War in Ukraine

War at One Month

Latest
  • The month-old war has forced more than 3.6 million people to flee Ukraine. WaPo
  • The Biden administration says the U.S. will accept 100,000 refugees from Ukraine. NYT
  • Biden and allies hold three summits Thursday: NATO, G7, European Council NYT
  • NATO: 7,000 to 15,000 Russian troops dead in Ukraine AP
  • U.S., allies set new sanctions on Russia, targeting 400 people, entities WaPo
  • The U.S. government accuses Russian forces of war crimes. NYT
    • The statement cited “atrocities,” including a March 9 attack on the Mariupol maternity hospital and a strike that destroyed a theater in the same city where hundreds of civilians were sheltering.
    • The statement also mentioned the destruction of “apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, critical infrastructure, civilian vehicles, shopping centers, and ambulances.”
  • NATO doubles its battlegroups in Eastern Europe ahead of multiple summits. NYT
State of the War
  • Russian forces stalled
    • Russia showed almost no signs of advancement this past week: U.S. defense official NPR
      • Russian forces in Ukraine have shown almost no signs of advancing over the past week, a senior U.S. defense official says, though they have stepped up artillery shelling in recent days.
    • Russia’s war for Ukraine could be headed toward stalemate WaPo
      • The front lines have barely moved in more than a week. Russians are being killed or injured at the rate of up to 1,000 a day, according to Western intelligence estimates, and even more according to Ukrainian ones.
    • Russia’s combat force has shrunk, a Pentagon official says, reflecting casualties and other struggles. NYT
      • The Pentagon has assessed that Russia’s “combat power” in Ukraine — comprising more than 150,000 troops massed in Belarus and western Russian prior to the invasion — has dipped below 90 percent of its original force for the first time, reflecting the losses Russian troops have suffered at the hands of Ukrainian soldiers.
  • Russia bombarding civilian populations with artillery and missiles.
    • Russia’s war for Ukraine could be headed toward stalemate WaPo
      • The ferocity of the Russian assault has only intensified as the advances have slowed, with Russia substituting harsh bombardments of civilian populations for progress on the battlefield.
    • A Russian missile strike reduces a Kyiv mall to smoldering ruins. NYT
      • A Russian missile strike reduced a sprawling shopping mall in Kyiv to a smoldering ruin, one of the most powerful strikes to rock the center of the Ukrainian capital since the war began last month.
    • Russia’s Attacks on Civilian Targets Have Obliterated Everyday Life in Ukraine NYT
      • In the weeks since Russia began its invasion, at least 1,500 civilian buildings, structures and vehicles in Ukraine have been damaged or destroyed. More than 953 civilians have been killed, including at least 78 children, according to the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, who noted that the real toll was likely to be considerably higher.
  • It’s Now Putin’s Plan B in Ukraine vs. Biden’s and Zelensky’s Plan A, Thomas Friedman NYT
    • Putin, having realized that his plan A has failed — his expectation that the Russian Army would march into Ukraine, decapitate its “Nazi” leadership and then just wait as the whole country fell peacefully into Russia’s arms — has shifted to his plan B.
    • Plan B is that the Russian Army deliberately fires upon Ukrainian civilians, apartment blocks, hospitals, businesses and even bomb shelters — all of which has happened in the past few weeks — for the purpose of encouraging Ukrainians to flee their homes, creating a massive refugee crisis inside Ukraine and, even more important, a massive refugee crisis inside nearby NATO nations.
    • Putin’s plan B, though, is running headlong into Biden and Zelensky’s plan A, to fight the Russian Army to a draw on the ground, break its will, and force Putin to agree to Zelensky’s terms for a peace deal — with only minimal face-saving for the Kremlin leader.
Weapons
  • US is sending Ukraine 800 anti-aircraft Stingers
  • US is sending Ukraine 2,000 antitank Javelins
    • What was the anti-tank weapon US GI’s used in WW2?
    • wikipedia.org/wiki/FGM-148_Javelin
      • Javelin is a fire-and-forget missile with lock-on before launch and automatic self-guidance. The system takes a top-attack flight profile against armored vehicles, attacking the usually thinner top armor, but can also make a direct attack, for use against buildings, targets too close for top attack, targets under obstructions and helicopters.  It is equipped with an imaging infrared seeker. The tandem warhead is fitted with two shaped charges: a precursor warhead to detonate any explosive reactive armor and a primary warhead to penetrate base armor.
      • The missile is ejected from the launcher to a safe distance from the operator before the main rocket motors ignite – a “soft launch arrangement”. This makes it harder to identify the launcher, though backblast from the launch tube still poses a hazard to nearby personnel. The firing team may change their position as soon as the “fire-and-forget” missile has been launched, or immediately prepare to fire on their next target.
    • commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Javelin_Fire!_(48638261261).jpg
  • US is sending Ukraine Switchblade drones
  • The Smaller Bombs That Could Turn Ukraine Into a Nuclear War Zone NYT
    • Today, both Russia and the United States have nuclear arms that are much less destructive — their power just fractions of the Hiroshima bomb’s force, their use perhaps less frightening and more thinkable.
    • Concern about these smaller arms has soared as Vladimir V. Putin, in the Ukraine war, has warned of his nuclear might, has put his atomic forces on alert and has had his military carry out risky attacks on nuclear power plants. The fear is that if Mr. Putin feels cornered in the conflict, he might choose to detonate one of his lesser nuclear arms — breaking the taboo set 76 years ago after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Russian Propaganda and Disinformation
  • Truth Is Another Front in Putin’s War NYT
    • The Kremlin has cycled through a torrent of lies to explain why it had to wage a “special military operation” against a sovereign neighbor. Drug-addled neo-Nazis. Genocide. American biological weapons factories. Birds and reptiles trained to carry pathogens into Russia. Ukrainian forces bombing their own cities, including theaters sheltering children.
    • Russia’s message has proved successful domestically, where the Kremlin’s claims go unchallenged. Surveys suggest a majority of Russians support the war effort.
    • Another meme gained even more traction, relying on a yearslong campaign in Russia to stoke unfounded fears that the United States was manufacturing biological weapons in Ukraine.
  • Putin’s war propaganda becomes ‘patriotic’ lessons in Russian schools WaPo
    • Children are told that Ukraine never truly existed as a country and was once just a tiny piece of land called Malorossiya.
    • Events of the past few weeks, such as Russian attacks on civilian targets including a maternity ward in Mariupol and a school near the western city Kharkiv, are presented as fake news.
    • Major Western platforms such as Instagram and Facebook have been banned in Russia.
    • In one school presentation Russia attempts to shift the blame for attacks on residential areas in Kharkiv:
      • “Fake: Russian military is attacking residential areas in Kharkiv. True: High-precision Russian weapons only strike military targets and don’t hit civilians, which the Ministry of Defense said many times,” it said.
  • Facing Putin’s wartime censorship, a Nobel laureate fights to keep truth in Russia alive WaPo
    • Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, is still publishing Novaya Gazeta three times a week. But the paper must abide by a new censorship law, signed on March 4, that threatens up to 15 years in prison for publishing what Russia calls “fake” news about the country’s military. Among other things, the censorship means Russian media can’t call the war a war — only a “special military operation.”
  • Russian American filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin one Russian propaganda WaPo
    • I don’t think Americans fully understand what’s been fed to Russians about the U.S. and the West for literally the past decade. It’s been an information war — a totally one-sided information war — and it has been waged so fully and artfully that it’s made a lot of what’s happening now preemptively possible. What this information war boils down to is this: “The West is completely against us and trying to stifle and destroy our way of life.” It’s a simple message. But people are told this over and over, in so many different ways.
    • If you ingrain this message of victimhood so completely, what it does is when there’s any kind of Putin aggressive action, as there is now, a lot of people in Russia don’t see it as aggressive — they just see it as standing up for their way of life.
Internet Access in Ukraine
  • Elon Musk’s Starlink is keeping Ukrainians online when traditional Internet fails WaPo
    • Starlink is a unit of Musk’s space company, SpaceX. The service uses terminals that resemble TV dishes equipped with antennas and are usually mounted on roofs to access the Internet via satellite in rural or disconnected areas.
    • When war broke out in Ukraine, the country faced threats of Russian cyberattacks and shelling that had the potential to take down the Internet, making it necessary to develop a backup plan. So the country’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, tweeted a direct plea to Musk urging him to send help. Musk replied just hours later: “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route.”
    • Ukraine has already received thousands of antennas from Musk’s companies and European allies, which has proved “very effective,” Fedorov said in an interview with The Washington Post Friday.

Contents

Geopolitics

Putin’s Strategy
  • Commentary by Joshua Yaffa NYR
    • Putin considers the expansion of the NATO to Eastern Europe and the Baltic states a direct threat to Russia’s security, and the idea of Ukraine drawing closer to NATO an existential red line. In his mind, given that Western leaders once promised that NATO would not expand toward Russia’s borders, he is merely rectifying a geopolitical injustice. At his annual press conference last December, Putin made his version of events clear: “ ‘Not one inch to the East,’ they told us in the nineties. So what? They cheated, just brazenly tricked us!”

Image Credit: npr.org/2022/02/26/1082964072/russia-ukraine-nato-article-5

  • Countries that joined NATO after 1992:
    • Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia

Image Credit: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/21/ukraine-invasion-putin-goals-what-expect/

  • Interview with Fiona Hill, Politico
    • Reynolds: So is Putin being driven by emotion right now, not by some kind of logical plan?
    • Hill: I think there’s been a logical, methodical plan that goes back a very long way, at least to 2007 when he put the world, and certainly Europe, on notice that Moscow would not accept the further expansion of NATO. And then within a year in 2008 NATO gave an open door to Georgia and Ukraine. It absolutely goes back to that juncture.
    • Back then I was a national intelligence officer, and the National Intelligence Council was analyzing what Russia was likely to do in response to the NATO Open Door declaration. One of our assessments was that there was a real, genuine risk of some kind of preemptive Russian military action, not just confined to the annexation of Crimea, but some much larger action taken against Ukraine along with Georgia. And of course, four months after NATO’s Bucharest Summit, there was the invasion of Georgia. There wasn’t an invasion of Ukraine then because the Ukrainian government pulled back from seeking NATO membership. But we should have seriously addressed how we were going to deal with this potential outcome and our relations with Russia.
    • Reynolds: Do you think Putin’s current goal is reconstituting the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire, or something different?
    • Hill: It’s reestablishing Russian dominance of what Russia sees as the Russian “Imperium.” Putin has articulated an idea of there being a “Russky Mir” or a “Russian World.” The recent essay he published about Ukraine and Russia states the Ukrainian and Russian people are “one people,” a “yedinyi narod.” He’s saying Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same. This idea of a Russian World means re-gathering all the Russian-speakers in different places that belonged at some point to the Russian tsardom.
  • OpEd by Fiona Hill NYT
    • In 2008 NATO announced that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually join the alliance. 
    • We warned President Bush that Mr. Putin would view steps to bring Ukraine and Georgia closer to NATO as a provocative move that would likely provoke pre-emptive Russian military action.
    • Within four months, in August 2008, Russia invaded Georgia. Ukraine got Russia’s message loud and clear. It backpedaled on NATO membership for the next several years. But in 2014, Ukraine wanted to sign an association agreement with the European Union, thinking this might be a safer route to the West. Moscow struck again, accusing Ukraine of seeking a back door to NATO, annexing Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and starting an ongoing proxy war in Ukraine’s southeastern Donbas region.
  • From David Remnick’s interview with Marie Yovanovitch, NYR
    • Why do you think Putin decided to invade now and not during the Trump Presidency?
    • There are probably a lot of factors. President Zelensky is a Russian speaker from the east of Ukraine, and has a real affinity for Russia and Russians. He came to power [in 2019] to do two things.
      • One was to get control of corruption.
      • The second was to achieve peace in the Donbass.
    • He was incredibly popular in Ukraine, and got a seventy-per-cent-plus mandate. Putin was hopeful that this was going to work out very well for himself. And it didn’t. Ukraine continues to turn west. When Zelensky came in, he was ambivalent about NATO, but over the years his appeals to NATO member countries have been increasingly strong. I think that Putin senses that he has nothing to offer Ukraine, that time may be running out.
    • The other thing is that it’s no secret that our country is divided. Putin himself has tried to exacerbate some of those divisions. Clearly, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was not a shining moment for the United States. The Nord Stream 2 decision [not to impose sanctions on a proposed pipeline that could carry gas from the Russian coast into Germany]—which now has been reversed, thankfully—was in place. I think he thought, Hmm, you know, they’re not going to react strongly. NATO and the E.U. are not cohesive. I can take advantage of this moment.
    • He’s finding out now that this calculation was wrong. Diplomatically, Biden and [Secretary of State] Antony Blinken have done an incredible job of keeping the allies together. And every day our policies get stronger.
    • It almost seems disrespectful to say so on such a day, but here’s a Jewish, Russian-speaking comic actor who became President. It’s as if Jerry Seinfeld or Jon Stewart had become President in our country. And yet look!
    • He’s done a phenomenal job. He’s also winning the Twitter and Facebook wars, which are impacting the kinetic war. He is inspiring his people, and he’s inspiring the world. I just hope it can continue.
Putin’s exploitation of NATO’s expansion for domestic political purposes
  • OpEd by Thomas Friedman NYT
    • In my view, there are two huge logs fueling this fire.
      • The first log was the ill-considered decision by the U.S. in the 1990s to expand NATO after — indeed, despite — the collapse of the Soviet Union.
      • And the second and far bigger log is how Putin cynically exploited NATO’s expansion closer to Russia’s borders to rally Russians to his side to cover for his huge failure of leadership. Putin has utterly failed to build Russia into an economic model that would actually attract its neighbors, not repel them, and inspire its most talented people to want to stay, not get in line for visas to the West.
  • Analysis by Samuel A. Greene and Graeme B. Robertson WaPo
    • To most outside observers Vladimir Putin’s actions this past week look shockingly reckless. Whatever his mental state, Putin’s actions seem at cross-purposes with his goals.
    • To understand Putin’s thinking it’s helpful to take the Ukraine crisis out of the realm of foreign policy and put it into the world in which Putin spends most of his time: that of Russian domestic politics. Viewed in that light, the war represents a continuation of Putin’s efforts to govern by presenting Russia as threatened by external forces bent on its destruction, and himself as the only leader who can successfully oppose them.
    • To maintain and consolidate his power in the face of challenges such as eight years of economic decline, Putin has spent much of the last decade restructuring Russian politics around the idea that the nation faces existential threats from outside its borders, aided by traitors within.
    • When we see his pursuit of domestic control and his foreign policy as part of the same strategy, each catalyzing the other, what Putin has done in recent days begins to make more sense. From the standpoint of domestic politics, exactly what Putin achieves at the negotiating table or on the battlefield is less important than maintaining a geopolitical confrontation sufficient in scale to justify his domestic repression and, ideally, with no end in sight.
    • Putin’s gamble is that a combination of military success, a powerful propaganda machine and widespread repression will keep domestic discontent under control and, crucially, keep the elite on his side.

Sanctions

Bank of Russia’s Foreign Exchange Reserves
  • The West’s Plan to Isolate Putin: Undermine the Ruble NYT
    • By targeting Russia’s central bank with sanctions, experts said, American and European leaders have taken aim at what could be one of President Vladimir V. Putin’s greatest weaknesses: the country’s currency.
    • At the heart of the move to restrict the Bank of Russia are its foreign exchange reserves. These are the vast haul of convertible assets — other nations’ currencies and gold — that Russia has built up, financed in large part through the money it earns selling oil and gas to Europe and other energy importers.
    • The crux of why the Western allies have such leverage comes down to a reality of the modern financial system: Although Russia’s central bank owns the assets, it doesn’t control them.
    • As Michael S. Bernstam, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, explained, the Bank of Russia has roughly $640 billion in foreign exchange reserves on paper — or rather as electronic entries. But a big chunk of that money is not in Russian vaults or financial institutions. Rather, it is held by central and commercial banks in New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo and elsewhere around the world.
    • In countries like Russia, where the currency is not so stable, the ability to convert to a strong and trusted one like the dollar or the euro is crucial. It is evidence that the home currency — in this case the Russian ruble — has value. Russia’s vast store of foreign exchange backs up that value.
  • britannica.com/topic/central-bank
    • Central banks buy and sell foreign exchange to stabilize the international value of their own currency. The central banks of major industrial nations engage in so-called “currency swaps,” in which they lend one another their own currencies in order to facilitate their activities in stabilizing their exchange rates. 
  • wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Russian_financial_crisis
    • The Russian financial crisis of 1998, which hit Russia on August 17, resulted in the Russian government and the Russian Central Bank devaluing the ruble and defaulting on its debt.
    • James Cook, the senior vice president of the U.S. Russia Investment Fund, suggested the crisis had the positive effect of teaching Russian banks to diversify their assets.

Image Source washingtonpost.com/business/2022/03/03/russia-ruble-putin-sanctions/

Image Source nytimes.com/2022/02/28/business/russia-sanctions-central-bank-ruble.html

  • NYT
    • Moody’s lowered Russia’s credit rating to B3, or junk status, noting the growing risk that Moscow would not repay its sovereign debt “given the severe and coordinated sanctions and significant concerns around Russia’s willingness to service its obligations.”
  • OpEd by Ezra Klein NYT
    • The sanctions, as proposed, are ferocious in cutting Russia off from global financial markets, but they exempt energy and agricultural goods. That’s a big loophole. “If we’re not interrupting the payment for energy deliveries, we are not hitting the bit of the Russian economy which generates the juice, which sustains Putin’s regime,” Adam Tooze, director of the European Institute at Columbia University, told me.
    • Those exemptions exist because the United States and Europe fear the pain that cutting off Russia’s core exports would cause their economies. That’s exactly what Putin is banking on, and what mutes the West’s leverage over him.
    • Pressure will build on Biden and the Europeans to choke off Russia’s energy exports. Both the sanctions we’ve seen and the sanctions that may come will be felt, in America and Europe and elsewhere, as inflation.
  • More than a third of the natural gas in Europe comes from Russia.  NYT

Image Source nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/15/business/energy-environment/russia-gas-europe-ukraine.html

Other Sanctions, imposed by US, EU, UK, Canada, and others
  • For Russian banks such as Sberbank, VTB Bank, Bank Rossiya, and Promsvyazbank
    • Freezing their assets
    • Prohibiting citizens from doing business with them.
    • Blocking their access to the SWIFT international payment system
  • For corporations such as Gazprom and Russian Railways:
    • Preventing them from raising money through Western credit markets
  • Blocking Russian purchases of high-tech goods
  • For Putin, Sergei Lavrov, Sergei Shoigu, Alexander Bortnikov, Valery Gerasimov, members of the Kremlin’s security council, members of the Duma, and a dozen billionaire oligarchs.
    • Freezing their assets
    • Cutting them off from Western financial systems
    • Prohibiting them from traveling to Western countries
  • Banning Russian planes from EU, UK and US airspace
  • Canceling Nord Stream 2 pipeline project
  • Private Sector
    • Some retailers have paused sales in Russia, e.g. Dell, Apple, and H&M Group
    • Oil companies, including BP, Exxon Mobil and Shell said they would exit the country
    • The Walt Disney Company and Warner Bros said they would pause the release of films in Russia.
    • Volvo Cars and General Motors have halted vehicle exports to Russia
    • Several of the world’s largest shipping companies have stopped servicing customers in Russia, including UPS, FedEx and Maersk.

NATO

  • The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a military alliance established by the North Atlantic Treaty of April 4, 1949, which sought to create a counterweight to Soviet armies stationed in central and eastern Europe after World War II.
  • NATO Countries (countries in italics belonged to the Warsaw Pact):
    • Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States
  • Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, 1949 nato.inc
    • The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

NATO versus the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War

Miscellany

  • What is SWIFT, and why does it matter in the Russia-Ukraine war? WaPo
    • SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is a messaging network that connects banks around the world and is considered the backbone of international finance. The Belgian-based consortium links more than 11,000 financial institutions operating in more than 200 countries and territories, acting as a critical hub to enable international payments. Last year, the system averaged 42 million messages a day, including orders and confirmations for payments, trades and currency exchanges. More than 1 percent of those messages are thought to involve Russian payments.
    • Russia created an alternative network, the System for Transfer of Financial Messages, but financial experts say it is an inadequate replacement. By the end of 2020, the system included only 400 participants from 23 countries. There is also China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, which would allow both countries to bypass SWIFT. This is a greater concern, since China is the second-largest economy in the world, and any strengthening of this alternative system could erode the current dollar-dominated global financial system, undermining Western power.
  • What is the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and how does it relate to the Ukraine crisis? WaPo
    • The project is a natural gas line that stretches from Russian fields to the German coast, spanning 764 miles under the Baltic Sea. The line, at a cost of $11 billion, will double the capacity of the original 2011 Nord Stream, which runs parallel to the new project. The line will supply gas to Germany — a nation heavily dependent on gas and oil imports — at a relatively low cost as the continent’s production capacity decreases.
    • The new pipeline is entirely owned by Gazprom. The company also owns 51 percent of the original Nord Stream pipeline. A group of European energy companies, including Shell and Wintershall, paid half the construction costs.
    • Construction was completed in September, and the pipeline has been filled with gas since late December. Before it becomes operational, though, it needs regulatory approval from Germany and a review by European Union authorities. Scholz’s announcement on Tuesday stopped that process.
  • Analysis by David Frum Atlantic
    • What does it mean that Russia “has” X or Y in foreign reserves? Where do these reserves exist? The dollars, euros, and pounds owned by the Russian central bank—Russia may own them, but Russia does not control them. Almost all those hundreds of billions of Russian-owned assets are controlled by foreign central banks. Russia’s reserves exist as notations in the records of central banks in the West, especially the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve. Most of Russia’s reserves are literally IOUs to the Russian central bank from Western governments.
  • Analysis by Timothy L. O’Brien Bloomberg
    • Standard analyses of Putin’s ability to withstand sanctions (including my own) have highlighted as evidence the Kremlin’s fortress balance sheet and its huge $630 billion stockpile of reserves. Experience has taught Putin the merits of having lots of money in his central bank vaults.
    • But here’s the rub: Most of Russia’s reserves are in institutions outside of the country. As my Bloomberg News colleagues have charted, 78% of that $630 billion is held in China, France, Japan, Germany, the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere. And the West just told Russia that it plans to block its central bank’s access to those funds. Think about that. The West is attempting to disarm Russia by crippling its financial autonomy. It’s a move Putin may not have anticipated and should give him pause.
  • OpEd by Robert Kagan WaPo
    • When the Russians complete their operation, they will be able to station forces — land, air and missile — in bases in western Ukraine as well as Belarus, which has effectively become a Russian satrapy.
    • Russian forces will thus be arrayed along Poland’s entire 650-mile eastern border, as well as along the eastern borders of Slovakia and Hungary and the northern border of Romania. (Moldova will likely be brought under Russian control, too, when Russian troops are able to form a land bridge from Crimea to Moldova’s breakaway province of Transnistria.) 
    • The most immediate threat will be to the Baltic states. Russia already borders Estonia and Latvia directly and touches Lithuania through Belarus and through its outpost in Kaliningrad. Even before the invasion, some questioned whether NATO could actually defend its Baltic members from a Russian attack. Once Russia has completed its conquest of Ukraine, that question will acquire new urgency.
    • One likely flash point will be Kaliningrad. The headquarters of the Russian Baltic Fleet, this city and its surrounding territory were cut off from the rest of Russia when the Soviet Union broke up. Since then, Russians have been able to access Kaliningrad only through Poland and Lithuania. Expect a Russian demand for a direct corridor that would put strips of the countries under Russian control.
    • Indeed, with Poland, Hungary and five other NATO members sharing a border with a new, expanded Russia, the ability of the United States and NATO to defend the alliance’s eastern flank will be seriously diminished.
    • The new situation could force a significant adjustment in the meaning and purpose of the alliance. Putin has been clear about his goals: He wants to reestablish Russia’s traditional sphere of influence in Eastern and Central Europe.
    • The map of Europe has experienced many changes over the centuries. Its current shape reflects the expansion of U.S. power and the collapse of Russian power from the 1980s until now; the next one will likely reflect the revival of Russian military power and the retraction of U.S. influence. If combined with Chinese gains in East Asia and the Western Pacific, it will herald the end of the present order and the beginning of an era of global disorder and conflict as every region in the world shakily adjusts to a new configuration of power.
  • OpEd by Richard Haass NYT
    • The Russian president’s justifications hold no water: There was and is no consensus about bringing Ukraine into NATO in the next decade or later. There was and is no threat to ethnic Russians in Ukraine. And the United States and NATO have voiced their openness to discussing European security arrangements that take legitimate Russian interests into account.
    • The West should aim to penalize Russia and to discourage it from further aggression. Germany’s suspension of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is a strong start, as are the financial sanctions targeting two Russian banks and Russia’s sovereign debt announced by President Biden on Tuesday. 
    • The United States and its NATO allies should expand support to Ukraine — military, intelligence, economic and diplomatic — to such an extent as to significantly raise the costs of a Russian occupation.
    • Removing the Kremlin’s cushion of high energy prices (by increasing oil and gas production in the U.S. and the Middle East), which have long been a windfall for the government, would be the best sanction.
    • ​​The history of wars of choice offers some useful perspective. While many start well, most — particularly those that are ambitious — end badly. The Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, which began in 1979, dragged on for a decade and badly damaged the state’s authority, is a case in point.
  • How new sanctions could cripple Russia’s economy  Economist
    • The new measures targeting Russia’s financial system announced by America, the EU and other allies on February 26th are capable of triggering financial mayhem in Russia because they target its central bank and may lead to the freezing of its $630 bn of foreign-exchange reserves. This could trigger a run on Russia’s banks and currency, and will cause shudders in global markets and a further spike in energy prices. It may also trigger Russian retaliation
    • Meanwhile limits on Western technology and industrial exports to Russia will take months or years to have an effect. Even American sanctions announced on February 24th against Sberbank and vtb Bank, which together hold 75% of the Russian banking industry’s assets, were a serious but not killer blow, particularly since energy transactions were exempted.
  • Analysis by Tom Pepinsky WaPo
    • Putin’s options for how to address this problem are limited. His choices boil down to the following: print lots of money on demand to cover all withdrawals; raise interest rates really high; or implement currency controls of some sort.
    • The first option generates inflation.
    • The second option seeks to keep money in banks (and rubles in Russia) by offering much more attractive returns for people holding ruble savings. But this is unattractive for many other reasons. With luck, it may eliminate inflation, but it may also put a sharp halt on spending and investment within Russia. It may avoid financial crisis, at the cost of a full-blown recession.
    • The third option would seem to be the most attractive. Indeed, this is an option that Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad followed during Malaysia’s economic crisis in 1998. But it was very unpopular among Malaysia’s most wealthy elites, who were no longer able to move their savings and investments across borders. Moreover, in Russia today, such controls would have to be paired with controls on bank withdrawals to shore up the domestic financial system itself. Russia’s central bank is proclaiming that its financial system is liquid precisely to avoid having to do this.
  • Biden’s Russia sanctions may let Moscow profit from oil, gas AP
    • There is a glaring carve-out in President Joe Biden’s sanctions against Russia: Oil and natural gas from that country will continue to flow freely to the rest of the world and money will keep flowing into Russia.
    • “Energy exports are the whole game,” said Columbia University historian Adam Tooze, an expert on finance and European politics. Politicians in the United States and Europe chose to “carve out the one sector that might truly be decisive. I don’t think Russia is blind to what is going on and it must indicate to them that the West does not really have the stomach for a painful fight over Ukraine.”
  • What Biden’s Sanctions on Russia Will Actually Do Time
    • Blocking Major Russian Banks From U.S. connections
      • The U.S. is cutting ties with Russia’s 10 largest financial institutions—effectively severing any flow of money between the U.S. market and institutions representing almost 80% of assets in the Russian banking sector.
      • The most notable restrictions fall on the country’s biggest bank, Sberbank, and 25 of its subsidiaries, all of which account for over one-third of Russia’s financial assets. Other major financial institutions that the U.S. will fully restrict include VTB Bank, Bank Otkritie, Sovcombank OJSC, and Novikombank. Any of their assets that even touch the U.S. financial system will be blocked, and the U.S. government and its citizens are prohibited from doing any business with them. “That means that every asset [these banks] have in America will be frozen,” Biden said at the briefing.
    • Sanctions on Individuals in Putin’s Power Hierarchy
      • The White House has added more than 10 people and entities to the list of Russian elites (and their family members) that the U.S. has sanctioned over the Ukraine threat and invasion. That means any assets those individuals hold in the U.S. will freeze. These individuals will be cut off from the U.S. financial system, and they are prohibited from traveling to America.
    • Restrictions on 13 Major Corporations and Other Entities
      • The sanctions also target 13 major Russian companies and other entities beyond the banking sector. That means the U.S. will apply new debt and equity restrictions on transactions involving the state-owned gas company Gazprom, the financial institution supporting Russia’s agricultural sector, and the Russian Railways train service.
      • These entities–representing Russia’s major industrial sectors–can no longer raise money through the U.S. market. The move is designed to damage the Kremlin’s ability to raise capital and generate revenue, according to the White House.
    • Restrictions on Russian Military Purchases
      • The U.S. will specifically target Russia’s means of expanding its military, Biden said Thursday. Blocking the country’s armed services from certain imports and financing will frustrate Putin’s strategic ambitions, the White House said.
      • The Biden administration is restricting exports of “nearly all” U.S. items–as well as products made in other countries using U.S. technology, equipment or software–to entities including the Russian Ministry of Defense, which includes the Armed Forces of Russia.
    • A Block on Russian Purchases of High-Tech U.S. Goods
      • With so much of the world’s technology originating in the U.S., the White House wants to strike a blow to Russia by curbing its access to those advances. Blocking Russia’s (non-military) high-tech imports has widespread implications—it could affect the entire Russian economy, including its defense industry, and ultimately stymie its long-term growth.
      • A Russia-wide block of U.S.-produced “sensitive technology” will land heavily on the defense sector. The U.S. will also restrict access to technology produced in other countries that relies upon things like American equipment and software, which could also affect the military, as well as Russia-wide access to smartphones, telecommunications, televisions, avionics, maritime tech, and game consoles.

britannica.com/event/Warsaw-Pact

  • Commentary by Anne Applebaum Atlantic
    • Like the Russian czars before him—like Stalin, like Lenin—Putin perceives Ukrainianness as a threat. Not a military threat, but an ideological threat. Ukraine’s determination to become a democracy is a genuine challenge to Putin’s nostalgic, imperial political project: the creation of an autocratic kleptocracy, in which he is all-powerful, within something approximating the old Soviet empire. Ukraine undermines this project just by existing as an independent state. By striving for something better, for freedom and prosperity, Ukraine becomes a dangerous rival. For if Ukraine were to succeed in its decades-long push for democracy, the rule of law, and European integration, then Russians might ask: Why not us?
  • Analysis by Brett V. Benson and Bradley C. Smith WaPo
    • Ukraine’s membership in NATO was hardly imminent, but Russia felt threatened enough by the possibility that it was willing to launch a war to prevent it (in addition to other nationalist goals Putin thinks he is achieving). Recognizing the dynamic at play is the first step toward understanding the conflict — and recognizing how NATO’s membership process may unintentionally invite this kind of crisis.
    • And in a situation with marked parallels, albeit on a smaller scale, to the current crisis in Ukraine, Russia attacked Georgia in 2008 after NATO membership for that country was proposed. Perhaps not coincidentally, Georgia is still not a NATO member.
  • White House Vows to Avoid Future Sanctions on Russian Crude Oil Bloomberg
    • The Biden administration won’t sanction Russian crude oil because that would harm U.S. consumers and not Vladimir Putin, a U.S. State Department official said Friday.
    • “The sanctions will not target the oil flows as we go forward,” Amos Hochstein, the State Department’s senior energy security adviser, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television.
    • The remarks underscore the Biden administration’s approach to sanctions that are intended to maximize pain for the Russian president while minimizing the blowback for U.S. and European consumers. 
    • “If we target the oil and gas sector for Putin, and in this case the Russian energy establishment, then prices would spike. Perhaps he would sell only half of his product, but for double the price,” Hochstein said. “That means he would not suffer the consequences while the United States and our allies would suffer the consequences.”
    • Oil prices have already eased in response, Hochstein said, and the administration “can see prices go down from here.”
  • OpEd by Thomas Friedman NYT
    • In my view, there are two huge logs fueling this fire.
      • The first log was the ill-considered decision by the U.S. in the 1990s to expand NATO after — indeed, despite — the collapse of the Soviet Union.
      • And the second and far bigger log is how Putin cynically exploited NATO’s expansion closer to Russia’s borders to rally Russians to his side to cover for his huge failure of leadership. Putin has utterly failed to build Russia into an economic model that would actually attract its neighbors, not repel them, and inspire its most talented people to want to stay, not get in line for visas to the West.
    • First Log: NATO Expansion
      • Most Americans paid scant attention to the expansion of NATO in the late 1990s and early 2000s to countries in Eastern and Central Europe like Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, all of which had been part of the former Soviet Union or its sphere of influence.
      • On May 2, 1998, immediately after the Senate ratified NATO expansion, I called George Kennan, the architect of America’s successful containment of the Soviet Union. Having joined the State Department in 1926 and served as U.S. ambassador to Moscow in 1952, Kennan was arguably America’s greatest expert on Russia. Though 94 at the time and frail of voice, he was sharp of mind when I asked for his opinion of NATO expansion.  Kennen said:
        • “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.
        • Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.”
      • It’s EXACTLY what has happened.
    • Second Log: Exploitation of NATO Expansion for Domestic Political Reasons
      • During Putin’s first two terms as president — from 2000 to 2008 — he occasionally grumbled about NATO expansion but did little more. Oil prices were high then, as was Putin’s domestic popularity, because he was presiding over the soaring growth of Russian personal incomes after a decade of painful restructuring and impoverishment following the collapse of communism.
      • But across the last decade, as Russia’s economy stagnated, Putin either had to go for deeper economic reforms, which might have weakened his top-down control, or double down on his corrupt crony capitalist kleptocracy. He chose the latter, explained Leon Aron, a Russia expert at the American Enterprise Institute. And to both cover and distract from that choice, Putin shifted the basis of his popularity from “being the distributor of Russia’s newfound wealth and an economic reformer to the defender of the motherland,” Aron said.
      • And right when Putin opted for domestic political reasons to become a nationalist avenger and a permanent “wartime president,” as Aron put it, what was waiting there for him to grasp onto was the most emotive threat to rally the Russian people behind him: “The low-hanging fruit of NATO expansion.”