Putin, czar with no empire, needs military victory for his own survival

BY ROBYN DIXON AND CATHERINE BELTON

President Vladimir Putin likes to portray himself as a new czar like Peter the Great or Ivan III, the 15th-century grand prince known as the “gatherer of the Russian lands.” But Putin’s year-long war in Ukraine has failed so far to secure the lands he aims to seize, and in Russia, there is fear that he is leading his nation into a dark period of strife and stagnation — or worse.

Some in the elite also say the Russian leader now desperately needs a military victory to ensure his own survival. “In Russia, loyalty does not exist,” one Russian billionaire said.

Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began with hubris and a zeal to reshape the world order. But even as he suffered repeated military defeats — diminishing his stature globally and staining him with allegations of atrocities being committed by his troops — Putin has tightened his authoritarian grip at home, using the war to destroy any opposition and to engineer a closed, paranoid society hostile to liberals, hipsters, LGBTQ people, and, especially, Western-style freedom and democracy.

The Russian president’s squadrons of cheerleaders swear he “simply cannot lose” in Ukraine, thanks to Russia’s vast energy, wealth, nuclear weapons and sheer number of soldiers it can throw onto the battlefield. These supporters see Putin rising supreme from Ukraine’s ashes to lead a swaggering nation defined by its repudiation of the West — a bigger, more powerful version of Iran.

But business executives and state officials say Putin’s own position at the top could prove precarious as doubts over his tactics grow among the elite. For many of them, Putin’s gambit has unwound 30 years of progress made since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin’s vision of Russia horrifies many oligarchs and state officials, who confide that the war has been a catastrophic error that has failed in every goal. But they remain paralyzed, fearful and publicly silent.

“Among the elite, though they understand it was a mistake, they still fear to do anything themselves,” said the only Russian diplomat to publicly quit office over the war, Boris Bondarev, formerly brd at Russia’s U.N. mission in Geneva. “Because they have gotten used to Putin deciding everything.”

Some are sure that Putin can maintain his hold on power without a victory, as long as he keeps the war going and wears down Western resolve and weapons supplies. For anyone in the elite to act, Bondarev said, “there needs to be an understanding that Putin is leading the country to total collapse. While Putin is still bombing and attacking, people think the situation is not so bad. There needs to be a full military loss, and only then will people understand they need to do something.”

What all camps seem to agree on is that Putin shows no willingness to give up. As Russia’s battlefield position deteriorated in recent months, he escalated repeatedly, shuffling his commanders, unleashing brutal airstrikes on civilian infrastructure and threatening to use nuclear weapons.

Now, with his troops reinforced by conscripts and convicts and poised to launch new offensives, the 70-year-old Russian leader needs a win to maintain his own credibility. “Putin needs some success to demonstrate to society that he is still very successful,” a senior Ukrainian security official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss politically sensitive issues.

MOSCOW’S GLITTERING INDIFFERENCE

As the casualties mount in Ukraine, filling graveyards across Russia’s provinces, Moscow’s glittering facade conveys a hedonistic, indifferent city. Its restaurants and cafes are crammed with glamorous young patrons sporting European designer wear, taking selfies on the latest iPhones, and ordering truffle pizza or duck confit to be washed down with trendy cocktails.

But beneath, Putin is creating a militarized, nationalistic society, fed on propaganda and obsessed with an “existential” forever war against the United States and NATO. So far, no one in officialdom has had the nerve to object — not publicly, at least.

“Whatever he says, it’s taken like this,” the editor in chief of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Konstantin Remchukov, said with a loud snap of his fingers.

RUSSIANS ABANDON WARTIME RUSSIA IN HISTORIC EXODUS

Since Putin rose to the presidency in 2000, his legitimacy has been brd on his popularity and stature among the elite, buttressed by his ability to instill fear by stripping some of their assets and throwing others into prison. The defeats in Ukraine have dented him.

The president seems forever haunted by the moment when as a young KGB officer serving in Dresden, the Soviet Union “gave up its position in Europe” as the Berlin Wall collapsed. And his pursuit of the empire lost with the subsequent Soviet collapse is throwing his country back into a gray, repressive and isolated past. For Putin, his efforts are a quest to right what he has perceived as historical wrongs. In his near-maniacal revisionist view, Ukraine has always belonged to Russia.

But even if Putin somehow forces Ukraine into capitulating and ceding occupied territory, those in the elite who lean toward a more liberal society stand to lose the most. Punitive Western economic sanctions are likely to remain in place, and some oligarchs undoubtedly would be pressed to pay to rebuild Russia’s new lands. Some analysts predict a sweeping purge of oligarchs and others deemed insufficiently patriotic.

Already, there are shocking glimpses of Putin’s new Russia: A couple in a Krasnodar restaurant were arrested, handcuffed and forced to the floor after being denounced to the police by an eavesdropper who heard them quietly bemoaning the war.

An older woman on a bus was dragged from her seat, thrown to the floor and roughly pushed out the door by passengers because she called Russia an empire that sends men to fight in cheap rubber boots.

Videos purportedly show members of the Kremlin-approved but technically illegal mercenary Wagner Group executing “traitors” in beatings with a sledgehammer.

Former central bank official Alexandra Prokopenko described an atmosphere in which officials fear prison amid intimidation by the security services.

“It is a concern for every member of the Russian elite,” said Prokopenko, who is in exile in the West. “It’s a question of survival for high-ranked, mid-ranked officials who all remained in Russia. People are quite terrified about their safety now.” She said former colleagues still at the bank told her they saw “no good exit for Russia right now.”

TWO-PRONGED BACKLASH

Increasingly isolated, Putin faces growing resentment from hawkish nationalists who say he should have acted more radically to seize Kyiv and from a liberal-leaning faction that thinks the war is a grave error. He has tightened his inner circle to a few hard-liners and sycophants, ruthlessly eliminated opposition rivals and set up a formidable security apparatus to safeguard against any threat.

Pro-Kremlin analysts see escalation — pumping in more soldiers and ramping up military production — as the path to victory. That appears to fit Putin’s character.

But no one really knows the current military goal or what Putin might consider a victory. Some say he will settle for seizing all of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, where Russia began fomenting separatist war in 2014. Others say he has not given up his designs on taking Kyiv and toppling the government.

In September, Ukraine’s first big successful counteroffensive shone a harsh spotlight on Putin’s instincts in a crisis: a bullish doubling-down designed to sever any path to compromise. His illegal claim to annex four Ukrainian territories, despite not controlling them militarily, was a burn-all-bridges tactic meant to draw sharp new red lines on the map of Ukraine.

His speech on the occasion of the supposed annexations, in the Grand Kremlin Palace’s St. George Hall, reached a new hysterical pitch over what he called the West’s “outright Satanism” and its desire to gobble Russia up and destroy its values.

“They do not want us to be free; they want us to be a colony,” he said. “They do not want equal cooperation; they want to loot. They do not want to see us a free society, but a mass of soulless slaves.” He has repeatedly described a quest to establish a multipolar world in which Russia regains its rightful place among the great powers.

DUTCH PROBE IMPLICATES PUTIN IN 2014 DOWNING OF MALAYSIAN PASSENGER JET

Sometimes, Putin sharply rebukes one of his officials about failures, leaving others fearful of public humiliation. He elevates and rewards thuggish figures, such as Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and the Wagner founder, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, but swiftly curbs them if they step out of line.

At times, Putin seems oddly out of touch with the realities of his war. Days after pro-war bloggers reported last week that dozens of Russian tanks and many soldiers were lost in a failed attack on Vuhledar involving Russia’s elite 155th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade, Putin boasted to journalists that the “marine infantry is working as it should — right now — fighting heroically.”

Meanwhile, a profound pessimism has settled on the country. Those who believe the war is lost run the gamut from liberals to hard-liners. “It seems it is impossible to win a political or military victory,” one state official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment. “The economy is under huge stress and can’t be long under such a situation.”

PATRIOTIC DEATH CULT

Publicly, Putin has voiced no concern about Russia’s brutal killings of civilians in cities including Bucha, Mariupol and Izyum, while his propaganda machine dismisses news of such atrocities as “fakes.” The International Criminal Court is investigating war crimes in Ukraine, and the European Parliament has called for a special court on Russia’s crime of aggression, the invasion of Ukraine.

But pro-Kremlin analyst Sergei Markov said talk of war crimes prosecutions only stiffened Putin’s resolve.

“What will Putin’s response be? Fighting — and it doesn’t matter what the price will be,” Markov said.

Kremlin image makers convey Putin’s power in staged events where he looks the archetypal dictator — often a lone figure in the distance placing flowers at monuments to past military heroes. His staged appearances with purported ordinary Russians seem scripted and artificial, with participants simpering in nervous awe. The same faces keep appearing in different settings — dressed as soldiers, fishers or churchgoers, raising questions about how many real people the President ever meets.

As the war casualties pile up, Putin and top propagandists extol a fatalistic cult of death, arguing that it is better to die in Russia’s war than in a car accident, from alcoholism or from cancer.

A RUSSIAN MUSICIAN MOUNTS A MODEST ANTIWAR PROTEST AND PAYS THE PRICE

“One day we will all leave this world,” Putin told a group of carefully selected women portrayed as mothers of mobilized soldiers in November, many of them actually pro-Kremlin activists or relatives of officials. “The question is how we lived. With some people, it is unclear whether they live or not. It is unclear why they die, because of vodka or something else. When they are gone, it is hard to say whether they lived or not. Their lives passed without notice.”

But a man who died in war “did not leave his life for nothing,” he said. “His life was important.”

Venerable rights organizations such as Memorial and the Sakharov Center have been forced to close, while respected political analysts, musicians, journalists and former Soviet political prisoners have been declared “foreign agents,” Many have fled or been jailed.

As sanctions slowly bite, prices soar and businesses struggle to adapt, economists and business executives predict a long economic decline amid isolation from Western technology, ideas and value chains.

“The economy has entered a long period of Argentinization,” a second Russian billionaire said. “It will be a long slow degradation. There will be less of everything.”

RUSSIA OUSTS DIRECTOR OF ELITE MUSEUM AS KREMLIN DEMANDS PATRIOTIC ART

Through the war, Putin has profoundly changed Russia, clamping down harder on liberties, prompting hundreds of thousands of Russians to emigrate. In the future, pro-democracy liberals will not be tolerated, analysts say.

“The pro-West opposition will be gone,” Markov said.

“Whoever doesn’t support the special military operation is not part of the people,” he said, using Putin’s term for the war.

But the second Russian billionaire said he was convinced that one day, somehow, the country would become “a normal European nonimperial country” and that his children, who have U.S. passports, would return. “I want them to return to a free Russia, of course,” he said. “To a free and democratic Russia.”

Wagner’s Prigozhin listed as passenger in Russian plane crash that killed 10

peeked into the tag only to find out some people had no freaking idea what the Wagner Group actually is so. well.look

its founder and leader, Yevgeniy Prigozhin (the one who announced the attempted coup), is a run-of-the-mill Kremlin bandit, a businessman under the nickname of "Putin's cook" because his companies manage his catering; he also owns the company responsible for providing food to public schools, and multiple investigations were made into the cases of food poisoning in schoolchildren from said provisions, and into his corruption. Prigozhin's response was to put pressure on the opposition investigators and journalists in an attempt to hush them, both legally and (allegedly) via anonymously threatening their safety

up until 2022, Prigozhin would also sue every journalist who connected him to the Wagner Group for libel. come the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Prigozhin stepped forward, proudly claiming his ownership of the group and throwing large numbers of mercs into the war on Ukraine, seeing it as an opportunity to become a known political figure

the Wagner Group has been active in Ukraine since 2014. it assisted the russian army in Syria and brutally murdered Muhammad Taha Ismal Al-Abdulla, filming the murder and subsequent desecration of his corpse on camera. it has been active in multiple African countries, serving the Kremlin's interests on the continent

since the start of the full-scale invasion, Prigozhin has been touring russian colonies and prisons and enlisting inmates, promising full amnesty to those who join the Group in the invasion. this on one hand uses incarcerated people as a source of cannon fodder and on the other unleashes people accused of violent crimes onto the civilians of occupied Ukranian territories

the Wagner Group is known for "punishing" its deserters on camera to "send a message" to the rest of the forces, specifically spreading a video of one of them getting "executed" with a sledgehammer

The Wagner Group is a violent, war-hungry unit, and its leader boasts being on "the people's" side, but he is very much of the elite he now badmouths and threatens. The best thing that could've come out of the whole attempt would be more sticks in the wheels of the russian army, buying Ukranian forces more advantage, but this whole thing was never going to be a "revolution"

Also, while I (hopefully) have your attention, consider donating to Ukranian organizations working on the ground to keep their people safe and free:

Solidarity Collectives

Come Back Alive

Livyj Bereh

Marsh Zhinok

Wow, a perfect example of "tell me you're a piece of shit with one single post"

Let's welcome our latest addition to the blocklist,

@ tentacion3099

Some more examples from their blog:

Note the Yevgeniy Prigozhin interview. Yes THAT Prigozhin.Of the Wagner group fame. Apparently OP thinks a neonazi mercenary who committed war crimes in Ukraine is a good source on Jews and Ukraine.

i'm not religious but i can pray so that yevgeniy prigozhin dies

In late January, with his mercenary forces dying by the thousands in a fight for the ruined city of Bakhmut, Wagner Group owner Yevgeniy Prigozhin made Ukraine an extraordinary offer.

Prigozhin said that if Ukraine’s commanders withdrew their soldiersfrom the area around Bakhmut, he would give Kyiv information on Russian troop positions, which Ukraine could use to attack them. Prigozhin conveyed the proposal to his contacts in Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, with whom he has maintained secret communications during the course of the war, according to previously unreported U.S. intelligence documents leaked on the group-chat platform Discord.

[...]

Two Ukrainian officials confirmed that Prigozhin has spoken several times to the Ukrainian intelligence directorate, known as HUR. One official said that Prigozhin extended the offer regarding Bakhmut more than once, but that Kyiv rejected it because officials don’t trust Prigozhin and thought his proposals could have been disingenuous.

In the summer of 2018, a little-known Russian journalist arrived in Washington with a bold plan to test the limits of U.S. freedom of speech. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election was in full swing, and the media pulsated with stories of alleged Russian spies, collusion, and plots to undermine U.S. democracy.

Alexander Malkevich was the latest emissary of Russia’s hopes for poisoning U.S. political discourse, this time using a news site called USA Really, tied to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the wealthy ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin behind the infamous social media “troll factory” and sponsor of the mercenary outfit Wagner Group. Unlike previous Russian influence efforts, Malkevich spoke openly about his plans, which included opening an office a block from the White House. “I want to make this media interesting and very much involved in the everyday life of Americans,” he told Foreign Policy in an interview at the time. “And maybe, in some years I can be a Pulitzer Prize winner.”

His lofty ambitions were short-lived. Malkevich was ejected from his office—a WeWork—just hours after he arrived. Facebook shuttered the publication’s page within a day of its launch, and his attempts to hold a protest in front of the White House sputtered out. After being sanctioned by the Treasury Department later that same year, his days of headline-grabbing sojourns to the United States were over.

It is tempting to write Malkevich off as a bumbling provocateur. But his career trajectory is a microcosm of Russia’s move-fast-and-break-things approach to its overseas influence operations. Despite his inauspicious start, Malkevich was back in the headlines a year later after founding the Foundation for National Values Protection, which the State Department has described as seeking to “facilitate global influence operations on behalf of Yevgeniy Prigozhin.” Malkevich trained his sights on Africa, where political instability, suspicion of former colonial powers, and a lack of oversight from social media giants provided an opening for Moscow to expand its reach through official and unofficial means. The State Department’s Rewards for Justice program now offers a $10 million bounty for information about Malkevich and his activities.

Malkevich is just a single node in a worldwide influence network engineered by the Kremlin and its allies over the past decade, as Russia has assiduously sought to reestablish itself as a player of consequence on the world stage and undermine the West. The end goal has been clear from the start: “To end American primacy in world affairs,” said Anna Borshchevskaya, a senior fellow with the Washington Institute. The toolkit has spanned conventional statecraft such as diplomacy, espionage, and the leveraging of natural resources to more shadowy means including covert political interference, cozying up to the far right, and the use of mercenary groups.

It’s always been tough to determine just how successful Moscow has been as it claws at countries’ weak seams, be it racial tensions, inequality, or xenophobia. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has put these influence efforts to the test as Moscow seeks to undermine support for Kyiv, advance its own narrative about the war, and bolster its relationships in the global south in search of new markets to shore up its heavily sanctioned economy.

The question of whether it has worked will likely be answered in the coming months as the war drags into winter and Kyiv’s Western partners grapple with spiraling energy prices, stiff economic headwinds, and an uphill battle to win hearts and minds in the developing world. It will have profound implications for Ukraine and the rest of the world.

“What we’re seeing now play out are all these strands coming together,” said Angela Stent, author of Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest. “Given the situation Russia is in, in terms of its poor performance in this war, it’s quite remarkable that they still maintain all of these partnerships and relationships with different countries and groups.”

Toward the end of his second term as Russian president, Putin took to the stage in the ballroom of the resplendent Hotel Bayerischer Hof at the 2007 Munich security conference to deliver a speech that would reverberate for years. Taking aim directly at the United States, he decried a world where “there is one master, one sovereign.” It was the clearest iteration at that time of the Russian leader’s darkening worldview, but it wasn’t until he returned to the presidency in 2012 that he began in earnest to try to reshape the global order.

While the overarching goal of Russia’s foreign policy has remained steadfast over the past decade, its means have been marked by flexibility, relentlessness, and at times a sadistic creativity. Earlier this year in Mali, the French military captured drone footage of Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group staging a mass grave using real bodies at the site of a former French military base before attempting to use social media to pin the blame on Paris.

In the West, as diplomatic ties soured in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Moscow has relied on a spectrum of underhanded tactics to curry favor and sow division, from attempting to overthrow the government of Montenegro in 2016 to leaking thousands of emails from French President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign on the eve of his election in 2017.

“Across the board, there have been different wake-up calls,” said Kyllike Sillaste-Elling, undersecretary for political affairs at the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Since 2014, Russia has spent more than $300 million in covert financing of political parties across four continents, according to a U.S. intelligence assessment released earlier this year. Such sums are a drop in the ocean by the multibillion-dollar standards of U.S. elections, but they have the potential to go a lot further amid comparatively lean election spending elsewhere. In Europe, Moscow has sought to inflame political sore spots from Catalonia’s independence aspirations to tensions over immigration, all while courting fringe political figures on the far left and right. Before they were banned by the European Union in March in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s state-backed broadcasters RT and Sputnik put out a steady drumbeat of disinformation, amplified by constellations of fake social media accounts.

The shadowy nature of Russia’s exploits makes it difficult for Western countries to respond in kind. “The activities themselves are often not serious enough for you to respond in any sort of major way, if you don’t want to risk a really dangerous escalation, but it’s also not so insignificant that you can do nothing,” said Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

In Germany, the cozy relationship between the Kremlin and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder gave rise to a new word—“Schröderization”—which has been used by analysts to describe the Kremlin’s efforts to win over European elites. As one of his last acts as chancellor in 2005, Schröder signed a deal giving the green light for the construction of the first Nord Stream gas pipeline, which runs from Russia to Germany, bypassing Ukraine and the Baltic states. Shortly after leaving office, Schröder received a call from Putin himself asking him to become chairman of the company overseeing the pipeline’s construction, and he later went on to work as a lobbyist for the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

The project would go on to become a lightning rod within Europe and in Germany’s relationship with the United States, where successive administrations argued that the pipeline would leave Europe dangerously dependent on Russian gas while depriving Ukraine of much-needed transit revenues. After years of fraught diplomacy, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz suspended completion of the pipeline in February when it became clear that Putin was on a war footing. But even as the pipeline lay unused, it was still utilized to send a message to Europe when a series of explosions ripped through both Nord Stream 1 and 2 in September, underscoring the vulnerability of the continent’s critical infrastructure in its northern seas. Although investigations are ongoing, suspicion quickly fell on Moscow.

“There’s one thing to bear in mind, and that’s that the Russians are opportunistic,” Braw said. “It’s highly unlikely that eight, 10, 12 years ago they thought, ‘We’ll build a pipeline, and then in the year 2022, we’ll sabotage it.’”

As tensions rose with the West following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Moscow sought to deepen its relationships with countries beyond the West, using a hybrid approach that included more conventional diplomacy as well as a suite of shadowy tactics. Facing Western sanctions, Moscow bolstered its ties with China while the Russian military’s intervention in the Syrian civil war in support of embattled President Bashar al-Assad in 2015 heralded Russia’s return to the chess board of the Middle East. “Putin was determined not to let the United States topple another dictator,” Borshchevskaya said.

Analysts will often describe Putin’s approach to his overseas exploits as playing a weak hand well, a maxim best exemplified by Russia’s decadelong effort to make inroads in Africa. By conventional metrics such as trade, investment, or foreign aid, Russia’s presence on the continent pales in comparison to those of the United States, China, and Europe. But by lending out its Wagner mercenaries and its expertise on political interference, Moscow has made itself indispensable to authoritarian regimes and power players from Libya to the Central African Republic, giving Russia outsized influence. In Africa’s Sahel region, which has experienced seven coups in just over two years, Russian disinformation networks tied to Prigozhin have sought to co-opt conversations about decolonization to stoke animosity toward France, the former colonial power in the region, while simultaneously calling for a greater Russian presence.

“It’s very cheap, and it’s a very good return on investment,” said a French official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

There was a moment in the spring, as Russia pounded Ukrainian cities with missile strikes, when it seemed like the Kremlin’s years of trying to weave a global web of influence had amounted to nothing. In a rare display of global unity, 141 countries voted to condemn the Russian invasion at an emergency meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, while Europe underwent in months the kind of shifts that usually take a generation. Germany halted completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and vowed to ramp up its defense spending. Sweden and Finland abandoned their long-standing policies of nonalignment and applied to join NATO, while the EU put on a unified front to impose a series of increasingly punitive sanctions on Moscow and welcome millions of Ukrainian refugees.

“If the [General Assembly] vote tells you anything, and if the state of European policy tells you anything, it seems like in the end you can have all the influence networks you want, [but] if you do something so egregious, that network isn’t going to be able to deliver because it’s so beyond the pale,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist with the Rand Corporation.

Perhaps the single most glaring failure of Moscow’s efforts to bend a country to its will is Ukraine itself. With extensive shared historical, linguistic, and cultural ties, Ukraine, in theory, should have been the easiest country for Moscow to woo. For decades, Russia invested heavily in maintaining a network of proxies at all levels of Ukrainian society, while the country’s intelligence agencies were widely reported to be infiltrated by Moscow’s spies. But the more stifling the Kremlin’s embrace became, the more Ukrainians pulled away, leading Russia to resort to an all-out invasion in a bid to permanently bring Kyiv to heel.

“If you have to keep invading your neighbor to get them to do what you want, it’s a sign of the weakness of your other means of statecraft,” Charap said. Not only did Russia fail to keep Ukraine within its orbit using a whole suite of influence and coercion tactics, it catastrophically misread how the country would respond to an invasion, as the opening phase of Russia’s military campaign appears to have been predicated on the assumption that Kyiv would fold within a matter of days.

Heading into the winter, Europe faces spiking energy prices, high inflation, and the possibility of a recession. Protesters have already taken to the streets across Europe in response to the spiraling cost of living. Many analysts fear that such tensions could provide an inroad for Russia to sow discord and undermine European support for Ukraine.

The election of a far-right coalition government in Italy, composed of parties with a history of being sympathetic toward Moscow, served as a stark reminder of how the consensus-based decision-making style of the EU and NATO could be easily disrupted by just one member, although new Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has vociferously supported Ukraine. For now, at least, current and former European officials are bullish about the fractious bloc’s ability to hang together.

“Actually, I’m quite optimistic,” said Mikk Marran, the former head of Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. “I’m quite optimistic. I think that the West has been considerably or quite united.”

When it comes to the rest of the world, current and former Western officials see an uphill battle in efforts to isolate Putin as the global south contends with rising food and energy prices sparked by a war in which they have no immediate stake. While Biden called for Russia to be expelled from the G-20 group of the world’s leading economies in March, Putin received a standing invitation to the group’s meeting in Bali this week as its host, Indonesian President Joko Widodo, tried to tamp down tensions over the war.

“It seems like a lot of this so far has worked out,” Stent said. “What it hasn’t done is help their military performance, but it has enabled them to maintain a global influence and a global presence, which is not necessarily warranted by the nature of their economy and their form of government.”

While few countries beyond the global gallery of rogues—Belarus, Iran, North Korea—have openly sided with Moscow, many have proven willing to compartmentalize the war from their wider relationship with Russia. India and China abstained from both U.N. General Assembly votes condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine, while Beijing’s diplomats and state media have echoed the Kremlin’s talking points about the war. As Western nations have frantically sought to cut their dependence on Russian oil, Asian economies, most notably India, have capitalized on heavy resource discounts by Moscow to feed their refineries.

In the Middle East and North Africa, where rising grain and oil prices have been most acutely felt, governments have by and large sought to refrain from taking sides. “The region wanted to stay neutral, even American allies,” Borshchevskaya said. This was most glaring in the decision of the oil cartel OPEC, led by Saudi Arabia, to cut oil production, driving prices higher and blunting the impact of sanctions on Russia’s economy. “You can also see that other American allies were simply too nervous or too afraid to anger Russia,” she said.

In Africa, where Russia has sought to expand its reach in recent years, Moscow’s narrative that the war in Ukraine is a conflict between East and West has prevailed, said Joseph Siegle, director of research at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. After being ousted from Europe in the wake of the war, Russia’s overseas state broadcaster, RT, announced plans to set up its first African bureau in South Africa.

Just over half of the countries in Africa voted to condemn the invasion at the United Nations. For those that didn’t, there is a spectrum of considerations at play. “There’s the obvious reality that you have some regimes that are actively colluding with the Russians, like in the Central African Republic or Mali, and they’re highly indebted to and compromised by Russia,” Siegle said, while others, from Uganda to Guinea, would likely welcome a greater Russian presence.

And then there are the countries that see little gain in crossing one of the world’s more disruptive powers. “From the perspective of many African leaders, they don’t gain a lot from condemning Russia. But if they condemn Russia, there is a cost to that, and Russia has been clear that it will hold a grudge with those who vote against it,” Siegle said.

Wagner Group financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin clarified that Wagner is building the Zasechnaya Line after having changed its name from Wagner Line because “many people in [Russia] do not like the activity of private military company Wagner.” Private military companies are illegal in Russia.

ISW always adds that catty little note

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 16, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 17, 2023

Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky has been on a tour of visits with European leaders. On May 13 he met with Pope Francis, who offered help finding the Ukrainian children kidnapped by the Russians and returning them to Ukraine, and with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The next day he met with German chancellor Olaf Scholz before flying to France to meet with President Emmanuel Macron. On Monday, Zelensky made a surprise visit to the United Kingdom, where he met with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. The European Parliament and the Foundation of the International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen awarded the Ukrainian people and Zelensky the Charlemagne Prize “for their fight for freedom and democracy against the unjustified Russian war of aggression. This award underscores the fact that Ukraine is part of Europe and that its people and its government—headed by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy—support and defend European values, and therefore deserve encouragement to enter swiftly into accession negotiations with the European Union.” Leaks linked to Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira have revealed a dynamic landscape. On the basis of those leaks, on May 13 the Washington Post reported that Zelensky’s calm public demeanor is different from his private positions, which have called for a much more aggressive stance toward Russia. On May 14 the Washington Post reported on a leaked document revealing that Yevgeniy Prigozhin had offered in January to tell Ukraine where Russian forces were positioned if it would pull back from the front in Bakhmut, where Prigozhin’s Wagner Group mercenaries were getting pounded. On Sunday, as Zelensky was receiving promises of more European support, Ukraine said it had captured more than ten key Russian positions near Bakhmut. Last week, Germany announced its largest aid package to Ukraine since the war began—a package of nearly $3 billion—and U.S. Abrams tanks arrived in Germany ahead of schedule for training Ukrainian troops. Rumors are swirling about the health of Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko, one of Putin’s key allies, who has not been seen recently and has skipped important public events. In July, leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will gather in Vilnius, Lithuania, to discuss strengthening the organization’s defenses against Russia, and the relationship of NATO to Ukraine. Meanwhile, the U.S. and the European Council have been hosting peace talks between Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia and President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan after Russian peacekeepers have become ineffective. And U.S. Deputy Secretary for Management and Resources Richard Verma is currently on a trip to Poland, Moldova, and Romania to “emphasize the United States’ commitment to our European Allies and partners, Transatlantic security, and our shared democratic values” even as Russia seeks to destabilize Moldova. Elections in Turkey have produced a runoff between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his main challenger, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Kilicdaroglu has promised to move Turkey closer to Europe than would Erdogan, who has swung toward Russia and authoritarianism. Turkey is a member of NATO, and Erodgan has ruled it for two decades, eroding its democracy. Opponents of Erdogan have coalesced behind Kilicdaroglu, who is popular enough that he managed to get within striking distance of Erdogan despite the leader’s attempt to rig the vote. Expert on Turkish foreign policy and fellow at the Brookings Institution Asli Aydintasbas told Jared Malsin and Elvan Kivilcim of the Wall Street Journal: “A Turkey that tilts a little more toward Europe or NATO, even if it’s not a full pivot, that would be a huge change for the global balance of power, particularly with Russia’s war on Ukraine.”

U.S. senior officials are in Detroit this week for one of a series of meetings of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, a group of 21 countries with nearly 40 percent of the global population— almost 3 billion people— and nearly 50 percent of global trade.  APEC members account for more than 60 percent of U.S. goods exports and seven of our top ten overall trading partners. Hosting APEC this year was supposed to show “U.S. economic leadership and multilateralism in the Indo-Pacific and highlight the direct impact of international economic engagement on prosperity here in the United States,” an illustration of the Biden administration’s outreach in the Indo-Pacific.  But just as Biden’s attempts to counter Russia and China and shore up democracy globally are bearing fruit, he has to cut short his visit to Australia and Papua New Guinea, where he was scheduled to travel after this weekend’s meeting of the Group of Seven (G7) in Hiroshima, Japan. The G7 is a forum of the leaders of France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Italy, and Canada, along with the European Union, to discuss economic and governmental policies. The debt ceiling crisis is forcing Biden to come home early rather than continue to strengthen ties in the region. Today, more than 140 leaders of the biggest U.S. companies published an open letter to the president and congressional leaders “to emphasize the potentially disastrous consequences of a failure by the federal government to meet its obligations.” They noted that when the government approached a default in 2011 under similar circumstances, the U.S. lost its AAA bond rating (which it has never regained), the stock market lost 17% of its value for more than a year, and “Moody’s reported that the heightened uncertainty from this crisis resulted in 1.2 million fewer jobs, a 0.7 percentage point higher unemployment rate, and a $180 billion smaller economy than it otherwise would have—dire impacts that occurred without an actual default.” House Republicans, led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), are refusing to raise the debt ceiling, which is a limit to how much money the Treasury can raise to pay existing obligations, in order to extract budget cuts they cannot get through the normal process of legislation. While Republicans claim to be concerned about spending, it is notable that they have flat-out refused to help reduce the deficit by closing tax loopholes that would raise $40 billion. They also refuse to consider any measure that would raise taxes, focusing solely on spending cuts. Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity, a group funded by billionaire Charles Koch, has rolled out an ad campaign putting pressure on Biden and Democratic senators in the battleground states of Arizona, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wisconsin to give in to Republican demands rather than insist on the same clean debt ceiling Congress passed three times under Trump.

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

In late January, with his mercenary forces dying by the thousands in a fight for the ruined city of Bakhmut, Wagner Group owner Yevgeniy Prigozhin made Ukraine an extraordinary offer.

Prigozhin said that if Ukraine’s commanders withdrew their soldiers from the area around Bakhmut, he would give Kyiv information on Russian troop positions, which Ukraine could use to attack them. Prigozhin conveyed the proposal to his contacts in Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, with whom he has maintained secret communications during the course of the war, according to previously unreported U.S. intelligence documents leaked on the group-chat platform Discord.

Prigozhin has publicly feuded with Russian military commanders, who he furiously claims have failed to equip and resupply his forces, which have provided vital support to Moscow’s war effort. But he is also an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who might well regard Prigozhin’s offer to trade the lives of Wagner fighters for Russian soldiers as a treasonous betrayal.

The leaked document does not make clear which Russian troop positions Prigozhin offered to disclose.

Two Ukrainian officials confirmed that Prigozhin has spoken several times to the Ukrainian intelligence directorate, known as HUR. One official said that Prigozhin extended the offer regarding Bakhmut more than once, but that Kyiv rejected it because officials don’t trust Prigozhin and thought his proposals could have been disingenuous.

A U.S. official also cautioned that there are similar doubts in Washington about Prigozhin’s intentions. The Ukrainian and U.S. officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

In an interview with The Washington Post this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would not confirm the contacts with Prigozhin. “This is a matter of [military] intelligence,” he said. The Ukrainian leader also objected to airing classified information publicly and said he believed that the leaks had benefited Russia.

This is true entertainment.

Kremlin Disinformation Targets Africa's Health

The Kremlin's Disinformation Campaign in Africa

In a concerning revelation, the U.S. Department of State's Global Engagement Center has spotlighted the Kremlin's insidious efforts to spread disinformation in Africa. This initiative, under the guise of the "African Initiative," aims to tarnish the image of the United States and European countries while glorifying Russia's influence on the continent. Remarkably, the campaign has set its sights on discrediting U.S. and Western health initiatives in Africa, posing a significant threat to public health and safety.   The Actors Behind the Scenes Artem Sergeyevich Kureyev, the chief editor of the African Initiative, leads the charge from Moscow, orchestrating a wide-reaching network that includes African journalists and bloggers. This network is designed to amplify Russia's narrative, with the African Initiative already establishing footholds in Burkina Faso and Mali. Interestingly, some members have ties to the enterprises of the late Yevgeniy Prigozhin, hinting at the deep roots of this disinformation network.   A Cloak of Authenticity The African Initiative cunningly leverages social media and other digital platforms to disseminate its propaganda. By employing a mix of branded and unbranded accounts, such as "African Initiative" and "African Kalashnikov," the organization ensures its messages reach a wide audience. This strategy, coupled with the use of popular channels like "Smile and Wave," allows the Kremlin's disinformation to infiltrate communities under the guise of legitimacy.

The Global Threat of Disinformation

The Kremlin's actions in Africa mirror its previous endeavors in Latin America, where it sought to undermine support for Ukraine through covert disinformation campaigns. This pattern of foreign information manipulation not only sows division and disrupts national discourse but also endangers health security by targeting vital health information and initiatives. The international community must recognize the grave implications of such disinformation campaigns. By distorting reality and undermining trust in public health efforts, these initiatives threaten to exacerbate health crises in Africa and beyond. The immediate cessation of the Kremlin's disinformation campaign is imperative to safeguard the well-being of countless individuals across the continent.   Sources: THX News & US Department of State. Read the full article

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