Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

The European Union is rapidly running out of patience with Kyiv and is looking for the exits out of Ukraine, especially with the Israel-Hamas conflict going volcanic. 

 

U.S. and European officials have begun quietly talking to the Ukrainian government about what possible peace negotiations with Russia might entail to end the war, according to one current senior U.S. official and one former senior U.S. official familiar with the discussions.

The conversations have included very broad outlines of what Ukraine might need to give up to reach a deal, the officials said. Some of the talks, which officials described as delicate, took place last month during a meeting of representatives from more than 50 nations supporting Ukraine, including NATO members, known as the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, the officials said.

The discussions are an acknowledgment of the dynamics militarily on the ground in Ukraine and politically in the U.S. and Europe, officials said.

They began amid concerns among U.S. and European officials that the war has reached a stalemate and about the ability to continue providing aid to Ukraine, officials said. Biden administration officials also are worried that Ukraine is running out of forces, while Russia has a seemingly endless supply, officials said. Ukraine is also struggling with recruiting and has recently seen public protests about some of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s open-ended conscription requirements.

And there is unease in the U.S. government with how much less public attention the war in Ukraine has garnered since the Israel-Hamas war began nearly a month ago, the officials said. Officials fear that shift could make securing additional aid for Kyiv more difficult.

Some U.S. military officials have privately begun using the term “stalemate” to describe the current battle in Ukraine, with some saying it may come down to which side can maintain a military force the longest. Neither side is making large strides on the battlefield, which some U.S. officials now describe as a war of inches. Officials also have privately said Ukraine likely only has until the end of the year or shortly thereafter before more urgent discussions about peace negotiations should begin. U.S. officials have shared their views on such a timeline with European allies, officials said.

“Any decisions about negotiations are up to Ukraine,” Adrienne Watson, spokesperson for the National Security Council, said in a statement. “We are focused on continuing to stand strongly in support of Ukraine as they defend their freedom and independence against Russian aggression.”

An administration official also noted that the U.S. has participated with Ukraine in discussions of its peace summit framework but said the White House “is not aware of any other conversations with Ukraine about negotiations at the moment.”

President Joe Biden has been intensely focused on Ukraine’s depleting military forces, according to two people familiar with the matter.

"Manpower is at the top of the administration’s concerns right now,” one said. The U.S. and its allies can provide Ukraine with weaponry, this person said, “but if they don’t have competent forces to use them it doesn’t do a lot of good”

 

With Republicans in the US continuing to do Russia's bidding and cutting off Kyiv from additional military aid, the writing is on the wall at this point.  Heavy casualties have been inflicted on Ukraine and Russia, but Russia has more manpower and always did. The advantage in military tech that Ukraine had matters less and less now.

But let's be honest: any peace negotiations will result in the end of Ukraine. The Zelenskyy government will be removed, jailed, and probably executed, a satrap will be installed and a defacto Russian government will run the place, and frankly there's zero reason to trust Putin won't take the rest of the country -- or additional former Soviet republics -- in the years ahead.

The defense of Ukraine may be politically inconvenient, but we know what happens if they surrender: the end of the country, period.

Russian To Final Judgment

Vladimir Putin wasn't going to leave Wagner Group head Yevgeny Prigozhin around as a loose end much longer, not after Wagner's putative revolt against Putin's rule earlier this summer was shut down in under 24 hours and as widely expected, apparently that loose end got snipped Wednesday.

 

Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was on the passenger list of a plane that crashed in Russia's Tver region on Wednesday, according to the press service of Russia's Federal Air Transport Agency.

Ten people were killed in the crash near the town of Kuzhenkino, including Prigozhin.

"An investigation has been launched into the crash of the Embraer aircraft, which occurred tonight in the Tver region. According to the list of passengers, among them is the name and surname of Yevgeny Prigozhin," the department said in a statement.

Among the 10 dead were three crew members and seven passengers. The seven passengers were identified as Sergey Propustin, Evgeniy Makaryan, Aleksandr Totmin, Valeriy Chekalov, Dmitriy Utkin, Nikolay Matuseev and Prigozhin.

The crew was identified as Cmdr. Aleksei Levshin, co-pilot Rustam Karimov and flight attendant Kristina Raspopova.

The Federal Air Transport Agency said the plane was en route from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said in a statement, "The demonstrative elimination of Prigozhin and the Wagner command two months after the coup attempt is a signal from Putin to Russia's elites ahead of the 2024 elections."

President Joe Biden has been briefed on the plane crash in Russia, according to the White House.

Biden told reporters he didn't "know for a fact what happened, but I'm not surprised."

"There’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind, but I don’t know enough to know the answer," he told reporters in Lake Tahoe, where he is on vacation.

 

I mean it's possible that Prigozhin is still alive somewhere, but I'm pretty sure whatever plans Putin has for him at this point, he wishes he had been killed in a plane crash if that's the case. 

Russian officials are basically going SURE IS A SHAME HE'S DEAD, ALEXA PLAY BACK IN THE USSR right now, and I strongly doubt we'll ever really know what happened.

But Putin knows, and brother, he's not telling.

Last Call For Ukraine On The Membrane, Con't

Once again, Russia is threatening global nuclear holocaust if Ukraine is successful in retaking the Donbas region from Russia's already illegal invasion.

 

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Russia would “have to” use nuclear weapons if Ukrainian forces threaten Russian territory in their ongoing counteroffensive, in a message on his social media accounts Monday.

Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council and a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons during the war.

“Imagine if the offensive, which is backed by NATO, was a success and they tore off a part of our land, then we would be forced to use a nuclear weapon according to the rules of a decree from the president of Russia,” he said Monday.

“There would simply be no other option. So our enemies should pray for our [warriors’ success]. They are making sure that a global nuclear fire is not ignited,” he added.

Medvedev was apparently referring to Russia’s nuclear weapon use policy, signed by Putin in 2020, that says Moscow may deploy nuclear weapons Russia’s nuclear weapons “when the very existence of the state is put under threat.”

Russia has illegally annexed entire regions of eastern Ukraine amid the war, claiming they are now part of Russia’s homeland. Ukraine has also recently ramped up attacks on Crimea, which Russia has occupied since 2014, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv would increase attacks within Russia.

Medvedev was vague about what land would risk a nuclear response if lost. He has frequently telegraphed his threats of nuclear warfare, often bolstering actions or declarations from Putin, including when the current Russian president last fall said nuclear weapons were “not a bluff.”

Putin has doubled down on his nuclear blackmail in recent months, transferring tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus. The weapons have a smaller yield upon detonation than larger weapons of mass destruction, but they still have devastating capabilities.

Putin has in part justified the transfer of the tactical weapons because the U.S. holds low-yield nuclear bombs in European allied nations.

This is not the response of a rational nation-state, and it goes well beyond saber-rattling. This is going into the armory, collecting all the one- and two-handed swords, dropping them on a metal floor at the same time and recording the noise for future broadcasting in the same way that requests to Twitter's PR department are returned with the poop emoji.

It's a bluff, but one that should be accompanied with consequences by the global community.

Where On Earth Is Qin Gang?

Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang has been AWOL for the last month or so, and now he's officially been replaced in the post by his predecessor, Wang Yi.

 

China’s foreign minister Qin Gang was dramatically ousted on Tuesday after a prolonged absence from public view and replaced by his predecessor in a surprising and highly unusual shake-up of the country’s foreign policy leadership.

The sudden move, approved by the top decision-making body of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, comes as mystery has swirled around the fate of Qin, who has not been seen in public for a month.

Qin, 57, a career diplomat and trusted aide of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, had only been appointed foreign minister in December after serving as China’s ambassador to Washington.

No reason has yet been given for Qin’s departure but his predecessor Wang Yi will now step back into the role, authorities confirmed.

Wang, who was foreign minister from 2013 to 2022, now serves as director of the foreign affairs arm of the ruling Communist Party, a position which makes him China’s top diplomat.

The appointment of the new foreign minister occurred during a meeting of the China’s National People’s Congress Standing Committee meeting on Tuesday. The meeting was abruptly announced on Monday in a deviation from usual precedent.

The sudden move comes in the middle of a busy and important diplomatic period for China following its emergence from its pandemic isolation earlier this year and as Beijing tries to mend strained relationships with international partners.

The high-profile diplomat has not been seen in public since June 25, after he met with officials from Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Russia in Beijing.

In his last public appearance, a smiling Qin was seen walking side by side with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko, who flew to Beijing to meet with Chinese officials after a short-lived insurrection by the Wagner mercenary group in Russia.

 

That last paragraph is the real story, "Chinese Foreign Minister Goes Missing After Meeting With Russians." Whatever Qin's fate actually was, the Chinese aren't saying and neither are the Russians.

Just another reminder that for all the fiction about BRICS taking over as the new economic and military supergroup, the reality is that both China and Russia are in economic tatters right now, and the rest of BRICS is in even worse shape.

That of course includes their diplomatic corps.

Last Call For Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

According to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Ukraine forces have now retaken half of the territory claimed by Russia as the counteroffensive continues.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday that Ukraine has already retaken about 50 percent of the territory seized by Russia and that the counteroffensive is still in its “relatively early days.”

“In terms of what Russia sought to achieve, what Putin sought to achieve, they’ve already failed. They’ve already lost. The objective was to erase Ukraine from the map, to eliminate its independence, its sovereignty, to subsume it into Russia. That failed a long time ago,” Blinken told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in an interview on “GPS.”

“Now Ukraine is in a battle to get back more of the land that Russia seized from it. It’s already taken back about 50 percent of what was initially seized. Now they’re in a very hard fight to take back more,” Blinken said. “These are still relatively early days of the counteroffensive. It is tough.”

Blinken projected optimism about Ukraine’s prospects in the counteroffensive attack, which it launched after months of preparation to retake land that Russia seized. 

 

There's still a long way to go however.

 

While the counteroffensive started off strong, Ukraine’s progress has slowed as it has quickly gone through its munitions and has had to navigate Russian minefields.

“The Russians have put in place strong defenses, but I’m convinced that with the equipment and support they’ve received now from more than 50 countries, with the training that their forces have gotten, and many of the forces who’ve gotten that training have not yet been put fully into this fight — and maybe more than anything else, with the fact that unlike the Russians, Ukrainians are fighting for their land, for their future, for their country, for their freedom. I think that is the decisive element, and that’s going to play out,” Blinken said.

“But it will not play out over the next week or two. We’re still looking, I think, at several months,” he added. 

 

Remember that the EU has basically given Ukraine until September to show progress. This is definitely progress if Kyiv can keep and hold it. Besides, the EU has no choice if Moscow is blocking grain shipments out of Ukraine, and Putin this weekend all but threatened to invade Poland next.

President Vladimir Putin on Friday accused NATO member Poland of having territorial ambitions in the former Soviet Union, and said any aggression against Russia's neighbour and close ally Belarus would be considered an attack on Russia.

Moscow would react to any aggression against Belarus, which forms a loose "Union State" with Russia, "with all the means at our disposal", Putin told a meeting of his Security Council in televised remarks.

Warsaw's Security Committee decided on Wednesday to move military units to eastern Poland after members of the Russian Wagner mercenary force arrived in Belarus, the state-run news agency PAP quoted its secretary as saying on Friday.

Poland denies any territorial ambitions in Belarus.

In his remarks Putin had also stated that the western part of Poland was a gift from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to the country and that Russia would remind Poles about it.

In apparent reference to that, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki tweeted on Friday evening that "Stalin was a war criminal, guilty of the death of hundreds of thousands of Poles. Historical truth is not debatable."

"The ambassador of the Russian Federation will be summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs", he said.

On Thursday, Belarus said Wagner mercenaries had started to train Belarusian special forces at a military range just a few miles from the Polish border.

 

No wonder Putin is trying to distract everyone from how bad he's losing in Ukraine this summer.

Ukraine Grain In The Membrane

Russia says it will let the UN-brokered grain export deal for Ukraine through Black Sea ports expire in retaliation for a Ukraine security forces attack last week on the main land bridge to Crimea.

 

The announcement appeared to be the most serious blow yet to a year-old agreement that had been a rare example of fruitful talks between the warring nations, and had helped to alleviate part of the global fallout from Russia’s full-scale invasion. Ukraine is a major producer of grain and other foodstuffs, and the United Nations had warned that some countries in the Middle East and Africa faced famine if Kyiv could not export its goods via the Black Sea.

A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told journalists on Monday that the agreement was “suspended,” but added that the decision was not connected to the attack hours earlier on the Kerch Strait Bridge linking Russia to occupied Crimea. Russian officials blamed Ukraine for the bridge attack, but Kyiv has not taken responsibility.

Speaking about the grain agreement, Mr. Peskov said: “As soon as the Russian part is fulfilled, the Russian side will immediately return to the implementation of that deal.”

Russia has repeatedly complained about the agreement, which it considers one-sided in Ukraine’s favor. Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Monday issued a statement that emphasized its objections, including what it described as continued Ukrainian “provocations and attacks against Russian civilian and military facilities” in the Black Sea area, and said that the United Nations and Ukraine’s Western allies had not addressed Russian demands.

“Only upon receipt of concrete results, and not promises and assurances, will Russia be ready to consider restoring the ‘deal,’” the statement said.

The deal, known as the Black Sea Grain Initiative and brokered by the United Nations and Turkey, had been set to expire on Monday.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said he would speak to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia about the agreement and signaled hope that he would agree to rejoin it.

“Despite the statement today, I believe the president of the Russian Federation, my friend Putin, wants the continuation of this humanitarian bridge,” Mr. Erdogan told reporters in Istanbul.

Last week, the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, sent a letter containing proposals for Mr. Putin in an effort to meet Russia’s conditions for extending the deal. U.N. and Turkish negotiators spent the weekend awaiting a response from Moscow as the clock ticked down. Grain exports from Ukraine’s ports had dwindled almost to zero in the days before the deal expired.

The deal successfully eased shortages that resulted from blockades in the first months of the war, which caused global wheat prices to soar. It allowed Ukraine to restart the export of millions of tons of grain that had languished for months, and it has been renewed multiple times, most recently in May.

But Moscow has argued that while the deal has benefited Ukraine, Western sanctions have restricted the sale of Russia’s agricultural products. In an effort to address Russia’s demands, Mr. Guterres sent Mr. Putin proposals that he said would “remove hurdles affecting financial transactions” through Russia’s agricultural bank while allowing the Ukrainian grain shipments to continue.

In addition to its hope for smoother financial transactions, Russia has sought guarantees that would facilitate exports of its own grain and fertilizers, and the reopening of an ammonia pipeline that crosses Ukraine.

Ukraine has exported 32.8 million tons of grain and other food since the initiative began, according to U.N. data. Under the agreement, ships are permitted to pass by Russian naval vessels that in effect have blockaded Ukraine’s ports since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. The ships are inspected off the coast of Istanbul, in part to ensure they are not carrying weapons.

 

Wheat prices were up by more than 3% in the Chicago commodities market after the announcement. Grain prices are nowhere near where they were in Spring of 2022 when the Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered a massive rise in wheat and grain prices worldwide, but if this agreement is suspended for too long things could get very bad, very quickly.

We'll see what happens with Turkey mediating.

Last Call For Shutdown Countdown, Military Edition

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has lost control of his caucus again, with MAGA Republicans now threatening to sink the yearly Pentagon budget over abortion, gender-affirming health care, and Ukraine funding.

 

The House is set to vote on Thursday on whether to limit abortion access, bar transgender services and end diversity training for military personnel, part of a series of major changes that hard-right Republicans are seeking to the annual defense policy bill, including pulling U.S. aid to Ukraine.

The debate was unfolding after Speaker Kevin McCarthy capitulated late Wednesday to a small group of ultraconservative Republicans who had threatened to block the legislation, which provides a yearly pay raise for U.S. troops and sets Pentagon policy, if their proposals did not receive consideration.

Instead the House moved forward on Thursday, with the fate of the $886 billion bill still in doubt. The far right’s proposals to strip away military assistance for Ukraine stand little chance of passage given the strong bipartisan consensus behind the aid, but it was not clear whether a proposal to bar the Biden administration from sending cluster munitions might draw enough bipartisan backing to succeed.

And the measures imposing socially conservative policies on the Pentagon are extremely popular among Republicans. Should they pass, Democrats are likely to abandon the bill in droves, sinking it altogether.

Shortly before debate got underway, Representative Katherine M. Clark of Massachusetts, the Democratic whip, told CNN that there would be no support for the bill in her party if it contained the provision to bar the Pentagon from providing time off and reimbursement to service members traveling out of state to get an abortion or other reproductive health services.

It was an unusual situation for the defense bill, normally a bipartisan matter that is considered one of the few must-pass items to come before Congress. This year, with Republicans in control of the House, it has become a partisan battleground whose very survival is in doubt.

“It is outrageous that a tiny minority of MAGA extremists is dictating how we’re going to proceed,” Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts and the ranking member of the Rules Committee, said early Thursday morning, denouncing G.O.P. leaders for accepting the demands of what he called “a dozen far-right wing nuts.”

“When you have a razor-thin majority in one half or one branch of government, you don’t get to dictate every single amendment that comes to the floor,” Mr. McGovern said. “Democracy means compromise.”

Republican leaders, who can afford to lose no more than four votes on their side if Democrats remain united, have been counting on Democratic votes to help pass the defense bill. Some of them have expressed frustration with hard-right lawmakers’ demands to load the bill with a deeply conservative cultural agenda that could cost them those critical votes.

“We’ve got some people that want all the things that will cost us Democratic support, but won’t guarantee you yet, if they don’t get X, Y, or Z, that they will actually vote for final passage or even for a rule,” Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and chairman of the rules panel, said in an interview Wednesday.

Still, Mr. Cole said he would likely vote in favor of the socially conservative amendments.

The proposals have alienated some mainstream Republicans, including those from politically competitive districts. Their opposition could block the changes, potentially salvaging the defense measure.

If you think that the MAGA meatballs are going to be allowed to sink the defense bill, normally I'd say no way in hell.

But Kevin McCarthy's "in charge".

So who knows?  

Expect scores of amendments for the legislation, any which could sink the bill, and if Republicans manage to get things passed like stripping all assistance for Ukraine's defense or banning abortions for military personnel, well, things are going to get bad.

We'll see.

mage

Last Call For Ridin' With Biden, Eurotrip Edition

President Biden will be in Europe this week, visiting King Charles III of Britain on the way to a NATO summit in Lithuania where Ukraine and Sweden's entry into the group is the top billing.

President Joe Biden begins a five-day swing through Europe on Sunday with a focus on NATO gathering later this week in Lithuania, as allied countries look to boost support for Ukraine and the possibility of Sweden's approval to join the military alliance.

"We're looking forward to a busy week in Europe. And we're looking forward to the president being able to further solidify, strengthen and give momentum to the strong united alliance that has been standing up so effectively against Russian aggression," White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters Friday afternoon.

The president begins his trip in London, where he will meet King Charles III at Windsor Castle on July 10, the first time Biden will meet with the king since his coronation. First Lady Jill Biden represented the United States at the coronation with their granddaughter Finnegan in May.

"While in London, he will meet with King Charles at Windsor Castle and engage with a forum that will focus on mobilizing climate finance especially bringing private finance off the sidelines for clean energy deployment and adaptation in developing countries," Sullivan said Friday.

Biden is also expected to meet with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak -- the sixth time the leaders will meet in the past six months. They last met at the White House in June.

From London, Biden heads to Vilnius, Lithuania, to attend the 74th NATO summit -- which is expected to center around the alliance's support for Ukraine amid Russia's ongoing invasion.

"Ukraine will not be joining NATO coming out of this summit," Sullivan stressed, but he added there will be discussion of "what steps are necessary as it continues along its path."

"Vilnius will be an important moment on that pathway towards membership because the United States, our NATO allies and Ukraine will have the opportunity discuss the reforms that are still necessary for Ukraine to come up to NATO standards. So, this will, in fact, be a milestone. But Ukraine still has further steps it needs to take before membership in NATO," Sullivan added.

Ukraine's counteroffensive is underway and has allowed their forces to regain territory in the southeast, but President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he'd like it to be accomplished sooner. He's repeatedly asked the U.S. for F-16 fighter aircraft, which he says would give them an "opportunity to move faster."

The Biden administration had resisted that request but is now working with allies to train Ukrainians on F-16s and eventually help get them jets for the war.

The NATO summit also takes place with an additional member, Finland, after being approved in April, and a lingering question of whether Turkey and Hungary will drop objections to Sweden joining the alliance.

 

The real draw here is what Ankara wants from NATO to allow Sweden to join, because as Vox's Jen Kirby explains, it's complicated, man.

All NATO members must approve new ones, so Erdoğan’s opposition is effectively a veto. The Turkish president is not alone; Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is also holding out, but Hungary has signaled it won’t be the final roadblock. Erdoğan has continued to insist that Sweden has not done enough to crack down on people in Sweden with ties to Kurdish militants and other groups that Turkey has deemed terrorists.

Sweden has tried to appease Turkey, including passing a new anti-terrorism law that went into effect June 1. But Erdoğan’s definition of terrorists is pretty expansive, and often includes dissidents and others critical of his regime. And even if Turkey has a case, Sweden has to follow due process and rule of law and can’t just, say, extradite a bunch of people on a whim. A recent Quran-burning outside a Stockholm mosque has added to tensions, as Turkey interprets these as Sweden’s permissive attitude toward anti-Islamic protests rather than freedom of speech.

Sweden, alongside NATO allies, has been doing some furious diplomacy to try to persuade Turkey to approve Sweden’s bid. Swedish and Turkish officials talked Thursday, with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg saying they made “good progress” but issues remained unresolved. Stoltenberg will meet Monday with Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Erdoğan, a day before the Vilnius summit kicks off.

Until then, the impasse prevails. Which means the thing everyone really wanted to happen — that Sweden would join NATO, becoming its 32nd member — might not happen this week in Lithuania. This will deny NATO its unity narrative in Vilnius, something the alliance very much wants to project.

But it is more than just the storyline: Sweden is cooperating and planning closely with NATO, but it remains outside the alliance, and its mutual defense protections. If Erdoğan won’t budge here, after everyone shuttling to meet with Turkish officials, after Swedish concessions, and during the military alliance equivalent of the Super Bowl, it’s not clear when he would — which could leave Sweden stuck outside the alliance at time when NATO is trying to redefine and reinvigorate itself amid Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

 

The proverbial Siberian Kodiak in the room is of course Putin, whom Erdogan wants to keep on his good side as much as he wants to be buddies with Biden.  We'll see if diplomacy can get things moving this week in Vilnius.

P.S. Can you imagine the disaster that would be Trump in the White House right now at this juncture?

Sunday Long Read: Putin, On The Fritz?

In our Sunday Long Read this week, New Yorker Magazine's Keith Gessen asks if Putin's wounded regime has taken enough damage from last month's putative coup to ever collapse, or if this is all just another time of wishful thinking in a regime that will last decades to come.

For the past several months, I have been talking to experts about a possible coup in Russia. I approached the question gingerly. It seemed too much to hope for; it seemed naïve. Vladimir Putin had been in power for more than two decades. Many had predicted his demise—always prematurely. There was a small cottage industry on Twitter of people insisting that Putin was ill. They liked to post photos of him sitting at meetings, clutching his desk as if he were about to fall. I didn’t want to be like that. “Is this ridiculous to even think about?” I would ask the experts. The experts laughed. They felt the same way. A coup was unlikely, they agreed. A popular uprising—a “Ceaușescu scenario,” in which the people stormed the Party’s headquarters, convened a hasty trial, and murdered their dictator—probably even less so. To a scenario like the one that actually played out last weekend—one of Putin’s warlords raising a mutiny, taking over one of the country's military headquarters, and marching on Moscow, all while Putin was still in power—we gave very little consideration. It just seemed too outlandish to talk about.

And yet, since the war began, all of the experts had been thinking about ways in which the Putin regime might collapse, and watching what Putin was doing to protect himself. Peter Clement, a former director of Russia analysis at the C.I.A., noted a televised meeting, days before the war, in which Putin browbeat members of his security council into pledging their support for his Ukraine policy. It was a brilliant move by Putin, Clement thought, to bring his senior administration officials in line. “They’re all complicit now,” Clement said. “It’s not like one of them can say, ‘I thought this was a stupid idea.’ They all signed on.”

For that reason, Clement thought it more likely that a move against Putin would come from the second circle, from someone less in the public eye, someone we’d not heard of. Clement was willing to speculate with me, but he considered the chances low. You’d have to have the security services on board, he said, because you’d need to physically arrest the President, and it was unlikely you could appeal to security hawks with an antiwar agenda. And you’d have to be prepared to run the country. It’s a big country and in the thick of a long war. “It can’t just be, ‘We got rid of the Wicked Witch of the West! Let’s all stand up and cheer!’,” Clement said. You’d have to have a plan, and Clement was having trouble thinking of people who might have one.

Another former C.I.A. analyst, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, who was a deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia between 2015 and 2018 and now runs the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security think tank, walked me through the political-science literature on how authoritarian regimes tend to fall. Of the four hundred and seventy-three authoritarian regimes that had fallen between 1950 and 2012, a hundred and fifty-three had done so via coup. But the coup was on the wane; after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. had stopped propping up quite so many military dictatorships, which are what tend to get militarily couped. It was unlikely, Kendall-Taylor explained, that the security services, or anyone from Putin’s inner circle, would move against the Russian President, because the regime had entered the stage that the political scientist Milan W. Svolik called “established autocracy.” In an established autocracy, the leader has monopolized power to such an extent that he can no longer be threatened by what Svolik calls an “allies’ rebellion.” The truth is, Kendall-Taylor said, most personalist dictatorships, such as Putin’s, ended with the dictator dying in power, especially when the dictator was older than sixty-five (Putin is seventy). “That is by far the most likely scenario,” she told me. She put the chance of regime change in Russia in the next two years at ten per cent, and that “ten per cent includes Putin having a heart attack.”

The historian Vladislav Zubok, who is the author of a recent book on the collapse of the Soviet Union, described the various ways in which other Russian and Soviet leaders—Nicholas II, Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev—had been ousted, and explained why none of those scenarios mapped onto this one. Nicholas II had abdicated, in 1917, after large protests in Petrograd (current-day St. Petersburg, then the Russian capital) shattered confidence in his regime, and the military joined the mutiny; Putin, Zubok pointed out, had made sure that his capital, Moscow, was well-provisioned and maximally isolated from the war in Ukraine; there is a loyal paramilitary force to control protests. Khrushchev was overthrown, in 1964, by a plot from within his own inner circle, led by his deputy, Leonid Brezhnev, who worked within the structures of the Communist Party to urge others to turn against their leader. The K.G.B. played a key role in the coup. Putin’s regime, by contrast, is highly informal, much more like Stalin’s, with all paths leading, in the end, to Putin. It is hard, under such circumstances, to plan a coup. And there are several branches of secret police, each competing with the others, making any plotting very complicated. As for Gorbachev, the comparison seemed the least apt of all. He had not only allowed his rival, Boris Yeltsin, to run for President of Russia—he permitted the government to finance his campaign. Putin was unlikely to do something like that. If there was a leader to whom Putin could be compared, Zubok said, it was Ivan the Terrible, who ruled Russia in the second half of the sixteenth century. Ivan fought a long war of attrition with his Western neighbors; he demoralized his ruling élite, and murdered his own son and heir. After his reign was over, the country eventually fell into civil war, the period known in Russian history as the Smuta, the Time of Troubles.

Two experts on Russian public opinion described their understanding of Russian attitudes toward the war in Ukraine, and what might cause those attitudes to change. Oleg Zhuravlev, a founding member of the Public Sociology Laboratory, an independent Russian research collective, summarized a series of in-depth interviews that his team had done with young Russians in the past year. They had found that support for the war was both thinner and narrower than it looked. There was a small group, about ten to fifteen per cent, of genuine supporters; there was a similarly small group of genuine opponents. In between was a large group of people, most of whom had come around to supporting the war not because they thought it was a good idea but because they didn’t know how to oppose it, and because they felt totally alienated from the people in charge of it. “Over and over we heard the same thing,” Zhuravlev said. “ ‘If there’s one thing I know about politics, it’s that I don’t know anything about politics. The people in the Kremlin are foreign to me; they are not like me. But they must have their reasons.’ ”

It was depoliticization in its purest form. Zhuravlev’s occasional collaborator, the longtime polling expert Elena Koneva, had spent the year and a half since the war began running a project called ExtremeScan, through which she designed polls to figure out the basis for Russian public support of the war and what could cause it to contract. She had seen signs, mostly in the border regions of Russia, that, when the war began to truly affect people’s lives, their opinions started to change. First they experienced fear of retribution—“We have done so many horrible things to Ukraine,” one respondent said, “that the Ukrainian Army will inevitably come here”—but the actual experience of war, of shortages, of shelling, of people being forced to evacuate, began to erode support for the war. And Koneva predicted that, if things got worse, support would erode further. “If people are constantly having to sit in bomb shelters, and women are giving birth without medicine,” she said, “then an end to the war will become their most passionate wish.”

Yevgeny Prigozhin figured in our conversations as a grotesque and somewhat comic character. When looking at the Putin regime, one Moscow-based historian said, “We’re all wondering who the Beria figure is going to be,” referring to one of Stalin’s most efficient henchmen, tried and executed by his former comrades after Stalin’s death. “Who are they going to take out and shoot right away? And then you look at the criminal types who are working for the Kremlin—and you see Prigozhin. There’s your Beria.”

Putin's regime on paper looks like a disaster waiting to collapse.  In reality, he has all the angles covered and will continue to do so.

Right up until he doesn't.

Russian To Judgment: Putin On A Show

I've read some pretty wild reasons as to why Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin called off his coup after just a day or so, but Occam's Razor reminds us the simplest explanations are most often correct, and in this case, it's that "Putin threatened Prighozin's family and the families of the rest of Wagner's bigwigs."

 

Russian intelligence services threatened to harm the families of Wagner leaders before Yevgeny Prigozhin called off his advance on Moscow, according to UK security sources.

It has also been assessed that the mercenary force had only 8,000 fighters rather than the 25,000 claimed and faced likely defeat in any attempt to take the Russian capital.

Vladimir Putin will now try to assimilate Wagner Group soldiers into the Russian military and take out its former leaders, according to insights shared with The Telegraph.

The analysis offers clues into the mystery of why Prigozhin, the Wagner Group leader, called off his mutinous march on Moscow on Saturday just hours before reaching the capital.

There remains speculation about what formal deal was struck, if any. The Kremlin said on Saturday that Prigozhin would head to Belarus in exchange for a pardon from charges of treason.

There has been no comment from Prigozhin over the suggestion. It also remains unclear if Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defence minister, is set to be demoted or fired, as Prigozhin demanded.

On Sunday, the Russian MP Andrey Gurulyov, a prominent Kremlin propagandist, said there was “no option” but for Prigozhin and another high-profile Wagner figure to be executed.

Putin has not been seen in public since addressing the nation on Saturday morning, but a pre-recorded interview filmed earlier in the week was played on state television on Sunday.

 

As far as how long Prigozhin himself survives, well, that's the million-ruble question, isn't it?

On Sunday, intelligence officials and diplomats — unsure if they had just witnessed an aborted coup or a thwarted mutiny — were left to parse official Kremlin statements and re-watch blurry videos posted on Telegram, the social network that Prigozhin has used to try to convince the Russian people that the war in Ukraine has been a strategic disaster led by incompetent commanders and political sycophants.

Publicly, U.S. officials have highlighted the possible benefits to Ukraine from the chaos in Russia. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday that the brief Wagner revolt, and how it was ultimately if tentatively resolved, showed “cracks in the facade” of Putin’s authoritarian leadership.

“Think about it this way: 16 months ago, Russian forces were on the doorstep of Kyiv in Ukraine, believing they would take the capital in a matter of days and erase the country from the map as an independent country. Now, what we’ve seen is Russia having to defend Moscow, its capital, against mercenaries of [Putin’s] own making,” Blinken said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”

“Certainly, we have all sorts of new questions that Putin is going to have to address in the weeks and months ahead,” Blinken added.

Officials in the United States and around Europe said they were unsure of what comes next and were concerned about the instability that could follow an effort by Putin’s rivals, including Prigozhin, to unseat the president at a vulnerable moment.

High on the list of questions policymakers are now putting to their intelligence analysts is whether Prigozhin has managed to shake the foundations of the Kremlin so strongly that Putin will feel compelled to sack top generals or ministers leading the war, as Prigozhin has repeatedly demanded.

More immediately, though, there’s another question: What just happened? One minute, Prigozhin had taken over a key military headquarters in the south running Russia’s war machine in Ukraine. The next, he had agreed to a truce brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who’s more accustomed to playing second fiddle to Putin than intervening between warring factions.

“Why did it calm down so quickly, and how come Putin’s puppet Lukashenko got the credit?” asked one senior European diplomat, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. “What impact will it have on Russia’s defenses, and are there going to be any personnel changes in the military leadership?”

 

Remember, US intelligence services have been crippled for a decade by Dudebro Defector's leaks exposing means and methods against Russia. Moscow's been a black hole for the US ever since. The fact that we're seeing multiple US news outlets tells us that both the State Department and intelligence services know basically nothing other than "something was up" in the weeks leading up to the coup and know even less now about Russia and its nuclear arsenal is...not good.

The UK is in a better position, it seems, to gather information from Putin and his oligarchy, than we are. That should worry a lot of people.

Russian To Judgment: Well That Was Fast

Friday night's coup in Russia was over by Saturday night, as Putin supposedly has cut a deal with Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group mercs, but at this point both Putin and Prigozhin, and the war on Ukraine, are both on borrowed time and everyone knows it.

 

A short recap of the past 24 hours in Russia reads like the backstory for a fanciful episode of Madam Secretary or The West Wing. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the brutal convicted criminal who leads the Wagner mercenary group, declared war on the Russian Ministry of Defense and marched into the city of Rostov-on-Don. He then headed north for Moscow, carrying his demand for the ousting of Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. The city went on alert.

Prigozhin and his men came within 125 miles of the capital—that is, closer to Moscow than Philadelphia is to Washington, D.C. He then said that a deal had been struck and that Wagner’s forces were turning around to avoid bloodshed. Apparently, however, the blood Prigozhin saved from being shed was his own. If the “deal” announced by the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov accurately reflects an actual settlement, Prigozhin has in the space of a day gone from being a powerful warlord to a man living on borrowed time in a foreign country, waiting for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inevitable retribution.

According to Peskov, Russia is dropping all charges against Prigozhin, who must now go into exile in Belarus. Wagner fighters who did not take part in the rebellion will be given amnesty, and then they will sign contracts that will bring them under the control of Shoigu’s Ministry of Defense. I suggested yesterday that Shoigu’s attempt to seize Wagner’s men and dissolve the force might be one of the reasons Prigozhin went on the march. This outcome is a defeat of the first order for Prigozhin, who has now lost everything except his life.

We can at this point only speculate about why Prigozhin undertook this putsch, and why it all failed so quickly. One possibility is that Prigozhin had allies in Moscow who promised to support him, and somehow that support fell through: Perhaps his friends in the Kremlin got cold feet, or were less numerous than Prigozhin realized, or never existed at all. Prigozhin, after all, is not exactly a military genius or a diplomat; he’s a violent, arrogant, emotional man who may well have embarked on this scheme huffing from a vat of his own overconfidence.

Nonetheless, this bizarre episode is not a win for Putin. The Russian dictator has been visibly wounded, and he will now bear the permanent scar of political vulnerability. Instead of looking like a decisive autocrat (or even just a mob boss in command of his crew), Putin left Moscow after issuing a short video in which he was visibly angry and off his usual self-assured game. Putin reportedly worries a great deal about being assassinated, and so perhaps he wanted to hunker down until he had more clarity about who might be in league with Prigozhin. But whatever the reason, he vowed to deal with Prigozhin decisively and then blew town, probably to his retreat at Valdai, in a move that looked weak and disorganized.

Bringing in President Aleksandr Lukashenko as a broker at first seemed an odd choice on Putin’s part, but it makes a bit more sense in light of the supposed deal. The Belarusian autocrat could personally vouch for Prigozhin’s safe passage; Lukashenko has no connections in Moscow that are more important than Putin; he does not live or work in the Kremlin and so he was a secure choice to carry out Putin’s terms; he owes Putin his continued rule and has no reason to betray him. Also, sending in Lukashenko was something of a power move: Putin is a former intelligence officer, and in that world, Prigozhin is merely a scummy convict. The two men were friendly before this, but they were not equals. It would have been a huge loss of face for the president of a great power to negotiate with his former chef in person.

Prigozhin gets to stay alive, at least for the moment, but his life as he knew it (and maybe in any sense) is over. Putin, however, is now politically weaker than ever. The once unchallengeable czar is no longer invincible. The master of the Kremlin had to make a deal with a convict—again, in Putin’s culture, among the lowest of the low—just to avert the shock and embarrassment of an armed march into the Russian capital while other Russians are fighting on the front lines in Ukraine.

Prigozhin drew blood and then walked away from a man who never, ever lets such a personal offense go unavenged. Putin, however, may have had no choice, which is yet another sign of his precarious situation. All of the options were terrifying: Ordering the Russian military to attack armed Russian men would have been a huge risk, especially because those men (and their hatred of the bureaucrats at the Defense Ministry) have at least some support among Russia’s officers and political elites. Killing Prigozhin outright was also a high-risk proposition; with their leader dead and the Russian military closing in, the Wagnerites might have decided to fight to the death.

This wound to Putin’s power goes deep, but how deep is difficult to gauge for now, especially because we do not know whether Shoigu or Gerasimov still have their jobs. And although the rebellion has taken Wagner off the field in Ukraine, Putin may still seek to cover this ignominious moment by escalating Russia’s brutality there. But two things appear certain. First, Putin has suffered a huge political blow, and he has survived by making deals both with Prigozhin and with his own colleagues in the Kremlin that are, by any definition, a humiliation. And second, Yevgeny Prigozhin has changed the Russian political environment surrounding Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Prigozhin’s rebellion and its effects will last beyond today, but how long he will live in Belarus—or stay alive in Belarus—to see how the rest of it plays out is unclear.

 

At this point nobody knows how this will end, and anyone who says they do is lying. But the current situation in both Ukraine and Russia is untenable. We've already seen one massive crack in the dam. More are coming. And Ukraine now has even more of a reason to fight back.

Russian To Judgment: Judgment Russian Edition

So, helpful tip if you ever find yourself the dictator of a major power: don't turn your military over to a large mercenary company, toss them into a year-plus long meat grinder invading your neighbor, and then treat those mercs like shit, because they might decide that they don't like you any more, and they have lots and lots of things that go boom and bang.

The hall of mirrors that Vladimir Putin has built around himself and within his country is so complex, and so multilayered, that on the eve of a genuine insurrection in Russia, I doubt very much if the Russian president himself believed it could be real.

Certainly the rest of us still can’t know, less than a day after this mutiny began, the true motives of the key players, and especially not of the central figure, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group. Prigozhin, whose fighters have taken part in brutal conflicts all over Africa and the Middle East—in Syria, Sudan, Libya, the Central African Republic—claims to command 25,000 men in Ukraine. In a statement yesterday afternoon, he accused the Russian army of killing “an enormous amount” of his mercenaries in a bombing raid on his base. Then he called for an armed rebellion, vowing to topple Russian military leaders.

Prigozhin has been lobbing insults at Russia’s military leadership for many weeks, mocking Sergei Shoigu, the Russian minister of defense, as lazy, and describing the chief of the general staff as prone to “paranoid tantrums.” Yesterday, he broke with the official narrative and directly blamed them, and their oligarch friends, for launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ukraine did not provoke Russia on February 24, he said: Instead, Russian elites had been pillaging the territories of the Donbas they’ve occupied since 2014, and became greedy for more. His message was clear: The Russian military launched a pointless war, ran it incompetently, and killed tens of thousands of Russian soldiers unnecessarily.

The “evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped,” Prigozhin declared. He warned the Russian generals not to resist: “Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation we see above our heads.” The snarling theatricality of Prigozhin’s statement, the baroque language, the very notion that 25,000 mercenaries were going to remove the commanders of the Russian army during an active war—all of that immediately led many to ask: Is this for real?

Up until the moment it started, when actual Wagner vehicles were spotted on the road from Ukraine to Rostov, a Russian city a couple of miles from the border (and actual Wagner soldiers were spotted buying coffee in a Rostov fast-food restaurant formerly known as McDonald’s), it seemed impossible. But once they appeared in the city—once Prigozhin posted a video of himself in the courtyard of the Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov—and once they seemed poised to take control of Voronezh, a city between Rostov and Moscow, theories began to multiply.

Maybe Prigozhin is collaborating with the Ukrainians, and this is all an elaborate plot to end the war. Maybe the Russian army really had been trying to put an end to Prigozhin’s operations, depriving his soldiers of weapons and ammunition. Maybe this is Prigozhin’s way of fighting not just for his job but for his life. Maybe Prigozhin, a convicted thief who lives by the moral code of Russia’s professional criminal caste, just feels dissed by the Russian military leadership and wants respect. And maybe, just maybe, he has good reason to believe that some Russian soldiers are willing to join him.

Because Russia no longer has anything resembling “mainstream media”—there is only state propaganda, plus some media in exile—we have no good sources of information right now. All of us now live in a world of information chaos, but this is a more profound sort of vacuum, because so many people are pretending to say things they don’t believe. To understand what is going on (or to guess at it), you have to follow a series of unreliable Russian Telegram accounts, or else read the Western and Ukrainian open-source intelligence bloggers who are reliable but farther from the action: @wartranslated, who captions Russian and Ukrainian video in English, for example; or Aric Toler (@arictoler), of Bellingcat, and Christo Grozev (@christogrozev), formerly of Bellingcat, the investigative group that pioneered the use of open-source intelligence. Grozev has enhanced credibility because he said the Wagner group was preparing a coup many months ago. (This morning, I spoke with him and told him he was vindicated. “Yes,” he said, “I am.”)

But the Kremlin may not have very good information either. Only a month ago, Putin was praising Prigozhin and Wagner for the “liberation” of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, after one of the longest, most drawn-out battles in modern military history. Today’s insurrection was, by contrast, better planned and executed: Bakhmut took nearly 11 months, but Prigozihin got to Rostov and Voronezh in less than 11 hours, helped along by commanders and soldiers who appeared to be waiting for him to arrive.

Now military vehicles are moving around Moscow, apparently putting into force “Operation Fortress,” a plan to defend the headquarters of the security services. One Russian military blogger claimed that units of the military, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB security service, and others had already been put on a counterterrorism alert in Moscow very early Thursday morning, supposedly in preparation for a Ukrainian terrorist attack. Perhaps that was what the Kremlin wanted its supporters to think—though the source of the blogger’s claim is not yet clear.

But the unavoidable clashes at play—Putin’s clash with reality, as well as Putin’s clash with Prigozhin—are now coming to a head. Prigozhin has demanded that Shoigu, the defense minister, come to see him in Rostov, which the Wagner boss must know is impossible. Putin has responded by denouncing Prigozhin, though not by name: “Exorbitant ambitions and personal interests have led to treason,” Putin said in an address to the nation this morning. A Telegram channel that is believed to represent Wagner has responded: “Soon we will have a new president.” Whether or not that account is really Wagner, some Russian security leaders are acting as if it is, and are declaring their loyalty to Putin. In a slow, unfocused sort of way, Russia is sliding into what can only be described as a civil war.

 

Break out the popcorn from your old bunkers, because this one is going to be historic.

 

And yes, this is 100% the end of Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the beginning of something...else.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

Turns out part of those Discord leaks from last month where an Air Force reservist allegedly blabbed US military documents on Ukraine to his right-wing gaming buddies included information on PMC outfit Wagner Group offering to help Ukrainian forces because the Russians left the Wagner mercs they bought  high and dry to die in Bakhmut.

 

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.

But there is no debating Prigozhin’s bitter frustration with the grinding fight in Bakhmut. He has complained, publicly and privately, that the Russian Defense Ministry has not given his fighters the ammunition and other resources they need to succeed. Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, has seen some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. Over the past few months, in a grinding back and forth measured by city blocks, Ukrainian and Russian forces have taken steep casualties.

Prigozhin, who promised to take control of the city by May 9, in time for Russia’s Victory Day celebrations, has recently threatened publicly to pull his forces out of the fight.

Other leaked documents reveal Russian Defense Ministry officials privately wondering how to respond to Prigozhin’s criticism of the military’s performance and his demands for more resources, which they apparently conceded were not illegitimate grievances. The documents also speak to a power struggle between Prigozhin and top officials, including Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

Against that tense backdrop, Prigohzin has carried on a secret relationship with Ukrainian intelligence that, in addition to phone calls, includes in-person meetings with HUR officers in an unspecified country in Africa, one document states. Wagner forces provide security to several governments on the continent.

The leaked U.S. intelligence shows Prigozhin bemoaning the heavy toll that fighting has taken on his own forces and urging Ukraine to strike harder against Russian troops.

 

Now, don't get me wrong, using mercenary groups composed of veterans in wars to bolster troops is a military strategy as old as human warfare itself. But so is turning on your employer when you leave the mercs in a hole to sacrifice themselves to save your own men.

War, war never changes, as the man once said.

The New Chief Chief For The Commander-In-Chief

With current Joint Chief of Staff chair Gen. Mark Milley expected to step down, his replacement is slated to be Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown, only the second Black JCS head after the late Colin Powell.

 

President Joe Biden is expected to nominate Gen. C.Q. Brown, the Air Force’s top officer and the first Black person to lead any branch of the military, to succeed Gen. Mark Milley as the next Joint Chiefs chair, two people familiar with the discussion said on Thursday.

If confirmed, Brown would become the second Black Joint Chiefs chair in the nation’s history, after the late Colin Powell.

Biden hasn’t given Brown the official stamp, and it’s unclear when he plans to make an announcement, said the people, a Democratic lawmaker and a congressional aide familiar with the White House’s planning, both of whom were granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

“When President Biden makes a final decision, he will inform the person selected and then announce it publicly,” a spokesperson for the National Security Council said when asked for comment. “That hasn’t happened yet.”

Brown’s reputation and command experience in both the Pacific and the Middle East made him the odds-on favorite to be Milley’s heir apparent dating back to the Trump administration. But his appointment seemed less of a sure thing in recent months, as the White House seriously considered Gen. David Berger, the Marine Corps commandant, for the top job.

He rose through the ranks as the sole Black pilot in classrooms filled with white men, an experience he spoke about in an emotional video after George Floyd’s death in the summer of 2020.

Those who know Brown say he has the right experience to keep the military focused on its top priority: China. Brown’s most recent command experience was in the Pacific, as chief of Pacific Air Forces.

Brown also commanded troops in the Middle East, as head of U.S. Air Forces Central Command, and was serving in Europe when Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, as a director of operations for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration at U.S. Air Forces in Europe. He was confirmed unanimously by the Senate for his current role as Air Force chief of staff in August, 2020.

 

So yeah, the Senate already unanimously confirmed him for the Air Force job, but who knows what te GOP will do.

Losing It At The Finnish Line

Finland's government led by PM Sanna Marin has been ousted in national elections on Sunday, with Marin's Social Democrat party finishing third behind right-wing National Coalition Party and extremely right-wing neo-Nationalist Finns Party.

Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin appears to have lost her bid for a second term on Sunday, with her party headed for defeat by two conservative opponents in an extremely tight three-way race for control of parliament.

The center-right National Coalition Party claimed victory Sunday evening with around 97.7% of the votes counted, coming out on top at 20.7%. They were followed closely by right-wing populist party The Finns with 20.1%, while the Social Democrats garnered 19.9%.

With the top three parties each getting around 20% of the vote, no party is in position to form a government alone. Over 2,400 candidates from 22 parties were vying for the 200 seats in the Nordic country’s parliament.

“Based on this result, talks over forming a new government to Finland will be initiated under the leadership of the National Coalition Party,” said the party’s leader Petteri Orpo, as he claimed victory surrounded by supporters.

Marin, who at age 37 is one of Europe’s youngest leaders, has received praise for her Cabinet’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and for her prominent role, along with President Sauli Niinistö, in advocating for Finland’s successful application to join NATO. Her vocal support of Ukraine in the last year has increased her international visibility.

The problem now is that Finland's bid to join NATO may be in jeopardy. The Finns Party has vowed to pull Finland out of the pact, and the National Coalition Party, and if talks fall apart to form a government, it's possible that the NATO bid fails completely. The NCP has said that Finland "should be prepared militarily" if Russia tries anything on the border, but that's no guarantee that they will stay if the Finns make the case that the easiest spending cuts, which the NCP ran on, would be military.

On the other hand, Finnish President Sauli Niinisto says Finland will officially join NATO tomorrow, so it's a done deal. As to if Finland stays in NATO, well, we'll see. I believe they will, but nothing is 100% in politics these days.

Putin On The Blitz, Con't

US Secretary of State Tony Blinken is helpfully reminding our European allies that if you see that Vladimir Putin guy, you should give him a free ride to the Hague.

European countries should detain Vladimir Putin and turn him over to the International Criminal Court if the Russian president visits their countries, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told lawmakers Wednesday.

Blinken’s remarks, made in response to a line of questioning, follow the court’s decision last week to issue an arrest warrant for Putin that accuses him of being personally responsible for the abductions of children from Ukraine — the first time the global court has issued a warrant against a leader of one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.

“Would you encourage our European allies to turn him over?” Republican Sen. Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina asked Blinken during a budget hearing.

“Anyone who is a party to the court and has obligations should fulfill their obligations,” Blinken said.

Putin is unlikely to visit hostile European countries any time soon, especially in light of the ICC arrest warrant — a decision that received both praise for standing up against Putin and criticism for potentially closing diplomatic pathways for reaching a political resolution that ends the fighting.

During the hearing, Blinken defended the Biden administration’s $6.8 trillion budget proposal to Congress, saying it was necessary in order for the United States to confront the “acute threat” posed by Russia and the “long-term challenge” from China while also addressing climate change and migration.

President Biden defied Republican demands to reduce the size of government earlier this month with a budget that proposes increasing spending on the Pentagon and social programs while raising taxes on higher earners and corporations.

“The post-Cold War world is over, and there is an intense competition underway to determine what comes next,” Blinken told a Senate panel on appropriations. “This budget will help us advance that vision, and deliver on the issues that matter most to the American people.”

 

Frankly Blinken is doing a hell of a job, given the challenges. I'm not worried about the State Department doing something stupid as with Rex Tillerson or Mike Pompeo.

Having said that, the odds of any non-Russian country besides the US delivering Putin to the ICC is precisely zero, and everyone knows it.  That's diplomacy!

Orange Meltdown, Con't

The Guardian's Hugo Lowell has been on the Trump crime beat for the UK for a while now, and his latest piece finds that Trump's media company and his failed social media platform are facing possible money laundering charges from the Feds, complete with ties to Russian mobsters.

 

Federal prosecutors in New York involved in the criminal investigation into Donald Trump’s social media company last year started examining whether it violated money laundering statutes in connection with the acceptance of $8m with suspected Russian ties, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The company – Trump Media, which owns Trump’s Truth Social platform – initially came under criminal investigation over its preparations for a potential merger with a blank check company called Digital World (DWAC) that was also the subject of an earlier probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Towards the end of last year, federal prosecutors started examining two loans totaling $8m wired to Trump Media, through the Caribbean, from two obscure entities that both appear to be controlled in part by the relation of an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin, the sources said.

The expanded nature of the criminal investigation, which has not been previously reported, threatens to delay the completion of the merger between Trump Media and DWAC, which would provide the company and Truth Social with up to $1.3bn in capital, in addition to a stock market listing.

Even if Trump Media and its officers face no criminal exposure for the transactions, the optics of borrowing money from potentially unsavory sources through opaque conduits could cloud Trump’s image as he seeks to recapture the White House in 2024.

The extent of the exposure for Trump Media and its officers for money laundering remains unclear. The statutes broadly require prosecutors to show that defendants knew the money was the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity and the transaction was designed to conceal its source.

But money laundering prosecutions are typically based on circumstantial evidence and can be based on materials that show that the money in question was unlikely to have legitimate origins, legal experts said.

The first $2m payment to Trump Media came in December 2021 when the company was on the brink of collapse after the planned merger with DWAC – that would have unlocked millions for the company – was delayed when the SEC opened an inquiry into whether the arrangement broke regulatory rules.

Trump Media needed a bridge loan to keep the company afloat. But it struggled to get financing until DWAC’s chief executive Patrick Orlando sourced a $2m loan wired from Paxum Bank registered in Dominica, according to the wire transfer receipt reviewed by the Guardian.

The wire transfer identified Paxum Bank as the beneficial owner, although the promissory note identified an entity called ES Family Trust as the lender. Two months later, an unexpected second $6m payment arrived in Trump Media’s account from ES Family Trust, the transfer receipt showed.

In both instances, Orlando declined to provide details about the true identity of the lenders or the origin of the money to Trump Media executives, Trump Media’s since-ousted co-founder turned whistleblower Will Wilkerson recounted in an interview.

Though the two payments to Trump Media ostensibly came from two separate entities – first Paxum Bank and second ES Family Trust – the trustee of ES Family Trust, a person called Angel Pacheco, appears to have simultaneously been a director of Paxum Bank.

The Russian connection, as being examined by prosecutors in the US attorney’s office for the southern district of New York, centers on a part-owner of Paxum Bank – an individual named Anton Postolnikov, who appears to be a relation of Putin ally Aleksandr Smirnov.

So roughly $8 billion in Putin money to try to keep Truth Social afloat. Yeah, it's worth a look from the Feds.

In other words, this is the domain of US Attorney for SDNY, Damian Williams. It means Trump is now facing a possible fifth investigation into criminal activity, on top of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg's payoff case to Stormy Daniels, Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis's election fraud case, NY Attorney General Tish James's civil tax fraud case, and Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigations into Trump's documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago.

In other words, it's a bad, bad time to be Trump.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Kyiv Edition

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, gearing up for his run at Donald Trump in 2024, at least agrees with him one one thing: if elected, Republicans will abandon Ukraine and NATO to Vladimir Putin and Russia.

 

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has sharply broken with Republicans who are determined to defend Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, saying in a statement made public on Monday night that protecting the European nation’s borders is not a vital U.S. interest and that policymakers should instead focus attention at home.

The statement from Mr. DeSantis, who is seen as an all but declared presidential candidate for the 2024 campaign, puts him in line with the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination, former President Donald J. Trump.

The venue Mr. DeSantis chose for his statement on a major foreign policy question revealed almost as much as the substance of the statement itself. The statement was broadcast on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” on Fox News. It was in response to a questionnaire that the host, Mr. Carlson, sent last week to all major prospective Republican presidential candidates, and is tantamount to an acknowledgment by Mr. DeSantis that a candidacy is in the offing.

On Mr. Carlson’s show, Mr. DeSantis separated himself from Republicans who say the problem with Mr. Biden’s Ukraine policy is that he’s not doing enough. Mr. DeSantis made clear he thinks Mr. Biden is doing too much, without a clearly defined objective, and taking actions that risk provoking war between the U.S. and Russia.

Mr. Carlson is one of the most ardent opponents of U.S. involvement in Ukraine. He has called President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine a corrupt “antihero” and mocked him for dressing “like the manager of a strip club.”

“While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness with our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them,” Mr. DeSantis said in a statement that Mr. Carlson read aloud on his show.

Mr. DeSantis’s views on Ukraine policy now align with Mr. Trump’s. The former president also answered Mr. Carlson’s questionnaire.

It's pretty clear that both Trump n DeSantis would give Ukraine and basically Europe over to Putin in exchange for help against China, when anyone with half a brain already knows that Putin and Xi Jinping are buddies looking to split up the rest of the world between them going forward once they deal with America.

Either way, Putin know that a Republican in the White House in 2024 will get him everything he wants and he has every reason to help the GOP. Question is whether he backs Trump, an unreliable but easily manipulated dunce, or the more ambitious, intelligent (relatively) but more wary DeSantis who would turn on Putin at the drop of a hat.

The answer of course for us here is Biden or Harris.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

The anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine this week marks renewed efforts from the Pentagon to help Kyiv fight back with another round of war-fighting technology.

 

The Pentagon announced a new package of long-term security assistance for Ukraine on Friday, marking the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion with a $2 billion commitment to send more rounds of ammunition and a variety of small, high-tech drones into the fight.

The announcement comes just days after President Joe Biden made an unannounced visit to Kyiv and pledged America’s continuing commitment to Ukraine. Biden told President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his people that “Americans stand with you, and the world stands with you.”

In a statement Friday, the Pentagon said the aid includes weapons to counter Russia’s unmanned systems and several types of drones, including the upgraded Switchblade 600 Kamikaze drone, as well as electronic warfare detection equipment.

It also includes money for additional ammunition for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, artillery rounds and munitions for laser-guided rocket systems. But, in an unusual move, the Pentagon provided no details on how many rounds of any kind will be bought. Including this latest package, the U.S. has now committed more than $32 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement that the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion is a chance for all who believe in freedom “to recommit ourselves to supporting Ukraine’s brave defenders for the long haul — and to recall that the stakes of Russia’s war stretch far beyond Ukraine.”

 

But increasingly, what Ukrainian officials want, and say they need, is commitment for a major counteroffensive to push Russia out for good.  WaPo's Josh Rogin:

As the Ukraine war enters its second year, the Biden administration is pledging to support Kyiv for “as long as it takes.” That language is calculated to send a message of resolve to Russian President Vladimir Putin, but it’s not what Ukrainians want to hear. Though they’re fighting valiantly, Ukrainians are also suffering greatly — and they are begging the West to help them speed up the war, not settle in for an endless slog.

Just a few days before the anniversary of Putin’s unprovoked invasion last year, Biden visited Kyiv and made a rousing speech in Poland promising that the West “will never waver” in the fight for freedom and democracy. A few days earlier, Vice President Harris took the stage at the Munich Security Conference to declare America’s endless commitment to the Ukraine effort.

“The daily agony of war will persist,” she said. “But if Putin thinks he can wait us out, he is badly mistaken. Time is not on his side.”

Nearly all the Ukrainian officials I met in Munich respectfully disagree. It’s not just about weapons (although they insist that more and better weapons are badly and quickly needed). These Ukrainian officials say they’re worried that the Biden administration’s stance could undermine support for Kyiv’s strategy, which is to accelerate the war effort now and avoid a protracted stalemate.

For them, an endless war means a win for Putin and the loss of their country as they know it.

“We are very grateful for the support that is coming, but there is one phrase that makes us very concerned,” Ukrainian member of parliament Yelyzaveta Yasko told me. “Many leaders right now are saying, ‘We will support you as long as it takes.’ And we feel this phrase is quite dangerous.” 

 

That will be difficult to do though as the GOP Circus of the Damned are increasingly signaling they will block aid on the scale Kyiv needs to win. 

The topic of Ukraine funding will be front and center when both spending fights and presidential politics heat up later this year. Republicans are seeking to rein in spending across the federal government now that they control the House and will have leverage in negotiations to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, while conservatives on the campaign trail are looking to contrast their priorities against Biden’s in the prelude to the 2024 election cycle.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday on Fox News that US aid to Ukraine was little more than an “open-ended blank check” – a sentiment shared by a handful of House Republicans who have growing power in a narrowly divided Congress.

For now, Republican leaders on Capitol Hill still view it differently, setting up a clash that could come next fall when the fight over government spending kicks into full gear. Republicans leaders will have to contend with a small but vocal bloc of anti-interventionists within their party who view military support for Ukraine as a prime example of US government waste. In a House of Representatives where Republicans control a razor-thin majority and conservative hardliners have a stranglehold on McCarthy’s speakership, those voices can’t simply be ignored.

 

So we'll see where this goes.