What’s happening in Lithuania is the external dimension of Germany’s Zeitenwende initiative launched after Russia’s attack on Ukraine. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

PABRADĖ, Lithuania — Thudding artillery and tank gunfire under the gaze of swooping attack helicopters, all set to a soundtrack of 1980’s heavy rock band Van Halen: This is what Germany’s Bundeswehr looks like in 2024.

After taking the landmark decision to post 5,000 soldiers to Lithuania by 2027 — Berlin’s first full-time foreign troop deployment since World War 2 — Germany closed out its part of last month’s NATO Steadfast Defender exercises with war games only 15 kilometers from the border with Russian ally Belarus.

A climatic 90-minute live fire battle was staged for lawmakers, diplomats and local military chiefs at the Pabradė training grounds.

With live commentary, and screens hanging from a gantry showing how modern tank systems find their targets and retrieve the wounded, the message for the VIPs was clear: We’re getting ready for Russia.

“Germany stands by its word,” General Carsten Breuer, the Germany army’s chief inspector, said under a sudden downpour after the sun-kissed demonstration had closed out with a choreographed fly-by of two aging anti-tank-missile-equipped Eurocopter Tiger attack helicopters. “We will defend every centimeter of NATO territory.”

Breuer said it will take five to eight years for Moscow to reconstitute its armed forces from the grinding war in Ukraine, which puts a 2029 deadline on NATO efforts to prepare for possible combat.

Troops line up in front of their tanks and military vehicles in front of diplomats and dignitaries after a live fire exercise in the Lithuanian countryside. | Joshua Posaner/POLITICO

What’s happening in Lithuania is the external dimension of Germany’s Zeitenwende initiative launched after Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Ditching the post-Cold War peace dividend, Germany threw an emergency €100 billion into re-equipping its military and revamped its defense doctrine to turn the Bundeswehr into a military able to fight — and win — a war.

“The world is different than it was before February 24, 2022,” Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said during a visit to Pabradė just days before the final show. “For us as the Bundeswehr, that means that the mission has changed; national and alliance defense is the focus.”

Germany is the lead nation in NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence in Lithuania. In Estonia it’s the U.K. playing a similar role, while in Latvia it’s Canada.

In Pabradė, German soldiers are joined by Lithuanian, Dutch and French troops for the so-called Quadriga exercise, but it’s the Bundeswehr’s 10th Panzer Division running the show with Leopard 2 tanks, Puma and Boxer infantry vehicles, the Panzerhaubitze2000 artillery platform and mine clearing systems.

Blitz in the Baltics

Deep in the pine forests south of Vilnius, 80 kilometers from Pabradė, soldiers and diggers are preparing the ground for many of the 5,000 troops and their families who will soon be permanently based in Lithuania.

The swampy Rūdninkai Forest was once peppered by Soviet bombers as part of Cold War training sorties, but today Lithuania’s top brass is mapping out a base camp with the dozens of Bundeswehr soldiers already in place. Hundreds more are due to land by the end of the year.

Rimantas Jarmalavičius, a colonel in the Lithuanian army, at the site of the future German barracks. | Joshua Posaner/POLITICO

Interest in the war games at Pabradė adds an element of urgency for Rimantas Jarmalavičius, a Lithuanian colonel who, gesturing across a shrubby clearing, says tree stumps and old explosives have already been removed to make way for new barracks.

“This is collective defense and it’s important for our aggressive neighbors that we are not alone,” said the 52-year-old, who came of age as Lithuania was struggling free of the Soviet Union. “The cyber attacks, the propaganda is constant, the Russians are aggressive all the time.”

Before taking on the post, Jarmalavičius oversaw the territorial defense of the southern region of Lithuania that includes the Suwałki Gap, the thin strip of border with Poland between Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad and Belarus that is often seen as a likely flashpoint in any future conflict between NATO and Moscow.

Walking across the Suwałki Gap’s 60 kilometers of unkempt terrain prepared him for the challenge of getting remote woodland for military use. It’s taken months to clear the undergrowth and Soviet-era explosives from the 40-hectare area needed for housing.

Unexploded bombs have been found sunk as deep as 2 meters into the mud in areas that will soon be used for tank training, he said.

There are other challenges too, as old graves, prehistoric settlements and the site of an 1863 battle with the Russians add complications for prospective developers. “There are places that need to be preserved,” Jarmalavičius said.

A Bundeswehr soldier walks across a cleared meadow which will in future be a live fire tank training area. | Joshua Posaner/POLITICO

Still, progress is being made. The local council has now fixed up water and waste lines to the edge of the forest; the aim is to tender out construction contracts this year.

In addition to housing for 5,000 troops and a helipad, roads have to be paved to shuttle people and vehicles between the various training facilities — from small arms and machine gun shooting ranges to a 12-kilometer artillery ground, a tank firing area and a fake settlement to train for intense urban warfare.

It’s Jarmalavičius’ job to make sure Lithuania’s pledge to pay for the housing and training facilities across the 170-square-kilometer base is managed properly.

Under a plan agreed with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Lithuania will pay for the infrastructure while Berlin will shoulder the costs of maintenance and equipment for the brigade.

German officials have estimated the cost to the taxpayer at anything from €6 billion to €9 billion; much of that will be spent on heavy weapons to arm the brigade.

Operating and maintaining the base will cost €800 million a year, a spokesperson for Germany’s defense ministry said.

The start of a road to wind its way further through the Rūdninkai Forest not far from Lithuania’s border with Belarus. | Joshua Posaner/POLITICO

The logistics of getting commercial flights scheduled to provincial German cities so those serving in Rūdninkai can easily head home for leave is another problem, one German soldier complained. But some creature comforts may be easier to install than others.

“Most probably Lidl will be established here,” joked Jarmalavičius of the popular German discount supermarket chain. “That’s up to the free market.”

Source: Politico

This weekend, Vladimir Putin will win another election as Russia’s president. The election will, of course, be rigged in Putin’s favor, just as all of his past elections have been, but Putin is all but assured to claim another six-year term, taking him to at least 2030.

Yet for all that inevitability, Putin’s next term as president has been the focus of surprisingly little discussion, including what it is likely to mean both inside and outside Russia. And that’s all the more surprising given that Putin’s regime is arguably more destabilized now than it’s ever been, with little end in sight for Russia’s growing economic troubles or the spiraling deaths on the battlefields of Ukraine. Since last summer alone, Russia has seen a sudden mutiny, led by a renegade militia that nearly marched on Moscow; rampaging anti-Semitic riots, with security services nowhere to be found; and protests erupt in normally placid places like Bashkortostan.

No one can say what these events portend. But it’s clear that the war in Ukraine has helped make Russia’s domestic situation more unstable than it’s been in decades, and all kinds of potential future scenarios are no longer unthinkable.

So it’s a good time to think about them. In at least considering the paths below — and the likelihood of their arrival in the not-too-distant future — the West can begin preparing accordingly, especially in terms of strategy and policy. We know much about Russia’s past and plenty about Russia’s present. But what about Russia’s future?

Below are five scenarios that Russia might (or might not) experience by the end of Putin’s next term in 2030.

While Alexei Navalny may have been the most prominent leader of democratic movements in Russia, killing him will hardly eliminate pro-democratic energies in the country. | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images

SCENARIO #1
Democracy Flowers
LIKELIHOOD: 5-10%

Why It Might Happen: As the anti-communist, anti-colonial revolutions in 1989 across Eastern Europe illustrated, totalitarian regimes can rest on quicksand and quickly crumble in the face of democratic movements. Putin’s disastrous decision-making in Ukraine has already had unforeseen knock-on effects, which will only continue to generate discontent moving forward — and more interest in potential alternatives, including outright democracy.

And that was true even before Alexei Navalny’s suspicious death in prison. While Navalny may have been the most prominent leader of democratic movements in Russia, killing him has hardly eliminated pro-democratic energies in the country. With Navalny transformed from a campaigner into a martyr, such momentum for democratic reform — even democratic revolution — might actually begin building anew. As a prisoner, Navalny was out of sight, and largely out of mind for most Russians. But as a symbol of the lengths Putin’s regime will go to snuff out any opposition, Navalny may now become something more.

Combined with the other protests still gurgling around Russia, not least those organized by soldiers’ mothers and wives, a sudden burst of democratic momentum around the country is now possible. Nothing would be more of a testament to Navalny’s life, and to Navalny’s legacy.

Why It Might Not Happen: As much as many in the West would like to see a full flourishing of democracy in Russia — whether led by Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, or someone else — the likelihood of such a scenario playing out before 2030 is minimal. And that was the case even before Navalny’s death. Now, with the leader of Russian democratic hopes suddenly snuffed out, any chance at rallying Russians to a democratic cause has almost certainly died with him, at least for the foreseeable future.

Just look at where Russia is. Navalny is, in many ways, irreplaceable, just as jailed pro-democratic figures like Vaclav Havel or Nelson Mandela before him were irreplaceable, and whose countries’ democratic transformations happened only after they were freed. The rest of Navalny’s pro-democracy infrastructure has been effectively undone, stamped out by Putin’s repression. And even with the shock of Navalny’s death still settling, the Russian body politic has hardly evinced any interest in liberal democracy anyway. Rather than rallying to his cause, many have simply shrugged their shoulders at Navalny’s demise, and gone on with their lives. The same goes for hopes of rising opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; even two years into Putin’s disastrous war, the majority of Russians are still passively, if not actively, supportive of the unprovoked invasion.

What the West Should Do: The best hopes for a democratic Russia lie, perhaps ironically, not in Russia itself, but in Ukraine. Just as colonial failures in places like Angola and Algeria led to democratic, post-imperial reforms in places like Portugal and France, so too could a Ukrainian victory kill off Russian nationalism and Russian revanchism — and finally spur the kind of democratic flourishing Navalny called for.

If this scenario does come to pass, it’s incumbent on the West to return to an old strategic staple: trust, but verify. Don’t get overexcited about Russia’s democratic prospects — a mistake far too many in the West made in the 1990s — but encourage what you can. Be open to lifting sanctions and hydrocarbon price caps, but only in return for concrete reforms and prosecutions of Putin-era officials. All the while, keep building out relations with Russia’s neighbors and former colonies, places like Moldova and Armenia.

Perhaps above all else — and as sacrilegious as it may sound right now — don’t put your hopes in a single leader. Navalny was the clear lodestar for Russian democratic hopes, but even he had his nationalist weaknesses, claiming, for instance, that Crimea is rightfully Russian. If nothing else, Navalny should be the last singular Russian figure so many in the West place hopes of democratic reform on — a belief that has burned the West in the past and that led the West to miss just how ingrained Russian imperialism still is.

A Dagestan officer kicks the body of a Chechen fighter in the village of Pervomaiskaya after the Russian grueling assault on Jan. 19, 1996. | Serguey Chirikov/AFP via Getty Images

SCENARIO #2
Russia Disintegrates
LIKELIHOOD: 10-15%

Why It Might Happen: Picture this: on the back of a devastating war, with hundreds of thousands of Moscow’s troops slaughtered in a meaningless fight, Russians turn out to protest en masse, and overthrow an aging, doddering regime. Long-buried frictions and frustrations ripple across the country and a nation supposedly united under the steady hand of Moscow suddenly splinters along ethnonationalist lines. Chaos sprints across the nation, which collapses into a mixture of anarchy, territorial fragmentation, and violence that leaves no region, and no family, untouched.

Sound farfetched? Think again. This is, after all, precisely what happened in Russia in the late 1910s and early 1920s, when the tsarist collapse ripped apart the Russian Empire, with peoples and polities across Eastern Europe and the Caucasus and northern Asia all declaring independence — only for most to eventually be gobbled up by a rising Soviet regime.

This is also what we saw following the Soviet collapse (albeit with far less violence), when new nations claimed their sovereignty following the USSR’s collapse — and not just in places like Ukraine or Kazakhstan. Residents in Chechnya voted for clear independence, while those in Tatarstan voted for equal footing with the Russian Federation. Residents in places like the Siberian nation of Sakha signed agreements for an independent army, while residents in the Buddhist nation of Tuva unleashed anti-Russian violence that bordered on outright pogroms. State fracture — and independence for nations long colonized by Moscow, but still largely unfamiliar to the West — stalked the Russian Federation.

Could it happen again? Perhaps not immediately. But Russia remains a conglomerate of 21 republics, dozens more regions, and even more nationalities with uncountable grievances against Moscow. The longer the war continues — and the more these colonized minorities are tossed into Putin’s meat grinder, slaughtered at far higher rates than ethnic Russians — the likelihood of such a scenario increases. Perhaps in the republic of Chechnya, its leader — an increasingly unhealthy Ramzan Kadyrov — dies in office and infighting over a successor spirals into a third Chechen War. Perhaps in Muslim-majority Tatarstan, veterans’ committees and local students gather to protest both Moscow’s recruitment of Tatar infantry and smothering of Tatar identity — and the Kremlin, in a fit of failed strategy, opens fire on the protesters, sparking a broader anti-colonial movement. Or perhaps, in Sakha, the unemployed storm and seize control of Russian hydrocarbon infrastructure, demanding the funds be returned to their colonized nation, and demanding the sovereignty they agreed to in the early 1990s.

Why It Might Not Happen: Many Russian analysts still view this scenario as farfetched, given Putin’s grip on power. And they’re not necessarily wrong; aside from Chechnya, no clear thirst for outright independence is evident, even in those nations watching their men be massacred in Ukraine. Recent protests in places like Dagestan and Bashkortostan, for instance, weren’t solely about independence but included economic and environmental grievances as well.

Still, dismissing this scenario out of hand would be unwise. All it takes is a spark, and the tinder that Putin has built up over his quarter-century in power could go up in flames — a likelihood that only grows alongside Putin’s disaster in Ukraine.

What the West Should Do: The West should stay flexible and remain mindful that the Russian Federation is hardly a homogenous entity. It should encourage democratic forces around the country, including in those that emerge in nations long colonized by Moscow, while training far more speakers of languages like Chechen, Sakha and Tatar. It should also lean on those who successfully safeguarded the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal during the Soviet collapse, making sure their expertise is implemented yet again. And it should prepare to be comfortable with territorial reorganization across the Russian Federation — a country that still refuses to recognize its own colonial legacies, which are only going to become more trenchant as the years pass.

While Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group never quite reached Moscow, that wasn’t for lack of opportunity; if anything, the path was wide open. | Vasily Deryugin/Kommersant Publishing House via AP

SCENARIO #3
Nationalists Rising
LIKELIHOOD: 15-20%

Why It Might Happen: A year ago, the idea that a renegade militia led by a frothing nationalist could nearly march on Moscow, sending Russian officials scurrying for cover, was fantasy. Not that it hadn’t been done before; the so-called “Kornilov Affair” of 1917, and even the failed hardliner coup of 1991, showed what a move could potentially look like. But under Putin, the idea that Russian nationalists might congeal and storm Moscow long seemed laughable.

And then, last June, militia head Yevgeny Prigozhin did just that. And while Prigozhin’s Wagner Group never quite reached Moscow, that wasn’t for lack of opportunity; if anything, the path was wide open. If Prigozhin accomplished anything, it was that he made Putin look like a tsar with no clothes.

Of course, Prigozhin is no longer around — his plane exploded over Russian airspace a few months later, killing him and much of his inner circle in what is widely assumed to be Putin’s retribution. But all of the ingredients that fueled Prigozhin’s rebellion are still there: frustration with Putin’s bungled invasion; the ongoing stripping of Russia of men and material in order to continue a quagmire; and the kind of spiraling wealth inequality that’s launched populists and revolutionaries around the world before.

For those reasons, this appears to be one of the likelier scenarios facing a post-Putin Russia. The flames of nationalism, stoked by Putin, will hardly subside anytime soon.

Why It Might Not Happen: Still, a scenario like this is hardly inevitable. Prigozhin himself was almost one-of-a-kind — a chef-turned-oligarch willing to publicly break with Putin’s cabinet, and even insult the president himself, all while building out a globe-spanning militia from Ukraine to central Africa. At the moment, there’s no other force that can compare to Prigozhin’s Wagner Group, much of which has been dismantled and subsumed by the state.

Plus, if anything, Putin is only getting more nationalistic as the war drags on, leaning further and further into outright fascism. Outflanking Putin from the right is only going to get more difficult, especially as he continues descending into the world of nationalistic conspiracies.

What the West Should Do: If and when a more nationalistic figure or cadre replaces Putin, the West should continue to strengthen and expand sanctions, lower the hydrocarbon price caps, build out diplomatic and security relations with Russia’s neighbors, especially those (like Ukraine) directly targeted by Russian nationalists — all of it part of a broader package of policies. Call it, if you will, containment — a policy that helped hem in Soviet expansionism and could once more help to rein in an expansionist Moscow.

Smoke rises from a building in Bakhmut, site of the heaviest battles with the Russian troops in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. | Libkos/AP

SCENARIO #4
A Technocratic Reset
LIKELIHOOD: 20-25%

Why it might happen: We’re now two years into Moscow’s failed invasion of Ukraine, and the impact in Russia is already obvious. And those costs, whether in terms of a sagging economy or spiraling body counts, will continue piling up. Which is why the idea of an inner circle of Kremlin officials meeting with Putin and informing him that they appreciate his service, and that they wish him well in retirement — a redux of Nikita Khrushchev’s 1964 ouster, in other words — is a scenario only rising in likelihood as time goes on.

Indeed, there’s a distinct likelihood that by 2030, a new regime will emerge in Russia. (Not that it needs to lead an internal conspiracy against Putin; the aging dictator could, of course, just die in office, and save us all the trouble.) The new government wouldn’t be democratic, necessarily. But it would be headed by a small number of Western-trained, technocratic elites, who would start out saying many of the things Western officials and businessmen, eager to get back to a kind of status quo antebellum, love to hear. They would put much of the blame for the war on Putin alone, promising a return to a sense of normalcy in Moscow. They might go so far as to free certain political prisoners and opposition politicians, or even rescind Putin’s 2022 announcement of annexations in eastern Ukraine (though not Crimea).

All the while, they would call for something that many Western politicians would welcome: “reset.” A chance to start over. To start fresh. And to pledge a new Russia moving forward.

Why It Might Not Happen: With apologies to Isaac Newton, there’s an iron law of authoritarianism: a dictator in power tends to stay in power. In other words, wresting control from a dictator like Putin always requires significantly more planning, energy and resources than the incumbent leader needs to thwart any internal conspiracy. It’s not that surprising, when you think about it, given that a dictator like Putin still holds all the levers of the state — and cultivates competition among his underlings, who would be eager to rat out any anti-Putin plotting. Toss in the fact that Putin still appears to have wide support among Russian officialdom — not least because, given the state of the war in Ukraine, Russia might actually win — and hopes of a Khrushchev-style ouster are hardly a safe bet.

What the West Should Do: If this actually were to happen — if a new, technocratic elite manages to wrest control from Putin — the West’s policy formula should be a flip of the strategy for actual democratic transition. That is, the West must distrust, but verify. If nothing else, Western officials should remember that every time a “reset” approach with Russia has been pursued, the West ended up appearing foolish, myopic, or both. For that reason, any calls for a renewed “reset” should be treated with severe skepticism. And while democratic reforms should obviously be encouraged and incentivized — especially as it pertains to lifting restrictions on civil society or Russia paying reparations for Ukraine — any improvements should be treated as temporary. After all, we’ve seen this story before, and we’ve seen how, time and again, it ends.

Vladimir Putin’s grip on power still appears strong — but there are plenty of factors that will make his next term far different, and potentially far more difficult, than anything he’s seen previously. | Mladen Antonov/AFP via Getty Images

SCENARIO #5
Long Live President Putin
LIKELIHOOD 45-50%

Why It Might Happen: This was always going to be the likeliest scenario, wasn’t it? Barring unforeseen health events, and especially given the U.S.’s newfound squeamishness on backing Ukraine, Putin can look at his new presidential term as something that he will likely serve out entirely, and potentially far beyond.

And understandably so. With the death of Navalny, the democratic opposition is in shambles. The Russian economy, despite a barrage of Western sanctions, has hardly collapsed, even if it’s turned sluggish. Although Putin hasn’t conquered Kyiv, the worst of the Ukrainian war may yet be behind him, especially given the U.S.’s reticence to arm Ukraine. And compared to American presidents, at just 71, Putin’s still got (relative) youth on his side.

He’s already become one of Russia’s longest ruling leaders, with plenty of presidential terms behind him. Looking ahead to 2030, why would anything change?

Why It Might Not Happen: Putin’s grip on power still appears strong — but there are plenty of factors that will make his next term far different, and potentially far more difficult, than anything he’s seen previously. Take the economy. While Putin’s managed to ride out the sanctions against Russia thus far, the economy as a whole is clearly heading for both stagnation and rising inflation. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, Putin’s missteps have already resulted in staggering casualty numbers. Either ingredient would be enough to threaten any leader, no matter how authoritarian. Escaping the vise of both is going to stretch Putin’s dictatorial toolkit further than ever before.

What the West Should Do: Ratchet up the pressure, wherever and however it can. Continue and enhance the sanctions, including against third parties in places like the United Arab Emirates that are helping Moscow skirt sanctions. Strengthen the hydrocarbon price caps, which have already drained revenue to the Russian state, and seize outright all of the frozen Russian Central Bank assets. Deepen partnerships with those on Russia’s periphery, especially as it pertains to encouraging democratic developments.

And, perhaps most of all, recognize that so long as Putin remains in power, Russia’s unprovoked war in Ukraine will continue, with threats of far broader warfare hanging in the offing. The West should use every tool it can find to force Russians — both those in the Kremlin and the broader populace itself — to realize how much better off they, and the rest of us, will be when Putin is no longer in power.

Source: Politico

Illustrations by Edmon de Haro for POLITICO

Vladimir Putin must be enjoying this moment.

Not only did the Russian president manage to snuff-troll the Munich Security Conference with news of the death of his main political rival, Alexei Navalny (“slowly murdered” by his jailers in Siberia, according to the European Union’s top diplomat Josep Borrell); he also scored a well-timed battlefield success when, over the weekend, his troops finally took the town of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine following a tactical retreat by ammunition-starved Ukrainian troops who had defended the town since 2014.

According to one participant in Munich, the mood at the gathering of Western security and diplomatic elites — typically a chance to project unity and resolve between exclusive cocktail receptions — was grim. “There is a sense of urgency, without a sense of action,” said Jan Techau, Germany director for the Eurasia Group, a think tank. “It’s a very strange state of affairs.”

Indeed, two years after Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the situation has never looked more perilous for Kyiv — and for its neighbors along Russia’s western frontier — since the dark days of February 2022, when U.S. President Joe Biden offered his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a one-way ticket out of Ukraine (declined), and much of the world assumed (wrongly) that Russia would overrun the country.

U.S. Republicans, following orders from ex-President Donald Trump, are blocking arms deliveries to Ukraine, subjecting troops to “ammo starvation” with immediate, deleterious effects on the battlefield. After taking Bakhmut and Avdiivka, Russian troops are now trying to press their advantage in the directions of Marinka, Robotyne and Kreminna, according to battlefield observers. European leaders, despite having become Ukraine’s chief material backers, are failing to fill the gap in military supplies left by the U.S. and, thanks to France, insisting on “Buy European” provisions despite a lack of manufacturing capacity and refusing to shop outside the bloc for shells.

Meanwhile Putin, who’s still very much in power despite efforts to sanction his regime into submission, is ramping up his campaign of intimidation against the West. In his interview with ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the Russian leader mentioned Poland more than a dozen times, placing the NATO member squarely within his vision for Grand Russia, and his deputy prime minister has started to make threatening noises toward the Norwegian leadership of the island of Svalbard, in the Arctic Ocean, of all places.

A residential building, damaged as a result of a missile attack in Kyiv | Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images

With a deepening sense of gloom and resignation, leaders in countries most exposed to Russia’s flank are preparing for scenarios that would have been laughed off, in Berlin and Washington, as the fever dreams of Cold War nostalgics just 25 months ago. A top Swedish defense official told his countrymen in January to “prepare mentally” for war, and the defense ministers of Denmark and Estonia warned earlier this month that Russia was likely to start testing NATO’s Article 5 commitment to collective security within the next five years — i.e. attack the world’s most powerful military alliance just for a chance to “find out.”

It’s a parabolic slide down from the burst of “can-doism” that delivered weapons, sanctions and Germany’s “Zeitenwende” (epochal shift) during the first months of the war. A NATO official speaking to POLITICO said the prevailing view within the alliance is that Ukraine is “not about to collapse” and that the “gloom is overdone.” Some battlefield observers aren’t so sure. “What we’re hearing from the front is increasingly worrying,” a senior European government official said in January. “The risk of a breakthrough [by the Russians] is real. We’re not taking it seriously enough.”

It may be too early to say the West will lose the war in Ukraine — but it’s becoming increasingly clear that it could. As Kyiv and its allies contemplate a gruesome menu of possibilities for the coming year — including an all-fronts push by Russia’s allies, Iran and China, to trigger World War III — it’s worthwhile to pause for a moment and ask: How did we get here? How did the West, with its aircraft carriers and combined economic footprint approaching €60 trillion (dwarfing China, Iran and Russia combined) cede the initiative to a shrinking, post-Soviet country with the GDP of Spain, and end up in a defensive crouch flinching at the next affront from Putin? And if repelling Putin’s invasion of Ukraine isn’t the West’s real objective — what is?

Drip-drip deterrence

According to diplomats, security officials and experts on both sides of the Atlantic who spoke to POLITICO for this article, the answer to the first question lies partly in the fact that the West’s response to Russia has been, at least in part, dictated by fear of nuclear confrontation rather than a proactive strategy to help Ukraine repel its invaders.

“It all started in the beginning of the war when [German Chancellor Olaf] Scholz and the [U.S. President Joe] Biden administration agreed on this gradual approach towards arming Ukraine and sanctioning Russia,” said one senior EU diplomat on condition of anonymity. “Some governments were arguing, ‘We need to use the full force of our dissuasive capacity against Russia. But the argument we heard in return was, ‘No, we don’t want to.’”

“There was fear in Biden’s administration and Scholz’s entourage about the possibility of a nuclear confrontation,” the diplomat continued. “This fear was very strong in the beginning. It shaped the world’s response.”

According to Techau and Edward Hunter Christie, a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, the likelihood that the Russian leader formulated some sort of nuclear threat directly to both Biden and Scholz early on in the conflict, scaring the bejesus out of them, is high. “We know that Putin told [former British Prime Minister] Boris Johnson that he could strike his country within five minutes,” said Hunter Christie. “If he did that to Johnson, it’s perfectly possible that he did the same thing to Biden.” Techau added: “There has been fairly well-informed speculation about a direct [nuclear] threat to Scholz, warning him that such a strike could happen.”

Public discussion of a Russian nuclear strike died down after the first few months of the war, replaced by conventional wisdom that Putin would gain little from a first-use strike. But there is evidence to suggest that, far from fading as a consideration for Biden, Scholz and their aides, fear has, in fact, shaped every aspect of their approach to Ukraine, particularly as regards deliveries of weapon systems.

“There is an obvious pattern here,” said Hunter Christie. “We saw it with tanks. We saw it with aircraft. We saw it with caveats on how the HIMARS [a rocket artillery system] could be used. There is an obsessive attention to detail, to caveats on how these weapons can be used, even though some of the considerations are militarily absurd. What this obsession is covering up for is a fear of triggering some escalatory response. That’s understandable — nobody wants nuclear war — but that’s what it is.”

A case in point: the topsy-turvy debate, starting in late 2022, about the danger of sending Western-made tanks, namely the German Leopard II and the American Abrams tank, to Ukraine. In October of that year, Wolfgang Schmidt, one of Scholz’s closest advisers and a fellow traveler dating back to his time as mayor of Hamburg, came out with a bewildering array of reasons not to send the tanks, including that a) Ukraine couldn’t possibly maintain them and b) that the Iron Cross painted on them would somehow be used to suggest Germany had joined the war, or something.

As it turned out, Berlin or Kyiv discovered the existence of paint, fears were overcome, and the tanks were delivered. But a pattern had been established whereby the West agonizingly debates the wisdom of sending a weapons system for months, until some trigger pushes Scholz and Biden over the line.

More than a year later, Berlin and Washington are still following the same playbook, except now the debate centers on long-range missiles that would help Ukraine disrupt Russian supply lines, namely the U.S.-made ATACMS and German Taurus cruise missiles and the possibility of using Russia’s frozen assets — some €300 billion is held in Western countries — to help Ukraine. Until Navalny supposedly died while taking a walk in his Siberian prison, Scholz was pushing back on sending Taurus missiles which, according to German officials, shoot too far and too precisely and therefore raised the risk of direct attacks on Russian soil that could, in turn, prompt retaliation from Moscow against Germany.

A ruined building after a missile strike in the town of Panteleimonovka, in a Russian-controlled part of Donetsk | AFP via Getty Images

Navalny’s untimely death — he was 47, and healthy-looking — seems to have changed the calculus. Media in Germany and the U.S. are now reporting that Biden and Scholz are getting ready to hand over Taurus and ATACMS missiles to Ukraine. Similar debates are under way regarding the use of Russian frozen assets to help Ukraine — currently held up due to opposition from Germany and Belgium, among other EU countries — and on purchasing ammunition for Ukraine from outside the bloc, opposed by France, Greece and Cyprus.

In each case, complex arguments are set up to establish the danger, complexity or impossibility of a particular option, only to be swept away and forgotten when a fresh provocation from Russia “justifies” the additional step. “This has been the pattern since day one,” said a second EU diplomat. “It’s no, then no but, and then yes once the pressure has become too great. Not much has changed.”

“Some people live under the illusion that limited support for Ukraine is enough to keep Russia at bay and that the situation doesn’t pose any real danger to the EU,” said Virginijus Sinkevičius, a European commissioner from Lithuania. “But I think this is wrong absolutely. The war itself, both as a humanitarian disaster and a security problem, is highly problematic for the EU.”

Not so dynamic duo

Beyond fear, diplomats and experts pointed to the dynamic between Scholz and Biden as a driving force behind the West’s overriding strategy of incrementalism and escalation management, rather than a focus on strategic outcomes, in dealing with Ukraine. Despite a 16-year age difference, both men came of age politically during the Cold War and its widespread fears of nuclear armageddon. Both are deeply wedded to the U.S.-led international order and NATO protections for Europe. Both are men of the left who are instinctively suspicious of armed intervention and, temperamentally speaking, risk-averse and uncomfortable with geopolitical gamesmanship, experts and diplomats argued.

“Biden, we know, has always been ideologically opposed to the idea of intervention and war — see his chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan,” said the first diplomat. “In this case, he is doing everything possible not to have a confrontation with Russia. America used to be strong on strategic ambiguity. But Biden has gone out of his way to telegraph moves in advance throughout this conflict. In this sense, he has found commonality with Chancellor Scholz, who is also cautious by nature.”

A former far-left activist who traveled to Moscow in his youth and rose through the ranks of a German Social Democratic Party known for its historic sympathy toward Russia, Scholz wasn’t naturally configured to be a Russia hawk. “He has come a huge distance, but nobody knows to what extent that legacy [of deference toward Russia] is still with him.”

U.S. President Joe Biden meets with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the White House | Win McNamee/Getty Images

Experts also pointed to the key role of advisers, namely U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Scholz’s advisers Schmidt and Jens Plötner, a foreign policy adviser, in shaping their bosses’ approach. Diplomats and experts consulted for this article described Sullivan as being “highly intelligent,” “not deeply experienced on national security,” “ultimately career-driven” and “a bit short on emotional intelligence.” Schmidt gets “inseparable from Scholz,” “very cautious,” “basically terrified of Russia,” “not as big a foreign policy expert as he thinks he is.” Plötner, in turn, is described as “a super close confidante,” “Russia-friendly,” “unconvinced by the narrative that an attack on Ukraine is an attack on all of us.”

“Together these two [Sullivan and Schmidt] engineered the idea that Russia would eventually get ground down and be discouraged,” said Hunter Christie. “That may have avoided nuclear war, but it has trapped us between two suboptimal outcomes: a bigger war with Russia or the collapse of Ukraine, which would be a shock and a humiliation and a demonstration of Western weakness.”

The role of other leaders in shaping Western policy is not to be under-estimated. Ukrainian sources tend to identify the United Kingdom, under both ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson and current PM Rishi Sunak, as a staunch ally that helped to break Western reticence on delivering certain weapons. They credit acting Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte with having broken a taboo on the delivery of Western fighter jets, as the Netherlands is currently preparing to deliver 24 F-16s to Ukraine at some point later this year, according to the Dutch Defense Ministry. Nordic, Baltic, Central and Eastern European states, namely Poland, win high marks from Ukrainian officials for the depth of their commitment to Ukraine’s victory — exemplified by Denmark’s recent decision to send all of its artillery to Kyiv.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who recently signed a defense agreement with Ukraine, comes in for more mixed reviews. While he is praised for having abandoned his insistence on dialogue with Putin and sending long-range SCALP missiles, his current insistence on “Buy European” has opened him to charges of leading a “cynical” policy more focused on rebuilding Europe’s defense industry than on helping Ukraine in the battlefield.

Yet in the broadest sense, interviewees agreed it was Scholz and Biden and their aides who set the overall pace. Their caution, incrementalism and fear of nuclear escalation has defined a Western strategy primarily focused on defensive measures, escalation management and avoidance of nuclear confrontation, with Ukraine’s battlefield success against Russia being a secondary consideration. Except that not everyone agrees that this amounts to a “strategy.”

“There is no strategy,” said a third European diplomat. “Things are just happening. Later on, it’s easy to say there was a strategy, this was all part of a plan. But that has never been the case.” A fourth diplomat concurred. “There are slogans — ‘As long as it takes,’ ‘Russia cannot win,’ this kind of thing. But what does any of this really mean? They are things that people say. What matters is what they do.”

‘The long term’

Having squandered an opportunity to equip Ukraine’s forces with air power during the early months of 2023 — a key factor in the failure of a much-touted counteroffensive — Western leaders now see their hands increasingly tied by politics: The U.S. presidential election and Donald Trump on one side; the European Parliament election and the rise of right-wing forces led by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on the other. Critics warn that the window of opportunity for the West to help Ukraine turn the tide is, if not already closed, closing.

The anti-Ukraine MAGA caucus led by Trump, with U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson as chief whip and Republican Senator J. D. Vance as its top ambassador (who couldn’t find time to meet with Zelenskyy while in Munich), looks unlikely to greenlight the next package of Ukraine funding anytime soon. Europe’s right-wing forces — from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party in France to Italy’s Matteo Salvini to Dutch populist Geert Wilders and Hungary’s Orbán — are expected to bolster their influence after the election in June, with further sanctions and aid packages for Ukraine a possible casualty.

Yet there is still time and the basket of options is far from empty. As the reports on ATACMS and Taurus suggest, Western leaders are still able to deliver game-changing weapons to Ukraine if the incentive is strong enough (in this case, officials say deliveries could be justified by sending Putin a “Navalny signal” following the opposition leader’s death). But the deliveries aren’t a done deal, and other possibilities — including confiscating Russian assets, taxing Western companies that continue to operate in Russia, or stepping up sanctions against Putin’s regime — remain on the table, visible to all, yet undeployed. Even after Navalny’s killing, there has been no “Mario Draghi moment” signaling resolve to do “whatever it takes” to help Ukraine prevail, added Techau.

“We see that the sanctions we have agreed — [on Feb. 21] we adopted another round — don’t bite enough,” added Sinkevičius. “So we need to fix our approach, globally.”

The restraint suggests that, behind the bold speeches on helping Ukraine “as long as it takes,” another unspoken agenda may well be dictating Western actions. When asked to describe the optimal outcome for Ukraine in the coming year, several European diplomats talked about a “stabilization” of the conflict. Pressed on what this would entail, the diplomats said it would mean nudging Kyiv to open negotiations with Putin to freeze the conflict and lock in current territorial gains, in exchange for Western “security guarantees” (such as those recently signed with France, the Netherlands and the U.K.) and a path to membership of the EU.

Acting Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who’s seen as a likely pick to become the next secretary-general of NATO, hinted at this “day after” vision during remarks at the Munich Security Conference. While saying that only Kyiv can trigger peace negotiations with Moscow, he added: “But when that happens, we will also have to sit down with the US, within NATO, [and] collectively with the Russians to talk about future security arrangements between us and the Russians.”

Diplomats acknowledge that such negotiations have failed in the past, and might buy Putin time to prepare for his next offensive. Yet the alternative — a surge in Western financial and military aid during 2024 that would let Ukraine deliver a decisive punch against the Russian invader — is greeted with even greater skepticism in European embassies.

Another, unspoken aspect of the Western approach is that some factions hope to return to business as usual with Russia soon after a hypothetical freezing of the war. This might explain the profound reticence, namely in Germany, to confiscate Russia’s frozen assets and face the risk that Moscow could hit back by repossessing the hundreds of billions of euros worth of assets still held by European firms in Russia. It also chimes with a report in Germany’s Welt newspaper (like POLITICO, a member of Axel Springer) asserting that Scholz opposed naming European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as NATO’s next secretary-general because she is “too critical toward Moscow, which could become a disadvantage in the long term.”

In a speech at the Munich conference, Scholz gave a hint of how the West is quietly redefining its war aims in Ukraine. Rather than say “Ukraine will win,” or “Russia must leave Ukraine,” the German Chancellor argued that Putin should not be allowed to dictate the terms of peace in Ukraine. “There will be no dictated peace. Ukraine will not accept this, and neither will we,” Reuters quoted Scholz as having said.

“This is certainly softer than ‘Ukraine cannot lose,’” said Techau. “And essentially [it] means to cement the status quo.”

The West hasn’t given up on Ukraine. But its overriding focus on risk management reveals a desire to wind down the conflict and make a deal with Putin, if possible sooner rather than later. The question looming over the conflict is whether that approach will stave off disaster — or invite something worse to come.

Source: Politico

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attends a press conference in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv on Jan.11, 2023, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. | Yuriy Dyachyshyn/AFP via Getty Images

For a second week in a row, Washington is the most important theater in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Billions in military and economic aid for Kyiv hang in the balance. As does, with only a bit of exaggeration, Ukraine’s fate as a nation, stability in Europe and America’s credibility as a world power. It’s a big moment. So why do the players on this stage all look so small?

You have Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose heroic aura has diminished with every visit here (Tuesday’s stop will be his third). The Ukrainian president’s host in the White House is a shrunken figure with poor polls and reelection prospects. Fresh off their latest bout of dysfunctional bloodletting, Republicans on the Hill are their own species of Lilliputians. Missing in this group picture but would fit right in: The Europeans, who act is if the worst armed conflict since World War II isn’t playing out in the heart of their continent.

There are a couple players in this drama who’ve avoided the shrinkage of the rest. You may have seen Vladimir Putin and his shit-eating grin finally venture out of the Kremlin bunker to tour the Middle East last week. Same goes for China’s Xi Jinping, who by any objective economic or strategic measure has no reason to feel big — except that his adversaries in the West are so good at self-diminutization. These two think they’re winning.

What a strange geopolitical moment this is. Russia didn’t deploy a Rick Moranis with a secret weapon. Everyone on Ukraine’s side — starting with the leadership in Kyiv and their allies in Europe and Washington — has in the last half year shrunk themselves. Mostly in terms of the ambition, vision and confidence they project about this conflict. Contrast that to the largeness of spirit and commitment everyone showed last year. This shift is divorced from the realities of the war on the ground. It shapes a dark and defeatist mood and for the Ukrainians represents the most perilous moment since Russia came within miles of Kyiv in the early days of the war.

Some of this is just how democracies work. Russians and Chinese can’t vent about the costs and fatigue of war. Putin muzzles his people, Zelenskyy won’t and can’t; it’s what this war is ultimately about. But free political systems should be able to allow and reward big thinking and brave action.

The question for Kyiv, Brussels and Washington is: How do you unshrink yourself?

Start with the Ukrainians. Zelenskyy was a prominent actor who played a president on television before winning an election. His most powerful adviser, Andriy Yermak, was a television producer. Screenwriters are in this circle as well. Last year was a masterclass in war communications. Zelenskyy won the world over with his courage. The season had big moments too: The heroic defense of Kyiv, the stunning counterstrike from Kharkiv, and the liberation of Kherson.

Coming into this spring’s fighting season, the Ukrainians wanted to sustain the West’s support — to keep ratings up. But the reality was that Kyiv’s forces lacked the weapons from the U.S. and Europe to break much through the most defended frontier outside the DMZ in Korea. They came close but failed to cut off Russian supplies to Crimea. On the seas, Ukraine scored overlooked victories in neutralizing the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol. Ultimately it was a case of overselling and underdelivering. In war as in business, that’s not a good mix . By the time the commander of Ukraine’s military General Valery Zaluzhny acknowledged a “stalemate” in the war, their people and the West felt let down.

The Ukrainians have gotten smaller in their politics, too. Zaluzhny’s comments brought to the surface tensions with Zelenskyy. Zelenskyy and his aides can barely contain their dislike for political rivals, like the former President Petro Poroshenko, who was stopped from travelling overseas last week. This is “politics as usual” in the Kyiv from before the war: struggles over power, prestige and money, bringing with that a whiff of corruption. It’s a bad and small look that hurts them in Washington and Europe.

In conversations with several senior Ukrainian officials, I hear that they realize they have to change the narrative about Ukraine in the West. They’re a little defensive about the internal political tensions, rejecting a suggestion that Zelenskyy consider a government of national unity, as Israel did after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. They sound more realistic and ambitious about their military planning for next year, convinced that stronger air power and better weapons can yield progress to put Russia on a defensive.

“America loves a winner,” Yermak told me over breakfast the other day. “We are very close to a victory. It’s illogical to be so close and stop it now.” Without the aid that the Senate blocked last week, he says, Ukraine could lose.

The Europeans are a letdown too. As the war started, the continent welcomed millions of refugees and pledged to ramp up military production and keep the aid going. It did the first and faltered on the rest. With the exception of eastern-front nations, no one’s on war footing.

“Europe thinks it’s still at peace,” snipes a senior European Union diplomat — and, worse, thinks the U.S. will as always carry the load. Some domestic politics are shrinking the ability of Europe to project power: You have the far-right AfD rising in Germany, a Euroskeptic win the Dutch elections, a Putin-friendly prime minister take power in Slovakia and anti-immigrant riots tear up Dublin. Putin thinks the West is dissolute and will come apart on its own. . Europe is in danger of proving his point.

America has a very strange case of geopolitical shrinkage. By almost any measure — its economy, capacity for innovation, military strength vis-à-vis China or anyone else — the U.S. hasn’t been as preeminent since the 1990s. Yet Zelenskyy is visiting a curious Mildendo: A capital of Lilliputian giants.

Joe Biden’s awful polls make him look small and constrain his ability to shape outcomes. His administration will get the credit for building the coalition last year and deploying over $66 billion to support Ukraine and severely diminish the world’s second largest military in Russia. The White House made one miscalculation. It drip-dripped the aid since last year, holding back weapons that Ukraine might have used to score the decisive battlefield wins that were promised this year. But the sheer large scale of the aid suggested the return on this investment should have been higher.

Most Republicans support more aid. Not their loudest members, and it’s they who are shaping perceptions overseas. Say what you want about Donald Trump and his appeal, but “America First” isolationism does objectively come across to your allies and adversaries as self-castrating the U.S. in a dangerous world. One can dwell on the irony of that approach for a movement that otherwise seems so eager to embrace masculinity as its preferred metaphor for power, swooning over pictures of a shirtless Putin on horseback.

Between Biden’s political and physical frailty (almost a tautology by now!) and Trump’s buckshots at American institutions and traditions, the U.S. is coming to be seen in banana republic terms outside its borders. In reality, it’s at a peak of its powers.

Ukrainians are holding their breaths. The coming days could see a border deal unlock the $61 billion in aid for Ukraine — odds are probably just around 50-60 percent, say the White House officials and the Ukrainians I’ve asked. Fortunately for the Ukrainians, aid for Israel has also been caught up in the package, raising chances of passage.

Looking into next year, Ukrainians find some hopes for unshrinking and lots of trouble. They have limited sway over EU or U.S. politics. They wish for the Europeans to start now to ramp up defense production, not wait in terror for a President Trump to kill NATO. They wish the Europeans, along with the U.S., would muster more of the rich world’s industrial and military might to squeeze Putin. The sanctions adopted last year didn’t sting here, and no longer do much in Russia.

Here’s a mission for Zelenskyy in the U.S.: Reset expectations, encourage patience on the ground and press the case for urgency. His inspirational speeches aren’t as effective anymore. Substance can make him large again in his meetings with Biden and Mike Johnson. The Ukrainians have worked the Hill well. Yermak and a delegation saw the new House speaker last week, and came away impressed and reassured by his claims to want Putin defeated. Johnson can sell the aid package better than Biden. As for Biden, they wish he would loosen up the restrictions to provide the air power Ukraine needs to cut into the Russian defense lines and hold off the expected Russian counteroffensive in the east.

For now, the prospect of a Trump victory is worse for Ukraine than an actual Trump win: Putin, the Europeans, American politics are all paralyzed by what might happen and projecting onto Trump their fears and, in Putin’s case, desires that the U.S. will abandon Ukraine. That might be a misreading, or at least the Ukrainians hope so. 2024 “will be bumpy for us in the United States,” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said at a WORLD.MINDS event last week. Ukraine is part of Biden’s legacy, he added, but was careful to acknowledge Republican supporters. As for you-know-who, who doesn’t sound like the biggest fan, Kuleba said, “One thing is when you run in elections, you say certain things and you do certain things. If you actually win and you become an authority it gets more complicated because there are very different actors and forces around you.”

The thing about perceptions as opposed to reality is they can quickly change. The GOP may start to notice the significant eastern European electorates in some key states: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona. With several important elections coming up in Europe next year, you might see the continent take on a different look. Biden could bounce back. Ukraine could break that supply line.

There was an old joke in Russia: Why did Vladimir Putin pick Dmitry Medvedev to hold his presidential seat in the Kremlin for a term back in 2008-12? He was the only man he could find who was shorter than him. Putin pays attention to the perceived and real stature of his enemies. As long as he sees Ukraine and its allies as shrinking in size, he has no interest in negotiating for peace or pulling back on his war aim — which is, ultimately, the destruction of an independent Ukraine and the undoing of eight decades of a Europe remade and protected by America.

Source: Politico

Russia once controlled 20 percent of U.S. territory. That legacy helps explain its aggression against Ukraine.

In the racial-reckoning summer of 2020, local leaders in a small American town gathered for a contentious vote on whether to take down a statue that honored a man who was, as one assessment read, “steeped in racial division, violence and injustice.” Would they join local leaders from cities in Virginia, Alabama and other states to remove a memorial praising a figure who symbolized a “historical trauma” that still caused anguish and anger among their constituents?

The town council listened, and debated, and finally decided. By a margin of 6-1, the seven members voted to join the floodtide of decisions elsewhere to take down another symbol of historic oppression.

This statue, though, had nothing to do with the Confederacy or the Civil War. Rather, this vote took place in Alaska, in the small coastal town of Sitka (population 8,400), located on an island about halfway between Anchorage and Vancouver, British Columbia. And the statue was of a Russian, a merchant by the name of Aleksandr Baranov, a key figure in Russia’s conquest of Alaska over 200 years ago. The resolution authorizing the removal said Baranov, who was Alaska’s first colonial governor, “directly over[saw] enslavement of Tlingit and Aleut people,” a policy that was “often justified under a theory of racial and cultural superiority.” Baranov’s criminality — which included, among other things, the “violation of Native women” and “murder and theft of Indigenous property” — was so depraved that local Tlingit nicknamed him “No Heart.”

The statue of Aleksandr Baranov, a key figure in Russia’s colonial conquest of Alaska over 200 years ago, was taken down in the summer of 2020 and relocated to a museum. | James Poulson/The Daily Sitka Sentinel via AP

The removal of Baranov’s statue never cracked into the national news cycle. And maybe that’s understandable, given the protests rocking the rest of the country at the time. But it’s also understandable for a related reason: Russia’s colonization of Alaska — and the rampant violence, spiraling massacres and decimation of local Alaska Native populations that came along with it — is hardly well-known among the broader American body politic. Even with new reassessments of European colonization of North America, as well as the recent spike in scholarship regarding the U.S.’s bloodied imperialism across the American West, Russia’s role in smothering and seizing Alaska stands apart as an overlooked chapter of colonialism on the continent.

It’s also an overlooked aspect of Russian history inside Russia. Official accounts of Russian expansion suggest that Russia simply agglomerated neighboring peoples as part of its defensive acquisition of territory, happily gathering new peoples and new lands into Moscow’s embrace. In Russia’s telling, the word “colonialism” applies to only other empires, not to the Russian one. As Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently claimed, Russia has “not stained itself with the bloody crimes of colonialism.”

But as the removal of Baranov’s statue indicates, Russia’s colonial legacy is hardly forgotten in Alaska. And given Russia’s renewed lurch toward imperialism in places like Ukraine, that legacy is arguably more resonant now than it’s been in decades — or perhaps ever.

In Western universities and research institutes, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered a sweeping reassessment of Russia’s relationship with other peoples and nations, including Ukraine. For decades, Western scholars saw the Soviet Union as a fundamentally different country from the Russian Empire that preceded it, and analyzed its system and behaviors primarily through the regime’s communist ideology. As such, when the Soviet Union collapsed, many in the West assumed that once Moscow had shed communism, democracy would naturally follow.

But post-Soviet Russia has turned out differently, and both inside and outside Russia, scholars and analysts are discerning important throughlines in patterns and practices from tsarist times to the present. One of those throughlines is colonialism, which is turning out to be one of the best explanations for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

Which is why it’s past time for Americans to finally familiarize themselves with the Russian occupation of Alaska, and with what it meant for not only Indigenous populations slaughtered and shattered by tsarist forces, but for how that history reframes our understanding of Russia as a colonial power little different from its European counterparts — especially here, in North America.

A 1775 map depicting the Russian Discoveries. It didn’t take long after the Russian landing in Alaska in 1741 for the familiar pattern of colonial crimes to play out, sending Indigenous populations reeling. | Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg via Wikimedia Commons

The story of Russia’s imperial designs in North America traces to 1741, when explorer Vitus Bering first sighted Alaska’s Aleutian islands. At the time, Bering was searching for proof of a reputed “Great Land” that lay to Siberia’s east, a semi-mythical outpost of untapped wealth that could enrich his benefactors back in St. Petersburg. There was nothing defensive, or even natural, about Russia’s expansion into Alaska across the northern expanse of the Pacific Ocean. It was predicated on one thing alone: wealth, which could be stolen from whomever they might meet in Alaska.

While Bering wouldn’t live to explore this “Great Land” — he perished soon after, undone by scurvy — his shipmates quickly realized that the rumors of unbound wealth, in the form of a flood of fur, were true. Just as Russian troops and trappers had scoured Siberia for riches like sable pelts (dubbed memorably as “soft gold”), Alaska proved a bounty of fox fur, as well as seal and otter pelts. Hundreds of thousands of skins soon began flowing westward, adding to the coffers of tsarist patrons in St. Petersburg.

The explorer Vitus Bering, who wouldn’t live to explore the “Great Land” of Alaska, but whose shipmates quickly realized that the rumors of unbound wealth, in the form of a flood of fur, were true. | Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

Of course, it wasn’t Russian sailors themselves who were clubbing or shooting each of these animals. The Aleutian Islands, and much of the southern rim of Alaska that Russian shipmen explored, already housed tens of thousands of locals. Aleuts and Tlingits, Inuit and Yupik, nation after nation of Alaska Natives already claimed a home in the region, largely untouched by European explorers.

And then the Russians came. And just as they had among Indigenous peoples in Siberia — and just as British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese explorers had done in the warmer climes of the Americas — Russian troops saw Indigenous peoples as little more than a subhuman hindrance, but also as a potential means to an end.

Sea lions on the Aleutian & Bering Sea Islands. Russian troops and trappers scoured Alaska for fur and pelts from seals and other animals. Hundreds of thousands of skins soon began flowing westward, adding to the coffers of tsarist patrons in St. Petersburg. | Ione Lauber/USFWS

It didn’t take long after the Russian landing for the familiar pattern of colonial crimes to play out, sending Indigenous populations reeling. Almost immediately, Russian colonizers began implementing the same playbook they’d perfected across Siberia. The first step was known as iasak, in which Russian representatives demanded tribute — furs, typically — from Indigenous populations. In order to assure compliance, Russian traders implemented the playbook’s second element: amanaty, in which Russians would seize hostages from Indigenous populations, held until the iasak requirements were completed. Often, Russian representatives would kidnap the children of local leaders — all the better to ensure compliance. In some cases, as historian Anne Hyde has written, the Russians would abduct the children of up to half of the male populations of a given community.

Nor did they stop there. As the U.S.’s National Institute for Health notes, such an arrangement allowed the Russians to effectively “enslave” local populations. Demanding “furs in exchange for [the] lives” of women and children, Russians would “sexually exploit the hostages” — and even “execute the hostages” should the fur intake fall short. All of it, just “to set an example” for other recalcitrant Indigenous populations.

For much of the 18th century, Russian rule in Alaska was largely driven by trappers and traders, diffusing across southern Alaska without any real organization. But a few decades after first contact, tsarist officials formally chartered the Russian-American Company to bring some order to Russia’s shambolic conquest. Modeled on private companies elsewhere, not least the British East India Company in South Asia, the RAC was a nominally independent entity, granted the right to expand and entrench Russia’s colonial holdings.

Backed by the Russian navy, the RAC’s expansion wasn’t difficult, sending employees across the broader Alaskan landmass, and even exploring farther south along the Canadian and American Pacific coasts. And at the helm of the company was one man: Baranov, serving as the first formal governor of Russian Alaska — and a man who, as one Alaskan said in 2020, was “responsible for murder, enslavement, rape and a perpetrator of genocide,” all on behalf of a distant tsar.

A lithograph from an 1802 Atlas showing the Three Saints Bay settlement in Kodiak Island, where hundreds died in a Russian mass slaughter event. | Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska, Fairbanks via Wikimedia Commons

Few nations suffered more under Russian rule than the Aleuts. Battered by both iasak and amanaty systems, Aleut populations went into immediate decline. But they hardly stood passive. By the early 1760s — just as British forces elsewhere on the continent began implementing new, and wildly unpopular, taxes on American subjects — Aleut men across the larger islands covertly gathered and plotted how to kill all the Russians. And at first, they succeeded. Far more familiar with the crannies and inlets of the Aleutian archipelago, Aleut men picked off wayward Russian invaders. Later, estimates placed Russian fatalities at nearly three dozen. One Russian ship attempted an escape, but was flung back by waves onto the shore, where Aleut infantry killed dozens more stranded Russian castaways.

Russian retaliation was, unsurprisingly, swift. One Russian captain, Ivan Solovyev, immediately unleashed a policy veering close to — and potentially into — genocide. Russian observers related how Solovyev began killing dozens of Aleuts where he found them, murdering them “on the spot” amid “terrible” bloodshed, writes historian Claudio Saunt. After 300 other Aleuts hid in a “fortified structure,” Russian observers later remembered Solovyev detonating the building, butchering the remainder “with guns and sabers.” As Saunt added, Solovyev reportedly “practiced a cruel experiment: arranging the Aleuts in a line, he fired at the first to discover how many people the bullet would pass through. … The slaughter was so atrocious that the sea around [one island] became bloody from those who threw themselves or were thrown into it.”

The interior of a hut in Oonalashka, Aleutian Islands in the 18th century. Few nations suffered more under Russian rule than the Aleuts. | DeAgostini/Getty Images

The total number of Aleuts killed remains unknown, but one Russian observer estimated that Solovyev alone oversaw the massacring of over 3,000 Aleuts. Given that there were only 17,000 inhabitants of the Aleutian Islands upon the Russian arrival, Solovyev may have been largely responsible for the annihilation of nearly one-fifth of the entire Aleut nation. Whatever the final number, Solovyev’s rampage was, said historian Katherine Johnson Ringsmuth, “the beginning of the end of [Indigenous] sovereignty.”

But Solovyev was far from the only Russian guilty of mass slaughter. Not long later, near Alaska’s massive Kodiak Island, Russian colonizers shelled fleeing Alutiiq men, women and children sheltering on the appropriately named Refuge Rock. Aiming cannonade at the defenseless Alutiiqs, the Russians “carried out a terrible bloodbath,” one Alutiiq elder later remembered, with “the stench of the corpses lying on the shore [that] polluted the air so badly that none could stay there.” Hundreds died — some shot, some flinging themselves into the sea from nearly 10 stories up. Other remembrances place the number of deaths even higher, reaching into the thousands. And all of it, without the Russians suffering a single casualty.

As one archaeologist later said, the Russian massacre at Refuge Rock – which took place just a year after American forces had finally completed their revolution against the British — “was the Wounded Knee of Alaska.”

The comparison is, in many ways, an apt one — and one that should help Americans, as well as Russians, more accurately understand Russia as a colonizing power, both then and now. Much like Wounded Knee — in which American soldiers slaughtered hundreds of prone Lakota men, women and children — Russian troops likewise liquidated hundreds of Indigenous civilians. Much like Wounded Knee, the people of Refuge Rock had already been stripped of both land and rights, subsumed into the colonial maw of an expanding empire. And much like the realities of Wounded Knee, whitewashed by later American propagandists, the actual details of the Refuge Rock massacre had been for centuries, as one newspaper report described, “forgotten.”

But where Wounded Knee has seen both new relevance and interest, events like Refuge Rock, as well as the broader crimes of Russian colonialism in Alaska, have been largely ignored. Part of that is general ignorance across most of America about Alaskan history, which is largely limited to trivia like the date the U.S. purchased Alaska (in 1867, after over a century of Russian colonial control). And part of that is a complete unwillingness in Russia to even gesture at Russian colonialism, let alone take any responsibility for Russians’ genocidal crimes, in Alaska and elsewhere.

Yet even aside from Alaska, the record is clear that Russia engaged in colonial conquest and exploitation from the earliest days of the tsarist empire. For hundreds of years, tsarist forces launched any number of colonial campaigns along its outer reaches, decimating neighboring powers and transforming them into tributaries of wealth for the Russian state. Toppling governments, slaughtering local populations, unleashing genocidal violence on many of those who opposed the expansion of Russian state power — Russia’s spread mirrored the stories of colonial conquest elsewhere. Indeed, like Spain in South America or Britain in South Asia, much of Russia’s expansion was driven not by national security concerns, but by efforts to grab and strip as many resources as Russian forces could find.

This is especially true in Alaska. After all, in Alaska, the propellant for expansion was glaringly obvious. You cannot argue that Russia needed to conquer Alaska in a search for territorial security, for so-called strategic depth that put distance between tsarist forces and any enemies. There was only wealth to be extracted — furs to be found, pelts to be culled, all as part of the “most important source of imperial revenue” for patrons in St. Petersburg. As seen with British brutality in places like Nigeria, or Belgian horrors in Congo, or French violence in Vietnam, Russia’s raison d’etre in Alaska was simple: pure, rote colonialism, dedicated to extracting wealth, entrenching Russian forces, and decimating an Alaska Native population that has only recently recovered to pre-Russian numbers.

Indeed, Alaska remains arguably the clearest case study in Russian colonialism available. While debates continue to surround Russian expansionism elsewhere — and where, exactly, the lines between Russian imperialism and Russian colonialism may lie — there’s little debate about what dragged tsarist forces to Alaska.

Russia, after all, never evinced any interest in actually settling Alaska. Russian nationals remained largely limited to Alaska’s southern rim, often using its bases there for further ventures in the Pacific Northwest, California, and even Hawaii. There’s little evidence tsarist powers had much interest in actually governing Alaska as a constituent part of the empire. Even after a century of Russian control, by the time Tsar Alexander II offloaded Alaska to the U.S., fewer than 500 Russian settlers actually lived in the territory.

Russian forces appeared interested solely in stripping Alaska of its bottomless wealth, and using and abusing Alaska Native populations for whatever they needed. Contra Lavrov, Alaska illustrates that Russians were motivated by unalloyed colonialism, and were willing to resort to the most brutal methods necessary to suck as much wealth out of Alaska as they could find. In the 18th century, Russia conquered much of the Eurasian continent, eventually controlling lands from the Black and Caspian seas in the south to the Arctic in the north to the far eastern Pacific coast, and subjugating dozens if not hundreds of Indigenous nations, including Buryats, Chechens and Tatars. But it was in Alaska that Russia’s colonialist drives reached its apex. And it was Alaska that highlighted just how similar Russian expansionism was to European colonial projects elsewhere.

A man pushes his bike past a destroyed Russian tank in Trostyanets, Ukraine on Mar. 30, 2022. In Alaska, Russia imported proxy politicians to oversee conquered local populations – just as we’ve seen in Ukraine. | Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Yet that reality remains largely unknown, and largely unexamined, even in the U.S. It’s only this year that the largest North American association of Russia scholars decided for the first time to focus on “decolonization” as a topic of its annual conference — some 75 years after the association was first formed. Such a lack of interest is that much more astonishing when you realize that Russia, in Alaska, colonized nearly 20 percent of the U.S. itself — a larger land-mass than the size of the 13 British colonies that first declared independence.

Thanks to that myopia, a sprawling blank space remains in our understanding not only of Europeans’ colonial cruelty in North America, but also in our framing of Russia as a colonial power, indistinguishable from Britain or France or Spain or elsewhere.

If the awareness of Russian colonial crimes in places like Alaska were better known, and better digested in the broader American body politic, events like the Ukraine invasion — and the colonial underpinnings of such brutality — would be far less shocking. As historian Timothy Snyder has argued, Moscow has long viewed Ukraine through a thoroughly colonial gaze, and is now helmed by a dictator who is trying to not only seize Ukrainian provinces but who is dedicated to Ukraine’s “national extinction,” with all of it “represented by Russian colonialism.”

To be sure, there are clear differences between Russia’s misadventures in Alaska and its ongoing efforts in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin, for instance, has routinely described Ukrainians and Russians as “one people,” but there were never any gauzy myths about the sameness of Russians and Alaska Natives. (As Saunt wrote, Russian invaders routinely dehumanized Indigenous Alaskans, describing the “filth” of people who “live their life just like animals.”) Likewise, Alaska never played a central role in Russia’s broader identity; while Russians claim Ukraine as a core, constituent part of Russia proper, there is no similar view of Alaska (for most Russians, at least).

And yet, even with those differences, the similarities amidst Russia’s colonial campaigns are increasingly inescapable. In Alaska, Russian colonizers adopted a specific policy of trying to “subdue [Alaska Natives] into citizenship of the Russian Empire” — an identical policy currently playing out in Ukraine. In Alaska, Russia imported proxy politicians to oversee conquered local populations — just as we’ve seen in Ukraine. And in Alaska, Russian colonizers remained convinced of their rightness, of their rectitude, and of their rampant abilities to seize as much territory and as many people as they’d like on behalf of their imperial leaders — just as we’ve seen from an increasingly messianic Kremlin.

But it is perhaps in the similarities to other European empires that Russia’s conquest of Alaska can be the most instructive. After all, Russia was hardly the only, let alone the first, European colonial power clawing apart North America. In many ways, it wasn’t even unique; if anything, many of Russia’s policies in Alaska were identical to other European colonial campaigns in North America (and elsewhere). There was the outright enslavement of Indigenous Alaskans, identical to Spanish mission-led enslavement of Indigenous Californians. There were the massacres of unarmed Alaska Natives, identical to the English slaughter of Pequot or French butchering of Fox. And there was, all throughout, the Russian conviction of moral, even spiritual, virtue to the entire colonial experience — indistinguishable from, say, American imperial expansion across North America, and even into Alaska. “Russia was no less a colonial empire than any of the other Western European powers,” Mikhail Khodarkovsky, one of the leading scholars on Russian colonialism, has written. “Russia had been imbued with its own sense of manifest destiny since the late 15th century.”

And it is that “manifest destiny” that now plays out in Ukraine. As Putin has claimed, Russia is not simply another nation, but is a “state-civilization” that, as analyst Andrei Kolesnikov wrote last year, has “a special path” laid before it, all part of the Russia’s “thousand-year history.” (As Lavrov reportedly said, Putin “has three advisers: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.”)

And that status as a supposed “state-civilization” means that Russia has a right — or a destiny, if you will — to absorb and dominate its former imperial holdings. Putin repeatedly insists Russia must be recognized as a “great power.” But that formulation by definition means Russia must be dominant over other peoples and exercise power over a range of other nations. Per Putin’s logic, Russia cannot be a great power without “subject” nations that prove its dominance. And so Ukraine — arguably its oldest, as well as geographically and culturally closest, colony — could not be allowed to escape Moscow’s grasp.

It now seems obvious that Russia’s monomaniacal obsession with empire drove it to invade Ukraine. And it was an unwillingness or inability to view Russian expansionism — either then or now — as colonial in nature that blinded so many in the West to Moscow’s actual designs. Unless the West grapples with this history now, the threat Russian imperialism still poses cannot be countered.

Thankfully, that recognition of Russian colonialism is finally happening. But it’s decades overdue. And it’s that much more unfortunate that all along, we had a clear case study of the phenomenon — and the costs, and the legacies — right here, in America. All we had to do was look.

Source: Politico

US troops shake hands with Russian troops in a staged photo on a wrecked bridge oin Germany to mark the link-up between American and Soviet forces to defeat the Nazis | Allan Jackson/Getty Images

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Everybody knows that a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has even got its boots on.

And the ongoing turmoil over Canada’s parliament recognizing former SS trooper Yaroslav Hunka highlights one of the most important reasons why.

Something that’s untrue but simple is far more persuasive than a complicated, nuanced truth — a major problem for Western democracies trying to fight disinformation and propaganda by countering it with the truth, and one reason why fact-checking and debunking are only of limited use for doing so.

In the case of Hunka, the mass outrage stems from his enlistment with one of the foreign legions of the Waffen-SS, fighting Soviet forces on Germany’s eastern front. And it’s a demonstration of how when history is complicated, it can be a gift to propagandists who exploit the appeal of simplicity.

This history is complicated because fighting against the USSR at the time didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi, just someone who had an excruciating choice over which of these two terror regimes to resist. However, the idea that foreign volunteers and conscripts were being allocated to the Waffen-SS rather than the Wehrmacht on administrative rather than ideological grounds is a hard sell for audiences conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide. And simple narratives like “everybody in the SS was guilty of war crimes” are more pervasive because they’re much simpler to grasp.

A photograph of SS Galizien soldier Yaroslav Hunka, taken between 1943 and 1945 | Creative Commons via Wikimedia

Canada’s enemies have thus latched on to these simple narratives, alongside concerned citizens in Canada itself, with the misstep over Hunka being used by Russia and its backers to attack Ukraine, Canada and each country’s association with the other.

According to Russia’s ambassador in Canada, Hunka’s unit “committed multiple war crimes, including mass murder, against the Russian people, ethnic Russians. This is a proven fact.” But whenever a Russian official calls something a “proven fact,” it should set off alarms. And sure enough, here too the facts were invented out of thin air. Repeated exhaustive investigations — including by not only the Nuremberg trials but also the British, Canadian and even Soviet authorities — led to the conclusion that no war crimes or atrocities had been committed by this particular unit.

But this is just the latest twist in a long-running campaign by the Russian Embassy in Ottawa, dating back even to Soviet times, when the USSR would leverage accusations of Nazi collaboration for political purposes as part of its “active measures” operations.

And given Moscow’s own history of aggression and atrocities during World War II and its aftermath, there’s a special cynicism underlying the Russian accusations. Russia feels comfortable shouting about “Nazis,” real or imaginary, in Ukraine or elsewhere, because unlike Nazi Germany, leaders and soldiers of the Soviet Union were never put on trial for their war crimes. Russia clings to the Nuremberg trials as a benchmark of legitimacy because as a victorious power, it was never subjected to the same reckoning. And yet, both before and after their collaborative effort to carve up eastern Europe between them, the Soviets and the Nazis had so much in common that it’s now illegal to point these similarities out in Russia.

Yet, it’s not just enemies of democracy that are subscribing to the seductively simple. Jewish advocacy groups in Canada have been understandably loud in their condemnation of Hunka’s recognition. But here, too, accusations risk being influenced more by misconception and supposition than history and evidence.

The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center registered its outrage, noting that Hunka’s unit’s “crimes against humanity during the Holocaust are well-documented” — a statement that doesn’t seem to have any more substance than the accusation by Russia.

In fact, during previous investigations of the same group carried out by a Canadian Commission of Inquiry, Simon Wiesenthal himself was found to have made broad accusations that were found to be “nearly totally useless” and “put the Canadian government to a considerable amount of purposeless work.”

The result of all this is that otherwise intelligent people are now trying to outdo each other in a chorus of evidence-free condemnation.

In Parliament itself, Canadian Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman called Hunka “a monster.” Meanwhile, Poland’s education minister appears to have decided to first seek Hunka’s extradition to Poland, then try to determine whether he has actually committed any crime afterward. And the ostracism is now extending to members of Hunka’s family, born long after any possible crime could have been committed during World War II.

The episode shows that dealing with complex truths is hard but essential. Unfortunately, though, a debunking or fact-checking approach to countering disinformation relies on an audience willing to put in the time and effort to read the accurate version of events, and be interested in discovering it in the first place. This means debunking mainly works for very specific audiences, like government officials, analysts, academics and (some) journalists.

But most of the rest of us, especially when just scrolling through social media, are instead likely to have a superficial and fleeting interest, which means a lengthy exposition of why a given piece of information is wrong will be far less likely to reach us and have an impact.

In the Hunka case, commentary taking a more balanced view of the complex history does exist, but it’s rare, and when it does occur, it is by unfortunate necessity very long — a direct contrast to most propaganda narratives that are successfully spread by Russia and its agents. Sadly, an idea simple enough to fit on a T-shirt is vastly more powerful than a rebuttal that has to start with “well, actually . . .”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has now issued an apology in his own name over Hunka’s ovation too. However, any further discussion of the error has to be carefully phrased, as any suggestion that Canada is showing contrition for “honoring a Nazi” would acquiesce to the rewriting of history by Russia and its backers, and concede to allegations of Hunka’s guilt that have no basis in evidence.

It’s true that Hunka should never have been invited into Canada’s House of Commons. But that’s not because he himself might be guilty of any crime. Rightly or wrongly, on an issue so toxic, it was inevitable the invitation would provide a golden opportunity for Russian propaganda.

Source: Politico

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and President Joe Biden meet in the Oval Office on Sept. 21. Graft in Ukraine has long been a concern of U.S. officials all the way up to Biden. But the topic was deemphasized in the wake of Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion. | Evan Vucci/AP

Biden administration officials are far more worried about corruption in Ukraine than they publicly admit, a confidential U.S. strategy document obtained by POLITICO suggests.

The “sensitive but unclassified” version of the long-term U.S. plan lays out numerous steps Washington is taking to help Kyiv root out malfeasance and otherwise reform an array of Ukrainian sectors. It stresses that corruption could cause Western allies to abandon Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion, and that Kyiv cannot put off the anti-graft effort.

“Perceptions of high-level corruption” the confidential version of the document warns, could “undermine the Ukrainian public’s and foreign leaders’ confidence in the war-time government.”

That’s starker than the analysis available in the little-noticed public version of the 22-page document, which the State Department appears to have posted on its website with no fanfare about a month ago.

The confidential version of the “Integrated Country Strategy” is about three times as long and contains many more details about U.S. objectives in Ukraine, from privatizing its banks to helping more schools teach English to encouraging its military to adopt NATO protocols. Many goals are designed to reduce the corruption that bedevils the country.

The quiet release of the strategy, and the fact that the toughest language was left in the confidential version, underscores the messaging challenge facing the Biden team.

The administration wants to press Ukraine to cut graft, not least because U.S. dollars are at stake. But being too loud about the issue could embolden opponents of U.S. aid to Ukraine, many of them Republican lawmakers who are trying to block such assistance. Any perception of weakened American support for Kyiv also could cause more European countries to think twice about their role.

When it comes to the Ukrainians, “there are some honest conversations happening behind the scenes,” a U.S. official familiar with Ukraine policy said. Like others, the person was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

Ukrainian graft has long been a concern of U.S. officials all the way up to President Joe Biden. But the topic was deemphasized in the wake of Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion, which Biden has called a real-life battle of democracy against autocracy.

For months, Biden aides stuck to brief mentions of corruption. They wanted to show solidarity with Kyiv and avoid giving fuel to a small number of Republican lawmakers critical of U.S. military and economic aid for Ukraine.

William Taylor, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said many ordinary Ukrainians will likely welcome the strategy because they, too, are tired of the endemic corruption in their country. | Andrew Harnik/AP Photo

More than a year into the full-scale war, U.S. officials are pressing the matter more in public and private. National security adviser Jake Sullivan, for instance, met in early September with a delegation from Ukrainian anti-corruption institutions.

A second U.S. official familiar with the discussions confirmed to POLITICO reports that the Biden administration is talking to Ukrainian leaders about potentially conditioning future economic aid on “reforms to tackle corruption and make Ukraine a more attractive place for private investment.”

Such conditions are not being considered for military aid, the official said.

A spokesperson for Ukraine’s foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired several top defense officials in a recent crackdown on alleged graft — a message to the United States and Europe that he’s listening.

The Integrated Country Strategy is a State Department product that draws on contributions from other parts of the U.S. government, including the Defense Department. It includes lists of goals, timelines for achieving them and milestones that U.S. officials would like to see hit. (The State Department produces such strategies for many countries once every few years.)

A State Department official, speaking on behalf of the department, would not say if Washington had shared the longer version of the strategy with the Ukrainian government or whether a classified version exists.

William Taylor, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said many ordinary Ukrainians will likely welcome the strategy because they, too, are tired of the endemic corruption in their country.

It’s all fine “as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the assistance we provide them to win the war,” he said.

The document says that fulfilling American objectives for Ukraine includes making good on U.S. promises of equipment and training to help Ukraine’s armed forces fend off the Kremlin’s attacks.

The confidential version also describes U.S. goals such as helping reform elements of Ukraine’s national security apparatus to allow for “decentralized, risk-tolerant approach to execution of tasks” and reduce “opportunities for corruption.”

Although the NATO military alliance is not close to allowing Ukraine to join, the American strategy often cites a desire to make Ukraine’s military adopt NATO standards.

One hoped-for milestone listed in the confidential version is that Ukraine’s Defense Ministry “establishes a professionalized junior officer and non-commissioned officer corps with NATO standard doctrine and principles.”

Even the format and content of Ukrainian defense documents should “reflect NATO terminology,” a confidential section of the strategy says.

One target includes creating a “national level resistance plan.” That could allude to ordinary Ukrainians fighting back if Russia gains more territory. (The State Department official would not clarify that point.)

The U.S. also wants to see Ukraine produce its own military equipment by establishing a “domestic defense industry capable of supporting core needs” as well as an environment that boosts defense information technology start-ups, according to one of the confidential sections.

U.S. officials appear especially concerned about the role of an elite few in Ukraine’s economy.

“Deoligarchization, particularly of the energy and mining sectors, is a core tenet to building back a better Ukraine,” the public part of the strategy declares. One indicator of success, the confidential version states, is that the Ukrainian government “embraces meaningful reforms decentralizing control of the energy sector.”

The United States appears eager to help Ukrainian institutions build their oversight capacities. The goals listed include everything from helping local governments assess corruption risks to reforms in human resources offices.

One hoped-for U.S. goal is that Ukraine’s Defense Ministry “establishes a professionalized junior officer and non-commissioned officer corps with NATO standard doctrine and principles.” | Libkos/AP Photo

As one example, the strategy says the U.S. is helping the Accounting Chamber of Ukraine enhance its auditing and related work in part so it can track direct budget support from the United States.

The strategy describes ways in which the United States is helping Ukraine’s health sector, cyber defenses and organizations that battle disinformation. It calls for supporting Ukrainian anti-monopoly efforts and initiatives to spur increased tax revenue for the country’s coffers.

The confidential portion calls for Ukraine’s financial systems to “increase lending to encourage business expansion” and a reduction in the state’s role in the banking sector.

One envisioned milestone for that section is that “Alfa Bank is transparently returned to private ownership.” That appears to be a reference to an institution now known as Sense Bank, which was previously Russian-owned but nationalized by Ukraine.

The U.S. strategy appears intent on ensuring that Ukraine not only retains its orientation toward the West but that it develops special ties with America.

One way Washington believes that will happen is through the English language. The strategy indicates the United States is offering technical and other aid to Ukraine’s education ministry to improve the teaching of English and that it believes offering English lessons can help reintegrate Ukrainians freed from Russian occupation.

U.S. officials also are helping Ukraine build its capacity to prosecute war crimes in its own judicial system. The desired milestones include the selection of more than 2,000 new judges and clearing up a backlog of over 9,000 judicial misconduct complaints.

The strategy also calls for rebuilding the U.S. diplomatic presence in Ukraine, expanding beyond Kyiv to cities such as Lviv, Odesa, Kharkiv and Dnipro.

Due to earlier staff drawdowns spurred by the full-scale Russian invasion, “the embassy remains in crisis mode,” one of the public sections states. (The State Department official would not discuss the current Embassy staffing numbers.)

As they have in past communications reported on by POLITICO, U.S. officials note inventive ways in which the United States is providing oversight of American aid to Ukraine despite facing limitations due to the war. Those efforts have included using an app called SEALR to help track the aid.

Source: Politico

“Enlargement is no longer a dream,” European Council chief Charles Michel said | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images

European Council President Charles Michel said Monday that he wants Europe to be ready for enlargement by 2030, as the European Union gears up for a renewed debate about its future size.

“Enlargement is no longer a dream,” the Council chief said at the Bled Strategic Forum in Slovenia, where leaders from the Western Balkans have gathered. “It is time to move forward,” he added.

While eight countries formally hold candidate status, for many in the Western Balkans the accession process has stalled. And for some countries like Turkey, the process has been officially put on hold, although dynamics linked to the war in Ukraine have reenergized the debate.

In June last year, EU leaders granted candidate status to Ukraine and Moldova and pressure is building to open accession talks with these countries by the end of the year.

“There is still a lot of work to do. It will be difficult,” Michel said at the forum, adding: “I believe we must be ready — on both sides — by 2030 to enlarge.”

The Council president underscored that “enlargement is and will remain a merit-based process,” pointing to the need for respecting rule of law, implementing European economic standards and aligning with Brussels on foreign policy.

Just the same, Michel called for the next long-term EU budget to take enlargement goals into account and for the EU to consider adapting its institutional framework for a larger form.

On the thorny issue of whether enlargement should entail a move away from unanimous decision-making on sensitive matters, he took a middle-ground stance: “Completely scrapping unanimity could be throwing the baby out with the bath water.”

“This will be a hard nut to crack,” the Council leader continued, “but there is no way to avoid this debate now.”

The biggest challenge, according to Michel, could be simply convincing Europeans of the enlargement project.

“We need to make sure,” he said, that “we have the hearts of the people with us.”

Source: Politico