Russian propagandists have published a recording of a “conversation between four senior German officers”. In it, they discuss the possible supply of Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine. The recording is authentic, the Bundeswehr has since confirmed. “This is a very serious matter and that is why it is now the subject of a very meticulous, in-depth and rapid investigation,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said.

On Friday afternoon, a half-hour recording of the conversation, which reportedly dates to Monday, Feb. 19, circulated on Russian propaganda channels. Margarita Simonyan, the head of Russia’s state broadcaster RT, then published the recording. She did not say how she obtained it.

It concerns a meeting that was held between Lieutenant General Ingo Gerhartz and three officers using the platform Webex for videoconferencing (!), writes ‘Die Welt’. During the conversation in Singapore, the four senior officers could be heard discussing the theoretical possibilities of deploying German Taurus missiles, apparently in preparation for a briefing to the German government. They talk about the challenges that a delivery of such missiles to Ukraine entails.

Scholz

The four officers do not assume that German soldiers should necessarily be sent to Ukraine for this. However, this is exactly what Chancellor Olaf Scholz has repeatedly used as a reason for not supplying Taurus missiles to Ukraine. According to him, Germany would thus be dragged into the conflict.

The officers also talk about the training of Ukrainian pilots and share technical details about missile systems. They also discuss several targets that the Ukrainians could attack with the Taurus – including ammunition depots and the Kerch Bridge (or Crimean Bridge), a key supply route for Russia-occupied Crimea.

What would make the publication of the recording even more painful for Berlin is that the participants in the call also discuss details about deliveries of Scalp long-range missiles by France and the United Kingdom.

“If this story is true, then this would be a highly problematic incident,” Konstanin van Notz, chairman of the parliamentary committee that monitors the secret services, told the newspapers of the RND group.

Singapore

It’s unclear how the Russians got the shot. One of the officers taking part in the interview is staying in a hotel in Singapore at the time. It is conceivable that he was bugged there, that his phone was compromised or that he dialed in via an unsecured Wi-Fi network.

Given that it was Russian propagandists who sent the audio recording into the ether, it seems obvious that Russian secret services are behind it.

German Chancellor Scholz promises quick clarification on the Russian publication of a recording of a conversation among German air force officers about support for Ukraine. “This is a very serious matter and that is why it is now the subject of a very meticulous, in-depth and rapid investigation,” he said after an audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican.

Damage Mitigation

The Bundeswehr tried to limit the damage on Friday by blocking accounts on X that distributed the recording in Germany.

The German Ministry of Defense is investigating whether the communications of the air force are being tapped by the Russians. “The German Military Counterintelligence Service (BAMAD) has initiated all necessary measures,” a ministry spokesman said.

The question of how secure the Bundeswehr’s internal communications are via unencrypted platforms such as Webex may be raised now that the audio recording has been found to be authentic. It is also possible that other communications were intercepted by the Russians.

The Russian Foreign Ministry had requested a statement from the German government, following the reports about the conversation. “Attempts to avoid answers will be interpreted as an admission of guilt,” said Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian ministry.

Source : DPG Media

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All men in Russia are required to do a year-long military service, or equivalent training during higher education, from the age of 18.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree setting out the routine spring conscription campaign, calling up 150,000 citizens for statutory military service, a document posted on the Kremlin’s website showed on Sunday (31 March).

All men in Russia are required to do a year-long military service, or equivalent training during higher education, from the age of 18.

In July Russia’s lower house of parliament voted to raise the maximum age at which men can be conscripted to 30 from 27. The new legislation came into effect on 1 January 2024.

Compulsory military service has long been a sensitive issue in Russia, where many men go to great lengths to avoid being handed conscription papers during the twice-yearly call-up periods.

Conscripts cannot legally be deployed to fight outside Russia and were exempted from a limited mobilisation in 2022 that gathered at least 300,000 men with previous military training to fight in Ukraine – although some conscripts were sent to the front in error.

In September Putin signed an order calling up 130,000 people for the autumn campaign and last spring Russia planned to conscript 147,000.

Russian attacks

Russian shelling killed at least three people in different regions of eastern Ukraine on the front of the more than two-year-old war against Russia, local officials said, and two more in Lviv region, far from the front lines.

In the centre of the northeastern city of Kharkiv, a frequent target of Russia’s intensifying assaults on energy and other infrastructure, regional governor Oleh Synehubov said a strike targeted civilian infrastructure in the evening.

Regional news outlets said aerial bombs had been dropped on different areas of the region. No injuries were reported.

Earlier on Sunday, heavy shelling killed a man in the town of Borova, southeast of Kharkiv, local prosecutors said.

Police in Donetsk region, in Ukraine’s southeast, said Russian shelling hit 14 towns and villages, with two dead reported in Krasnohorivka, west of the Russian-held regional centre of Donetsk.

Russian forces captured the city of Avdiivka in Donetsk region last month and have since made small gains, but the situation along the 1,000-km front has changed little for months.

Attacks on infrastructure have extended well beyond the front line and Lviv regional governor Maksym Kozitskyi said two bodies were pulled from rubble after on such strike by cruise missiles. Rescue work continued through the day at the site.

Over the border in Russia’s Belgorod Region, a frequent target of Ukrainian shelling, regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said a woman was killed when a border village came umder attack.

Reuters could not independently confirm accounts of military action from either side.

Source

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Long before it was reported, at the end of January, that Volodymyr Zelensky had decided to replace his popular Army chief, Valery Zaluzhny, the Ukrainian counter-offensive of 2023 had devolved from attempted maneuvers to mutual recriminations. The arrows pointed in multiple directions: Zelensky seemed to think that his commander-in-chief was being defeatist; Zaluzhny, that his President was refusing to face facts. And there were arguments, too, between Ukraine and its allies. In a two-part investigation in the Washington Post, in early December, U.S. officials complained that Ukrainian generals did not follow their advice. They tried to attack in too many places; they were too cautious; and they waited too long to launch the operation. The Ukrainians, in turn, blamed the Americans. They delivered too few weapons and did so too late; they insisted on their tactics even when it was clear these were unsuitable for the terrain and the opponent; and they did all this from the comfort of Washington and Wiesbaden, rather than from the trenches, tree lines, and open fields where Ukrainian soldiers gave their lives.

The arguments were painful and significant. Was Zelensky right that, given the wobbliness of Western support, Ukraine had to keep up a brave face and the so-called military momentum, no matter the cost? Or was Zaluzhny right that a change of strategy and more troops were needed, no matter how unpopular these choices might be? The argument with the U.S. was significant, too. Was the failure of the counter-offensive, as the Americans argued, one of strategy or, as the Ukrainians counter-argued, one of equipment?

There was a third option: neither. The dominant factor was the Russian military. It was better than people had given it credit for, after its disastrous performance in the first year of the war. It was not demoralized, incompetent, or ill-equipped. Russian soldiers and their officers were fighting to the death. They had executed a brutal and effective defense and, despite all the losses they had incurred, they still had attack helicopters, drones, and mines. “People came to very strong conclusions based off the first month of the war,” Rob Lee, a former marine and an analyst of the Russian military at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said. “And I think a lot of those conclusions were wrong.”

Being wrong about war can be disastrous, yet it is extremely common. The political scientist Stephen Biddle’s influential book, “Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle,” begins by listing a century of analytical mistakes. “In 1914,” he writes, “Europeans expected a short, decisive war of movement. None foresaw a nearly four-year trench stalemate—if they had, the war might never have happened. In 1940 Allied leaders were astonished by the Germans’ lightning victory over France. They had expected something closer to the trench warfare of 1914-18; even the victors were surprised.” Biddle goes on to describe the debate over the tank, deemed obsolete after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and then resurrected by its awesome performance in the Gulf War, in 1990 and 1991. Biddle’s book came out in 2004; since then, two major American wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, have not gone as anyone had planned.

“It’s impossible, basically, to predict a future war,” Bettina Renz, an international-security professor at the University of Nottingham and an expert on the Russian military, said. “Most people who start a war think it will be over quickly. And, of course, nobody starts a war that they think they can’t win.”

Once a war ends, or even earlier, military historians begin to describe what happened and who was right. Some debates remain unsettled, because the war they theorize never takes place. A famous instance is a debate many years ago, on the pages of the journal International Security, over whether nato was adequately prepared for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The political scientists John Mearsheimer and Barry Posen, having calculated the relative balance of forces, said that it was; the defense intellectual Eliot Cohen, who had worked in the Pentagon’s famous Office of Net Assessment, said that it was not. The debate stretched over several months, in 1988 and 1989. A short while later, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

The war in Ukraine has led to more than its share of arguments. In the run-up, the U.S. spent months warning skeptical allies that an invasion was imminent. This argument was mirrored inside Ukraine: Zaluzhny became convinced that the Russians were coming, and spent the weeks before the war urging a mobilization; Zelensky remained uncertain, and resisted the advice, worried that it would panic the population and give Russia an excuse to invade. There was widespread consensus that, in the event of an invasion, Russia would quickly win. General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told congressional leaders in early February of 2022 that the Russian military might take Kyiv in as little as seventy-two hours.

When this did not happen, in part because Zaluzhny repositioned some of his forces without authorization and moved or camouflaged the country’s military hardware, a new round of arguments broke out. Was Russia a paper tiger, or did it simply fight in the stupidest possible way? Was China also overrated? Was the tank dead (again)?

Some of the figures in the argument were familiar: Eliot Cohen was back, urging the West to take a harder line with Russia (and China); so were Mearsheimer and Posen, counselling caution. (Mearsheimer sometimes went further, blaming the West for provoking the Russian bear and for violating the tenets of his books, which posit that great-power conflict is inevitable.) Both sides invoked Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist. Cohen cited Clausewitz’s observation that intangible “moral factors,” like the will to fight, are the most important thing in war; Cohen’s opponents held up Clausewitz’s arguments that defense always has the advantage, and also that war is the realm of contingency and chance. (“Clausewitz is like the Bible,” the American University international-relations scholar Joshua Rovner told me. “You can pull out parts of it to suit basically any argument.”)

Among analysts who had studied the Russian military and thought it would do much better than it did, there was some soul-searching. Russian units turned out to be shorthanded, and neither their cyberattacks nor their Air Force were as dominant as expected. The Ukrainian military had better cyber defenses than people realized, and they fought tenaciously. Importantly, they also had the full support of U.S. intelligence, which was able to tell them when and where Russian forces would try to land, and to help them prepare for it. But the biggest surprise was Vladimir Putin’s terrible war plan, which assumed that Ukrainians would not resist, and which he kept secret from his own Army until the eve of the invasion. “No one would have done a Ukraine war game that was set with the political and strategic starting conditions of the Ukraine conflict,” Scott Boston, a defense analyst at the rand Corporation who often “plays Russia” in the think tank’s war games, said. “You’d be kicked out of the room.”

So, was the Russian military as bad as it seemed, and would Russian lines collapse if subjected to a bit of pressure? Or was it a fundamentally competent military that had been given an impossible task? Boston said he kept thinking of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, between Somali militants and American special forces, in which two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and eighteen Americans were killed in a misbegotten snatch-and-grab mission inside the Somali capital: “You can take the best soldiers on the planet, and, if you throw them in a bad enough situation, it’s not going to go well.” Russian soldiers were not the best on the planet, but they were probably not as bad as they looked in that first month of the war, running out of gas for their tanks and asking locals for directions to Kyiv.

The very successful Ukrainian counter-offensive in the fall of 2022 presented evidence for both sides. In the Kharkiv region, thinly defended Russian lines collapsed when confronted with mobile Ukrainian units, allowing Ukraine to take back significant amounts of territory and cut off key Russian supply lines. But along the other axis of attack, in the city of Kherson, Russian forces held out for a long time and then made a large and orderly retreat, saving much manpower and matériel. The question became which army Ukraine would face in the summer and fall of 2023: the undermanned and demoralized one they saw in Kharkiv, or the organized and capable one they saw in Kherson?

The answer, unfortunately, turned out to be the latter. “The Russian military adapted,” Lee said. “They often require some painful lessons, but then they do adapt.” Lee agrees with some of the criticisms lobbed by both sides in the aftermath of the offensive. Strategically, he thinks the defense of Bakhmut was carried out for too long by Ukrainian forces, for political reasons; materially, he agrees that the West should have got its act together a little sooner to provide more advanced weaponry to the front. But, for him, these are secondary matters: “Most of it came down to the Russian side.” A failure to appreciate this was a major problem in U.S. discussions of the war. Dara Massicot, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me that the emphasis on Russian incompetence in the first months of the war created unrealistic expectations and complacency. “The narratives that the Russian military is an incompetent clown car, incapable of learning, that they are about to collapse, and so on, are unhelpful and have done real damage,” Massicot said. “They have not collapsed. They’re still there. They have stood in the field and absorbed billions’ worth of Western weapons and aid over two years.”

In early November, the behind-the-scenes disagreements over Russian capabilities broke out into the open, in the form of an extraordinary essay by Zaluzhny and accompanying interview published in The Economist. Zaluzhny admitted that the counter-offensive had stalled and that the war was now in what he called a stalemate. He identified several factors—technological breakthroughs, achieving air superiority, improving electronic-warfare capabilities—that, he hoped, might move the war into a new phase. But Zaluzhny had lost faith in the idea that, by imposing devastating casualties on the invader, he would be able to take them out of the fight: “That was my mistake. Russia has lost at least 150,000 dead. In any other country such casualties would have stopped the war.” Zelensky, in turn, was frustrated that the commander-in-chief was making his views public—worsening an already tense relationship between the two.

Some analysts hope that the upcoming introduction of the American F-16 fighter to the Ukrainian side will change the course of the war. (Most predict that the F-16 will be helpful but not decisive.) Some believe that dropping a requirement that Western weaponry not be used to strike inside Russia could help. (Others, while agreeing, caution that deep strikes cannot be a substitute for conventional warfare; ultimately, Ukraine will have to take back territory in a ground offensive.) Many are concerned about the fact that Oleksandr Syrsky, Zelensky’s new choice for commander-in-chief, is the general who insisted on defending Bakhmut even after it became indefensible; they are even more concerned about the military-assistance package that is being held up in the U.S. Congress. But if, as Zaluzhny told The Economist, there will be no “deep and beautiful breakthrough,” what will happen instead?

The political-science literature on war duration (as opposed to war outcomes) is pretty clear: If a war is not over quickly, then it will last a long time. This is because incentives change. Blood and treasure have been expended. Society has been mobilized, the enemy vilified. People are angry. The war must go on.

There is a wrinkle to this story, however, when it comes to regime types. The standard work is “Democracies at War,” by Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, from 2002. Reiter and Stam argue, based on a slew of examples, that democracies have a better war-fighting record than autocracies. The reason is that they are better at fighting (the soldiers are more motivated) and that they start fewer dumb wars of choice. In a late chapter of the book, however, Reiter and Stam sound a cautionary note. For the same reason that democracies tend to start fewer wars, they tend to grow weary of them faster: “When the promised quick victory does not materialize . . . the people may reconsider their decision to consent to the war at hand and actively withdraw their support.” According to Reiter and Stam, this is the main reason that Harry Truman decided to drop two atomic bombs on Japanese cities in the summer of 1945. When wars drag on, democracies’ chances of victory diminish. In fact, Reiter and Stam write, “The longer a war continues, the more likely autocracies are to win.”

Putin has probably not read Chapter 7 of “Democracies at War,” but he has long been counting on the dynamics it describes. He has what he likes to think of as stability—he can decide on a policy and stick with it—whereas Western democracies are constantly changing their leaders and their minds. It was apparently his calculation, in the run-up to the war, that European voters would not long stand for the high energy prices that a war with Russia would entail; he believed, too, that the U.S. was preoccupied with its own difficulties and would not mount a sustained response. For nearly two years, he was wrong. Western democracies rallied to the side of Ukraine, and Russia seemed a lot less stable than Putin had supposed: a partial mobilization in the fall of 2022 was unpopular, and, in the summer of 2023, one of Putin’s longtime loyal oligarchs, Yevgeny Prigozhin, gathered a column of men and started marching toward Moscow. But Prigozhin was assassinated, and, in recent months, Putin’s expectations of Western disarray have finally begun to be met. Largely owing to Hungarian recalcitrance, the European Union took months to agree on a large aid package to Ukraine; more worrisome still, a group of Republicans has been able to stall a similarly large aid package in the U.S. Congress. And inside Ukraine, too, politics have reappeared. It is widely thought that Zelensky decided to remove Zaluzhny because he worried that Zaluzhny was becoming a political rival. (Zaluzhny’s public disagreements with his boss did not help.)

Hamas’s violent incursion into Israel on October 7th of last year, followed by Israel’s hugely disproportionate response, has scrambled the international map. It has also occupied the time of senior U.S. officials and weakened Joe Biden politically. Then there is this year’s U.S. Presidential election. The fact that, back in 2019, Donald Trump appeared to attempt to extort Zelensky—conditioning military aid on Ukraine’s willingness to investigate the Biden family—is not an encouraging sign for supporters of Ukraine. Neither is Trump’s long-standing skepticism of nato, expressed most recently in his comment that he would encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to nato countries that did not “pay.”

Most military analysts believe that, in the coming year, even if U.S. aid finally comes through, Russia has the advantage. Russia has used continued revenues from the sale of oil and gas to pay for weapons manufacturing: it’s producing munitions, missiles, and tanks at rates double and triple what they were before the war. Though Ukrainian forces have driven drone innovation on the battlefield, Russia, over the past year, has produced more drones. And the state has managed, by hook and by crook, to continue recruiting men into the armed forces. “Let’s be honest,” Zaluzhny told The Economist, “it’s a feudal state where the cheapest resource is human life.”

Ukraine has some advantages. Western-supplied long-range missile systems possess precision and evasion capabilities that Russian missiles cannot match. These have allowed Ukraine to strike Russian airfields, barracks, and weapons depots well behind the front lines, including in Crimea; they have also helped Ukraine break the blockade of its Black Sea shipping lanes. Ukrainian soldiers have a better sense of what they’re fighting for, and the Army is the most respected institution in the country. Though Zaluzhny has been replaced, there is reason to believe that the reforms he’s been advocating, including a substantial increase in troop mobilization, will be carried out without him.

Military analysts are, however, a little hard-pressed to describe an actual military victory for Ukraine. Boston says he has not heard anyone discussing the equipment and firepower Ukraine would need. “Let’s say I want to have a breakthrough operation against Russian forces,” he said. “I need to have substantial artillery superiority at the point of the attack. I need to find a way to introduce land forces in sufficient numbers and have a way that they will not all get blown up by enemy artillery. The enemy artillery needs to be suppressed, needs to be destroyed, or needs to be blinded so that you can get enough of the land forces to punch the hole.” This needs to happen, furthermore, at multiple points, and Ukraine needs to have forces in reserve so that, if a breakthrough is achieved, those troops can take advantage of it. “That all, to me, sounds remarkably expensive,” Boston said. In a situation where a roughly base level of support is having trouble making it through a divided Congress, Boston found it hard to see a way toward an even greater level.

“Ukraine needs to prepare for a long war,” Olga Oliker, a former rand analyst and Pentagon staffer who is now the head of the Europe and Central Asia program at the International Crisis Group, told me. Oliker believes that a long war could be won, but it may not look like the victory some maximalists have been promising. “You have to create the space for Ukraine to claim victory under less-than-ideal conditions,” she said. “Because, if you say the only thing that is victory is the Russians go home entirely from Crimea and Donbas, Ukraine is in nato, and Moscow somehow disappears off the face of the earth—that’s an unrealistic goal. To me, Ukrainian victory is a situation in which Russia can’t do this again or at least is going to have a very hard time doing it again.”

This could mean that the Russian military is constrained by some agreement that it’s been forced into, but it could also mean that Ukraine’s defenses are sufficiently bolstered, and its allies sufficiently clear in their resolve, that the cost to Russia of a renewed offensive would simply be too high. There is also the hope, not entirely illusory, that Russian vulnerabilities will eventually become too much for the Putin regime to handle. “There’s a certain amount of instability that’s built into the Russian system that the Russians worry about,” Oliker said. “At some point, if they’re worried enough, they might be willing to negotiate.”

A senior Biden Administration official who has helped develop sanctions against Russia expounded on this theory. He said that, for some time, the Administration’s view has been that Russia can continue its current level of war expenditures into the spring of 2025, at which point it will run into trouble. He pointed to the freezing of Russian assets abroad, the running down of its hard-currency reserves, and the increasingly complex supply lines that Russia needs to evade Western sanctions. “It’s like a top that’s slowing down,” the official said. “They’re going to have to start making harder and harder choices, faster and faster, as we get into 2025. That’s a far cry from whatever Putin’s aim was in this war—which was, you know, reinstating Catherine the Great’s empire or something.”

The Administration official was painting an optimistic picture—one that depends on continued Western support. When I asked whether there was a contingency plan if the aid did not come through, he said there wasn’t one: “The contingency plan, frankly, is that the Ukrainians will keep fighting with less and less.” Ukraine is already running short of artillery shells, and it could eventually run out of air-defense interceptors. “So it’s a very stark choice in terms of the security assistance,” the official said. He estimated that, with the help of Western air-defense systems, Ukrainian forces could shoot down as many as ninety per cent of Russian air-attack assets. “Without it, that number will be zero soon.”

There is a third option for how the war might develop, beyond a “mutually hurting stalemate,” as it’s known in the literature, and a measured Ukrainian victory. As Michael Kofman, a longtime analyst of the Russian military who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, stressed to me, Ukraine could start to lose. That could mean a breakthrough by Russian forces, though they have so far been unable to achieve one, or just enough wearing down of Ukrainian and Western will that Ukraine is forced to negotiate concessions from a position of weakness. The question then becomes what, aside from the catastrophic humanitarian and political consequences in Ukraine, a Russian victory would mean for the world. If Putin wins, or feels like he has won, what will he do next?

Some argue that he would do nothing—that Ukraine is a special case, more central to Russia’s conception of itself as an imperial power than any other country. The counter-argument is that we don’t know. “In Moscow, they have all sorts of assessments of nato power,” Massicot said. “I don’t think they can confront it directly. For one thing, the Russian Army is partially destroyed. The Russian Air Force has not exactly covered themselves in glory in this war. But they will downgrade their assessment of nato as a cohesive alliance on the basis of our political will. From their point of view, they will feel that they have won a proxy war with nato. And they’re going to be angry, they’re going to want revenge, and now they think we’re weaker than we are. That’s a dangerous situation.” Right now, the U.S. has about a hundred thousand troops in Europe; in 1989, there were three times that many. An ambiguous result in Ukraine, which leaves Russia capable of further offensive action, could mean a movement toward old troop levels. And Mearsheimer, Posen, and Cohen would have to dust off their essays on nato preparedness.

It feels, in fact, like all the old Cold War arguments are back. Clearly, the Russian leadership is capable of brutal expansionist aggression. But just how far are they willing to go, and what exactly will they think of next? “The problem that I see is that the Russian economy has undergone a structural transition and is now on a militarized footing,” Kofman said. “So the Russian government is probably going to be focussed on regenerating military power for some time, both because it’s a matter of strategy but also because the militarized economy is going to be producing military goods and they will not have an easy way to transition it back.” This, Kofman concluded, means “that they could be in a position sooner than people think to actually contest the security and stability of Europe.”

Kofman, Lee, and Massicot recently published an article on the national-security Web site War on the Rocks in which they outlined a strategy for Ukrainian victory. “Hold, Build, and Strike,” they called it. In the essay, they urged Ukraine to hold the line of contact in the coming months, spend 2024 building up its forces, and then strike, in 2025, when they could see an advantage. These ideas were not far from what Zaluzhny had been advocating over the past several months. “You shouldn’t fight a war till your first failed offensive,” Kofman said. “That’s not how most conventional wars go. If that’s how they went, they’d all be over really fast.” He went on to give an example from the Second World War. “You know Stalin’s famous ten blows?” These were ten major offensives, several of them on Ukrainian territory, that the Soviets undertook against Germany in 1944. But there were, in fact, far more than ten offensives, Kofman said: “They just don’t include all the offensives that failed.” Last summer was a good opportunity for Ukraine to take back territory from the Russian Army, but it will not, Kofman believes, be the last such opportunity.

Oliker, whose job at the International Crisis Group is to seek ways to end conflicts, does not see how this one can end just yet. She admitted that, in the aftermath of the failed counter-offensive, in the midst of a long cold winter, and with Western support in doubt, Ukraine is facing a very difficult moment. “But it was not a good moment for Russia in spring and summer of 2022,” Oliker said. “That’s war. If it is, in fact, a long war, prepare for a few more back-and-forths.”

Source: The New Yorker

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The basic question was simple, Are We at War? Will Russia win? What’s the consequence for Europe if Russia wins? What is the European Union willingness to defend the Ukraine and willingness to mobilize Europe to go to war? If we are at war, then what is the strategy? How do we win?

The illustrious group agreed, if we are at war that than in cyber, we are at war. Cyberwars have no beginning and no end. Cyber has no boundary.

But besides cyber the war in the trenches continues, casualties on both sides are piling up. A culture of strategic exhaustion is adopted by both sides. This is neither new nor revolutionary. New is the tactical glass battlefield. Both sides see what the other side is planning. Deception does again become important. The killing becomes routine sort of a mechanical, tragic but a sideshow. We are at war.

Since we are now accepting war is the currency of today, what is the strategy for the near-term future? The lunch group conclusion is that four main strategies apply.

We Are At War!

Accepting Europeans facing a peer adversary with a history of violence, brutality, violations of human rights and disregard for the protection of culture and its humanity. The consequence of Russia beating the Ukraine is a strategic defeat for the European idea. The concept of war is abstract for Europeans. It’s bizarre. It is violent, destructive, and revolting to the senses. However, it must be done. As it was done to destroy the German war machine the Russian needs defeating. A war of attrition must be applied.

Beat Russia!

…and its allies near and far. Decisive and strategic. The strategy is simple. The objective out of textbooks. The attacker must be defeated. On all fronts. Wherever the Russians are a threat, the Russians must be defeated. The Russian nuclear fleet must be scuttled. The Airforce must be destroyed. Strategic commando operations must cripple the defense industry. No more hiding behind the Ural, out of reach. The Russian army is within reach!

The Ukrainian foreign minister said recently, ‘Every city, village, town the Ukrainian army surrenders is closer to your homes. Peace in Europe is over!’ The Russians must be beaten!

Russian Surrenders!

We except the surrender of the Russian forces. Unconditionally and immediate. A process of returning the territories occupied will be agreed on. A conditional process of surrendering of the war cabinet and incorporation of a peaceful transition will be initiated. Peace returns. But Russia must be defeated!

What’s Next?

The current conditions are closely watched by near peer rising challengers to the new hegemon, the European Union. The United States is largely a subservient client state of Europe and in the orbit of China, Turkey, with emerging Africa and states in Asia.

The United States are embroidered in an ideological dispute between the Republican and the Democratic parties for years to come. The political climate is a mouth service and serves the U.S. interest first and foremost. The newly rise of a new player on the scene is seen with mistrust within Washington power circles and Russians playbook operations. To off balance the distrust for Kyiv is bizarrely matched with Russian ambitions to bring the U.S. power circles closer to Moscow. If the Trump administration beliefs he brings ‘peace in our times’ he is mistaken.

However, the power brokers in Washington forget foreign relationships are born out of necessity rather than ambitions. Hence regardless of who is on the lever of power in the U.S. congress the long term relations with the Russian Federation are determined in a bilateral fashion.

We are on the verge of a multi-conflict ranging across Europe, embattling Asia, unhinging Africa. The evil forces may not be as evident as they are present, but the ideological battle is present. For years forces of moderation in the Islamic world gave lip services to the moderate European or American forces. Now a battle between good and evil is emerging.

by Marc Dubois

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If devastation is the goal, Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip has been a resounding success. More than two months after Hamas killed over 1,100 people on October 7, Israeli air and ground operations have killed some 20,000 Palestinians, many of them children, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry. Much of Gaza lies in ruins, with the United Nations estimating that almost 20 percent of the territory’s prewar structures have been destroyed. More than half of Gazans are experiencing severe hunger, unemployment has risen to 85 percent, and disease is spreading.

But the statements of a few extremist ministers notwithstanding, Israel’s goals in Gaza are broader and more strategic than inflicting pain on the Palestinians. On December 12, I landed in Israel for a weeklong research trip, joined by colleagues from the Center for Strategic and International Studies and several other experts. In an effort to understand Israel’s goals and strategy, we spoke with current and former Israeli military leaders, senior security officials, diplomats, and politicians, as well as ordinary citizens. The interviewees related their perspectives on October 7, the state of the war today, and the future of their country.

Israel’s war in Gaza differs from many other conflicts in that there is not a single finite objective. There is no invading force to be expelled, no territory to be conquered, no dictator to be toppled. Nonetheless, two months on, a more or less clear list of goals is emerging. Israel seeks to destroy Hamas, capturing or killing its leaders, shattering its military capacity, and ending its power in Gaza. It seeks the release of the hostages who were kidnapped on October 7 and remain alive, as well as the bodies of those who have been killed. It wants to prevent another attack, particularly by Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon. It wants to maintain international support, especially from the United States, and safeguard the diplomatic gains it has made with Arab countries in recent years. And it seeks to rebuild the trust in security institutions that the public lost after the attacks.

Israel’s response can seem confusing to outsiders, but it makes more sense when these competing goals are considered. Each has its own metrics and complications, and some are in direct conflict with one another. So far, the results of Israel’s campaign have been mixed: Israel has hit Hamas hard, but it is falling short in many areas, inflicting a devastating toll on civilians in Gaza and paying a heavy price in terms of international support. Israel’s leaders are often trying to have it all. Instead, they need to make hard choices about which goals to prioritize and which to downplay.

Because maintaining U.S support is vital, Israel should focus on targeting Hamas’s leaders more than destroying the group’s broader military forces and infrastructure. It should make more of an effort to reduce civilian casualties. It should seek to deter, rather than destroy, Hezbollah, maintaining larger numbers of forces near Gaza and Lebanon even after active hostilities end to reassure the Israeli people. And it should focus more on who will replace Hamas in Gaza, which requires bolstering the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian technocrats. If Israel instead tries to have it all, it risks having nothing.

Appetite for Destruction

No visitor to Israel can miss the sense of pain, fury, and mistrust that pervades every conversation. The term “earthquake” came up again and again when I asked about October 7. One Israeli security official declared that “something fundamental broke” in the country that day. (To encourage candor, we agreed to not to identify our interview subjects.) Israelis believe that they cannot go back to a pre–October 7 world, with a hostile and intact Hamas across the border in Gaza. In their eyes, the brutality of the attacks showed Hamas to be beyond redemption, unable to be deterred or contained.

The problem goes beyond Gaza, however. With justification, many Israelis blame Iran for Hamas’s impressive arsenal and the innovative methods of its fighters. They fear that Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, will also attack Israel, using its exponentially larger rocket arsenal and far more skilled fighters to launch a much more devastating attack on Israel’s north. Since October 7, over 200,000 Israelis have fled areas near Gaza and Lebanon.

At the same time, Israelis no longer trust their own security institutions. As one Israeli security official explained, “Before October 7, intelligence told the country, ‘We know Hamas,’ while the military said, ‘We can handle Hamas.’” Both, he added, were wrong. It is now hard for Israeli leaders to reassure the public that next time, the military and intelligence services will keep them safe.

To rebuild public confidence, Israeli leaders have vowed to utterly destroy Hamas. Days after the attack, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant issued one such pledge. “We will wipe this thing called Hamas, ISIS-Gaza, off the face of the earth,” he said. “It will cease to exist.” But destroying Hamas can mean many different things in practice.

Israelis no longer trust their own security institutions.

The focus of Israel’s current military campaign is to destroy Hamas’s military wing, which boasted around 25,000 to 30,000 members before October 7. At the time of my interviews, most Israeli officials estimated that 7,000 of those fighters had been killed in the war. That figure is hard to verify, however, and it may include Palestinians who fought back against invading forces yet were not formally part of Hamas’s military wing. The number of fighters appears to be dwindling further: some Israeli officials told me that more and more are fleeing or surrendering.

Although the Israel Defense Forces are inflicting a steep toll on Hamas, the group’s large numbers and ability to blend in with the population make it difficult to eradicate, especially without killing a huge number of Palestinian civilians. Urban warfare is a nightmare for even the best militaries, and the IDF has already lost more than 100 soldiers in its current campaign. Adding to the difficulty, Hamas has located many of its military assets near or in civilian facilities such as mosques and schools. In addition, Gaza has a vast tunnel network, more extensive than Israeli intelligence had originally thought, where fighters can move undetected and leaders can hide. Hamas also has deep roots in Gaza, with decades-old ties to mosques, hospitals, schools, and charities, and since 2007, it has been the government there. The group permeates everyday life in Gaza: the doctor, the police officer, the garbage collector, and the teacher may all have links to Hamas, making it difficult to eradicate the group beyond its military wing.

Israel, of course, will not be able to kill every single Hamas fighter. But it may be able to kill enough members, especially leaders and veteran forces, to shatter the group’s military capacity. In this vision of victory, Hamas’s units would no longer be able to fight effectively and launch operations against Israel. And if there were a new government in Gaza, the remnants of Hamas would be more easily suppressed because that administration’s security forces would have a decent chance of finding and suppressing isolated cells of fighters.

Hamas also has a vast military infrastructure. This includes not only its tunnel network but also its rockets, missiles, launch pads, and ammunition depots. The assets are everywhere: Hamas has been preparing for an Israeli invasion for more than a decade. Part of the purpose of Israel’s invasion is to destroy this infrastructure, which in turn requires bombing or occupying much of Gaza. There isn’t much publicly available data for quantifying this progress, but it can be measured by the frequency and size of Hamas’s rocket and missile attacks, the quantity of ammunition Hamas fighters have, and the territory that Hamas controls—all of which, according to the officials I interviewed, are steadily shrinking. Some of these observations are visible to outsiders, whereas others require detailed intelligence to judge.

Hide and Seek

Another metric of success is whether Hamas’s leadership has been destroyed. Israel has a long history of killing terrorist leaders, and Israeli officials have announced plans to assassinate Hamas’s leaders after the war ends. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called Hamas’s top official, Yahya Sinwar, a “dead man walking,” and even before October 7, Israeli forces had repeatedly tried to kill Hamas’s military leader, Mohammed Deif, as well as his second-in-command, Marwan Issa. The Israeli government reports that it has already killed many Hamas leaders in the current military campaign, with Netanyahu claiming that half of Hamas’s battalion commanders are now dead.

Yet like destroying Hamas’s military infrastructure, eliminating its leadership is difficult. Deif, Issa, and Sinwar are believed to be hiding underground. More junior leaders are clearly being killed, but at least some of them will be replaced by other competent leaders. Because of the difficulty of destroying infrastructure and killing Hamas members and leaders, most of the Israeli security officials I spoke with estimated that another six to nine months of high-intensity military operations are necessary.

Even if the current cohort of leaders is killed, however, Hamas has a deep bench of replacements. Ever since Hamas’s founding in 1987, Israel has routinely killed or jailed its high-level leaders, yet the organization has endured. It has ample lower-level leaders and large support networks to draw on. That said, killing Sinwar and Deif, in particular, would have political value for Israel, even if Hamas replaced them with equally competent and hostile leaders. Both have become symbols of October 7, and an Israeli government could more credibly claim victory if they were killed, even if many of their fellow leaders survived.

Beyond any individual leader, Hamas embodies an ideology that will be even harder to eliminate. The idea behind muqawama, or resistance, is that the way to defeat Israel (and, for that matter, the United States) is through persistent military force, a credo also embraced by Hezbollah and Iran. Should Israel devastate Hamas but a strong new organization with the same mindset take its place, Israel will only have replaced one foe with another. In the past, Israel has nearly eliminated individual Palestinian terrorist groups, such as Al Saiqa, a once-strong Baathist group backed by Syria in the 1960s and 1970s whose leader, Zuheir Mohsen, was gunned down by Israeli agents in 1979. Israel has greatly diminished others, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a leftist group famed for its airplane hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s and a hang-glider attack on Israel in 1987. But would-be terrorists simply joined other groups, including Hamas.

The ideology of resistance is popular among Palestinians, and October 7 has made it even more so. Hamas deeply hurt Israel, which many Palestinians, humiliated by decades of occupation, regard with glee. Israel’s destructive military campaign, with its large civilian death toll, has further angered Palestinians, and Hamas’s seizure of hostages has forced Israel to release some detained Palestinians, a goal that past negotiations by moderate Palestinians were unable to achieve. A poll conducted in late November and early December by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 82 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank support the attack. Eventually, Palestinians may look at the destruction in Gaza and conclude that violent resistance makes their lives worse, and polls show that there is less support for October 7 in Gaza, which is paying the price of Hamas’s brutality. But so far, support for Hamas has grown.

A very different aspect of destroying Hamas involves its long-term replacement as the government of Gaza. Someone must govern the strip and prevent Hamas from returning to power, and Israel has no interest in being a long-term occupier. On this question, however, there is little progress, and if anything, the situation for Israel is worse than on October 7. No outside power wants to act as Israel’s police force in Gaza.

U.S. President Joe Biden has called for a “revitalized Palestinian Authority” to govern Gaza. The PA now controls the West Bank and works closely with Israel there on security, but its leadership is incompetent and unpopular. Israel’s harsh policies and expansion of settlements in the West Bank steadily undermined the PA there, and its invasion of Gaza has worsened the organization’s legitimacy problem, as Palestinians admire Hamas’s defiance and see the PA as complicit in Israel’s occupation. “There is no Palestinian leadership,” one interviewee noted acidly, even as he added, “Palestinians must control Gaza.” If the PA were put in charge of Gaza, Palestinians would see it as a handmaiden of the brutal Israeli occupiers. Without significant support from Israel, the PA’s forces would be overwhelmed even by a remnant of Hamas.

Held Hostage

Everywhere I looked in Israel, the faces of hostages stared out from posters. Their treatment in Gaza and the need for their release came up constantly in my conversations. Hamas took roughly 240 hostages on October 7, and a little under half have been freed. The remainder, estimated at 129 today, are still in Gaza, and it is unclear how many of them survive. (Israel believes at least 20 of them have died.) At a psychological level, the presence of over 100 hostages is an open wound for Israel. At a tactical level, it complicates the IDF’s operations.

To comprehend the scale of the trauma for Israelis, consider how Israel has handled hostage situations in the past. In 2011, it traded more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for a single Israeli soldier whom Hamas had captured, Gilad Shalit. Since October 7, it has already freed around 240 prisoners in exchange for Hamas’s liberating more than 100 of those captured on October 7, including 23 citizens of Thailand and one from the Philippines, as well as many dual nationals. Many of the remaining hostages are young Israeli men of fighting age, and Hamas has vowed to extract a high price for their release—part of the reason that talks collapsed after the initial releases. Remaining hostages also include women whom Israelis believe were raped or otherwise brutalized, and Hamas is reluctant to release them lest they publicize their abuse. Further complicating the hostage problem, perhaps around 30 of the remaining hostages are under the control of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another terrorist group, or other factions in Gaza.

Conducting high-intensity military operations while trying to free prisoners is exceptionally difficult. Just as Hamas places its forces among civilians, it uses hostages as shields. Friendly fire by the IDF has killed some Israeli prisoners, and IDF bombing has undoubtedly killed more. If military operations continue, Israel will likely be able to liberate some of those kidnapped, but it will also lose many in the fighting.

The Northern Front

Israel has long relied on deterrence to counter its enemies, trying to convince them that any attack would leave them worse off. Measuring deterrence is difficult. Most Israelis would have said before October 7 that Hamas was successfully deterred, but Hamas nonetheless attacked, and its success may inspire other enemies to do so as well. In general, it is hard to understand the risk-reward calculus of a foe, especially a highly ideological one.

Even as Israel fights on in Gaza, it has engaged in a back-and-forth with Hezbollah on its northern border, with Hezbollah firing rockets and attacking Israeli border posts and the IDF bombing Hezbollah positions. Israeli leaders hope to demonstrate resolve by making Hezbollah pay a price for its aggression, but they also wish to avoid a larger war while their forces are occupied with fighting Hamas. For now, Hezbollah also seems to want to avoid full conflict, launching limited attacks to show solidarity with Hamas but avoiding a more intense campaign. The devastation of Gaza has probably reinforced deterrence: Hezbollah may not want to risk its strongholds in Beirut looking like the moonscape that is much of Gaza today.

Eventually, however, Israel may want to wage a larger war against Hezbollah in the belief that unless it does so, deterrence will not hold and Israel might be surprised again. As one Israeli security official put it to me, “Deterrence is something that lasts until the other side is ready for war.” Hezbollah keeps elite commando units—its Radwan forces—on the Lebanese border with Israel. It also has a substantial rocket arsenal that can reach targets throughout Israel and is big enough to overwhelm the country’s missile defense system.

Israel may be able to continue deterring Hezbollah from launching a war, but the threat of rockets and commando attacks—a repeat of October 7, but in the north and from a far more capable foe—keeps Israeli military planners up at night. In early December, in fact, Gallant, the defense minister, threatened to open up a second front against Hezbollah if the group didn’t remove its Radwan units from the border.

Foreign Friends

Israel is a small country, and despite its military prowess, it cannot operate alone indefinitely. It also sees itself as a Western democracy and is sensitive to criticism from other members of that club. So Israeli leaders have looked on with worry as Western support appears to slip. Anti-Israeli protests have broken out across Europe, and 17 of 27 EU members supported a UN General Assembly resolution calling for a cease-fire.

Arab leaders, including ones who have recently signed peace treaties with Israel, are very critical of Israel publicly—even if they strongly oppose Hamas and its brand of political Islam privately—because Arab publics are outraged by the Palestinian death toll. Yet the new peace deals with Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates have held, and there is little sign that they are in jeopardy, even as their leaders’ rhetoric grows more heated.

Israel can live with fraying European ties and growing criticism from Arab states, but losing American support would be an altogether different matter. The Israelis I spoke with were uniformly glowing about Biden—a “mensch,” in one interviewee’s words, and, in another’s, “the biggest friend of Israel since Harry Truman,” who was the first world leader to officially recognize Israel. On top of the more than $3 billion Israel receives from the United States in military aid every year, Congress and the White House are now considering a package that would provide a $14 billion supplement. Israel also depends on the United States for munitions, which it needs in Gaza and would need far more of in a war in Lebanon. The United States also regularly provides cover for Israel at the United Nations—for instance, vetoing a recent Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.

So far, support for Hamas has grown among Palestinians.

But many Israeli leaders worry that American support may not last forever, and those who don’t harbor that fear should. Biden’s own party is increasingly split over Israel’s conduct in the war, the president himself has now criticized “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza, and officials in his administration are pressing for an end to major military operations. The Biden administration has also strongly discouraged a preventive war in the north against Hezbollah, with senior U.S. officials, including Biden, telling their Israeli counterparts not to expand the war. The United States deployed two aircraft carriers to the eastern Mediterranean Sea with the explicit purpose of deterring Iran and Hezbollah and the implicit goal of reassuring Israel that the United States has its back—a marked change from before October 7, when many in the Middle East believed the United States was turning its back on the region to focus on China.

To maintain strong U.S. support and avoid putting Arab leaders into a box from which they cannot escape, Israel will need to tone down its military operations in Gaza. But a less aggressive and less destructive campaign will make it harder to kill Hamas’s fighters and demolish its infrastructure. In the north, Israel is also constrained. Barring a serious act of provocation by Hezbollah, Israel cannot launch a war in Lebanon and maintain U.S. support.

Keeping the Faith

Israel was a divided country before October 7, with Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing government pushing to weaken the judiciary, expand settlements in the West Bank, and protect the prime minister from allegations of corruption. Now, Israelis are united behind the goal of destroying Hamas, but many hold Netanyahu responsible for failing to prevent the attack and want to see him resign.

Israelis’ loss of faith in their leaders might simply seem like normal politics, not anything to do with counterterrorism, but in fact such an outcome represents a major goal of terrorists. Hamas was probably seeking to destroy Israelis’ confidence in their government institutions, and even if that wasn’t a goal, this consequence has surely been a welcome bonus for the group. Absent such confidence, displaced Israelis will not return to their homes near Gaza or Lebanon. And skeptics of the Israeli government will see some of its continued anti-Hamas operations as a way for Netanyahu to keep himself in power, not as a genuine necessity in the fight against terrorism.

When it comes to restoring faith in government, Israel has a long way to go. Although Netanyahu has brought some opposition figures into a war cabinet, his own support has plummeted, with a November poll finding that just four percent of Israeli Jews considered him a trustworthy source of information on the war. As operations in Gaza ebb, commissions will investigate the military and intelligence failure on October 7, and the revelations will in the short term no doubt cause Israelis to lose even more confidence in their security institutions. Some confidence will be restored as the IDF and Israeli intelligence services demonstrate their combat proficiency in Gaza, as most Israelis agree they have already by hitting Hamas hard and limiting Israeli casualties. And as a new generation of military and intelligence leaders replaces those who have taken responsibility for the October 7 debacle and promised to resign, some trust should be rebuilt. But in the end, it will probably take years of relative calm for Israelis to regain their faith.

No Way Out

All of Israel’s goals are difficult to achieve, and some are at cross-purposes. A continued military campaign, which would be necessary to severely degrade Hamas and to help rebuild public confidence in the military, will take months to succeed—and even then, it will be unlikely to kill every last Hamas leader and destroy every last tunnel. Releasing hostages and maintaining U.S. support, however, will be difficult to achieve without reducing military operations. And an intense campaign will not help find a solution to the long-term problem of who will govern Gaza: when the dust has settled, Israel will need a Palestinian partner to run the strip, and destructive military operations diminish its credibility among the population there.

Because its goals are difficult to achieve separately and even harder to achieve together, Israel is likely to fall short. Whatever happens, more of Hamas’s leaders and fighters will probably survive than Israel would prefer, and Hezbollah will probably continue its rocket attacks as the war rages in Gaza. Yet a lack of complete success does not mean failure. Hezbollah, like Israel, does not appear to want an all-out war. The October 7 attack has brought Israel and the U.S. government closer and diminished concerns that Washington will abandon the Middle East.

But what became clear from my conversations is that Israel’s current approach to Gaza is too ambitious, and the time has come to correct course. In the coming months, Israel should move away from high-intensity operations while continuing to eliminate Hamas’s top leaders through drone strikes, raids by special operations forces, and other means, doing so even if some of Hamas’s military infrastructure and regular forces remain. Israel needs U.S. backing, and that requires limiting civilian casualties in Gaza, greatly expanding humanitarian efforts in the strip, and avoiding an unprovoked war with Hezbollah. To reassure the Israeli population without fully destroying Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel should station more military forces near Lebanon and Gaza. Perhaps most important, Israel and the international community should begin the long process of bolstering the PA and other alternatives to Hamas to govern Gaza.

Israel must also accept the reality that in many ways, it is damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t. Its leaders must make hard choices about which goals to prioritize and which to set aside. One Israeli security official put it to me best: “The only resource in the Middle East more plentiful than oil is bad options.”

Source: Foreign Affairs

The post Israel’s Muddled Strategy in Gaza appeared first on Ankara Haftalik.

Drawing from its prior clashes with Israel, Hamas has gained vital insights on how to effectively counter Israel. Despite being at a military disadvantage in nearly every area, Hamas has developed unconventional methods to attack Israel, including a powerful propaganda system to garner global backing for its objectives.

For example, on Tuesday, Hamas employed extensive propaganda tactics as reports emerged of an alleged Israeli airstrike targeting the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza. One of the earliest pieces of evidence demonstrating the dissemination of disinformation appeared when a member of the Hamas-operated health ministry was quoted by al-Jazeera – a fervent advocate of Hamas and Islamic Jihad – alleging that five hundred individuals at a hospital had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. Subsequently, this information rapidly proliferated across various social media platforms, including mainstream news web sites.

The news spurred the Israeli military to deny the accusation and declassify intelligence demonstrating that it did not strike the hospital and that it was an errant rocket fired by Islamic Jihad. Allied countries like the United States and France publicly supported Israel’s assertion that it was not responsible for the blast.

Another point of significance is that rockets launched by Palestinian armed groups are unreliable and often times strike the civilian population in Gaza. Last year, video evidence surfaced that rockets fired by terrorist organizations were falling short and hitting civilian infrastructure.

Although the explosion at the hospital was probably caused by a misdirected rocket, and the casualties initially reported were inflated, the damage had already been done to Israel’s image on the international stage.

Another example of Hamas propaganda emerged during the first days of the war when its spokesperson, Abu Obeida, threatened that Hamas would begin executing hostages if Israeli airstrikes did not cease. Since the statement, Israel has continued striking military infrastructure, and Hamas has not made any more public threats about the hostages.

Lastly, Hamas disseminated a recording showing a seemingly injured Israeli hostage receiving medical care. The video was an attempt to show that Hamas cared for the prisoners. Still, in reality, Hamas was trying to restore its image after much of the brutality and kidnappings by the group were published online.

Hamas has implemented various propaganda techniques throughout previous wars, including during times of general calm. Specific methods have effectively dispelled inaccurate information, primarily because of mainstream media’s limited comprehension of the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Given the propensity of journalists to at times conduct insufficient research when reporting events during war because of the urgency to provide speedy information on social media platforms, Hamas will undoubtedly attempt to continue exploiting these vulnerabilities.

Source: FDD

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Bulgaria’s booming arms industry has never had it so good, with exports estimated at $4.3 billion last year (about four billion euros) — three times its previous record.

The country’s oldest arms maker Arsenal, which already employs 7,000 workers in its Kazanlak plant, is offering seaside holidays and other incentives to attract staff.

It has even been tempting back Bulgarians who left the Balkan country to find work abroad.

“When they hired us they said there’s orders to keep us busy for at least five years,” one of the newly hired workers told AFP at the factory gates.

“I have only been here a week myself, but I already have three new colleagues,” said the woman, who would not give her name.

Historic Russia links

While you might think it would be trumpeting its success from the rooftops, the company did not reply to AFP requests for an interview.

Although Bulgaria itself has largely not sent arms to Ukraine because of the EU member’s historic ties with Moscow, that is where Kazanlak’s burgeoning production is mostly destined.

Its arms and munitions are instead being bought up by neighbouring Romania and Poland before being funnelled to Kyiv.

Kazanlak and the “Valley of the Roses” around it, which is also famous for its rose oil, suffered badly when its arms makers lost their markets when the Soviet bloc collapsed in 1989, though conflicts in the Middle East revived demand for their cheap and sturdy weapons, like the AR-M1, the “Bulgarian Kalashnikov” rifle, in the 2010s.

Arsenal’s upturn “benefits the whole town”, Yordan Ignatov, deputy chair of the local chamber of commerce, said.

“Last year, Kazanlak had the lowest unemployment rate in the country after Sofia,” he added, half the national average.

Investment is also booming.

“Everything that is built is bought,” real estate agent Teodor Tenev told AFP.

Bulgaria specialises in ammunition for Soviet-era weapons — those most used by Kyiv — though it wants to modernise its ageing production facilities with European money to start churning out NATO-standard shells and other ammo.

And there was more good news on that front Monday when European Union foreign ministers agreed on a two-billion-euro plan that included jointly purchasing desperately needed artillery shells for Ukraine.

Even though it stands to vastly benefit from the deal, Sofia sought to save its diplomatic blushes by not signing the joint declaration.

Nor did its reticence stop EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton from starting a tour last week of European arms makers in Bulgaria.

Up the road from Kazanlak in Sopot, Breton visited the country’s biggest arms maker, VMZ.

The state-owned plant has a new production line for the 155 mm artillery shells that Ukraine’s army needs. Breton’s visit was not open to the media.

‘Not a political pawn’

Supplying arms to Ukraine is an extremely sensitive issue in Bulgaria.

The Socialists — the successors to the old communist party — and the ever-rising ultra-nationalists are firmly against as the country gears up for the fifth election in two years next month.

Parliament so far has authorised only one shipment of light arms and ammunition to Kyiv.

Shortly after the invasion began, pro-European then-premier Kiril Petkov walked a tightrope to try to help Kyiv.

“We estimate that one-third of the ammunition needed by Ukraine in the first phase of the war came from Bulgaria,” Petkov told the German daily Die Welt.

Even after the fall of Petkov’s short-lived cabinet last June, indirect arms sales continued.

Retired Bulgarian army colonel Vladimir Milenski regrets that Bulgaria has refused to openly arm Kyiv.

“This would have sent a strong political signal showing that we are not a political pawn in Russia’s hands,” he said.

“To belong to the EU and NATO family and behave in such a way as not to infringe on the interests of Russia, an aggressor, is in the end tantamount to supporting it.”

Bulgarians will vote on 2 April in snap parliamentary elections, with the war in Ukraine taking center stage in the campaign.

Source: euractiv

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At about 1am on February 24 last year, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, received a troubling phone call.

After spending months building up a more than 100,000-strong invasion force on the border with Ukraine, Vladimir Putin had given the go-ahead to invade.

The decision caught Lavrov completely by surprise. Just days earlier, the Russian president had polled his security council for their opinions on recognising two separatist statelets in the Donbas, an industrial border region in Ukraine, at an excruciatingly awkward televised session — but had left them none the wiser about his true intentions.

Keeping Lavrov in the dark was not unusual for Putin, who tended to concentrate his foreign policy decision-making among a handful of close confidants, even when it undermined Russia’s diplomatic efforts.

On this occasion, the phone call made Lavrov one of the very few people who had any knowledge of the plan ahead of time. The Kremlin’s senior leadership all found out about the invasion only when they saw Putin declare a “special military operation” on television that morning.

Later that day, several dozen oligarchs gathered at the Kremlin for a meeting arranged only the day before, aware that the invasion would trigger western sanctions that could destroy their empires. “Everyone was completely losing it,” says a person who attended the event.

While they waited, one of the oligarchs spied Lavrov exiting another meeting and pressed him for an explanation about why Putin had decided to invade. Lavrov had no answer: the officials he was there to see in the Kremlin had known less about it than he did.

Stunned, the oligarch asked Lavrov how Putin could have planned such an enormous invasion in such a tiny circle — so much so that most of the senior officials at the Kremlin, Russia’s economic cabinet and its business elite had not believed it was even possible.

“He has three advisers,” Lavrov replied, according to the oligarch. “Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.”

Under Putin’s invasion plan, Russia’s troops were to seize Kyiv within a matter of days in a brilliant, comparatively bloodless blitzkrieg.

Instead, the war has proved to be a quagmire of historic proportions for Russia. A year on, Putin’s invasion has claimed well over 200,000 dead and injured among Russia’s armed forces, according to US and European officials; depleted its stock of tanks, artillery and cruise missiles; and cut the country off from global financial markets and western supply chains.

Nor has the fighting in Ukraine brought Putin any closer to his vaguely defined goals of “demilitarising” and “de-Nazifying” Kyiv. Though Russia now controls 17 per cent of Ukraine’s internationally recognised territory, it has abandoned half of the land it seized in the war’s early weeks — including a humiliating retreat from Kherson, the only provincial capital under its control, just weeks after Putin attempted to annex it.

But as the war rumbles on with no end in sight, Putin has given no indication he intends to back down on his war efforts.

At his state-of-the-union address on Tuesday, Putin insisted the war was “about the very existence of our country” and said the west had forced him to invade Ukraine. “They’re the ones who started the war. We are using force to stop it,” he said.

Even as the huge cost of the invasion to Russia becomes apparent to him, Putin is more determined than ever to see it through, people who know him say.

“The idea was never for hundreds of thousands of people to die. It’s all gone horribly wrong,” a former senior Russian official says. With the initial plan in tatters, Putin is searching for new rationales to justify the war effort, insisting he had no choice but to pursue the invasion by any means necessary, current and former officials say.

“He tells people close to him, ‘It turns out we were completely unprepared. The army is a mess. Our industry is a mess. But it’s good that we found out about it this way, rather than when Nato invades us,’” the former official adds.

The Financial Times spoke to six longtime Putin confidants as well as people involved in Russia’s war effort, and current and former senior officials in the west and Ukraine for this account of how Putin blundered his way into the invasion — then doubled down rather than admit his mistake. All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The people who know Putin describe a leader who has become even more isolated since the start of the war. “Stalin was a villain, but a good manager, because he couldn’t be lied to. But nobody can tell Putin the truth,” says one. “People who don’t trust anyone start trusting a very small number of people who lie to them.”

‘If you don’t agree with it, you can leave’Last year was not the first time Putin had withheld plans of an invasion from close advisers. When Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, he did not inform his own security council — instead on one occasion gaming out the peninsula’s annexation with his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, and three top security officials all night until 7am.

Initially, the advisers urged Putin against sending troops into Crimea, according to a former senior Russian official and a former senior US official. “Putin said, ‘This is a historic moment. If you don’t agree with it, you can leave,’” the former Russian official recalls.

When the west, fearful of escalating tensions to a point of no return and jeopardising Europe’s economic ties with Russia, responded with only a slap on the wrist, Putin was convinced he had made the right decision, according to several people who know the president.

In the years after the 2014 invasion, Putin’s inner circle began to shrink further as he became increasingly consumed with what he saw as growing western threats to Russia’s security, the people say. His isolation deepened when the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020: for fear they could infect a germaphobic Putin, even top officials were forced to spend weeks at a time quarantining for a personal audience.

One of the few people to spend extended time with Putin was his friend Yuri Kovalchuk, a former physicist who in the 1990s owned a dacha adjoining the future president’s in the countryside outside St Petersburg.

The secretive Kovalchuk — a banker and media mogul who the US says manages Putin’s personal finances — almost never speaks in public and did not reply to a request for comment.

People who know him say he shares a passion for Russian imperial revanchism with his older brother Mikhail, a physicist whose conspiracy theory-laden rants about US plans to develop super-soldiers and “ethnic weapons” have, on occasion, popped up later in Putin’s speeches.

During the height of the pandemic, Putin was largely cut off from comparatively liberal, western-minded confidants who had previously had his ear. Instead he spent the first few months in his residence at Valdai, a bucolic town on a lake in northern Russia, essentially on lockdown with the younger Kovalchuk, who inspired Putin to think of his historic mission to assert Russia’s greatness, much as Peter the Great had.

“He really believes all the stuff he says about sacrality and Peter the Great. He thinks he will be remembered like Peter,” a former senior official says.

Increasingly, Putin became fixated on Ukraine as his relations soured with its energetic young president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

One of Zelenskyy’s early moves was to curb the influence of Viktor Medvedchuk, a close friend of Putin’s who headed the largest opposition party in parliament. Whereas former president Petro Poroshenko had used Medvedchuk as a crucial go-between with Moscow, Zelenskyy’s team sought other intermediaries in the belief that his influence on Putin had begun to wane.

But as Putin began drawing up plans for a possible invasion, Medvedchuk insisted that Ukrainians would greet Russia’s forces with open arms.

One part of the plan involved Viktor Yanukovych, a former president who has been in Russian exile since fleeing the 2014 revolution against him. He was to deliver a video message conferring legitimacy on Medvedchuk — and anointing him to rule Ukraine with Russia’s backing.

The vision was starkly at odds with political realities in Ukraine, where the pro-Russian minority that Medvedchuk represented was vastly outnumbered by those who despised him for his ties to Moscow. But it proved seductive for Putin, who authorised payments through Medvedchuk’s party to pay off local collaborators.

There was plenty of scepticism in Moscow. “If Medvedchuk says it’s raining, you need to look out of the window — it’ll be sunny,” says another former senior Russian official. “You have polls, you have the secret services — how can you do anything serious based on what Medvedchuk says?”

However, his assessment was backed up by the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, which assured Putin victory was certain — and paid large sums in bribes to officials in Ukraine in the hope that this would guarantee success.

“The FSB had built a whole system of telling the boss what he wanted to hear. There were huge budgets given out and corruption at every level,” a western intelligence official says. “You tell the right story up top and you skim off a bit for yourself.”

Dissenting voices in the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, and Russia’s general staff attempted to raise doubts. At the security council meeting three days before the invasion, even Nikolai Patrushev, security council secretary and Putin’s longest-standing and most hawkish ally, suggested giving diplomacy another chance.

“He knew what a bad state the army was in and told Putin as much,” a person close to the Kremlin says.

But just as he had in 2014, Putin overruled them, insisting he was better informed.

“Putin was overconfident,” a former senior US official says. “He knows better than his advisers just the way Hitler knew better than his generals.”

The invasion began to unravel almost immediately after Putin set it into motion. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff, had drawn up a plan to seize the Hostomel airfield outside Kyiv, giving Russian elite paratrooper squadrons a platform from which to attack Zelenskyy’s government headquarters.

Some of Medvedchuk’s collaborators worked as spotters for the advancing Russian forces, painting markings on buildings and highways to direct the invaders to key locations. Others joined in the attack on the government quarter. In southern Ukraine, they helped Russia capture a large swath of territory including Kherson with little to no resistance.

Most of Medvedchuk’s network, however, simply took the money and ran, refusing to join in the invasion — or went straight to Ukrainian authorities and warned them of the instructions they had been given, according to a senior Ukrainian official and former US and Russian officials.

Prewar predictions that Ukraine’s army would collapse had largely been based on the assumption Russia’s air force would quickly establish control of Ukraine’s skies.

Instead, amid widespread disarray among the invaders, Russia’s army shot down a number of its own aircraft in the early days of the invasion. As a result, it ran out of pilots with experience of combat operations involving ground forces who were also prepared to fly, according to two western officials and a Ukrainian official.

“It may not have been double digits, but it’s more than one or two” Russian aircraft shot down by friendly fire, says the former senior US official. “There was a lot of fratricide.”

He adds: “They may not have had pilots with combat experience who were willing to fly over Ukraine and risk their necks in that crazy environment.”

Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of Ukrainian military intelligence, adds: “It happened. From artillery units, from tanks, and we even saw it from our intercepts of their conversations. They shot down their own helicopters and they shot down their own planes.”

On the ground, Russia’s advances came at the price of huge casualties and did not help it capture any major cities apart from Kherson. By the end of March, the invading forces were in such a poor state that they withdrew from most of central and north-eastern Ukraine, which it portrayed as a “gesture of goodwill”.

The brilliant plan had proved a failure.

“Russia screwed up,” says Skibitsky. “Gerasimov initially didn’t want to go in from all sides like he did. But the FSB and everyone else convinced him everyone was waiting for him to show up and there wouldn’t be any resistance.”

‘A unique war in world history’As the consequences of his invasion became clear, Putin searched for a scapegoat to hold responsible for the intelligence blunders underpinning it. That person was Sergei Beseda, the head of the FSB’s fifth directorate, which is responsible for foreign operations and had laid the groundwork for the invasion by paying off Ukrainian collaborators, according to two western officials.

Initially, Beseda was placed under house arrest, according to the officials. His time in the doghouse, however, did not last long. Weeks later, US officials arrived for a meeting on bilateral issues with their Russian counterparts wondering, after news of Beseda’s detention leaked to the Russian media, whether he would turn up and how the Russians might explain where he was.

Instead, Beseda walked in and said, paraphrasing Mark Twain: “You know, the rumours of my demise are greatly exaggerated,” according to the former US official.

Beseda’s quick comeback demonstrated what advisers see as some of Putin’s biggest weaknesses. The Russian president prizes loyalty over competence; is obsessive about secrecy to a fault; and presides over a bureaucratic culture where his underlings tell him what he wants to hear, according to people who know him.

The steady drumbeat of propaganda around the war and Putin’s demands for loyalty from the elite have only increased the incentive for advisers to tell him what he wants to hear, the people say.

“He’s of sound mind. He’s reasonable. He’s not crazy. But nobody can be an expert on everything. They need to be honest with him and they are not,” another longtime Putin confidant says. “The management system is a huge problem. It creates big gaps in his knowledge and the quality of the information he gets is poor.”

For many in the elite, the stream of lies is a survival tactic: most of Putin’s presidential administration and economic cabinet have told friends they oppose the war but feel they are powerless to do anything about it. “It’s really a unique war in world history, when all the elite is against it,” says a former senior official.

A small number, including former climate special representative Anatoly Chubais, have quietly resigned. One former senior official who now heads a major state-run company went so far as to apply for an Israeli passport while still in his post, and started making plans to leave the country, according to two people close to him.

As the war continues to sputter, the scale of Russia’s miscalculation has begun to dawn on Putin, prompting him to seek out more information from people at lower levels, people who know him say. A cohort of ultranationalist bloggers who are critical of the military establishment have held at least two closed-door meetings with Putin since last summer; some were guests of honour at a ceremony to annex the four Ukrainian provinces in September.

On occasion, Putin has used information from his informal channels to trip up senior officials in public. Last month, Denis Manturov, a deputy prime minister, told Putin the government had signed contracts with Russian aviation factories to produce new aircraft, one of the industries worst hit by the difficulty of procuring components under the sanctions. Putin replied: “I know the factories don’t have contracts, the directors told me. What are you playing the fool for? When will the contracts be ready? Here’s what I’m talking about: the factory directors say they don’t have contracts. And you’re telling me it’s all on paper.”

Putin’s newfound scepticism, however, is limited by his unwillingness to admit the invasion was a mistake in the first place, the people say. Some of the liberal officials who oppose the war have attempted to convince him to end it by pointing out the economic damage the sanctions are likely to wreak on Russia’s economy.

But Putin tells them “he has already factored in the discounts”, another former senior Russian official says. “He says, ‘We pay a huge price, I get it. We underestimated how difficult it could be.’ But how can you convince a crazy man? His brain will collapse if he realises it was a mistake,” the person adds. “He doesn’t trust anyone.”

Asked about the discrepancy between the defence ministry’s statements and complaints from fighters at the front about poor equipment in December, Putin paraphrased a character from his favourite TV show, the Soviet espionage drama Seventeen Moments of Spring: “You can’t trust anyone. Only me.” Then he chuckled.

Existential fight continuesPutin’s state-of-the-union address on Tuesday demonstrated his determination to “solve the tasks before us step by step” as he insisted Russia’s war would go on until a victorious end.

The remarks underscored how existential the fight has become for Putin as the threat he sees from a hostile west consumes him. Putin spent comparatively little time discussing Ukraine itself, instead focusing his ire on the US, which he accused of trying to “destroy” Russia and use “national traitors” to break it up.

The speech marked his first return to nuclear rhetoric since last autumn, when he made veiled warnings to “use all the means at our disposal” in defence of Russia’s conquests and suggested Russia could carry out a nuclear first strike.

Those threats worried western countries sufficiently that the US, UK, and France, Nato’s three nuclear powers, delivered a joint message to Russia vowing to retaliate with conventional weapons if Putin decided to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, according to the former US and Russian officials.

According to two people close to the Kremlin, Putin has already gamed out the possibility of using a nuclear weapon in Ukraine and has come to the conclusion that even a limited strike would do nothing to benefit Russia.

“He has no reason to press the button. What is the point of bombing Ukraine? You detonate a tactical nuke on Zaporizhzhia,” says a former Russian official, referring to the Ukrainian-held capital of a province Putin has claimed for Russia. “Everything is totally irradiated, you can’t go in there, and it’s supposedly Russia anyway, so what was the point?”

Instead, Putin said Russia would suspend its participation in New Start, the last remaining arms treaty with the US governing the countries’ nuclear arsenals. The suspension was the most concrete step Putin has taken on the escalation ladder since the war began: Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary-general, said “the whole arms control architecture has been dismantled.”

This time, however, Putin made no threats to actually use nuclear weapons — which analysts interpreted as a sign he had begun to realise Russia’s limitations.

“The war’s been going on for a year. Putin has been saying he’s fighting the west, not Ukraine, for a long time. You can’t just keep talking about it, you need to take steps to demonstrate something tangible,” says Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter. “Otherwise in his paradigm it’s going to look like the west is wiping the floor with Russia and [he] can’t say anything in response.”

Putin’s calculation, people close to the Kremlin say, is that Russia is more committed to the war than the west is to Ukraine, and resilient enough to see out the economic pain. Senior Republicans have openly questioned how long the US can go on supporting Ukraine to the same extent and the party retains a realistic chance of capturing the White House in 2024.

In ramping up military support for Ukraine, western officials are mindful anything less than a crushing defeat for Russia risks failing to deal with the problem.

“We need to ask ourselves: How do we want to this end up? Do we want to end up in a situation when Putin will survive and he will have more time?” says an EU foreign minister. “Something like the lull between the first and second world war.”

Putin, by contrast, is betting that he can see through that strategic turbulence, people who know him say. Instead of insisting that most Russians are unaffected by the war, as the Kremlin did in its early months when life largely went on as normal, Putin has adopted mobilisation rhetoric, urging all of society to unite behind the invasion.

The scenes at a patriotic rally on Wednesday underscored how far Putin had come down that road in just a few years. At Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium, where the World Cup final was held five years ago, a soldier rapped about “the difficult hour we did not anticipate” alongside Russia’s military choir and the parents of people killed fighting for Russia made speeches to a huge flag-waving crowd. The rally’s hosts welcomed a group of children “saved” by the Russian army in Mariupol, a city in south-eastern Ukraine it razed to the ground last spring.

Then Putin appeared, shook hands with a select group of soldiers, and told Russians to take inspiration from them. “The motherland is our family,” Putin said. “The people standing up here are deciding to defend the most valuable and dear thing they have — our family. They are fighting heroically, courageously, bravely.”

Russian independent media reported that tens of thousands of state employees and students were paid small sums or forced to attend. The fact the Kremlin evidently did not think it could fill a stadium to support Putin without forcing people to go suggests officials know how difficult mobilising society around the war will be.

“Even in his own mind, he realises it’s not going to happen soon. It’s going to be a costly, lengthy process,” the former US official says. “He’s got, he thinks, the time — he’s 70 — and the resources, the oil and gas money to achieve it. And that’s what he’ll be remembered for: gathering the Russian lands the way Peter the Great did.”

But the alternative, one former senior Kremlin official says, may be too difficult for Putin to contemplate.

“It’s scary to think what happens if this ends in a disastrous defeat for Russia,” the former official says. “That means disastrous mistakes were made and the man behind it needs to exit this life, whether it’s via a bullet, cyanide, or something else. And if there’s no justice in this world, then nobody gets to have it,” he adds.

“It’s like when two chess players are playing. One of them is losing and bashes the other one over the head with the chessboard. Does that mean he won? No, it’s just an act of desperation.”

Additional reporting by Henry Foy in Brussels and Anastasia Stognei in Riga

Russia at war: a two-part seriesHow Putin’s technocrats steadied Russia’s economyOnce thought of as reformers, the president’s economic confidants have ended up as enablers of an invasion they warned against

A country Learning to Live without ImportsRather than provoking a collapse, international sanctions are causing a steady degradation of the country’s productive capacity.



Source: Informed

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