I don’t usually write about cultural products from my own country, but I must make an exception for Slovenian filmmaker Miran Zupanič’s new documentary Sarajevo Safari, which details one of the most
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A year after, the war in Ukraine has invited diverse reactions from across the World. The two warring sides are continuing to look at successful culmination by attaining political objectives. There is a consensus in the military community internationally however that a closure to the War is not in sight in the near future.
At the larger geopolitical level division in blocks – West versus Russia/China was clearly evident at the G 20 Finance Minister’s conclave in Bengaluru, India over the week end. A joint communique could not be issued as mention of the Ukraine War was opposed by Moscow and Beijing jointly. India’s attempts at mediation as the G 20 chair could not achieve a breakthrough.
On the military front these ‘blocks,” have solidified in terms of provision of support to Ukraine in the form of a strong western alliance with an arms supply of billions of US dollars that will sustain Ukrainian armed forces in their ambition to regain lost territories including Crimea.
On the Russian side Moscow’s vast military industrial complex was exposed with many chinks resulting in a reach out to the most unlikely quarters Iran and North Korea for weapons and munitions support.
China has remained out of the arms grid so far and is not likely to provide lethal weapons concerned over what impact this may have on economic relations with the United States and Europe. An economically weakened at least partially Beijing may not seek to antagonise the West by providing arms to Russia, which will also pull the rug of the high moral ground attempted to be projected by China of abhorrence of lethal means for conflict resolution. If China does so to support Russia there may be repercussions that will go beyond the US and Europe to the many developing countries where Chinese projects are ongoing and Beijing is mindful of the same.
But what about the military lessons of the Ukraine War-
Firstly, Clausewitz the doyen of conventional warfare – fought by military of one state against another is back.
There are many military analysts who had written the obituary of conventional warfighting as it has been known since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
Coining new phrases as Hybrid War, Three Warfare Strategies, Grey Zone Warfare and so on they had advised a focus away from tanks and guns.
Russia abandoned the Gerasimov Doctrine the chief proponent of which was Valery Gerasimov the longest serving Chief of Staff of the Russian armed forces and embraced Clausewitz.
Alas! The proponents of New Way of War were proven wrong for in Ukraine it was not cyber or information that made a difference but the artillery shell and the missiles the roaring of tank guns and close in fighting in urban areas as the Azov Steel plant.
This is not to undermine the value of information, communication and media as well as other addendums that influenced Ukrainian people as well as the global community to support Kyiv, yet had the Ukrainian forces folded up as the Russians expected them, no amount of information tweaking could have saved the country.
Secondly Clausewitzian trinity of war – violence, chance and reason survives. Exemplified in the resistance by the government, people and the armed forces that dictates the outcome of wars.
While well versed in this trinity Russia attempted to target all three elements at various stages of the War so far but has failed and is unlikely to succeed in the near term.
Thirdly as Napoleon said moral is to material is to three is to one – this axiom has also been proven by the Ukrainian armed forces and the people at large who withstood the brunt of the fighting suffering heavy losses in turn yet the wondrous counter offensive undertaken in Kharkiv and Kherson proved Napoleon right apart from many other instances.
Fourthly integrated operations are the essence of success on the modern battlefield while artillery is the God of War, armour the King and Infantry traditionally known as the Queen – only combined arms can win success.
Importantly the air arm will also assume important though it did not receive as much attention due to limited employment for reasons which need to be gone into in detail in due course.
Fifthly logistics once again proved a key factor – an underprepared Russia military could not make a breakthrough in Kyiv in the initial months of February – March 2022 due to poor logistics preparation.
Sixthly just as in the Second World War – alliances win wars while the Soviet Union fought with the West in the 1940’s today the successor Russia is on the other side.
Ukraine supported by the West has survived without this support a collapse would have been inevitable and in the future too any weakness of support to Kyiv will spell disaster.
Seventhly security of information, operations and preparations continues to be an important factor. Ukraine’s curtain of security was evident as information flow was controlled even from the closest allies.
Eighthly, unmanned aerial vehicles commonly known as the drone – suicide and other forms is here to stay. First making a decisive mark in December 2020 in the Azerbaijan – Armenia war, in Ukraine multiple use of drones facilitated tactical advantage to the side which could employ the same effectively. Yet the limitations of drones to create strategic success continues to be limited.
Ninthly asymmetry has a decided advantage be it against the drones and the cost benefit calculation of use of inexpensive drones versus expensive missiles to bring them down is a dimension that needs to be explored further.
Finally the jury is still out if the supply of a bouquet of tanks, guns and air defence missiles provided by the West to Ukraine can be effectively managed through the training, operational and logistics cycle by Ukrainian armed forces.
On the flip side the depth of reserves manpower and military material of Russia will also be under test.
A Chinese envoy on Friday called for a resumption of non-conditional talks between Russia and Ukraine, stressing that Ukraine is not “an arena for fights between major countries.”
“We call on Russia and Ukraine to resume negotiations without any preconditions,” said Dai Bing, charge d’affaires of China’s permanent mission to the United Nations, while addressing a high-level UN Security Council briefing on Ukraine.
“Ukraine is not an arena for fights between major countries. No one should seek to benefit from the conflict at the cost of the Ukrainian people,” he said.
The security of one country should not be pursued at the expense of others. Strengthening or even expanding military blocs will only undermine regional security and will never bring about peace, he said.
Russia, Ukraine and European countries are neighbors that cannot be physically moved away. To realize lasting peace and stability in Europe, the Cold War mentality and bloc confrontation must be abandoned, and the legitimate security concerns of all countries must be taken seriously and addressed properly, so as to build a balanced, effective and sustainable regional security architecture, said Dai.
The envoy said China is ready to continue to play a responsible and constructive role in resolving the Ukraine crisis.
China issued earlier Friday a paper stating its position on the political settlement of the Ukraine crisis, he said. “We have always taken an objective and impartial stance based on the merits of the issue.”
Dai stressed that when handling and solving international disputes, universally recognized international law, including the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, must be upheld.
The sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of all countries must be effectively guaranteed. Observing universally recognized international law and the basic norms governing international relations bears on the stability of the international system and international fairness and justice. They should be equally and uniformly applied in every place and on every issue without exception, he said.
“Some country, while stressing sovereignty and territorial integrity on the Ukraine issue, is blatantly interfering in other countries’ internal affairs and undermining their sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Dai said. “This reveals its double standard at full display. The international community is clear-eyed about this.”
He underscored the need to pursue common security to facilitate a political solution to the Ukraine crisis, saying security is not an exclusive right enjoyed only by some countries.
Highlighting diplomatic negotiations as the only right way to solve the Ukraine crisis, he said “conflicts have no winners” and called on the international community to promote peace talks with the highest sense of urgency and work to create enabling factors and platforms for the resumption of negotiation.
Bringing parties to the conflict back to the negotiating table is not going to be easy, but it is the first step toward a political solution, he said.
Dai emphasized that it is imperative to never cross the red line of nuclear security under any circumstances.
Nuclear weapons must never be used, and nuclear war must never be fought. Faced with the risk that the Ukraine crisis could lead to an escalation of the conflict, major countries bear special and important responsibilities to maintain communication and coordination and to do everything they can to prevent a nuclear crisis, he said.
The international community should jointly oppose armed attacks against nuclear power plants or other peaceful nuclear facilities, ensure strict compliance with the Convention on Nuclear Safety, among others, and support the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in playing a constructive role in promoting the safety and security of peaceful nuclear facilities, he added.
The humanitarian crisis is worsening and should be proactively and properly addressed, Dai said.
The international humanitarian law is a code of conduct that must be strictly observed in conflict situations. Relevant parties should avoid attacking civilians or civilian facilities, protect the vulnerable, including women and children, ensure humanitarian access, and respect the basic rights of prisoners of war, he said.
The international community should increase humanitarian assistance, help restore civilian infrastructure, and ensure the basic livelihood of refugees and displaced persons, with a view to preventing a humanitarian crisis on a larger scale, Dai said.
“At the same time, humanitarian operations should earnestly follow the principles of neutrality and impartiality and avoid politicization,” he stressed.
The envoy also urged efforts to be made to manage the spillovers of the Ukraine crisis, which he said has far-reaching impacts, noting that developing countries that are not parties to this conflict should not pay an excessively high price for it.
Some relevant parties have been resorting to unilateral sanctions and maximum pressure, which cannot solve any issue, and can only undermine the stability of the global industrial and supply chains and exacerbate the global food, energy and financial crises, he said.
“We hope that the relevant parties will take responsible actions and stop abusing unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction,” said Dai.
The Black Sea Grain Initiative and the Memorandum of Understanding signed by the United Nations and Russia on the export of food products and fertilizers have great significance for ensuring global food security and should be implemented fully and effectively in a balanced manner, he said.
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On February 2, 2023, former U.S. Marine Peter Reed was killed in Ukraine while evacuating civilians in the front-line city of Bakhmut. Two days later on February 4, the bodies of two British volunteers, Christopher Perry and Andrew Bagshaw, were returned as part of a prisoner swap deal with Russian forces. Their deaths mark some of the latest Western casualties in Ukraine one year after Russian forces invaded the country in February 2022.
Foreign fighters have flocked to Ukraine since the initial round of Russian military intervention in 2014. But following the Russian invasion in February 2022, the number of fighters making their way to Ukraine has skyrocketed. After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked foreigners to join the International Defense Legion of Ukraine at the beginning of the war on February 27, around 20,000 volunteers from more than 50 countries arrived in Kyiv over the next two weeks.
Many traveled to the country for ideological reasons. In contrast to the disillusionment many Western veterans felt after combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, the belief that they would be helping to “ease Ukrainian suffering” and would be defending democracy have been powerful motivators in bringing thousands of volunteers to Kyiv.
However, the vast majority of foreign arrivals returned home before the summer of 2022 for several reasons. Some lacked credible experience and were accused of being “war tourists” instead of being dedicated to Ukraine’s liberation. Western soldiers who volunteered also found themselves operating without strong air support and other key technological advantages enjoyed over militant groups in the Middle East.
Language barriers have often inhibited foreign fighters from not being able to communicate clearly with their Ukrainian counterparts. Allegations of criminality, both in their home countries as well as in Ukraine, have also been levied on some foreign volunteers.
Most estimates place between 1,000 and 3,000 foreign fighters currently supporting Ukrainian forces, largely serving in three battalions of the International Legion. Hundreds of more professional foreign volunteers are believed to be serving in smaller units separate from the International Legion.
These include groups dominated by citizens from across the former Soviet Union, such as the Georgian Legion, Chechen battalions, and Kalinoŭski Regiment, a group of Belarusian fighters. Western-dominated military units include groups like Alpha, Phalanx, and the Norman Brigade. However, even these units have faced controversy. The leadership of the Norman Brigade, a Canadian-led unit, for example, has been repeatedly criticized by former members.
Western private military and security companies (PMSCs) are also active in Ukraine. The Mozart Group, a U.S. PMSC, styled to counter the Russian PMSC Wagner Group (similarly named after a German composer), was active in the Ukrainian conflict in the early days. But as funding dried up and remarks by some of its members drew negative attention on social media, the Mozart Group fell apart. Its remaining leadership is currently attempting to reorganize itself and get back to the front line.
The involvement of U.S. volunteers in Ukraine has also raised questions over potential violations of the Neutrality Act, enacted in 1794 to prevent American citizens from getting involved in foreign wars. Yet while the U.S. State Department has recommended against U.S. citizens from traveling to Ukraine, Washington has done little to prevent thousands of its citizens from traveling there.
The U.S. is not alone in its mixed messaging over foreign fighters. The British government has stated it is illegal for British troops and ex-service personnel to travel to Ukraine to fight, but just days into the Russian invasion in February 2022, then-Foreign Secretary Liz Truss announced her support for British individuals traveling to Ukraine to do so. Other Western governments have, meanwhile, declared they would discourage individual citizens from traveling to Ukraine but would not prosecute those who did so.
This has not prevented some legal action from being taken against those who are caught. In June 2022, a court in the Russian-controlled separatist region of Donetsk sentenced two British citizens and a Moroccan to death for fighting in the Ukrainian military. “Such treatment of prisoners of war constitutes a war crime, but the Russians claimed that they were mercenaries and, thus, the rules of war did not apply to them,” stated the Harvard International Review.
Wary of instigating a wider war between NATO and Russia, Western officials have refrained from putting official boots on the ground. Nonetheless, U.S. special operations forces have been active in Ukraine since before the war and continue to operate in the country, along with CIA personnel. Additionally, special forces from Britain, France, Canada, Lithuania, and other Western allies are also active in Ukraine.
Alongside the lack of clarity over the intelligence and special forces operations, it is difficult to confirm the exact number of Westerners in Ukraine, what type of roles they are serving, where exactly they are, and how many have died. Seemingly erroneous claims are also often made regarding their casualties. On January 25, 2023, a Turkish website, allegedly citing what is assumed to be data from Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad, stated that thousands of soldiers from NATO countries had been killed, including hundreds from the U.S. and the UK. This claim was quickly denied by NATO.
The Kremlin has, meanwhile, highlighted how Russia is not just fighting Ukraine, but NATO itself, and captured Western fighters are key to portraying this message to both the Russian public and international audiences. Moscow has sought to frame the conflict as a wider struggle against the West, which it believes will resonate with other populations around the world.
In March 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin called for foreign fighters to help liberate the Donbas, while according to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, 16,000 foreigners had indicated they were willing to fight alongside Russian forces in Ukraine, according to Newsweek.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the financier of Wagner Group, declared on his company’s Telegram channel in February 2023 that more than 10 million U.S. citizens had signed up with the group to fight for Russia. While Wagner has found most of its new recruits from Russian prisons, the Kremlin has had some luck in recruiting foreign fighters to Ukraine. Many Russian PMSCs have typically recruited from former Soviet states, and Central Asian fighters are suspected to be fighting on both sides of the conflict.
Many Serbians also resent the West’s historical role in their country’s affairs and small groups of Serbian nationals have been fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine since 2014. Serbian officials noted in January 2023 that they were monitoring reports of additional Serbians serving Russia in Ukraine. Montenegrin officials are also attempting to prevent their citizens, many of whom share pro-Serbian and pro-Russian sentiment, from going to Ukraine, with some having already done so since 2014 as well.
Iranian soldiers and personnel are in Ukraine helping Russians operate Iranian-made drones, and according to a Ukrainian official, 10 Iranians were killed during an attack on Russian positions in October 2022. Hundreds of Syrian fighters are also suspected to be in Ukraine, mirroring the dynamics of the Syrian civil war where Iranian, Syrian, and Russian troops have fought together since 2015.
The possibility of additional volunteers from other countries joining the war on both sides remains high. In August 2022, Russian state media began suggesting that up to 100,000 North Korean volunteers could end up supporting the Kremlin’s campaign in Ukraine. While that number is clearly optimistic, North Korean volunteers may come to exceed the handful of South Korean citizens known to have traveled to Ukraine to fight for Kyiv.
Additionally, small numbers of U.S. citizens have also gone to fight for Russia, alongside U.S.-trained Afghan commandos also now fighting for Russia in Ukraine. Though the Kremlin denies the reports, it is believed Afghan soldiers have been actively recruited by the Kremlin for months.
The Russia-Ukraine war is clearly more than a war between two countries. In addition to the material aid, both Russia and particularly Ukraine have received from their allies, thousands of foreign fighters from around the world have arrived to fight alongside them. As more volunteers continue to arrive, there is a greater risk of other countries becoming entangled in the conflict. Establishing safeguards to deal with foreign volunteer casualties and prisoners of war is crucial to preventing the conflict from escalating further.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
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In October 2022, about eight months after the war in Ukraine started, the University of Cambridge in the UK harmonized surveys conducted in 137 countries about their attitudes towards the West and towards Russia and China.
The findings in the study, while not free of a margin of error, are robust enough to take seriously.
These are:
- For the 6.3 billion people who live outside of the West, 66 percent feel positively towards Russia and 70 percent feel positively towards China, and,
- Among the 66 percent who feel positively about Russia the breakdown is 75 percent in South Asia, 68 percent in Francophone Africa, and 62 percent in Southeast Asia.
- Public opinion of Russia remains positive in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam.
Sentiments of this nature have caused some ire, surprise, and even anger in the West. It is difficult for them to believe that two-thirds of the world’s population is not siding with the West.
What are some of the reasons or causes for this? I believe there are five reasons as explained in this brief essay.
1. The Global South does not believe that the West understands or empathizes with their problems.
India’s foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, summed it up succinctly in a recent interview: “Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.” He is referring to the many challenges that developing countries face whether they relate to the aftermath of the pandemic, the high cost of debt service, the climate crisis that is ravaging their lives, the pain of poverty, food shortages, droughts, and high energy prices. The West has barely given lip service to the Global South on many of these problems. Yet the West is insisting that the Global South join it in sanctioning Russia.
The Covid pandemic is a perfect example—despite the Global South’s repeated pleas to share intellectual property on the vaccines, with the goal of saving lives, no Western nation was willing to do so. Africa remains to this day the most unvaccinated continent in the world. Africa had the capability to make the vaccines but without the intellectual property they could not do it.
But help did come from Russia, China, and India. Algeria launched a vaccination program in January 2021 after it received its first batch of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccines. Egypt started vaccinations after it got China’s Sinopharm vaccine at about the same time. South Africa procured a million doses of AstraZeneca from the Serum Institute of India. In Argentina, Sputnik became the backbone of their vaccine program. All of this was happening while the West was using its financial resources to buy millions of doses in advance, and often destroying them when they became outdated. The message to the Global South was clear—your problems are your problems, they are not our problems.
2. History Matters: Who stood where during colonialism and after independence?
Many countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia view the war in Ukraine through a different lens than the West. Many of them see their former colonial powers regrouped as members of the Western alliance. The countries that have sanctioned Russia are either members of the European Union and NATO or the closest allies of the United States in the Asia Pacific region. By contrast, many countries in Asia, and almost all countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America have tried to remain on good terms with both Russia and the West, and to shun sanctions against Russia. Could it be because they remember their history at the receiving end of the West’s colonial policies, a trauma that they still live with but which the West has mostly forgotten.
Nelson Mandela often said that it was the Soviet Union’s support, both moral and material, that helped inspire Southern Africans to overthrow the Apartheid regime. It is because of this that Russia is still viewed in a favorable light by many African countries. And once Independence came for these countries, it was the Soviet Union that supported them even though it had limited resources itself. The Aswan Dam in Egypt which took 11 years to build, from 1960 to 1971, was designed by the Moscow based Hydro project Institute and financed in large part by the Soviet Union. The Bhilai Steel Plant in India, one of the first large infrastructure projects in a newly independent India, was set up by the USSR in 1959. Other countries also benefited from the support provided by the former Soviet Union, both political and economic, including Ghana, Mali, Sudan, Angola, Benin, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Mozambique.
On February 18, 2023, at the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the foreign minister of Uganda, Jeje Odongo, had this to say, “We were colonized and forgave those who colonized us. Now the colonizers are asking us to be enemies of Russia, who never colonized us. Is that fair? Not for us. Their enemies are their enemies. Our friends are our friends.”
Rightly or wrongly, present day Russia is seen by many countries in the Global South as an ideological successor to the former Soviet Union. These countries have a long memory that makes them view Russia in a somewhat different light. Given the history, can we blame them?
3. The war in Ukraine is seen by the Global South as mainly about the future of Europe rather than the future of the entire world.
The history of the Cold War has taught developing countries that getting embroiled in great power conflicts generates few benefits for them yet carries enormous risks. And they view the Ukraine proxy war as one that is more about the future of European security than the future of the entire world. Furthermore, the war is seen by the Global South as an expensive distraction from the most pressing issues that they are dealing with. These include higher fuel prices, food prices, higher debt service costs, and more inflation, all of which have become more aggravated because of the Western sanctions that have been imposed on Russia.
A recent survey published by Nature Energy states that up to 140 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty due to the higher energy prices that have come about over the past year.
Soaring energy prices not only directly impact energy bills, but they also lead to upward price pressures on all supply chains and consumer items, including food and other necessities. This hurts the developing countries even more than it hurts the West.
The West can sustain the war “as long as it takes” since they have the financial resources and the capital markets to do so. But the Global South does not have the same luxury. A war for the future of European security has the potential of devastating the security of the entire world.
The Global South is also alarmed that the West is not pursuing negotiations that could bring this war to an early end. There were missed opportunities in December 2021 when Russia proposed revised security treaties for Europe that could have prevented the war and which were rejected by the West. The peace negotiations of April 2022 in Istanbul were also rejected by the West in part to “weaken” Russia. And now the entire world is paying the price for an invasion that the Western media like to call “unprovoked” and which could have been avoided.
4. The world economy is no longer American dominated or Western led and the Global South does have other options.
Several countries in the Global South increasingly see their future tied to countries that are no longer in the Western sphere of influence. Whether this is their perception of how the power balance is shifting away from the West, or wishful thinking as part of their colonial legacy, let us look at some metrics that may be relevant.
The U.S. share of global output declined from 21 percent in 1991 to 15 percent in 2021, while China’s share rose from 4 percent to 19 percent during the same period. China is the largest trading partner for most of the world, and its GDP in purchasing power parity already exceeds that of the United States. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa) had a combined GDP in 2021 of $42 trillion compared with $41 trillion in the G7. Their population of 3.2 billion is more than 4.5 times the combined population of the G7 countries, at 700 million.
The BRICS are not imposing sanctions on Russia nor supplying arms to the opposing side. While Russia is the biggest supplier of energy and foodgrains for the Global South, China remains the biggest supplier of financing and infrastructure projects to them through the Belt and Road Initiative. And now Russia and China are closer than ever before because of the war. What does it all mean for developing countries?
It means that when it comes to financing, food, energy, and infrastructure, the Global South must rely more on China and Russia more than on the West. The Global South is also seeing the Shanghai Cooperation Organization expanding, more countries wanting to join the BRICS, and many countries now trading in currencies that move them away from the dollar, the Euro, or the West. They also see a deindustrialization taking place in some countries in Europe because of higher energy costs, along with higher inflation. This makes quite apparent an economic vulnerability in the West that was not so evident before the war. With developing countries having an obligation to put the interests of their own citizens first, is it any wonder that they see their future tied more to countries that are not Western led or American dominated?
5. The “rule based international order” is lacking in credibility and is in decline.
The “rule based international order” is a concept that is seen by many countries in the Global South as one that has been conceived by the West and imposed unilaterally on other countries. Few if any non-Western countries ever signed on to this order. The South is not opposed to a rule-based order, but rather to the present content of these rules as conceived by the West.
But one must also ask, does the rule based international order apply even to the West?
For decades now, for many in the Global South, the West is seen to have had its way with the world without regard to anyone else’s views. Several countries were invaded at will, mostly without Security Council authorization. These include the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. Under what “rules” were those countries attacked or devastated, and were those wars provoked or unprovoked? Julian Assange is languishing in prison, and Ed Snowden is in exile, for having the courage (or perhaps the audacity) to expose the truths behind these actions.
Sanctions imposed on over 40 countries by the West impose considerable hardship and suffering. Under what international law or “rules-based order” did the West use its economic strength to impose these sanctions? Why are the assets of Afghanistan still frozen in Western banks while the country is facing starvation and famine? Why is Venezuelan gold still held hostage in the UK while the people of Venezuela are living at subsistence levels? And if Sy Hersh’s expose is true, under what “rules-based order” did the West destroy the Nord Stream pipelines?
There appears to be a paradigm shift that is taking place away from a Western dominated world and into a more multipolar world. And the war in Ukraine has made more evident those differences or chasms that are part of this paradigm shift. Partly because of its own history, and partly because of the economic realities that are emerging, the Global South sees a multipolar world as a preferable outcome in which their voices are more likely to be heard.
President Kennedy ended his American University speech in 1963 with the following words: “We must do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless for its success. Confident and unafraid, we must labor on towards a strategy of peace.”
That strategy of peace was the challenge before us in 1963 and they remain a challenge for us today. And the voices for peace, including those of the Global South, need to be heard.
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Last May, before being newly re-elected as president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, bear equal responsibility for the war in Ukraine. Yet whether the refusal to pick sides comes from Brazil, South Africa, or India, claiming to be “neutral” on Russia’s war of aggression is untenable.
The same is true of individuals. If a passerby saw a man relentlessly beating a child on a street corner, we would expect the witness to try to stop it. Neutrality is out of the question. On the contrary, we would deplore the moral turpitude of inaction.
How, then, should we respond to Roger Waters’ recent remarks to the United Nations Security Council? In a video call, the activist and Pink Floyd co-founder claimed to be speaking for “four billion or so brothers and sisters” around the world. He acknowledged that Russia’s war in Ukraine is illegal and should be condemned “in the strongest possible terms.” But then he hastened to add:
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine was not unprovoked, so I also condemn the provocateurs in the strongest possible terms….[T]he only sensible course of action today is to call for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine. Not one more Ukrainian or Russian life is to be spent, not one, they are all precious in our eyes. So the time has come to speak truth to power.”
Is Waters’ “truth” really an expression of neutrality? In an interview earlier this month with Berliner Zeitung, he said: “Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I am now more open to listen to what Putin actually says. According to independent voices I listen to, he governs carefully, making decisions on the grounds of a consensus in the Russian Federation government.”
As an independent voice who follows Russian media very closely, I am well acquainted with what Putin and his propagandists “actually say.” The major TV channels are full of commentators recommending that countries like Poland, Germany, or the United Kingdom be nuked. The Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, one of Putin’s closes allies, now openly calls for “the fight against Satanism [to] continue throughout Europe and, first of all, on the territory of Poland.”
Indeed, the official Kremlin line describes the war as a “special operation” for the de-Nazification and de-demonization of Ukraine. Among Ukraine’s “provocations” is that it has permitted Pride parades and allowed LGBTQ+ rights to undermine traditional sexual norms and gender roles. Kremlin-aligned commentators speak of “liberal totalitarianism,” even going so far as to argue that George Orwell’s 1984 was a critique not of fascism or Stalinism but of liberalism.
One finds nothing like this in the Western media, where the main motif is that we should help Ukraine to survive. As far as I know, nobody has demanded that Russia’s borders be changed, or that some part of its territory be seized. At worst, one finds counterproductive demands to boycott Russian culture, as though Putin’s regime somehow represents the likes of Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, and Tolstoy. Just as we are supporting Ukraine against an aggressor, so should we defend Russian culture against its abuser in the Kremlin. We also should avoid triumphalism and frame our objective in positive terms. The primary goal is not for Russia to lose and be humiliated, but for Ukraine to survive.
“Neutral” countries outside the West contend that the war is a local conflict that pales in comparison to the horrors of colonialism or more recent events like the US occupation of Iraq. But this is an obvious dodge. After all, Russia’s imperialist war is itself an act of colonialism. Those who would claim neutrality forfeit their standing to complain about the horrors of colonization anywhere. Waters is a vocal exponent of the Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonization. Why is Ukrainian resistance to Russian colonization any less worthy of support?
Sometimes, things really are as simple as that, especially now that Russia is preparing to celebrate the anniversary of its war with a new offensive. It is obscene to blame Ukraine for Russian acts of destruction, or to mischaracterize the Ukrainians’ heroic resistance as a rejection of peace. Those, like Waters, who call for “an immediate ceasefire” would have Ukrainians respond to redoubled Russian aggression by abandoning their own self-defense. That is a formula not for peace, but for pacification.
It bears mentioning – once again – that Russia is counting on the “neutralist” argument eventually to prevail. As the military historian Michael Clarke explains, “the Kremlin’s plan will be to keep fighting until the West gets fed up and pressures Kyiv into appeasing them with whatever territory they have taken by then.” Russia is digging in for a protracted war that will include the quiet mobilization of some 600,000 soldiers every year for the “indefinite future.”
Waters is almost right: Ukraine is indeed “provoking” Russia by refusing to submit to its imperial ambitions, even in the face of desperate odds. At this point, the only way that it could stop provoking its aggressive revisionist neighbor would be to lay down and surrender. The same, Waters would agree, is true of Palestine.
But surrendering to imperialism brings neither peace nor justice. To preserve the possibility of achieving either, we must drop the pretense of neutrality and act accordingly.
Courtesy: Project Syndicate
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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) needs to “ramp up production” of ammunition as Ukraine’s rate of usage is depleting current capacities and draining stockpiles, the alliance’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Monday.
The conflict in Ukraine “is consuming an enormous amount of ammunition and depleting allied stockpiles,” he told journalists ahead of a meeting of the NATO member states’ defense ministers.
“The current rate of Ukraine’s ammunition expenditure is many times higher than our current rate of production. This puts our defense industries under strain,” he said.
Stoltenberg said the current waiting time for large-caliber ammunition has increased from 12 months to 28 months.
“Orders placed today will only be delivered two and a half years later. So, we need to ramp up production and invest in our production capacity,” he said.
On Tuesday, the ministers will discuss Ukraine’s request for more weapons.
Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov will join them both for the United States-led Contact Group for Ukraine and for the NATO ministerial session.
Stoltenberg said the alliance has decided to establish a new coordination cell at NATO Headquarters to support its efforts to prevent and counter threats to critical infrastructure, including undersea cables and pipelines.
The U.S. Navy has been accused in press reports of involvement in last September’s attacks on the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Swedish and Danish exclusive economic zones under the Baltic Sea, which were built to transport natural gas from Russia to Germany.
U.S. investigative journalist Seymour Hersh alleged in recent days that U.S. Navy divers detonated explosives under the pipelines during the Baltic Operations 2022 NATO maritime exercise.
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Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine has created the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. While millions of Ukrainian refugees have since returned home, almost 2.9 million moved to Russia, according to October 2022 figures, and roughly 7.9 million were registered across Europe between February and December 27, 2022. Besides Russia, Poland (1.5 million), Germany (1 million), and the Czech Republic (474,731) have welcomed the largest numbers of Ukrainian refugees, while Italy, Spain, France, Romania, and the UK have also accepted more than 100,000 each.
There is little reason to suggest many Ukrainian refugees will return home soon. A June survey by polling group Rating, for example, found that 24 percent of Ukrainian refugees wanted to return but were waiting for a certain time, 48 percent said they would return after the end of the war, and 8 percent said they would not go back to Ukraine. A German government-backed survey from December 2022, meanwhile, found that around 37 percent of Ukrainian refugees wanted to settle in the country permanently or at least for the next few years.
As part of the Temporary Protection Directive that was invoked by the EU in March 2022, Ukrainians can now live, work, and study in EU countries for a period of three years. Many Ukrainian refugees have already found employment in host countries and may—like the temporary guest workers invited to Europe in the 1960s—choose to permanently settle in those countries eventually. Millions of Ukrainians also left their country before the 2022 Russian invasion, with 1.4 million Ukrainians having lived and worked in Poland in 2020 (most of whom came after the initial round of unrest in 2014) and another 250,000 having lived in Italy before the war alone.
The incentive for Ukrainian foreign workers and refugees to return home has been significantly reduced following the widespread destruction across the country since the war began in February 2022. Much of the country’s population has been suffering from limited and sporadic access to electricity, heat, and water, and Ukraine’s economy “shrank by 30 percent in 2022.” Ukraine is now Europe’s poorest country, and its entry into the EU will likely take years. Instability in the country’s Donbas region since 2014 coupled with almost a year of open conflict with Russia means that peace will likely continue to elude Ukraine.
While some Ukrainian refugees have returned, “‘unliveable’ conditions” during winters and the crumbling basic infrastructure will drive more Ukrainians to seek refuge in Europe, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. Additionally, it is estimated that 90 percent of Ukrainian refugees are women and children, as conscription prevented most Ukrainian men from leaving the country. The men that remained in Ukraine may try to reunite with their families abroad, while those men that managed to leave may face the risk of being recruited into military service or being punished for evading it if they do return to Ukraine.
Other countries that have suffered from conflicts in recent decades demonstrate that the longer violence continues, the less likely refugees are to return home. “In the Kosovo war of 1999, when NATO bombed Yugoslavia to prevent the brutalization of ethnic Albanians who make up Kosovo’s majority, hundreds of thousands fled, or were forcibly moved, to neighboring Albania and Macedonia.” These refugees eventually returned to Kosovo since the war lasted only 78 days, explained an article in the Economist. During the war in nearby Bosnia, which took place from 1992 to 1995, however, many Bosnians left “and far fewer returned.”
More recently, the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011, resulted in 6.8 million Syrian refugees fleeing mostly to neighboring states as well as to Europe until 2021. The conflict, soon to enter its 12th year, has reinforced the perception that both the desire of refugees to return, as well as the ability of host countries to deport them, is limited as long as violence is ongoing.
Between 2016 and 2022, for instance, just 336,496 Syrians returned to the country from neighboring host countries according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). And a UNHCR poll from June 2022 showed that more than 92.8 percent of Syrian refugees in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq do not plan to return to their country within the next year. As a new generation of Syrian children born outside the country emerges, the likelihood of Syrian families returning will continue to decline.
The Turkish government stated in May 2022 that it intends to relocate up to 1 million Syrian refugees back to northern Syria in regions controlled by Turkish-backed forces, and is increasingly using force to move them back across the border, even at gunpoint.
But the failed efforts by Turkey to return Syrian refugees suggest that European countries will struggle to do the same with Ukrainian refugees who refuse to turn home. Additionally, Ukrainian refugees have received a relatively warm welcome across Europe. While poorer EU countries bordering Ukraine, such as Poland and the Czech Republic, may seek to curtail future refugee intake, Ukrainian refugees may instead head further west into the continent.
The creation of millions of Ukrainian refugees has compounded the demographic crisis that Ukraine has faced since the 1990s. Falling birth rates, rising death rates, an aging population, and high emigration even before 2014 saw Ukraine’s population decline from 52 million in 1991 to about 42 million in 2020.
While other Eastern European countries, as well as Russia, have faced similar predicaments, Ukraine’s population decline has been far more acute. Due to low wages and high unemployment, Ukraine has been unable to attract immigrants, while the possible accession of Ukraine into the EU risks further emigration in the future. Furthermore, the large number of casualties of prime-aged men because of the conflict will also undermine Ukraine’s demographic position for decades.
French philosopher Auguste Comte is attributed with stating “Demography is destiny,” noting a link between a country’s future and the youthfulness of its population. A UN report from 2022 predicts that Ukraine’s population will likely never recover from the ongoing conflict and will continue to experience a significant population decline this century. A less populated Ukraine may be part of the Kremlin’s strategy of weakening the country, ominously hinted at by Russian President Vladimir Putin in March 2022, who declared “If they continue to do what they are doing, they are calling into question the future of Ukrainian statehood.”
Russia has of course played an active part in depopulating Ukraine. In addition to launching its destabilizing military operations, since 2014 it has facilitated the migration of Ukrainian refugees into Russia, policies that seem to have continued with additional Ukrainian refugees making their way to Russia since the invasion in February 2022. And in May 2022, Putin signed a decree easing constraints on Russians seeking to adopt Ukrainian children in war-torn regions, while making it harder for relatives of these children in Ukraine to have them returned.
Many Ukrainians in Europe may never come back, including those who traveled to Russia. Thus, without enough Ukrainians to repopulate the country, the ability of the Ukrainian government to reestablish a strong state and national identity in some regions risks becoming increasingly limited as the war drags on.
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Since September, Kosovo’s fragile stability that has endured since 1999, following intervention by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), has grown progressively precarious. Clashes between ethnic Serbians and Kosovo security forces saw Serbia’s military placed on high alert in November. Several high-profile Serbian officials, including President Aleksandar Vučić, announced that the Serbian military could be deployed to northern Kosovo to protect the ethnic Serbs, who make up the majority of the population in the region.
Moscow has natural incentives to provoke the crisis. An unraveling of regional security would create more obstacles for Serbia’s EU aspirations, optimistically slated for 2025. The West’s support for Kosovo has historically undermined Serbia’s European integration effort, and 51 percent of Serbs polled by Belgrade-based pollster Demostat in June 2022 said they would vote against EU membership in a national referendum.
But by escalating tensions, Russia can also prevent further EU and NATO expansion in the region, and potentially reduce Western pressure on Russian forces in Ukraine by diverging resources from Kyiv to the Balkans.
Throughout the 1990s, NATO took a leading role in the breakup of Yugoslavia, perceived to be dominated by Serbia. While the West supported Bosnian and Croatian independence initiatives and Kosovan autonomy, Serbia was supported by Russia. These policies led to considerable tension between NATO and Russia, with the Kremlin’s occupation of Kosovo’s Slatina airport in 1999 leading to “one of the most tense standoffs between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War.”
However, Russia was too weak to adequately support Serbia in the 1990s. And after then-Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milošević was overthrown in 2000 and Russian forces withdrew from Kosovo in 2003, Serbian political elites instead pursued cautious integration with Europe while keeping the U.S. at arm’s length. At the same time, Serbia and Russia forged closer relations through growing economic ties, embracing their common Slavic Orthodox heritage, and sharing resentment toward NATO’s role in their affairs.
Territories under Serbian control continued to secede in the 2000s, with Montenegro peacefully voting for independence in 2006 and Kosovo in 2008. Yet unlike other secession initiatives in the former Yugoslavia, Kosovo’s failed to gain universal recognition. Almost half of the UN General Assembly refused to recognize Kosovo’s independence, with NATO/EU members Spain, Greece, Slovakia, and Romania among them.
Moscow was firmly against Kosovo’s independence, and prior to the February 2008 declaration of independence, the Kremlin warned of geopolitical consequences if it were to move forward. Six months later, Russia invoked the “Kosovo Precedent” to invade Georgia and recognized the separatist territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent. The Kremlin is now using the same paradigm to justify its support for Russian-backed separatist territories in Ukraine.
Currently bogged down in Ukraine, the Kremlin is exploring fomenting additional unrest in the Balkans by exploiting Serbian nationalist sentiment. Doing so will undoubtedly redirect some Western political, economic, and military efforts away from Ukraine.
Russia’s influence over Serbia has grown in recent years, and Serbian politicians have become more assertive regarding northern Kosovo. Though overall trade between Russia and Serbia is negligible in comparison to the EU, Russia provides one-quarter of the oil imported to Serbia, while Gazprom finalized 51 percent share in Serbia’s major oil and gas company, Naftna Industrija Srbije (NIS), in 2009.
Russia’s veto power at the UN Security Council has prevented greater international recognition of Kosovo, demonstrating Moscow’s usefulness as a diplomatic ally. Putin has, meanwhile, become Serbians’ most admired international leader, with pro-Putin and pro-Russia rallies having been held in Serbia since the invasion of Ukraine. According to recent polling, almost 70 percent of Serbians hold NATO responsible for the conflict.
Balancing Putin’s popularity and Serbia’s relations with Europe has been a delicate task for Serbian President Vučić. Though he condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he refused to implement sanctions against the Kremlin, prompting German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to signal that Vučić had to make a choice between Europe and Russia in June.
But the Serbian leader had already signed a three-year gas deal with Russia in May, and in September agreed to “consult” with Moscow on foreign policy issues. Other ventures, such as doubling flights from Moscow to Belgrade, have demonstrated Serbia’s willingness to assist Russia in undermining Western sanctions.
More concerning to Western officials is Russia’s attempts over the last decade to alter the military balance between Serbia and Kosovo. A Russian humanitarian center located in the Serbian city of Niš, which is close to the Kosovo border and opened in 2012, is suspected of being a secret Russian military base “set up by the Kremlin to spy on U.S. interests in the Balkans.” Additionally, Serbia has increased imports of Russian weaponry, while joint military exercises between Russia, Belarus, and Serbia (labeled “Slavic Brotherhood”) have been held annually since 2015.
Russian-backed non-state actors have in turn become increasingly present in Serbia. In 2009, Russian private military and security companies, as well as organizations composed of Russian military veterans, began conducting, in coordination with Serbian counterparts, military youth camps in Zlatibor, Serbia. These were seen as attempts to develop the next generation of fighters and were eventually shut down by the local police in 2018.
Russia’s Night Wolves biker gang, which has played a pivotal role in the 2014 seizure of Crimea and the unrest that has followed in Ukraine since, also opened a Serbian chapter and conducted road trips in the region for years. And in December, a cultural center was opened by the Russian private military company Wagner—which is similarly fighting in Ukraine—in Serbia, “to strengthen and develop friendly relations between Russia and Serbia with the help of ‘soft power.’”
Using these forces to threaten a low-level insurgency in Kosovo would cause enormous alarm in NATO and the EU. But Russia’s efforts to fan the flames of Serbian nationalism will also be directed toward Bosnia and Herzegovina. The country’s Serb-dominated territory, Republika Srpska, accepted power-sharing stipulations as part of the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995, and Russian forces similarly withdrew from the country in 2003.
Nonetheless, Milorad Dodik, president of Republika Srpska (who was also the president from 2010-2018), has increasingly allied himself with the Kremlin and has taken greater steps toward declaring his region’s independence from the rest of Bosnia and Herzegovina over the last decade. Republika Srpska security forces are now well-equipped with Russian weaponry, while Moscow has given subtle approval to supporting and developing Republika Srpska paramilitary groups. A Bosnian-Serb militia group called Serbian Honor is believed to have received training at the humanitarian center in Niš and the Night Wolves have also repeatedly held rallies in the territory.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Dodik has expressed his support for Russia, raising alarm over his ability to instigate unrest in Bosnia and Herzegovina with limited Russian state and non-state support. In response, the EU’s peacekeeping mission in the country, EUFOR or Operation Althea, almost doubled its presence from 600 to 1,100 since the invasion in February.
Yet this still pales compared to the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR), which has roughly 3,700 troops in a country with a smaller population and less territory than Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is further aided by the EU Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX). Pushing Republika Srpska’s independence initiative to a point where Russia can officially recognize and support it may in turn rapidly overwhelm the smaller international force there. It would also provoke calls for independence among Bosnia and Herzegovina’s ethnic Croatian minority, whose leaders have close relations with Moscow.
Disagreements in the Western alliance over the collective approach to the Balkans have been revealed in recent months. While the UK and the U.S. placed sanctions on “various Bosnian politicians who are threatening the country’s territorial integrity,” the EU chose not to, notably due to opposition by Slovenia, Croatia, and Hungary. And while Croatia was accepted into the Schengen area in December, Romania, and Bulgaria, already EU members since 2007, were denied entry by Austria, while the Netherlands similarly opposed Bulgaria being part of the Schengen area.
Effectively managing potential violence in the former Yugoslavia while continuing the integration efforts of other Balkan EU/NATO members would prove to be a difficult procedure for the Western alliance. Billions of dollars in aid and assistance have already been provided to Ukraine in 2022. Confronting additional instability in the Balkans would also highlight the flaws of NATO policy in the region since the 1990s and the lack of a viable, long-term solution to confront the issues plaguing the Balkans.
Yet regional integration efforts have picked up in recent months. In July, the EU restarted membership talks of bringing Albania and North Macedonia into the organization, Bosnia and Herzegovina was officially accepted as a candidate on December 15, and Kosovo applied for EU membership on December 14. NATO membership for both Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina remains largely on hold, however, and is currently out of the question for Serbia, which considers NATO its “enemy.”
Considerable work will be required to integrate these divided states into the Western alliance, and recent attempts to speed up this process have been largely unsuccessful. The scheme by former President Donald Trump’s administration to change the Serbia-Kosovo border amounted to little, while the proposed Association of Serb Municipalities in Kosovo has been criticized for outlining the creation of another Republika Srpska.
The role of Russian intelligence and Serbian nationalists in the attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016, which sought to derail the country’s NATO accession, reveals the lengths to which Moscow will go to achieve its aims. Western officials must, therefore, remain wary of Russia’s potential in the region. Escalating unresolved Balkan conflicts is now a major part of the Kremlin’s attempts to stall Western integration in Europe and take pressure off its war with Ukraine.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
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On November 1, the deputy director of Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation downplayed remarks made on October 30 by an agency official, who warned of Western weapons bound for Ukraine being smuggled into Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Nonetheless, the affair generated significant attention and reflected previous concerns expressed by European authorities over Ukraine’s vulnerability to organized crime and the repercussions for the continent.
Organized crime emerged as a potent force in Ukraine after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Criminal groups exploited flawed economic privatization measures to amass significant economic power, while the collapse of the Soviet security state allowed armed criminal factions to replace government authority and entrench themselves permanently.
These developments were mirrored in many former Soviet states in the 1990s, including Russia. But after Vladimir Putin assumed the Russian presidency in 2000, he and his allies in Russia’s intelligence community reestablished a strong security apparatus and clamped down on many domestic organized crime syndicates.
However, the Kremlin chose not to eradicate them completely. Wary of further violence, Putin sought to consolidate power rather than risk a return to the instability that characterized Russia in the 1990s.
And perhaps more importantly, criminal groups could provide Moscow with unique opportunities. By turning a blind eye to much of their activities and legitimizing their wealth and businesses, the Kremlin gained access to illegal profit-making schemes, extensive smuggling networks, manpower, and other illicit services.
The Kremlin also expanded cooperation with criminal groups across the former Soviet Union. In Ukraine’s southeast, where criminal activity has been most concentrated, Russian intelligence figures have cultivated relationships for decades, with most of Crimea’s high-end criminal businesses dependent on relations with Russian criminal networks to survive.
Organized crime in Ukraine had also evolved significantly by the time Putin entered office. In 2006, a U.S. Embassy cable stated that Crimean criminals were “fundamentally different than in the 1990s: then, they were tracksuit-wearing, pistol-wielding ‘bandits’ who gave Crimea a reputation as the ‘Ukrainian Sicily’ and ended up in jail, shot, or going to ground; now they had moved into mainly above-board businesses, as well as local government.”
These developments allowed Russia to quickly assume political control over Crimea when Russian forces seized it in 2014. Dozens of pro-Russian politicians elected to Crimean political offices, including the Crimean Prime Minister Sergei Aksyonov and speaker of the Crimean Parliament Vladimir Konstantinov shared suspected ties to organized crime.
In Ukraine’s Donbas region, the “density of criminality, combined with the weakness of local institutions” similarly allowed criminal groups to amass significant economic and political power after the Soviet collapse. But following the launch of Russia’s proxy war in the region alongside the seizure of Crimea in 2014, Donbas criminal groups also provided much of the manpower for newly-created militant groups and attempted to recruit others in neighboring Ukrainian regions to take up arms against government forces.
Despite their higher density in Crimea and the Donbas, Russian-supported criminal groups operate across Ukraine and the Black Sea region. Speaking with Mark Galeotti, an expert on modern Russia, in 2019, a Bulgarian security officer detailed a smuggling operation through Bulgaria’s port of Varna, bringing in drugs and counterfeit goods from Ukraine’s port of Odessa.
Operated by “Ukrainians working for a Russian-based gang,” the Bulgarian officer believed the criminal group was being taxed by Russian authorities and was “feeding information on Odessa” back to the Kremlin.
The threat of Russian-backed organized crime has only grown since Russia’s invasion in February. Conflicts generally tend to weaken state capacity, or the ability of governments to function properly, allowing organized crime groups to increase their power and influence. The Kremlin has expanded its use of criminality to both weaken Ukraine and complement its own war effort.
While reports of Ukrainian criminal groups smuggling Western weapons out of Ukraine have been consistently downplayed, it would be in the Russian government’s interest to dilute the effectiveness of Western military aid. Additionally, many weapons successfully smuggled out of Ukraine will likely end up in Europe, with weapons from Eastern Europe having been used in several terrorist attacks over the last decade. “Just beyond the countries of Western Europe, with their restrictive gun laws, lie the Balkan states, awash with illegal weapons left over from the conflicts that raged there in the 1990s,” stated Time magazine.
In April, Ukrainian officials also accused Russia of smuggling weapons into Ukraine from the Moldovan breakaway region of Transnistria in an effort to arm local allies, as well as using smugglers to bring in sanctioned weapons and military technology for the Russian military via Georgia.
Economic sanctions have in turn forced the Kremlin to expand its criminal profiteering activities, according to Western intelligence and law enforcement officials who spoke with VICE World News. A report by the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute mentioned an incident from April 2022 where the “Ukrainian Ministry of Justice officials charged a Ukrainian individual with helping a Russian business to launder money using a Cypriot company, registering their accounts into a private bank in Ukraine.” Meanwhile, a metal shipment worth more than $3 million was intercepted before it could leave a port in Ukraine’s Odessa region.
On top of existing, lucrative tobacco-smuggling networks, NATO and EU officials believe that a large tobacco smuggling ring in Belgium exposed in September was sponsored by both Belarusian and Russian intelligence to raise funds for their operations in the face of sanctions. Russian and Belarusian state-controlled industries have similarly increased cooperation with criminal groups to export oil, gas, and counterfeit goods to bypass sanctions.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, European security officials have also noted a rise in drug smuggling to Europe through the northern route from Afghanistan through Central Asia and Russia—likely due to Moscow easing restraints on these activities. Central Asian political and security circles have historically had direct involvement in the drug smuggling networks and often work closely with Russian criminal groups aligned with the Kremlin.
Taxing the drug trade allows Russian government entities to raise cash. But as with guns, flooding Europe with drugs creates its own problems. Court systems, prisons, hospitals, and other state and social institutions can be overwhelmed by increased drug flows, while distribution fuels local criminal activity—similar to Washington’s concern over Chinese drug trafficking to the U.S.
Additionally, Russia has turned to Central Asian smugglers to gain access to essential sanctioned products from abroad, while the Kremlin may explore selling Russia’s vast gold reserves on the international black markets depending on the compounding effects of sanctions.
And following the West’s decision to freeze much of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves and other financial assets, Russian criminals, in coordination with the Kremlin, have turned to cryptocurrencies to help raise funds and evade sanctions. Criminal hacking groups have also been used by Moscow to help launch cyberattacks on Ukraine and Western targets.
Notably, the Russian government has taken steps in recent months to further institutionalize illegal activity among Russian companies. In March, the Kremlin legalized “parallel imports,” allowing Russian companies to import commodities into the country without the consent of the overseas producer.
Though often innovative, the Kremlin’s embrace of organized crime underlines Russia’s sense of desperation as the most sanctioned country in the world. Yet Russia poses a greater challenge than other sanctioned rogue states like Venezuela, Iran, or North Korea. Its relatively large, industrialized economy, natural resources, extensive borders, and economic integration with Eurasia make isolating it far more difficult.
Continued collaboration with organized crime will be essential for Russia to safeguard its economy and prolong its war effort. Despite the risks of greater integration with the underworld and a growing dependency on their illicit networks, the Kremlin will continue these policies so long as sanctions remain in place.
Encouraging the growth of organized crime in Ukraine also has its own benefits for Moscow. Domestic criminal groups have helped Ukrainian men seeking to avoid conscription to leave the country, reducing the manpower available to Kyiv. In addition, sustaining Ukraine’s entrenched criminal culture and corruption prevents its further Westernization through economic and political reform.
Western law enforcement agencies have attempted to increase cross-country coordination with Ukraine to stem Russian-backed organized crime since the outbreak of the war. The European Multidisciplinary Platform Against Criminal Threats (EMPACT) gathered in April to discuss the situation, while entities such as Interpol, Europol, Frontex, and others have increased cooperation with both Ukraine and Moldova in recent months in “fighting serious and organized crime.”
The fight against Russian-backed organized crime clearly remains essential to Ukraine’s war effort. But as Kyiv has observed since the 1990s, just as much attention should be paid to how organized crime in the country will continue to evolve once large-scale fighting subsides.
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The US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s meetings with Ukrainian leaders, including President Vladimir Zelensky, in Kiev has created a lot of confusion and misperceptions. One one side, the White House maintains that the trip aimed “to underscore the United States’ steadfast support to Ukraine and its people.” The readout stated that Sullivan also affirmed “the continued provision of economic and humanitarian assistance, as well as ongoing efforts with partners to hold Russia accountable for its aggression.”
However, unnamed US officials gave the spin that Sullivan’s real mission was to “nudge” Zelensky to negotiate with Moscow and urge that “Kyiv must show its willingness to end the war reasonably and peacefully.” Politico later reported that Zelensky indeed heeded Sullivan’s “soft nudging”. The US media also reported that the US officials have been nudging the Ukrainians for sometime.
The Washington Post reported last week that the Biden administration privately encouraged Ukrainian officials to show they are willing to engage in dialogue with Russia, in an acknowledgment of the growing frustration in the US and some of its allies at the cost and duration of the war. But, apparently, the Ukrainians pushed back.
Sullivan also added some spice to the media speculation by claiming on Monday that the US has channels to communicate with Russia at senior levels. The Wall Street Journal had earlier reported, citing unnamed US and Western officials, that Sullivan had allegedly held a series of confidential meetings recently with Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov and Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev on the conflict in Ukraine. (Moscow has not reacted to these reports.)
The heart of the matter is that Sullivan has been on a PR exercise in the run-up to the midterms in the US (November 8) in a concerted strategy aimed at countering the growing criticism among the Democrats and Republicans that the Biden Administration is avoiding the diplomatic track to try to end the war in Ukraine. That apart, Sullivan’s theatrics also achieved the purpose of distorting the perception that it is Zelensky who is recalcitrant about dialogue and peace talks — not Biden.
In fact, all indications are that the Biden Administration is preparing for the long haul in Ukraine. Stars and Stripes reported on Wednesday that a three-star general will lead a new Army headquarters in Germany called the Security Assistance Group Ukraine, or SAGU, that will include about 300 US service members responsible for coordinating security assistance for Ukraine. On Sunday, The New York Times had reported last Friday that Lt. Gen. Antonio Aguto Jr., head of the First US Army headquarters at Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois, was a leading candidate for the new job.
The SAGU will be based out of US Army Europe and Africa headquarters in Wiesbaden. Sabrina Singh, the deputy Pentagon press secretary, told reporters the new command will “ensure we are postured to continue supporting Ukraine over the long term.” She added the US remains “committed to Ukraine for as long as it takes.”
It is improbable that Moscow has fallen for Sullivan’s dissimulation. There is reason to believe that Sullivan who is a thoroughbred neocon from the Clinton clan would only have urged Zelensky to expedite the planned Ukrainian offensive on Kherson, which has been in the making for quite a while as a decisive battle for the Crimea and control of the Black Sea/Azov Sea ports and is critical for Ukraine’s long-term viability as a prosperous nation and of vital interest to the US and NATO for the encirclement of Russia.
Above all, the Biden Administration is badly in need of a success story from Ukraine as the newly-elected Congress convenes in January with a likely Republican Party majority in the House of Representatives.
No doubt, the Russians are taking the Ukrainian offensive in Kherson seriously. In a stunning announcement in Moscow on Wednesday, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu ordered a troop pullout from the western side of the Dnieper River in the Kherson Region. The fact that the Kremlin is risking criticism from the Russian public opinion for ordering such a retreat (from a region that Putin decreed is an integral part of Russia) underscores the gravity of the Ukrainian military threat and the imperative needs to strengthen the defence line.
Zelensky is forcing Moscow to literally eat its words about the “demilitarisation” of Ukraine! He continues to be in a belligerent mood. On Monday, Zelensky did make a peace offer but with five conditions for a settlement:
- Restoring Ukraine’s territorial integrity;
- Russia respecting UN Charter on sovereignty and territorial integrity;
- Russia paying off all war reparations;
- Punishing each war criminal; and,
- Guarantees that such an invasion and atrocities will not happen again.
The only “concession” Zelensky made is that he didn’t mention his earlier precondition that President Vladimir Putin should relinquish office before any negotiations. It is a non-starter.
There is no end in view for the war in Ukraine. By the way, although the midterm elections are typically the point in a US presidential cycle where one expects to see top Cabinet members being replaced, but there is no sign of that happening to Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin.
Austin, 69, being a critical voice in the Ukraine conflict, who mobilised billions of dollars worth of military aid from around the world for Kiev, Biden anticipates that the war effort may only become more entrenched and this is not the time to change the top ranks of the Pentagon.
Indeed, the ground situation shows that the ongoing Russian operations in the areas of Ugledar and Bakhmut in Donetsk have run into strong resistance from Ukrainian forces, contrary to the Russian narrative that Kiev’s military is in a shambles and is a demoralised lot.
In particular, the advance of the Russians around Ugledar got stuck in the mud in the village of Pavlovka, located on the important crossroads, and in a fierce battle three days ago, reportedly, there were heavy casualties on both sides. Putin’s decision to retreat in Kherson was probably with the hope of avoiding a similar fate, as the Russians are experiencing logistical difficulties to supply their forces on the western side of Dnieper river.
Of course, this seamy picture is not the whole picture insofar as the phase of regrouping and resupplying following the Russian mobilisation is still a work in progress and the ongoing fighting in Donbass and Kherson is at the tactical level and does not involve large movements of troops.
Equally, the intensive Russian strikes on Ukrainian depots, command centres and artillery and air-defence systems plus the destruction of Ukraine’s military-industrial facilities and energy system are yet to impact Kiev’s capacity to wage the war.
Meanwhile, the situation on the front lines in Kherson region remains extremely tense for the Russians. The Ukrainian forces are on the prowl poking the Russian defence line incessantly to break through to advance toward the city of Kherson. A large-scale Ukrainian offensive backed by western advisors and mercenaries is to be expected any day. So far, Russian are holding their positions, repelling the ongoing Ukrainian attacks and fortifying their defences.
From Kherson city, Ukrainian artillery can threaten Crimea. In the prognosis of Moscow’s close ally, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, “Challenging times are ahead of us. Next winter will be even harsher than this one because we’re facing the Battle of Stalingrad, the decisive battle in the conflict in Ukraine, the battle for Kherson.” He predicted that both sides are likely to deploy thousands of tanks, aircraft and artillery pieces in the struggle for the key city.
Vucic said, “The West thinks it’ll be able to ruin Russia that way, while Russia believes it’ll be able to defend what it secured at the start of the war and bring it to an end.”
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