Assessing Russia’s Ruling Convolutions
Perspective: In an insightful 2016 paper, “A Little Masquerade: Russia’s Evolving Employment of Maskirovka,” Major Morgan Maier, United States Army, wrote: “Russians originally employed maskirovka to create a false reality to achieve surprise and battlefield advantage over adversaries. While surprise remains a significant component of maskirovka, it fails to address Russia’s application of deception in…
China’s Ukraine Issues
Xi Jinping’s China has a problem in Russia’s past recognition of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty under the Yeltsin Administration, and in Russia’s Putin-era abrogation of the Budapest Memorandum. It was the Yeltsin Administration foreign policy that initially joined Russia to the core treaty of the Shanghai Five in 1996, later renamed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization…
Multilateral Supply Suppression in Support of Ukraine
Argument The “Ukraine Defense Contact Support Group” (DCG) and others supporting Ukraine should take collective action to suppress international supply lines of bombs and weapons to the Russian Federation for use against Ukraine and Ukrainian civilian targets under the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings,(CSTB) despite near certain anticipated challenges under Article 19(2) of…
If Russia Cannot Hold Ukraine What Does Victory Mean?
Nine months ago, CSIS’s Seth Jones wrote at WaPo that Russia could defeat Ukraine but could not hold the territory. Today it is not even certain that Russia can “defeat Ukraine” much less hold it. To give it a serious try, Moscow would need to dilute its defenses along borders on its vast frontier. Moscow…
Governing Incompetence of the Siloviki
The Russian intelligence service veterans termed “Siloviki” who became self-dealing oligarchs, or “Silovarchs,”1 have all but destroyed the KGB-FSB-SVR-GRU brands with their incompetence. A metaphorical meme for Putin’s war on Ukraine could be Tom Clancy’s “Hunt for the Red October” scene in which the Lithuanian-born (today he could be Ukrainian) Captain Marko Ramius of the…
Utilize Russians Fleeing Draft to Write Russians at Home
There is a mass exodus of Russians avoiding Putin’s war observed by media in and outside of Russia, with up to 700,000 Russian men according to unnamed Russian official sources cited by Forbes, Russia. Reuters has been using the words “tens of thousands.” Russian exiles have native literacy, fluency, and knowledge to write colloquially and credibly…