Author: John Hanno

Daily Beast

Signs of Another Humiliating Loss Send Russia Into Denial Mode

Shannon Vavra – November 28, 2022

Russian forces may be preparing to leave the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which Russia has occupied since the early months of the war this year, according to Ukrainian authorities.

Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, said Sunday he believes Russian troops will be leaving the power plant as Ukrainian forces continue to make advances in occupied territories.

“Russian servicemen will leave the Zaporizhzhia NPP, as their line of defense is gradually moving towards the borders of the Russian Federation,” Podolyak said in an interview with Freedom TV.

Russian news outlets have also been hinting at a possible withdrawal from the plant, Petro Kotin, the head of Ukraine’s state nuclear energy company Energoatom, said Sunday.

“There are some signs showing that they might be going to leave the Zaporizhzhia NPP,” Kotin said. “There have been a lot of publications in the Russian press saying that the Zaporizhzhia NPP could be left and handed over to the IAEA’s control.”

Crew of Nuclear Plant Captured by Putin Spill Their Secrets

A withdrawal from the nuclear power plant could mark a significant loss for Russian forces, which have been occupying the plant since March while Ukrainian employees continue to work there under threat of violence. Russian President Vladimir Putin worked up a sham referendum and illegally annexed Zaporizhzhia this fall, attempting to show that Russian forces had gained complete control of the territory. In reality, the Kremlin had been unsure of what portion of Zaporizhzhia Russia actually controlled and which parts it didn’t.

Leaving the power plant behind would be a major blow to Putin’s invasion scheme. Russia annexed other territories around the same time it annexed Zaporizhzhia, but lost some of them soon after announcing they were under Russian control. The potential withdrawal would add to a list of staggering losses in recent weeks, including Russia’s retreat from Kherson and defeats in the northeast of the country as well.

The Kremlin has denied that it has plans to leave the power plant.

“There is no need to look for some signs where they are not and cannot be,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Monday, according to TASS.

Now, Moscow is making moves to bar Ukrainian power plant workers who haven’t yet signed contracts with Russian energy company Rosatom from entering the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, though, according to Interfax.

The move could raise questions about safe operations at the plant.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) did not immediately return a request for comment on a potential Russian withdrawal.

Ukraine has been accusing Russia of using the nuclear power plant as a way to terrorize civilians for months now. Russia reportedly kidnapped multiple officials working at the power plant—officials whose absence has threatened the safety of operations at the plant, which is the largest in Europe. Other workers have said they have been subjected to abductions and violent interrogations. G7 leaders have condemned the “pressure exerted on the personnel of the facility.”

Sinister Putin Scheme Spirals With Kidnapping at Nuclear Plant

The IAEA’s Director General, Rafael Grossi, met with Rosatom Director General Alexey Likhachev in Turkey earlier this month to discuss concerns around the nuclear power plant. Rossi stressed the importance of establishing a security protection zone surrounding the area, as Ukrainians and Russians accused each other of targeting the plant.

The reactors are currently shut down but still need power for cooling and other safety functions, according to the IAEA.

Struggles over territory in Zaporizhzhia continued Monday. Ukrainian forces damaged a bridge in the Zaporizhzhia region that Russian forces used to deliver military supplies, according to an update from the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The Russians, too, are working to thwart Ukraine’s progress, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine spokesperson, Alexander Štupun, said.

“In the Zaporizhzhia direction, the occupiers are defending themselves,” Štupun said Monday.

Associated Press

14 years later, NATO is set to renew its vow to Ukraine

Lorne Cook and Stephen McGrath – November 28, 2022

BUCHAREST (AP) — NATO returns on Tuesday to the scene of one of its most controversial decisions, intent on repeating its vow that Ukraine — now suffering through the 10th month of a war against Russia — will join the world’s biggest military alliance one day.

NATO foreign ministers will gather for two days at the Palace of the Parliament in the Romanian capital Bucharest. It was there in April 2008 that U.S. President George W. Bush persuaded his allies to open NATO’s door to Ukraine and Georgia, over vehement Russian objections.

“NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO,” the leaders said in a statement. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was at the summit, described this as “a direct threat” to Russia’s security.

About four months later, Russian forces invaded Georgia.

Some experts describe the decision in Bucharest as a massive error that left Russia feeling cornered by a seemingly ever-expanding NATO. NATO counters that it doesn’t pressgang countries into joining, and that some requested membership to seek protection from Russia — as Finland and Sweden are doing now.

More than 14 years on, NATO will pledge this week to support Ukraine long-term as it defends itself against Russian aerial, missile and ground attacks — many of which have struck power grids and other civilian infrastructure, depriving millions of people of electricity and heating.

In a press conference Monday in Bucharest after a meeting with Romania’s President Klaus Iohannis, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg highlighted the importance of investing in defense “as we face our greatest security crisis in a generation.”

“We cannot let Putin win,” he said. “This would show authoritarian leaders around the world that they can achieve their goals by using military force — and make the world a more dangerous place for all of us. It is in our own security interests to support Ukraine.”

Stoltenberg noted Russia’s recent bombardment of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, saying Putin “is trying to use winter as a weapon of war against Ukraine” and that “we need to be prepared for more attacks.”

North Macedonia and Montenegro have joined the U.S.-led alliance in recent years. With this, Stoltenberg said last week before travelling to Bucharest, “we have demonstrated that NATO’s door is open and that it is for NATO allies and aspirant countries to decide on membership. This is also the message to Ukraine.”

This gathering in Bucharest is likely to see NATO make fresh pledges of non-lethal support to Ukraine: fuel, electricity generators, medical supplies, winter equipment and drone jamming devices.

Individual allies are also likely to announce fresh supplies of military equipment for Ukraine — chiefly the air defense systems that Kyiv so desperately seeks to protect its skies. NATO as an organization will not offer such supplies, to avoid being dragged into a wider war with nuclear-armed Russia.

But the ministers, along with their Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba, will also look further afield.

“Over the longer term we will help Ukraine transition from Soviet-era equipment to modern NATO standards, doctrine and training,” Stoltenberg said last week. This will not only improve Ukraine’s armed forces and help them to better integrate, it will also meet some of the conditions for membership.

That said, Ukraine will not join NATO anytime soon. With the Crimean Peninsula annexed, and Russian troops and pro-Moscow separatists holding parts of the south and east, it’s not clear what Ukraine’s borders would even look like.

Many of the 30 allies believe the focus now must be uniquely on defeating Russia.

“What we have seen in the last months is that President Putin made a big strategic mistake,” Stoltenberg said. “He underestimated the strength of the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian armed forces, and the Ukrainian political leadership.”

But even as economic pressure — high electricity and gas prices, plus inflation, all exacerbated by the war — mounts on many allies, Stoltenberg would not press Ukraine to enter into peace talks, and indeed NATO and European diplomats say that Putin does not appear willing to come to the table.

“The war will end at some stage at the negotiating table,” Stoltenberg said Monday. “But the outcome of those negotiations are totally dependent on the situation on the battlefield,” adding “it would be a tragedy for (the) Ukrainian people if President Putin wins.”

The foreign ministers of Bosnia, Georgia and Moldova — three partners that NATO says are under increasing Russian pressure — will also be in Bucharest. Stoltenberg said NATO would “take further steps to help them protect their independence, and strengthen their ability to defend themselves.

Cook reported from Brussels.

Daily Beast

This Is How the U.S. Totally Misjudged the War in Ukraine

Sascha Brodsky – November 28, 2022

The war in Ukraine isn’t going the way Russian President Vladimir Putin expected. And he’s certainly not the only one who was caught by surprise—the U.S. expected a rapid Russian success, with the Kremlin’s tanks inside Kyiv within days.

Many U.S. officials from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House believed Russia would quickly conquer Ukraine when it invaded last February. But Ukraine mounted an effective defense, and the Russian forces have retreated in some areas after ferocious counter-attacks. The outcome of the war hangs by a thread, and the U.S. was simply not expecting to find itself involved in a major international conflict that could go on for years.

Former military officials and intel insiders have told The Daily Beast that reviews are underway after failures in human intelligence and “lethargic” analysis led to warped predictions.

The misjudgment in Washington, D.C., was near-total. The U.S. did accurately warn that Putin’s threat of invasion was real, while some intel agencies—including those in Kyiv—sought to play down the likelihood of all-out war, but after that the biggest land conflict in Europe since World War II has confounded the world’s most extensive and costly intelligence agencies right here in the U.S.

The Ukrainians were clear from the outset that they would fight off invaders from the East with the same brutal dedication that saw Finland defeat the USSR in the infamous Winter War of 1939. So what went wrong back at the intel offices in Virginia and D.C.? Why did the U.S. not take them seriously enough? And was their analysis of Russia’s decrepit and weary army so badly out of date?

In March, the odds seemed heavily stacked against Ukraine. At the start of the war, Russia had about 900,000 active military personnel across its forces, compared with Ukraine’s 196,600. But a massive influx of Western equipment and a stronger-than-expected Ukrainian offense has surprised observers.

“I, along with many other people, misjudged the Russian military capabilities before this war began. I thought that they were much better prepared for a war like this,” retired U.S. Army Brigadier General Kevin Ryan said in an interview. “This is a high-intensity war that they hoped would be over soon.”

Ryan has been closely watching the Russian military rebuild after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. From 1998 to 2000, he served as senior regional director for Slavic States in the Office of Secretary of Defense and, from 2001 to 2003, as defense attaché to Russia.

“I think there’s a very real tendency to overestimate the capability of an adversary, not just the Russians, or the Chinese or anybody else,” he said.

Ryan said that Russia invested heavily in modern precision weapons like cruise missiles in recent years. But the problem is that the Russians didn’t have sufficiently trained troops to carry out attacks in Ukraine.

When Russia began building up its forces around the borders of Ukraine in February, “I expected that those forces would work so that they would accomplish their goal not because the Ukrainians couldn’t fight but because the Russians were overwhelming with size,” Ryan said. “And that turned out to be wrong.”

Jeffrey Pryce, a former senior official in the office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, where he negotiated nuclear disarmament agreements with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, said in an interview that Russia “had a huge amount” of combat power but “used it very, very badly.”

One fundamental problem for Russia was that it has failed to achieve air superiority in Ukraine, leaving its troops open to attack, Pryce said. “Even if they took an airfield, they didn’t provide air support to a very light unit, and then that unit got decimated,” he added.

Figuring out how a conflict will unfold is no easy task. In an interview, Susan Cho, a former U.S. Army officer who worked in intelligence, said that battles are not just a matter of weapons and personnel.

“There are other factors that play a huge role in determining the outcome of a battle, which include leadership, tactics, tempo, and troop morale—and these factors are much more difficult to estimate prior to an actual war,” Cho added.

The failure by U.S. and allied intelligence agencies to predict how the war in Ukraine would work out is hardly unique, pointed out Hugh Gusterson, an expert in nuclear and drone warfare and professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs.

“Russian intelligence also got Ukraine wrong, repeating their disastrous errors back in 1979 when they told [Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev that Soviet soldiers would be welcomed by Afghans (who proceeded to kill 15,000 Soviet soldiers before the Soviet Union gave up),” he added. “And U.S. intelligence failed to foresee the strength of the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan that defeated them.”

Gusterson said predictions about future wars are usually based on the experience of previous wars, but new wars are won by learning from past campaigns and innovating. “In this war, for example, the Ukrainians have made innovative use of drones—drones bought from Turkey and off-the-shelf commercial drones—but who could have predicted that?” he added.

Watch: Infighting between Russian troops leads to deadly friendly fire, reports say Ad: 0:12 0:15 https://s.yimg.com/rx/martini/builds/50810797/executor.htmlScroll back up to restore default view.

Also, Gusterson said intelligence agencies tend to see things from a distance. “They count weapons systems and soldiers under arms, and they repeat military judgments about the relative effectiveness of different weapons systems,” he added. “But wars are not just a contest between weapons systems and armies,” he said. “They are also won by tactical innovation, brilliant commanders, morale, stamina, and civilian solidarity.”

According to retired Lieutenant Colonel Hunter Ripley Rawlings IV, bureaucracy in the U.S. defense establishment may have contributed to the misjudgment of Russian forces.

“Having worked in the Pentagon, what happens is that people typically get lethargic, that here’s the same intelligence over and over again,” said Ripley, who now runs a nonprofit that provides equipment to Ukrainian troops. “It becomes kind of the drone in the background.”

Rawlings said that it’s unclear what would have been the material benefit if U.S. intelligence had foreseen the strength of the Russian invaders.

“What would we do with that information?” he added. “Well, we could galvanize and strengthen our allies. We could certainly place the 18th Airborne Corps into Poland, which we’ve done since the invasion commenced. But we weren’t going to defend Ukraine. We weren’t going to send men and tanks and materiel into Ukraine to defend them directly. They’ve become stronger allies, but I don’t know that we even saw them as allies. We saw them as on the fence.”

Rawlings said that U.S. intelligence underestimated the importance that drones would play in the war in Ukraine, leaving the Ukrainian forces without enough drones. To keep the supply of drones flowing, his nonprofit has been trying to send Western commercial drones to Ukraine through its neighbor of Poland.

“Poland has been one of our greatest allies and one of our biggest obstacles,” he said. “For a time, they were stopping anything that was remote-controlled.”

Russia Risks Knockout Blow in War as Putin Hits Rock Bottom

Laurence Pfeiffer, a longtime U.S. intelligence community insider whose career included stints as senior director of the White House Situation Room and chief of staff to Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Michael V. Hayden, said the situation in Ukraine “appears to be a kind of a combination of, of a misjudgment of Russian military capability as well as a misjudgment of Ukrainian will and resolve.”

Pfeiffer said that defense establishment bureaucracy was part of the problem. “Your average bureaucrat is going to get rewarded for being conservative in their estimates as opposed to the opposite,” he added. “In other words, there’s a greater risk if I think that they can’t perform as capably as they’re advertising. So, therefore, the safer bet is to just go ahead and invest in a way that assumes that they have the capabilities that their advertising they have.”

Pryce said that there needs to be a reckoning on how the U.S. can better assess potential future conflicts.

“I’m sure that the intelligence community is engaging in a serious review of this,” he added “They’ve been asked by the Hill [to review the war in Ukraine], but they were engaged in it already. And so it’s one of the things that the intelligence community does is they’re constantly assessing, self-critiquing, evaluating, how well they did and how they can do better. And so, you know, I have no doubt that they’re doing a very serious job.”

One aspect of the intel community’s failure, is that the emphasis in recent decades has shifted towards fighting terrorism rather than clashes with global powers, as a result there is simply not as much of an obsession at the Pentagon or in Langley with tracking exactly how a potential superpower adversary will perform on the battlefield.

“There’s no question that from the time of the 9/11 attacks, for some years thereafter, there was an extremely heavy focus on counterinsurgency or operations, and also, just because of the deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, security policy and security resources are scarce,” Robert B. Murrett, a former senior intelligence official and vice admiral in the Navy, said in an interview. “And when you’re paying a lot of attention to one thing, it tends to degrade the amount of attention you’re paying to things like peer competitors.”

Russia inherited vast quantities of military supplies from the Soviet Union, but much of the equipment is outdated. Rawlings said that of the tanks in Russia’s vaunted First Guards Army, which is fighting in Ukraine, only about a quarter were modernized with modern night vision equipment and ballistic computers for accurate shooting.

“I was very surprised on the ground to see that it was that the Russian army was so far degraded in comparison with what I had expected,” he said.

Rawlings pointed out that President Putin announced in 2016 that he was modernizing the armed forces and proposed new tanks and weapons. But he said that U.S. intelligence failed to grasp how poorly Russian troops would perform on the ground.

Putin “designed new uniforms for his people, which is a lot of pomp and circumstance, but typically harkens the fact that they’re trying to reinvigorate the personnel, and then made a big show of talking about how unit leaders had more autonomy. What we found out is that was the exact opposite.”

Rawlings, who travels regularly to Ukraine, said he has spoken to Ukrainian fighters who had been on the front and said they had never seen a Russian officer on the front line. The Russian officers “were so far removed from the conflict, that the only people that I’ve ever spoken to that ever talked to Russian officers were those that captured them, and they said those Russian officers were overwhelmed.”

With Russia making veiled threats about using nuclear weapons, intelligence agencies are scrambling to assess just how real the threat is. Also at issue is exactly how capable Russia’s nuclear forces are.

“I would like to think that there are a lot of people around D.C. right now completely recalibrating a lot of potentialities because of what we now know about the weakness of the Russian military,” Pfeiffer said. “I mean, they truly are appearing to be, you know, solely a nuclear power. And frankly, there’s a part of me that scratches my head and says, ‘If they’re this bad with everything else? Maybe they’re pretty bad with their nuclear?’”

While fighting is still going on in Ukraine, many U.S. military officials are pointing to China as a potential threat. “China is looking at this war and they’re seeing the same things we are,” Ryan said. They’re seeing a mistake. They’re seeing that they themselves probably anticipated the Russian military was going to be better and more successful than it did in the first. So they’re asking the same question, and they’re wondering what it is that we need to do differently.”

The U.S. needs to learn from lapses in Ukraine, said Stuart Kaufman, a professor of political science and international relations at the University of Delaware. The U.S. needs to rely less on technology to improve its intelligence assessments. “We’ve got great signals intelligence, and we’ve got great photo-reconnaissance,” he said. “What we need is more human intelligence to get at that the human side of military performance. That’s our weak spot.”