Friday News Roundup — April 1, 2022
Nothing to joke about here today, with plenty on the agenda in Washington and events unfolding rapidly around the world. The legislative traffic jam continues on the Hill, with additional COVID funds, cutting off trade with Russia, and competition legislation among key priorities ahead of recesses, summer, and campaigning. It appears that there is a green light, however, for the historic nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the nation’s highest court. At the intersection of economics, energy, and geopolitics, President Biden announced an unprecedented release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve of 1 million barrels per day for six months. At the same time, Europe and Russia appear to be in a petro-payment game of chicken over Moscow’s demand that gas payments be made in rubles. More on that in this week’s roundup.
In the media this week, Mike Rogers Center for Intelligence & Global Affairs director, Joshua C. Huminski penned an op-ed for the Hill which raises questions that need to be asked about what peace in Ukraine looks like and how the West may go about shaping the necessary conditions on-the-ground. It is, however, insufficient to think just of how to end the immediate war. The West must also look the reconstruction of Ukraine and how best to secure its long-term territorial integrity. Successfully resolving this conflict also means not merely delaying its resumption at a future date.
This week Huminski reviewed Thane Gustafson’s “Klimat” a look at Russia’s energy sector in a time of climate change for the Diplomatic Courier. An interesting book, it will certainly need a hefty update for the paperback edition as, arguably, the challenges Gustafson identified as driving changes with Russia will be less climate-related and more the result of geopolitical fallout from Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
In this week’s roundup, Joshua looks at how Europe is dealing with Russian espionage and the tit-for-tat expulsions. Wes looks at the latest negotiations and how Russia’s objectives, both on the battlefield and strategically, are shifting. Ethan reminds us that the rules of conflict must be adhered to by all sides, and Veera highlights coverage of how Finland has provided an example of societal resilience — especially as the risk of war has grown. As always, we wrap with news you may have missed.
Spy Expulsions & a New Wave of European Counter-Intelligence?
Joshua C. Huminski
This week European countries announced that they would collectively be expelling over 40 Russian diplomats on suspicion of espionage, national security threats, and influence operations across the continent. Belgium expelled 21 Russian officials, the Netherlands ejected another 17, and Ireland was kicking out four. The Czech Republic kicked out one Russian diplomat. Shortly after the European announcement, Moscow retaliated expelling four Lithuanian officials, three Latvian, and three Estonian officials. Earlier this month, Poland kicked out 45 Russian diplomats, while Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia kicked out 20 in the middle of March. Warsaw said that the 45 expelled included Russian intelligence officers, but also those “associated with them”.
Ukrainian intelligence also released a list of over 600 alleged Russian FSB (state security) officers including their names, phone numbers, and personal details. The veracity of the list cannot be confirmed and it could well be part of Ukraine’s information war against Moscow, as well as being an accurate list (the possibilities are not mutually exclusive).
Finland’s Security and Intelligence Service (SUPO) released its annual yearbook of threats and trends, warning that “The broad influencing and unlawful intelligence operations of Russia are among the main threats to national security.”
The tit-for-tat spy expulsions, the naming and shaming of spies, and Finland’s warning are all part of the ongoing spy wars between Moscow and Europe, which has taken on new urgency in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Speaking to the Financial Times, Chatham House expert Keir Giles, noted “What we know about [it] is almost certainly the tip of the iceberg.” He added, “For many years there has been a conspiracy of silence, with western powers reluctant to talk about Russian activities or even go after them.”
Naturally in the wake of high-profile incidents there have been more expulsions. Following the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 and the attempted poisoning of Sergei Skripal in 2018, the United Kingdom, in concert with some European countries and the United States expelled some Russian diplomats. Russia is believed to have been taken by surprise by the response to the Skripal poisoning, which saw over 150 Russian diplomats expelled, after the Litvinenko murder met with a muted response.
In any other time, the expulsions would have been particularly detrimental to Russia’s operations in Europe. These come, however, at a time when Europe is much more aware of Moscow’s malign influence and much more emboldened to act in both response and in an anticipatory measure. It is, however, important to note, that the expulsion of the officers themselves does not mean the shutdown of the agent networks these officers have established. To be sure it will take some time to rebuild and reconstitute these networks, but the agents in place will almost certainly be re-activated by new, replacement officers.
This is where the new awareness and confidence of European capitals in the wake of Ukraine, may make the lives of the SVR (Russia’s foreign intelligence) and the GU (Russia’s military intelligence) more difficult. One can imagine that a sustained counter-intelligence campaign will be mounted in the immediate future. Indeed, counter-intelligence is a struggling on the European continent. Hamstrung by domestic surveillance and security laws, many European countries rely on the United States and United Kingdom to supplement or augment their own investigations and activities.
This institutional weakness is compounded by Russia’s sheer aggressiveness and expansiveness of its intelligence operations — the fact that Poland expelled 45 officers alone is reflective of this problem of scale. Tracking one officer requires a team of counter-intelligence officers and supplementary resources. Russia is believed to employ some 400,000 personnel across its intelligence organizations and while, naturally, not all of these are the equivalent of operations officers, it is indicative of the investment Russia makes in, and emphasis it places on, intelligence.
Sustained counter-intelligence activities take a lot of time and attention, and in an era of limited resources, this proves particularly challenging. Right now. the inertia and focus is clearly on Russia’s activities as a result of Ukraine, but whether or not that will be sustained in the future remains to be seen. It is interesting to note that European countries are taking a renewed focus on the broader ecosystem of Russian malign influence in addition to traditional espionage. The United Kingdom is, at least rhetorically, taking on the “Russian Laundromat” and looking to crack down on illicit Russian financial inflows.
At the same time, the panoply of Russia’s malign activities will almost certainly be under greater scrutiny and pressure, at least in the near term. “News” outlets like RT and Sputnik are being closed or receiving renewed attention. It will be difficult in the near term for politicians or parties to express pro-Russian sentiment, let alone receive Russian funding, as some European parties have in the past. The “agents of influence” (intentional or otherwise) within European politics and, arguably, within American politics will certainly be identified and called out with greater frequency.
Taken together, this means that Russia’s intelligence and influence activities in the post-Ukraine world will need to adapt to a more constrained environment — just how constrained is an open question. How they adapt and to what extent things return to “normal” or find a “new normal” remains to be seen.
There is a very real risk of “presentism” and expectations that things will change much more than they perhaps will in practice. The end of the Cold War arguably suggested that Russia’s intelligence activities will scale back or halt entirely. They most certainly did not. The mid- to late 2000s have shown, if anything, that Russia expanded its activities and found new and novel ways to spread Moscow’s reach and influence, to say nothing of the continued utility of human intelligence.
As Negotiations Continue, Russian Objectives in Ukraine Shift
Wesley Culp
Moscow’s maximalist goals in the beginning of its “special military operation” to “denazify and demilitarize” have given way to more modest goals signaled by Russian negotiators and leaders. As these goals shift, there is reason to believe that the Kremlin is exploring direct annexations of territory as a visible face-saving victory after being prevented from accomplishing its primary goals.
Just as in previous weeks, Russian and Ukrainian leaders alike have remained publicly optimistic about the prospects for future negotiations and diplomatic breakthroughs. On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov expressed optimism about ongoing negotiations in Istanbul between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators and described them as moving forward in a positive direction. Lavrov’s comments were preceded by Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin’s Tuesday claim that Russian forces near Kyiv and Chernihiv in Northern Ukraine would significantly reduce their operations in order to “increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations.” Ukrainian negotiators have also continued to engage in bilateral negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow, as demonstrated by the Ukrainian negotiating team’s Tuesday proposal that Ukraine adopt neutral status in return for security guarantees from a variety of Western countries.
As the realistic horizons of Russia’s advances on its northern and southern axes have narrowed in the short term, so too has Russian messaging on its goals. Following the Tuesday March 29 announcement by Russian negotiators that military operations around Kyiv and Chernihiv would be reduced, Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Igor Konashenkov declared on March 30 that Russia had, in fact, “completed” its principal goals around Kyiv and Chernihiv. Such a statement is at odds with Moscow’s initial strategy of attempting to seize Kyiv within the first few days of its invasion through aggressive use of airborne and light infantry units to force a collapse of the Ukrainian government, but instead likely heralds a shift in focus to operations in Ukraine’s east, particularly around the so-called Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. A repositioning of this nature would allow Russian invasion forces to focus on their axis of advance in Donbas and potentially reduce some of the logistical stress that has bedeviled Russian units in Ukraine since the beginning of the invasion. This notable shift in goals had already become impossible ignore as Russian leaders begansignaling on March 25 that the “first phase” of Russia’s military operation was drawing to a close.
Certain signals emanating from Russia’s belt of breakaway states in Ukraine and Georgia also appear to hint at what the future of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine might be. In a March 29 message on his Telegram channel, Denis Pushilin, the head of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), announced that his breakaway republic would consider being officially annexed by Russia after the entirety of its claimed territory is seized by Russian and Russian-backed forces. The DNR claims the entirety of Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast in the east of the country, where military operations in the near-term future are likely to be the most active. Three days prior, Leonid Pasechik, the head of the so-called Lugansk People’s Republic (LNR), said that it was “likely” that a referendum on the LNR becoming part of Russia was possible “in the near future.” Pushilin and Pasechik, whose separatist governments played integral roles in the choreographed path to Russia’s invasion, are unlikely to have broached the question of their annexation by Russia without the go-ahead from Moscow.
In an apparent copycat move on March 30, President Anatoly Bibilov of Georgia’s separatist republic of South Ossetia declared that the Caucasian statelet would “take legal steps” to join Russia. The reaction from Moscow to the South Ossetian declaration was mixed, as the Communist Party leader of the State Duma’s Committee for CIS affairs declared that such a step would be feasible, while the Presidential Administration claimed that Moscow had not taken any steps to annex South Ossetia. Around the same time, the leadership of Abkhazia appeared to reject the possibility of the Georgian breakaway region joining Russia. Nonetheless, the head of the Abkhaz Security Council said that Abkhazia supports South Ossetia’s request to join Russia.
This would not be the first time Russian leaders made use of proxy pseudo-governments as cover in the prosecution of an invasion of a sovereign state. In the early days of its invasion of Finland in 1939, the Soviet Union created the so-called “Finnish Democratic Republic” as a means to provide diplomatic cover to its invasion and a willing partner to “negotiate” with. In particular, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov used the statelet to make the contrived claim to an incensed League of Nations that the Soviet Union was actually at peace with Finland. When it became clear that the Soviet Union’s maximalist war aims in Finland had failed and Russia had received territorial acquisitions in Karelia and elsewhere, the “Terijoki Government” (named for the captured Finnish town it was stood up in) was folded into the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic, a constituent part of the USSR. Just as the “Finnish Democratic Republic” was directly annexed when it had outlived its usefulness, so too may Russia’s proxy pseudo-states in Ukraine and potentially Georgia as well.
To be sure, the course of negotiations and Russia’s invasion remain far from decided, and Russia’s war aims will continue to evolve as battlefield conditions themselves change.
We should be as critical of Ukrainian war crimes as we are of Putin
Ethan Brown
You are always the villain in someone else’s story. This is fundamentally true in both war and international relations and remains the basis of legitimacy between any two antagonists regardless of the arena of competition.
And it’s why the West should take reports of Ukrainian war crimes as seriously as we do those actions reported on Russian forces using thermobaric weapons, bombing hospitals, and using cluster munitions in civilian locales. Such allegations of Ukrainian defense forces committing atrocities emerged on open source repositories, which inevitably made their way to Twitter (*warning*, link includes graphic content and disturbing imagery) earlier this week. And it deserves recognition for the uncomfortable reality that it suggests: while hopping on the Ukraine bandwagon and cheering on their defiance of a key antagonist, that doesn’t absolve the rules-based order of holding its liberal ideals dearer than life itself. After all, the way we value human life — even adversaries — is what is supposed to make us different, credible, and stolid.
Make no mistake, what the Ukrainian people have done over the last five weeks is a beautiful and noble act — defending their sovereignty against a hostile aggressor who’s intent seems to be subjugation into their sphere of hegemony, first by compellence and now through outright hostile force. But we have all become so swept up in changing social media profile pictures and headers with catchy hashtags, because this was a feel-good story that everyone could get behind. And of course, Vladimir Putin has seemingly no qualms with being the villain in our version of this story.
But as I’ve written about before, credibility matters in these contests for sovereignty; it might be the most important facet of this ethereal thing we’re calling strategic competition-GPC-liminal conflict-hybrid war-newbuzzwordX. Let’s not forget that the world’s current favorite beneficiary has dealt with myriad government and economic corruption for years. And now, the alleged conduct of Ukrainian forces deliberately harming captured Russian soldiers prior to executing them is simply abhorrent.
Don’t merely take this analyst’s opinion for it. Ukrainian President Volodimyr Zelenskys government has conspicuously released a statement ordering adherence to the Geneva Convention, posted to telegram for swifter distribution to Ukrainian forces. Credit goes to what is left of the Ukrainian federal government who is currently busy in the de facto trenches with its citizens repelling an invasion for trying to get in front of this jackpot for Russian propaganda. But this, as much as any other aspect of trying to enter the legitimate rules-based international order, is a major stumbling block towards Ukrainian legitimacy. Playing by the same rules as the adversaries who do not respect human life is a surefire way to initiate the end of democracy’s fragile perch atop the world order. It’s why I’ve criticized ‘experts’ who opine that the West should “get sneaky” in Ukraine instead of pushing harder for credibility and transparency in how democracies operate.
What constitutes a war crime? Admittedly, that label gets thrown about far too casually because let’s face it, war is a terrible, violent endeavor that the overwhelming percentage of the population will never experience, which makes anything violent a tempting accusation candidate. From last week’s CSPC roundup, my colleague Robert Gerber does an excellent job outlining the UN-defined parameters of war crimes, allegations, and the legal mechanisms for handling such criminal acts. Thus, I won’t belabor the labeling and constitution of a war crime, and suggest reviewing our analysis from last week. However, I will take this blurb to emphatically state that those actions shown in the viral videos indeed cross the threshold of war crimes by standing, professional soldiers of a state military force, and deserve to be treated as such.
War crimes have taken a front-and-center seat in this Ukraine conflict, overwhelmingly owing to Russia’s actions against civilian infrastructure, people, and inhuman tactics since the invasion began five weeks ago. The U.N. Human Rights Council has already selected a team and begun its collection of evidence to support a criminal prosecution of Russian actors in Ukraine, due to release a report no later than September of this year. Russian atrocities in war zones are well known, documented, and make for compelling rhetoric by the West, such as President Biden’s casual accusation of Putin for being a war criminal barely garnering the media highlight reel — it’s just something that we attribute to the villains in our version of the story.
But for Ukraine and the West to remain on the right side of history in this story, we have to take these allegations seriously and Ukraine must hold those soldiers accountable for these reprehensible actions against Russian detainees. The institutional process of investigating war crimes should not be so swept up in this story’s villain (Russian forces and Vladimir Putin’s revanchism) that we hand-wave the evils of the other actors involved. Ukraine is shedding blood for its sovereignty and legitimacy, and to let this atrocity go un-resolved would undermine the noble endeavor.
News you should not have missed:Financial Times looks at Finland’s Plan for War
Veera Parko
Many people in the US seem to have noted the news on Finland being named thehappiest country in the world for the fifth time in a row. But some of you may have missed another important piece on Finland. On Monday, the Financial Times reported on Finland´s — a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner with a 680-mile border with Russia — extensive national preparedness system. Finland has consistently built a robust military and civilian readiness ever since the country´s tough experiences with fighting Russia in World War II. Finland has strategic supplies of fuel, grain and pharmaceuticals. It also has civil defence shelters and regulations in place, as well as a strong reservist military and general conscription. It has built networks and training programs — especially the so called National Defense Courses — to equip leaders with knowledge and networks that are crucial when a real crisis hits.
For top Finnish politicians and ordinary people alike, Russia´s aggression in Ukraine seems to have brought about a strengthened awareness of the threats facing the country. A large percentage of Finns are willing to defend their country, and the ongoing crisis in Ukraine has prompted growing interest in how an individual citizen can prepare for a crisis at home (stockpiles? iodine pills?) and a clear shift in public opinion towards NATO membership.
A nationally unified picture of the threats and choices Finland is facing seems also to be forming across political party lines, most visible in the discussion surrounding Finland´s possible application for NATO membership. Finland´s President Sauli Niinistö hasemphasised that the Parliament should have a central role in the process, and that both MPs and citizens should prepare in advance for Russian countermeasures if the country submits an application to join the Alliance. This week, the Director of the Finnish Intelligence Service explicitly stated that “Finnish society as a whole should be prepared for various measures from Russia seeking to influence policymaking in Finland on the NATO issue”.
A unified and shared situational picture coupled with a well-established preparedness such as Finland´s is, it can be argued, a powerful deterrent against outside influence and potential aggression. In case Finland decides to apply for NATO membership, it would be a security provider to the Alliance, also because of its robust preparedness system. However, a shared “preparedness mindset” does not appear overnight. Finland´s strength has been its ability to, over time, create networks of people and sectors discussing threats and vulnerabilities, credible arrangements for military and civil defense as well as a population aware of their own role in a crisis. As the FT puts it: “what Finland calls its strategy of “comprehensive security” offers an example of how countries can create rigorous, society-wide systems to protect themselves ahead of time — planning not just for a potential invasion, but also for natural disasters or cyber attacks or a pandemic.”
News You May Have Missed
Russia Sets April 1 Deadline for European Gas Payments in Rubles
A March 31 decree signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin has set an April 1 deadline for European countries to begin paying for their gas imports from Russia in rubles. In remarks accompanying the decree, President Putin said that if Western importers were unable to pay for their imports in rubles by setting up Russian bank accounts, Russian gas exporters would consider that a default and would take action accordingly to halt deliveries. The scheme to force payment for Russian gas in rubles has helped prop up the Russian currency, which was heavily impacted by Western sanctions on the Russian financial system following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. European governments and companies have so far rejected the possibility that they will pay for their Russian gas imports in rubles.
French Military Intelligence Chief Sacked Over Ukraine War Failings
French Army General Eric Vidaud has been relieved from his post as the head of French military intelligence following perceived failings in the post — notably over French assessments that Russia would not invade Ukraine. This stood in contrast to warnings from Washington and London that Putin was planning an assault. He had also been faulted with “inadequate briefings” and a “lack of mastery of subjects.” French military leaders did not comment, but some said that Vidaud shared blame with the wider French intelligence community, as others said that Vidaud had been on the hot seat since military intelligence failed to alert France’s leaders to the AUKUS deal.
The views of authors are their own and not that of CSPC.