That should be a headline going forward. There’s still time.
Truth: Those who cave to Moscow today will soon become its conscripts tomorrow, thrown into wars they sought to avoid. Secret police states don’t govern well and the Soviet Union proved it, collapsing on itself. The Putin persona is a trained product of that failed system.
Argument: Georgian politicians must hear the majority of Georgians and rally the warrior spirit of their people against the neo-Soviet project of the silovarchy that hijacked Russia.
Secret police autocracies think corruptly alike. Georgian politicians acquiescing to their threats are failing their people for the long haul. They should instead stand tall, outnumber and neutralize their bullies. They should not try to fight Russia’s way because their leaders haven’t prepared for that, playing the appeasement card. Georgians should instead engage whatever Russian forces dare to open a second front outside of Ukraine with a persistent, mobile guerrilla war that is a quagmire for Putin. Now is the time while Russia is engaged with the brave Ukrainians.
Georgia was miserable under the Soviet Union just as other republics were. Citizens of Soviet republics found themselves having to bribe doctors to give them standard of care; bribe government officials to get trumped-up fines reduced; bribe KGB internal security not to inform on them; pay organized crime enforcers to be able to continue doing business; and pay judges to compete with other parties paying judges to clamor for a semblance of justice.
Short memories make for short stints of freedom when autocrats offer inducements on sharpened hooks. Russia threatens Georgia as it has Ukraine. Yet does anyone believe Russia is ready for a second front? Must the Georgian people bribe everyone up the pecking order to Putin just to get basic things done for the next 50 years? Do Georgians think Putin won’t make them the next wave of conscripts to fight in Ukraine? May as well fight side by side with Ukraine.
It would be better for Georgians to prepare to make the Georgia Putin’s last front, holding Russia’s forces inside a crucible of hurt until they are forced to retreat. That is how free countries act, and make independence last.
With a warrior spirit and the ability to rally the people, members of Georgia’s government, military, police forces, veterans, and citizen groups can join together and eject those who have taken the bribes from Moscow to ransom Georgia’s future freedom. When the wolves around the aging dear leader of Moscow rip him out of his hospital bed and throw him out a window, the repression will start over again.
There’s a better way geopolitically, and that way is to ally with Armenia, Ukraine, and others in solidarity against Russian occupation and the candy coated Chinese debt deals with hidden hooks in them. Turn West, ally-up, and hold onto your freedom. There is an opportunity now that should not go to waste. Doing this will give others across the former Soviet Union the nerve to join in.
It only takes a spark to get a fire going as free peoples warm up to its glowing, contributing wood and fuel for everyone to keep warm. There is strength in numbers pressed against a tyrant tied down and finding it hard to move as winter sets in. Just make sure the tyrant’s winter does not become yours and he send your children to war.
Resist and win going forward, or tomorrow become Putin’s conscripts.
Eastern Slavs, generally include Ukrainians, Russians, and Byelorussians yet it is Russia’s ruler today that uniquely implies Russia owns the highest tier of a presumed Eastern Slavic caste system with the right to dominate the others. Present day leader of Belarus, Alexandr Lukashenka is submissive to Putin and has acquiesced to Putin’s domination. Having based his post-Soviet legitimacy on Slavic unity, Lukashenka slavishly supports Putin, who is sending more innocent Slavs to their deaths than anyone since Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Thus Lukashenka is the opposite of a traditional, Slavic tribal chieftain
Not so President Volodymyr Zelenskiy who with and for the Ukrainian people has proven Ukraine worthy of freedom from any caste system, Russia’s included. Of the three Eastern Slavic leaders today, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is the only one worthy to lead the Eastern Slavs, territorial lines notwithstanding.
Vladimir Putin was installed in the Kremlin by a former KGB colleague who inveigled himself into the Yeltsin family and administration, Valentin Yumashev. Putin was given power because he was loyal to his senior siloviki and did not speak out of turn to oligarchs. He did not earn power the old tribal chieftain’s way despite PR photo ops showing him wrestling tigers, practicing Judo, and riding in subs in Lake Baikal. Instead, he was one day merely found in the garden of Russian democracy. Putin, despite his carefully managed image has never seen combat and no one knows how he would fare under that pressure.
Zelenskiy pretended none of the things Putin has, yet earned his status by being a true chieftain of the Ukrainian people when tested by a superiorly funded, armed, and populated aggressor power in Putin’s Russia. Zelenskiy has not only passed the test but supplied with partial parity of military supply (after his predecessors saw Ukraine’s nuclear deterrent and military industrial complex swindled off of them by Russia via the Budapest Memorandum), has outperformed Putin with fewer men, fewer resources, has begged, borrowed, and bought weapons, and with sheer moral courage and authority has kept Ukraine fighting for its freedom and life. That is how Slavic chieftains traditionally win and hold leadership over their tribes.
By the old world measures of leadership virtue, Volodymyr Zelenskiy is the proven de facto leader of Eastern Slavs in Eurasia today. If tribal honor and tradition were put first, Putin would honor Zelenskiy, lay down his arms against Ukraine and recognize Zelenskiy’s rule.
And the United States and all free nations seeing and knowing this would support Ukraine’s material, defense, civilian, and intelligence needs to enable Ukraine to strike inside Russia to the extent Russia has aggressively struck inside Ukraine to make it anywhere close to a fair fight. What is the right thing to do so as not to encourage future tyrants to conquer at will and hold the world hostage to their tyranny? All free nations know the answer to that. We don’t sell out fairness at the World Series, and we don’t sell it out among our friends and allies.
President Vladimir Putin’s nearly three year slog inside sovereign Ukraine fuels mission creep for Russian forces and Chinese sponsor Xi Jinping’s substantial, yet globally interdependent, and therefore limited, instruments of power.
Compared with his predecessors, Xi has become a spendthrift of Chinese good will with his international support for aggressors Russia and Iran against Ukraine and Israel, and his direct aggression against South China Sea neighbors.
Xi Jinping Thought Validates Munger’s Psychology of Human Misjudgment in Unnecessary Investments
Investing in Russian wars on the West’s borders with diminishing returns and no exit strategy was not necessary under PRC Presidents Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao. This is inferred from the SCO charter predating Xi Jinping which slanted SCO members’ strategic obligations toward China with recognition of Taiwan-as-China the key term for SCO membership. Recognition of Ukraine as Russia’s was not a term of SCO membership.
For even if Ukraine was wholly occupied by Russian forces, a well-supplied, protracted Ukrainian guerrilla war would be unendingly successful against the shrinking Russian military. The Russian military would eventually be forced to exit, or, invite China’s military in to secure Russia’s western border in what would amount to a soft takeover of Russia itself, tempting unrest.
As Russia slowly becomes collateral for the Siloviki regime’s debt to China in Russia’s name, slavic nations, seeing secular China’s rise in proximity to Moscow and Moscow’s willingness to war against slavic nations of shared faith and culture could balk and reverse course, befriending Ukraine and aligning with the West.
Putin could have made peace with Ukraine in 2014, put the minority separatists in the Donbas in their place, and moved on with peaceful trade and coexistence with Ukraine in harmony with Hu Jintao’s “peaceful development” policy. This, especially having finagled Ukraine’s nuclear weapons from them.
Instead, he rolled the dice of war again.
Xi Jinping has since allowed Putin to steer the Chinese Communist Party’s risk tolerance toward an investment black hole in Russian military adventures with no limits in sight.
The Black Hole
As one who cares for and feeds an addict, China is investing in and creating a heavier and heavier albatross for itself to carry that could destroy its Belt and Road objectives as countries remembering Soviet dominance, and some their Islamic roots, resist reabsorption.
As Russia’s economy shows signs of temporary strength in its war industry, without men enough to run the machines of conquest much less defense, it is due to collapse. Likewise, China’s bet on Russian manpower will sink into a demographic decline of the ruling Russian slav majority into a diversity mash-up of un-consenting power blocs that will likely renege on Chinese deals.
To avert that, China will need to send its supplies increasingly on credit to Russia to help it crack down across its time zones, and or, Russia must pay exorbitant interest via artificially low energy prices guaranteed to China as an offset to China’s risk, thus depriving itself of much needed cash for its resources. Yet the war is already taking its toll on Russian energy infrastructure as Ukraine shows its superiority in punching above weight.
What this necessitates for secularist China in the future may be a soft-takeover of Russia to hope to recover its investments and to keep an Islamist regime from taking over when Putin’s siloviki network collapses by its own malfeasance and leadership failure. This, as Putin sends wave after wave of Russian men into a war with fellow slavs with diminishing returns. Russia’s many demographics will not likely stand unified for Chinese rule or suzerainty, and warlords will arise, engulfing Chinese troops and expats in an endless civil and counter-insurgency war.
Indeed, by continually encouraging the Gambler from Tver, secularist China could accelerate its own, and the world’s, profound insecurity.
The Future of Eurasia is Bright with an Independent Ukraine & Most Likely for Russians Too
Indeed, Ukraine is proving to be a great power with its president more worthy of ruling Russians than Russians are themselves, however, not asking for it. Rather, Ukrainians simply want to rule themselves and let Russians rule their own ample territory without hogging more that they have consistently run so poorly. Ukrainians have sought independence for over a century and have shown themselves worthier of freedom and investment by all of their neighbors. If by successfully expelling Russia from Ukraine the Russians finally get competent leadership, it will benefit Russia as well.
Thaw Sought: National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has wrapped-up his August visit to China to try to find grounds for resolving gridlocked issues in U.S.-Chinese relations. One of those that may not have come up is China’s economically and geopolitically destabilizing 2017 National Intelligence Law(NIL17).
NIL17 and the loyalty law open a pandora’s box of national security, safety, legal, freedom, trust, unregulated influence, and anti-liberty issues for Chinese expats and their free nation hosts in the United States. The pressure can be acute when the Xi government leverages Chinese expats with implied negative outcomes for their families if they do not obey NIL17.
Illustrative National Security Case Discussion: This short dispatch focuses on an evolving national security incident and case that illustrates NIL17’s corrosive effects on the US-China relationship, and on US national security.
The bio lab reportedly made and shipped pregnancy and COVID-19 testing kits under the business names Universal Meditech Incorporated (UMI) and Prestige Biotech Incorporated (PBI). However, the businesses’ owner Jia Bei Zhu is now under federal criminal indictment for mislabeling, adulteration, fraud, conspiracy, and lying to FDA agents. Zhu and his slew of companies in Canada had reportedly faced a $330 million dollar judgment in Canada for theft of US intellectual property after which Zhu allegedly committed contempt of court and fled to the United States using the name “David He.”
About two months after Reedley city officials contacted the CDC, FBI, and their Senator, CDC personnel reportedly inspected the Reedley, California bio lab in March 2023. In August 2023, the Associated Press reported on the March 2023 CDC inspection findings:
If the House report’s findings are true and contextually sound that the CDC did not test or secure for expert testing the infectious disease materials found inside the Reedley area bio lab, it seems to cast doubt on the CDC’s transparency in its public characterizations of its inspection of the bio lab. However, it is possible that CDC estimated that it would be more dangerous to test than to destroy the alleged bio-agents. Testing them might either lead to a virulent pandemic escape, war, or wasted resources finding dummy substances, whereas destroying them might prevent all three possibilities while the case experience and modus of operations observed provides leads to detecting and thwarting other adversarial strategies and operations.
As politicized media, politician, and CDC agency narratives flew back and forth however, it seems few questioned the role of the international context quietly energizing the churn: Beijing’s NIL17 (2017 National Intelligence Law), which obligates Chinese nationals like the bio lab’s owner Jia Bei Zhu and his Chinese expat employees to aid Chinese ministries of intelligence, security, and the People’s Liberation Army intelligence branch. NIL17 does create plausible contextual suspicion supporting the House Subcommittee’s and City of Reedley’s calls for reform and further investigation of the case, yet it also suggests that there will be deterrent and escalation logic considerations for national security workforces to prioritize.
Indeed, Jia Bei Zhu, per the House Committee video overview reportedly made statements on Chinese social media site “We Chat” suggesting that he had been working against the West in his business activities, allegedly writing:
and
The above writings might suggest that Zhu was responding to the call of the NIL17 or the CCP loyalty policy, or wishing to signal that he was doing so with his activities. Or possibly, Zhu wanted Xi Jinping to consider him a loyal expat and work to secure his release once the law caught up with him. Either way, the NIL17 creates a context and incentive for nationalistic activity for expats abroad of a mind to seek advantages and support from Beijing.
The bio lab near Reedley, California was ostensibly a civilian test kit business, however, given City of Reedley, CDC, and House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party findings, the bio-agents that its labels indicated were present went far beyond civilian business use. This raised the issue of a potentially dual-use, civilian-military facility making revenues from selling adulterated pregnancy and COVID-19 test kits to provide state-deniable private commercial and criminal revenues to support contingent militarization of biological agents stored in the US under the auspices of a civilian business.
The House Committee also uncovered what it characterized as wire transfers of some 2 million dollars from China to Zhu, increasing chances that Beijing could not fail to know about such wire transfers in and out of the Great Firewall, nor to understand what Zhu was up to given Zhu’s apparent officer roles in what the House Committee characterized as joint civilian-military fusion companies in China. First the wire transfer documents below, then that of joint civilian-military fusion experience in Zhu’s background:
Wire Transfers
Zhu’s Background with Civilian-Military Fusion Entities:
Conceptually, militarization of the Reedley facility would likely have involved simple yet very risky additions to its test kit ‘business’ such as CRISPR gene-editing kits and visiting personnel trained and qualified to design, modify, alter, prepare and or deploy the work product of those kits in the event of a China-US conflict. The idea that Beijing would put such a risky operation into the hands of someone like Zhu is hard to believe.
If the disease agents stored in the freezers and refrigerators were as-marked, and others unmarked to keep their nature a secret, it is possible that some modification of the bio-agents had already been done, but again, is China’s intelligence apparatus so desperate as to run a biowarfare operation this way? This may be another reason why the CDC left the cache of biological materials to court ordered destruction of the lab’s contents rather than either risk their escape or waste resources in an effort to transport, process, test, handle, and dispose of them.
As implied by China’s NIL17 legal requirements that Chinese expats work for the government’s security entities, Beijing’s pressure on expats, illicit companies in Canada and the US, and inducement of their cooperation with substantial sums of laundered funds sent by wire transfer to men like Zhu, is not so far fetched. But would Beijing risk starting a major war by entrusting biological weapons of mass destruction to a loose operation such as Zhu’s and to a person such as Zhu, with a major Canadian judgment against him?
If the Reedley warehouse operation had the potential for dual use (civilian / military) infectious disease development, it explains one likely reason it flew covertly under the radar without permits. However, it was discovered, highly sensitive operations would not normally be so easily discovered, and it isn’t certain if the bio-agents were real as they were not apparently tested by CDC. These thoughts suggest Zhu’s operation was more likely decoy, distraction, and psychological operations activity if backed by Beijing.
Should the bio-agents labeled have been counterfeits, then it is almost certain their existence in Reedley, if known to Chinese authorities, would be more likely a psychologically weaponized message to scare or deter Americans from defending Taiwan, challenging the PLAN in the South China Sea, or otherwise opposing China’s more muscular foreign policy going forward.
As such, Prestige Biotech, Inc., if known to the Chinese government, might have been intended to present a psychological threat analogy to China’s manufacturers that ship dual use technology to Russia that Moscow weaponizes against Ukrainians; or to sovereign Chinese chemical companies’ shipping of supposed civilian component chemicals for fentanyl production to drug cartels in the Western Hemisphere causing mass death in the US. These deniable, gray warfare actions and preparations are potentially destabilizing and potentially escalatory. Their existence tends to show that the imposition and offer of NIL17 involvement to Chinese expats meant business.
A side-issue of concern somewhat countervailing the above is that it appears the CDC took about two months to get out and inspect the illicit lab in March 2023 after it was discovered in December 2022. And as noted above, CDC announced after inspection that ‘there was no sign that the lab was illegally in possession of the materials or had select agents or toxins that could be used as bioweapons.’ Unless federal, state, and city authorities had seized and inventoried the contents of the bio lab in December or January 2022, the Chinese entity likely had ample time to remove whatever it wanted from its facility before the official CDC inspection, a concerning point. That said, reportedly, no weaponized agents were reportedly found in environmental testing at and surrounding the bio lab site, and it is possible Zhu was a known entity not taken seriously from the start.
The behaviors of Prestige Biotech, Inc. and its expat employees were oddly and unnecessarily provocative with discoverable appearances of bold wrongdoing and risk if there was no actual intention to do anything nefarious. The women working at the warehouse had told the code enforcement officer Jesalyn Harper to leave after openly disclosing their Chinese national ID and that of the owner. This open and obvious approach increases the possibility that Beijing was using Prestige via its NIL to send a psychological shot over the bow of the US while trying to entangle and confuse US national security efforts against China’s HUMINT operations inside the US.
Decoys, Accidental Decoys, and Information Warfare
The Reedley area bio lab, even if not militarized for present kinetic warfare, could be used for three sub-kinetic or gray warfare uses: psychological, political, and decoy warfare, each aimed at damaging United States security, freedom, will power, and political legitimacy if possible to win Beijing’s objectives without kinetic warfare. And then there is adaptability and extreme whipsawing contingencies, whereby an operation seemingly far fetched could be adapted to suddenly become a threat. This is a strategically-oriented tactic of keeping one’s competitor off balance that should not cause US national security personnel to utterly write-off reserved exceptions to unlikely resource commitment by Chinese intelligence. Sometimes great powers do become desperate when US intelligence does not know it if the surprise breakup of the Soviet Union was instructive.
Also, in recent history there may have been precedent for sub-kinetic use of decoy activity to tempt erroneous investigations of suspect Chinese expats or first generation citizens as publicized about espionage cases under the 2018 Trump DOJ’s “China Initiative” that raised a McCarthyist chill for some scientists of Chinese descent. This on a smaller scale brought to mind 1950s Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare tactics as would suit China’s and Russia’s information warfare objectives for the global image of the United States today.
Also, decoy operations that go nowhere would entangle US national security and counterintelligence workforces in frustrating, wasteful cases that Beijing would hope would prompt more conservative national security work at a time China wishes to soon become more aggressive. From such a decoy perspective, Prestige Biotech’s owner could also have been tasked with behaving badly in obvious ways in Canada and the US to entangle US national security workforces while attracting and dividing official attention from more subtle expat or proxy intelligence operations elsewhere.
Some decoy operations could also be undertaken to try to overwhelm and fatigue investigators with waves of dead end reports that go nowhere as a deliberate strategy of junk-case frequency to divert energies from higher-yield Chinese or Chinese-Russian operations. This, and the janky, public nature of Zhu’s operations could be one explanation why the FBI seemed to pass on investigating the Reedley case in depth, leaving enforcement to the FDA and others.
Still, recalling 9-11 a troubling aspect of deliberate decoying is that it drives-up the “cry wolf” risk. The costs to one’s opposing security forces and the tempted cynicism, uncertainty, and errors can hurt investigator morale force errors from national security workforces. This, while actual bio, nerve, or clandestine militarized drone production activities might be taking place off-of, or in the middle of some over-beaten path inside or over the border from the CONUS.
There will also be accidental decoying in which good intentioned expats pursue careers making them useful and necessary in the United States in hopes of securing a life here, while fleeing the Chinese dictatorship. However, these efforts may raise flags because these Chinese expats may rise within proximity to innovation, security, political, intelligence or defense roles and or related industrial positions, raising suspicion and soaking up resources if they are errantly investigated.
These movements and more may be anticipated within the purpose of NIL17 by which creative operations at whole-of-society scale among Chinese citizens and expats aim to wear down US defense, security, and freedom-protecting resources over time.
Parting Thoughts on Handling Expat Agents, Decoys, and Accidental Decoys
It is essential for US national security agents and analysts to be as clear, complete, specific, and honest about what is known and not known in handling reports of Chinese intelligence or military activities as possible. The NIL17 bias is to require, force, or coerce Chinese expats and guests abroad to work for Beijing, so those who do so may not be well-trained in intelligence disciplines. Many may have formed affinities for their new homes outside China and their reticence will show and be subject to reversal by sensitive, free nation outreach in a spirit of assistance.
Suspicion can create what it fears by offending or frightening expats who might never have intended to give into pressure from Beijing to spy on the U.S. These would be the accidental decoys.
And sometimes, if poorly treated with loss of face some expats may turn and serve Beijing out of anger and spite after all. A siege-mentality among expats inside their host country would be a loss to national security efforts. Mistreating expats may also do more to confirm in expats’ minds years of communist propaganda about the US that decades of communist speeches and The People’s Daily could not achieve alone.
To prevent alienation of Chinese expats while maintaining a robust national security program against Chinese spying, unrestricted gray warfare, hacking, infrastructure cyber warfare, and more, the United States needs a reinvigorated HUMINT program with substantial open and closed-source contextual data research and analysis to help intelligence operatives and analysts check contexts surrounding their subjects, objects, information bases, and operations.
Moreover, whole-of-society security responses calling for partnerships across sectors in the United States as set forth by FBI Director Christopher Wray can lead to trickle-down training of American citizens on how to spot likely foreign intelligence activity, narratives, approaches, infiltrates, illegals, proxies, and operational patterns. Teaching responsible context checking of perceptions to determine if “seeing something” means one should “say something” would be an art worth learning within the critical thinking enterprise across educational platforms of all kinds.
Note: While these general suggestions are not highly unique, they are not intended to be in a public source such as this. New ideas for national security effectiveness are for offline consultation.
The People’s Republic of China in 2020 created a pretext for spying, influencing, and shaping global innovation hubs by initiating an annual Global Innovation Hubs Index (GIHI) ratings report through Tsinghua University’s Center for Industrial Development and Environmental Governance (CIDEG), joining its effort to the Nature Research brand by purchasing an article on Nature.com.
To set criteria for ranking the development of global innovation hubs including those in the United States requires gathering information about innovation hubs that wish to be rated in cities across the world. Think US News and World Report ranking universities in the United States: who does not want in to showcase their university efforts in the rankings? The same principle is at work with the GIHI.
Yet consider U.S. Army counterintelligence Colonel Stewart A. Herrington’s account in 1999 of the feelings among his colleagues regarding the fall of the Berlin Wall and liberalization of the Soviet Union:
And Herrington added this quotation, colder now in hindsight:
“When Soviet foreign ministers Shevardnadze announced with a puckish grin in 1988, ‘We are going to do something that will really hurt you: we are going to remove ‘the threat,’ his words contained greater wisdom than he could have known.” (Herrington, p. xiv)
With China and Russia increasingly working together today, this puts in new perspective (1) the deceptive western charm offensive of Jiang Zemin within the decade after the fall of the USSR while forming up the Shanghai Cooperation Organization; (2) Putin’s early position as External Relations representative for St. Petersburg, Russia as sister city to Shanghai China, and (3) the U.S. military’s demonstration of military prowess in the Gulf War as likely forming-up the early structure for today’s reassertion of dictatorial imperial Chinese and Russian power in Europe, Asia, the Arctic, the Oceans, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.
It is a strong likelihood if not a certainty that Beijing, Russia, and other sub-alpha autocracies have had a presence at, in, and near innovation hubs and relatively open innovation conferences during years when the two were not considered the threat they have proven to be today, including innovation hubs in the United States under various auspices and statuses.
The idea for China is to identify, follow, reverse engineer, copy, hack, update, and establish future capabilities and information from inventors across the world showcasing their work and research at innovation conferences and expos before it is ever classified. Take this quote from the CIDEG ‘article’ at Nature giving ‘guidance’ for innovation hub cities and venues that want to rank higher in the GIHI:
It is no coincidence that GIHI sees wide openness to Chinese sovereign direct investment and collaboration as essential for innovation hubs to rank high in harmony with the People’s Republic of China, the People’s Liberation Army, and Ministries of Public Security, State Security, Commerce, Science and Technology, and Ecology and Environment.
Finally, neither is it likely that innovation hub spying is limited only to thriving, big-city hubs. PRC inveiglement and bold, open insertion of its agents and assets into innovation communities in the USA and globally will continue. Startups need cash to thrive and Beijing has cash to leverage direct or indirect influence over them. Where cash does not work, Beijing has other methods, such as funding its small companies that hire its expats to hack and spy on foreign small businesses located in and near innovation hubs abroad.
Two ad based websites using WordPress blog sites helped illustrate the trend last week, found within the first two pages of Duck Duck Go search results regarding a bird flu outbreak at a number of Colorado dairy farms: “County Local News” and “Trend News Line.”
A review of both sites shows an emphasis on disturbing, dispiriting, divisive, or troubling news items specific to the United States or allies, sketchy ads, a fearful spin absent balancing facts, failures of security, and obituaries; all with a combined effect of the implied decline of American civilization. And both sites promoted the same YouTube video of Putin warning the West that Russia was ready for nuclear war (see screenshot samples below):
Propaganda and disinformation as sampled above has proliferated during the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin over Russia, and has historically been used by aggressor states in the wars of the 20th Century before and during their wars for expansion and control. The idea is to break the spirit of nations opposing the imperial march and fool them into capitulating. Now, they have the internet and AI to help flood the information spaces of free countries with such content.
The targeting of Americans is likely designed to create an overall sense of fear to get out the vote for either a pacifist or a demagogic, fear-pandering candidate feigning strength that promises to protect them from the whipped-up fear of the propaganda campaigns: think Lukashenko of Belarus, Kadyrov of Chechnya, or Assad of Syria. Closer to home, critically examine the output of candidates that repeat fear-mongering lies and falsehoods.
By promoting candidates to lead free nations that do what dictators do to control mindsets in their ruled populations, dictators hope to get friendly, kindred leaders to control the freedom and independence instincts of their populations and negotiate in collaboration with fellow strongmen rather than oppose illegitimate dictatorial expansion at cost to comparatively free nations.
Situation: Illegal border crossings reportedly dropped by 40% after the Biden Administration applied restrictions on immigration giving federal and state agencies an opportunity to catch-up on filtering, monitoring, checking, and securing threat-elements already in the country. Domestic migration observations, datapoints, analyses, and alternative migration route probabilities have never been more important. Combined with first responder intelligence, field experience, and knowledge, a running, continuously updated domestic illegal migration pathways database would help manage tomorrow’s immigration problems.
Logically On-deck: Attempts at clandestine crossing will likely increase with tighter restrictions. This puts a premium on funding migration intelligence, migration monitoring technologies, and manpower to utilize these tools to better track and intercept illegal crossers and relocating illegals domestically. And that implies funding to increase ICE, CDC, and other extended HS-local capabilities to intercept, and quickly process illegal migrants and whatever they bring with them according to national security principles closely fused with humanitarian principles.
Free Nation Hurdles Can Become Foreign-Domestic Policy Victories: The hardest part of the national-security-humanity yin-yang for a free nation is figuring out where to place those with seemingly nowhere good to go, or whose trustworthiness is uncertain. New idea generation is required when known resources for placement are not acceptable for national security, health, and or resource reasons. Yet here is a zone in which the United States can win hearts and minds internationally and inter-culturally in contrast to the dictatorships in the world that drive migration with crackdown-politics, aggressive imperial land grabs, funding cartels, and other self-defeating practices in a human inhabited world. It is this contrast in creative, humaneness amidst peerless national security acumen that should set the free world, developed-nation systems and leadership apart from imperial, human-exploiting regimes. Private and public sector efforts are whole-of-society, and the can-do attitude that “there’s an app for that” can’t hurt as those seeking clandestine-status or covert-ordinary status will use their own ‘apps’ to sustain themselves.
Examples of High Yield Triaging in Security Efforts: On the peerless national security side, consider the need for: whole-of-society guidances and vigilance focusing on behaviors indicative of WMD handling; intense secrecy efforts; standout behaviors evincing cultural and legal lack of awareness or concern; biosafety behavior where there are no known bio-related facilities, at-risk persons, or businesses nearby; intense inter-cultural hostility, aggressive boldness in theft of necessities; excessive inveiglement with innocent or naive persons to use them for concealing domiciles or resources, and more are among signs of risk requiring specific guidances.
Likewise, discernment of decoy and false positive conduct and communications versus actual threat or threat preparation conduct must be studied and more deeply understood for wider training in methods of checking and sussing out differences, not just conclusory dismissal from surface appearances. HUMINT disciplines, street cop wisdom, linguistic support, and relief worker experience could come together to aid in developing a data-OODA loop support facility for and in connection to and in support of those human and non-human sensors having to do with high-yield, whole-of-society, national security risk chokepoints.
Spatially, infrastructure, transportation elements and hubs, illicit market supply chains, flea markets, public food service businesses, food supply chains, illegal migration wilderness routes, farms, high-traffic-high-touch areas, delivery businesses, ride services, counterfeit vendors sending unregulated substances into U.S. homes, wilderness routes and camps where illegal migrants may be found, and jurisdictions where local authorities do not usually go are among locations and instrumentalities where trained and programmed senses in data collection, response-support, and civilian workforce awareness make sense.
Adaptive Action Principle in the Above: Empathic, intuitive thinking about where threat actors could or would go, how they would respond, what that could entail, and that coupled with random, discrete non-linear inquiries from randomly-tapped observers can begin immediately to improve adaptivity to changing, moving threat actors which themselves may choose randomness as a guide to remaining undiscovered. Coupling findings from both linear and non-linear random approaches for data-informed OODA loops seems the right way to break-up self-defeating siloes.
In 2022 in the journal Nature, an adaptive AI approach to predicting asylum migration flows into Europe from remote drivers to points of entry envisioned an adaptive analysis approach similar to that discussed here. It was also discussed in November 2023 regarding immigration and border control in the Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, here, and here. These are non-exhaustive samples, and last year we broached the subject in our LinkedIn content discussions, however, there are few illegal migration route finding and prediction facilities continuing into the domestic domain for the purpose of screening illegals for threat actors, action plans, and intelligence regarding same. There is also not much public discussion of the sort of sensors and sensing available for such a task, from border entry point to destination points domestically.
Preliminary Conclusion: These non-exhaustive ideas invite constant Improvement in strategy, tactics, and particulars on the ground with excellent adaptive training going out to the hands-on, eyes-on, ears-open members in a whole-of-society approach to choking-out human trafficking, terrorist, state espionage, state operators, and crime related illegals from the larger population of migrating peoples. The need for an adaptive human and software-based system for forecasting, monitoring, gathering intelligence about, and tracing illegal and asylum migration flows from foreign drivers to domestic destinations, if not already met or underway, is urgent. And that, without tossing computer-independent, offline human-based methods should that system be brought down at any point, or for any point in time. The byproduct of selecting-out threat actors from large illegal migration flows will be identifying non-threatening migrant needs, and averting their exploitation to put them on a path to legal migration or finding a stable, lasting home in which to live and thrive.
Note Putin’s dictatorial cynicism in the apparatchik-wording at the Russian Foreign Ministry, reported by Politico covering Russia’s latest free press restrictions retaliating for EU bans on Russia’s state-controlled RT and Sputnik:
The word apparatchik was originally a term of derision for a communist bureaucrat obsessed with enforcing picayune legalisms such as calling a war of aggression causing hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties a “special military operation.” It was a derisive term that corroded the Soviet Union’s legitimacy among cynical Soviet citizens.
The term “special military operation” is state-forced speech in Russia, the use of which by the Foreign Ministry reminds Russians it is illegal to use the word “war” to describe Putin’s war in Ukraine. It is illegal to call it war as it would:
(1) expose the folly of the ruler’s premise that conquering Ukraine would be as easy and short as a special military operation;
(2) reveal the hypocrisy of Putin’s use of propaganda about the war-mongering West;
(3) make Russians ask ‘Why are we at war against Ukraine when just two and a half years ago we could peacefully travel there and see relatives?’
(4) accentuate the reality of steep losses of so many men to Putin’s war, losses mocked by the term “special military operation.”
The “special military operation” term is also an admission that Vladimir Putin’s secret police regime over Russia is so paranoid of the Russian people rising up against it that it must control the very words people speak and thereby their thoughts, intellect, and feelings about their steep losses to Putin’s wars.
Current Event: Russia will soon secretly try Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich who has been in Lefortovo Prison for over one year.
Argument: The United States should exercise seizure powers against Russian international assets and properties over and above economic sanction seizures for every innocent American Moscow seizes as human leverage with which to negotiate release of one of Moscow’s assassins, spies, active measures, or criminal operatives.
Moscow under Putin has proven its willingness to try to undo justice for and recover degraded, destructive agents of Putin’s gray and irregular warfare such as Viktor Bout, in exchange for relatively harmless civilians it seizes as bargaining chips on trumped-up charges incomparable in seriousness with those for which free nations have evidence against Putin’s agents and assets.
What kind of assets could be seized until innocent Americans like Evan Gershkovich are set free? Anything of value, function, import, and or necessity to the larger state and non-state Putin organization anywhere in the world, to be held in custody until Russia’s criminal seizures of non-criminal Americans ends and said hostages returned safe and sound, to the United States.
The acknowledgement of this right to nation state self-help recovering its kidnapped citizens could help deter and remedy the state terror and or state criminal practice of kidnapping and ransoming of American citizens. It would also put on notice Russians or their agents abroad and in cyberspace that who will likely attempt to move, launder, hide, or use their assets upon awareness of the policy adopted by the United States, perhaps aiding detection of more assets to target.
Rewards might even be offered to those with confirmable information about laundered Russian assets or instrumentalities that could be seized.
In such cases, the assets, while held, could be used to generate income and meet needs of Ukraine, Israel, Libya, and refugee populations suffering from Russian destabilization operations until such time as Moscow turns over its wrongfully seized American citizens.
Russia’s build-up, pre-treaty installation of coastal landing capability, naval infantry, and anti-submarine potential of the new air wing in the Caspian sent a coercive message to the other Caspian Sea powers negotiating a treaty to settle rights to Caspian Sea resources since 1996. The coerciveness of the message took on more gravity as Russia had seized Crimea and intervened for the Assad regime in the Syrian Civil War within four years of the signed Convention, using Caspian Sea military assets to bomb Syrian cities.
Caspian Sea Flotilla’s Use in War of Aggression on Ukraine
Perhaps it was the possibility of retaliation against its standoff offensive assets staged in the Caspian Sea that Moscow had in 2014 exacted a declaration of the Caspian Sea as an exclusionary zone against non-Caspian militaries (Kremlin press release website, not secure), implying that Caspian littoral states would share a duty enforce the declaration.
By militarizing the Caspian Sea itself and allowing other Caspian states to do so, Russia could argue that any outside retaliation against Russian forces operating in the Caspian Sea constitutes non-littoral states’ military presence in the Caspian Sea, triggering an obligation for other Caspian states to join Russia in repelling same.
Putin might then argue that if Caspian states did not join Russia’s side to defend their portions of Caspian Sea and airspace through which pass outside military opponents’ retaliatory strikes against Moscow’s naval vessels, warplanes, and airspace, it would violate the Convention, permitting Russia to abrogate the treaty and leverage its overmatching Caspian military resources to take control of the Sea and its resources for its own ‘national defense’ interests.
What Can Caspian Sea Powers Do To Escape Russia’s Attempted Military Co-option?
While Coffey’s point is taken regarding NATO strategic contingency planning should the Russian and or Iranian sponsorship of Russian state terror against Ukraine expand against NATO member nations, it could more immediately and justly apply to the Ukraine Defense Contact Support Group’s removal of range restrictions on Ukraine’s equally proportionate use of longer range weapons to strike Russia’s longer range weapon systems and supplies attacking or supplying attacks on Ukraine from the Caspian Sea surface and airspace.
The Ukraine Defense Contact Support Group, by ceasing to restrict Ukraine’s proportionate right to self-defense under international law can help shorten the war of aggression and save lives of the innocent parties to the war as well as end incentives for Moscow to continue compelling its citizens and territorial conscripts to fight in its illegal war of aggression.
