1990s in Russia being something of an insanely chaotic, corrupt Wild West-like environment where it would hardly have been unthinkable that money and bioagents changed hands, we have no way of knowing which struggling scientists might have smuggled bioagents or their designs to which buyers, let alone where elements of Russia’s biological weapons stockpile are today.

In fact, some of the Soviet Union’s smallpox cache seems to have somehow gotten lost and made its way to North Korea during the tumultuous time of the USSR’s final collapse.  And a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report from 1994 stated that in the late 1980s or early 1990, the USSR or Russia had supplied North Korea with smallpox, too, which may or not be the same as the stocks of which Russia apparently lost track.  But that rogue nation would also have had its own stocks (though likely less potent) as part of its suspected longstanding biowarfare program, decades old but one about which few concrete details are known due to the secretive and sealed-off nature of the regime.  Despite this lack of information, many experts contend North Korea’s biowarfare program is a substantial and advanced one, and it seems the government of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-Un (if he is still leading, or even alive, amid his current disappearance) is trying to expand its program and bioweapons research and production capabilities.  One North Korean soldier who defected a few years ago tested positive for anthrax antibodies, suggesting (though not proving) the possibility anthrax is an active part of its arsenal.  North Korea’s military is thought to be vaccinated for both smallpox and anthrax, making both those potential bioweapons attractive to them.  And our own troops stationed in South Korea (and in general) are, overall, underequipped and unprepared for a biowarfare attack.  Experts believe the government is more likely to use bioweapons than nuclear ones and, the volatile, desperate, risky, unconventional, and sometimes unpredictable nature of the North Korean regime mean its bioweapons program may be one of the world’s programs that poses the largest threat, not least because a desperate and cash-strapped North Korean government could be willing to sell parts of this program and bioweapons expertise in general to other rogue regimes or non-state terrorist groups (it has supported terrorism across the world in the past), as it has already done with its chemical and nuclear programs and related expertise for Syria, which is also is known to have a bioweapons program.

As for other countries, a number had programs rise and fall during the Cold War, and other have clear capabilities of having or jumpstarting a program even if no evidence exists that they current do have a program.  Others still have programs today: Israel, for example, has long had a bioweapons program, but very few details are known about its current status.  China is thought to also have a program, but likely a small one and practically nothing is known about it, with experts emphasizing China’s dual-use capabilities more than actually any robust current program.  Iran is in a similar category.

It is notable that Iraq had a robust program for a number of years not too long ago under Saddam Hussein, one about which we know a lot and that really kicked into high developmental gear from the middle of the Iran-Iraq War until the Gulf War and subsequent demands and inspections from the powers who defeated Saddam’s government and severely disrupted his program at its peak.  At that peak, the program was in its early stages of being operational, but it does not seem the regime ever used its bioweapons.  The earlier DIA assessment from 1994 that concluded Russia had supplied North Korea with smallpox concluded Russia had also supplied Iraq with the virus around the same time, but Iraq likely also had its own stocks and there is evidence supporting the idea it was weaponizing smallpox, perhaps using camelpox research as a cover.  Until the mid-1990s, even under the scrutiny of international inspections, the regime was still trying to salvage its program, but after renewed and intensified international actions, Hussein’s government in 1996 may have largely abandoned serious efforts to reconstitute its biowarfare program.  The post-Saddam era has thankfully seen Iraqi governments that have abandoned all WMD pursuits.

Bioterrorism

I’ll tell you the problem with engineers and scientists.  Scientists have an elaborate line of bullshit about how they are seeking to know the truth about nature.  Which is true, but that’s not what drives them. Nobody is driven by abstractions like “seeking truth.”

Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment.  So they are focused on whether they can do something.  They never stop to ask if they should do something.  They conveniently define such considerations as pointless.  If they don’t do it, someone else will.  Discovery, they believe, is inevitable.  So they just try to do it first.  That’s the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act.  It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward.  Particle accelerators sear the land, and leave radioactive byproducts.  Astronauts leave trash on the moon.  There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries.  Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.

The scientists want it that way.  They have to stick their instruments in.  They have to leave their mark. They can’t just watch.  They can’t just appreciate.  They can’t just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen.  That is the scientist’s job, and now we have whole societies that try to be scientific.

—Dr. Ian Malcolm, in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

Besides states, there are, of course, the terrorists seeking to develop and use these weapons.

Besides the occasional partisans/guerillas who, as mentioned, used bioweapons against occupying German troops during World War II, there are, thankfully, only a few major examples of bioterrorism in general throughout history.  In the modern era, there is the strange case of a religious cult in America deliberately poisoning restaurant salad bars with Salmonella in Oregon in 1984, sickening hundreds of people, dozens of them seriously.  While Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult is famous for its sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, it was also planning to carry out biological attacks before those plots were discovered and foiled.

Just after the September 11^th, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks in the U.S., there was the strange incident of the anthrax mail attacks that infected twenty-two people and killed five.  The case was quite murky and the best available explanation is that the attacks seems to have been an example of domestic terrorism by particular a government scientist who was an expert on, and worked with, anthrax, one who committed suicide and whose possible motives have not been definitively determined by investigators but that most likely would seem to have amounted to creating a false flag attack to raise awareness about bioterrorism and boost funding for biodefense.  Even so, the evidence is far from conclusive and some questions remains as to the identity of the terrorist(s), let alone any motives.

Al-Qaeda itself harbored serious ambitions for developing bioweapons capabilities, in particular one major plot in the years before 9/11 focusing on anthrax to carry out a large-scale attack on U.S. soil run by the organization’s second-in-command (and still current leader), the surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri.  In the months prior to the 9/11 attacks, multiple al-Qaeda operatives were looking into crop-dusting airplanes, a tool that would make an exceptional delivery mechanism for a bioagent.  One of these operatives was Mohammad Atta, a 9/11 ringleader and a successful hijacker on 9/11, who was trying to get a loan to buy a crop duster in Florida but was rejected.  Another was Zacarias Moussaoui, caught before 9/11 and later convicted in court on 9/11 related terrorism charges, thought to maybe be designated as a hijacker (possibly of another plane that was supposed to hit the White House) but also perhaps, instead, to have been tasked with carrying out other attacks after 9/11.  An associate of Moussaoui’s who entered the U.S. with him was detained in possession of biology textbooks while Moussaoui had in his possession crop-dusting aircraft manuals.

After the 9/11 attacks, U.S. forces in Afghanistan would destroy what U.S. intelligence officials said was an under-construction facility to produce anthrax in Kandahar, and anthrax powder was found in Zawahiri’s house in the country.  Zawahiri had even recruited a Pakistani government scientist to work on advancing al-Qaeda’s bioweapons program at that Kandahar lab.  Extremist nuclear scientists in Pakistan also formed an NGO (with a former head of Pakistan’s notoriously-extremist-sympathizing ISI intelligence service and a former head of Pakistan’s Khushab nuclear reactor on its board) that was a front for supporting terrorists, including al-Qaeda and, specifically, bioterrorism plans were found in the organization’s office in Kabul shortly after 9/11.  Al-Qaeda also had a cell in Saudi Arabia that was planning biological attacks.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Qaeda in Iraq/Mesopotamia—which would later, during the Iraq War, evolve into ISIS—was even trying to develop, train with, and use bioweapons before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

More recently, in 2014, a laptop that belonged to an ISIS operative with an academic background in science was apparently recovered from an ISIS safehouse.  Files on the computer showed the group was putting energy into looking at developing bioweapons and carrying out bioterrorist attacks, with specific documents outlining techniques for testing agents and carrying out attacks in public areas, directing that biological agents be disseminated into the air using air conditioning systems, and explaining how to weaponize plague.  There was also discussion of theological justifications for biological attacks and of the advantages of biological weapons being cheap to create and able to kill large numbers of people.  While its “caliphate” was at its height, ISIS even established a lab in Mosul for chemical and biological weapons research and development that employed a team of scientific experts dedicated to the cause.

Additionally, Kenyan police stopped a anthrax plot with big ambitions in 2016 concocted by an ISIS-linked terror group.  And in 2018, a Lebanese citizen was arrested by anti-terrorism police in Italy for plotting a terrorist attack that would have included anthrax he was seeking to obtain, taking ISIS for inspiration.  Overall, European officials worry that ISIS attacks utilizing bioagents are being planned for European targets and could be executed soon, perhaps even using drones.

In the end, the novel-coronavirus should be a wakeup call for a number of reasons.  First, we can consider this something of a dry run for how we would handle a deliberate bioattack with even a mildly deadly infectious disease (and know that we failed and do must do much better).  We can also think of this as a wakeup call for the need to prepare far more for biodefense, either a bioterrorist attack or an attack launched with a bioweapon from a hostile state, because it is certain that those considering using bioweapons will take much hope and inspiration from the devastation COVID-19 has visited upon us, and even those on the fence will likely be inspired to dabble more with bioweapons.  Considering the dark history of bioweapons, biowarfare, and bioterrorism even before the coronavirus era, and considering the rapidly advancing technology that makes bioweapons research and development ever more accessible, we cannot continue with our current biodefense postures in a world where coronavirus is clearly a game-changer.

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

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