Welcome to this week’s Active Measures.
I’m baffled (as is everyone I talk to) by Putin’s decision to back down over Ukraine. None of the explanations makes sense.
1) “He was seeking to intimidate Ukraine but failed”; no, he had barely started. In the the Sea of Azov, Russia has its thumb on Ukraine’s neck.
2) “He got what he wanted”; if so, what was that? Not the urgently need deal on water for Crimea. Putin will look bad if his great geopolitical trophy desertifies, or is deserted by its people. A summit with Biden is hardly a victory as he will be lectured (again) by the US president, and has to suck up the latest round of US sanctions.
3) “He was scared by the Western reaction”; possibly there were some super-secret, super-tough messages from Washington. But it seems unlikely.
4) “It’s not really over”; this seems the most likely. Russia is adept at wars on nerves. Having tested the water with this big deployment, and seen how the West reacts (and doesn’t), the Kremlin can ratchet up the pressure again in a few days, weeks or months.
By the way: my assessment (in the Times and in radio interviews) that war was not imminent was vindicated.
Lessons learned:
Ukraine’s military is a lot more capable than it was in 2014
Turkey takes Ukraine’s side in Black Sea security issues.
The Biden administration care more about European security than most Europeans do. That’s not sustainable in the long run.
Russia’s military is really good at assembling and moving large numbers of people and their equipment.
We are still really bad at understanding Putin’s motivations and predicting his actions.
What I’ve been doing: finalising my big Nordic-Baltic security report. Remember: this is the only place in the world where NATO can lose its credibility in the space of six hours.
Among the things we’ve found to worry about:
badly targeted or ill-managed defense spending
differing threat assessments
fragmented security cooperation,
inadequate stocks,
incomplete plans,
insufficiently realistic exercises,
lack of assigned forces,
low levels of readiness,
missing air and missile defense (AMD),
outdated or absent air and maritime strategies,
unclear command structures.
Lots more on that in the weeks to come. One vignette though: British forces in Estonia are the main part of the NATO enhanced Forward Presence there. It’s been an unpopular deployment in the years since 2014: nine months away from home, at regular intervals, with little family contact. A lot of the time our guys are shut up in barracks. When they do get out, the tanks aren’t allowed off the main roads, need permission from farmers to enter fields etc. And the highway network is not closed off. So baffled British soldiers pilot their hugely expensive and lethal killing machines, pretending to be at war, and are overtaken by cyclists.
All very Nordic. But not a good way of showing the Russians that we are serious.
What I’ve been writing:
The China Influence Monitor. Every week showcase the most obnoxiously counterproductive behaviour by a Chinese embassy and award it our Wolf Warrior Prize.
My weekly column for CEPA looked at the Czech-Russian spy bust.
That’s it — I will be back in your inboxes next week.
Best regards, Edward
PS tips, rants, raves, or just gossip welcome — I’m on +447770380791. Signal or WhatsApp please.