Global Eyes, Western Edition
News and notes from Claire's Continent
⚠️ The War
“I’m a former Marine training Ukrainians. The Russians are worse than ISIS.”
I was one of the first people in Bucha after the Russian retreat and I saw the bodies dumped there, including kids’ bodies. Things happen in war. When you have soldiers who are nervous they get trigger happy, but this appears to have been a very, very deliberate approach to killing civilians. People were dragged from their homes and killed, women gang-raped in cellars and executed. The Ukrainians’ hands are not unbloodied either but I find it hard to blame them. Because I imagine this was my country and those were families I knew. I’m also not rolling into this as someone who is naive and hasn’t seen cruelty and depravity before. Hopefully that gives a scale of the cruelty that is occurring here.
“Russian forces appear increasingly unlikely to achieve any major advances in eastern Ukraine, and Ukrainian forces may be able to conduct wider counterattacks in the coming days,” says the Institute for the Study of War.
The ISW believes Russian forces are trying to establish permanent control over the areas of southern Ukraine they occupy, either as nominally independent “People’s Republics” or by annexing them to Russia.
The Western artillery flooding into Ukraine will “alter the war with Russia, setting off a bloody battle of wits backed by long-range weapons and forcing both sides to grow more nimble if they hope to avoid significant fatalities as fighting intensifies in the east.”
☞ Here’s a detailed thread, in Russian, explaining why the Russian military is performing so poorly. Tip from John Turner, who correctly said, “It’s long but worth it.” (I’ve set the language to English; if you’d prefer to read it in the original Russian, it’s here.) Long story short: “It turned out, to the shame of all of Russia, that the Russian army is for the most part a rabble of poorly trained, poorly equipped, and inexperienced recruits. But the Ukrainians are exactly the opposite.” Or as John put it, “It’s operation Uranus without the prep, matériel, and leadership. They’re f*cked.”
🪆Observers of Russian demography see the country’s continuing population decline as a catastrophe. So severe is the trend that scholars now warn there soon may not be enough Russian males to populate the armed forces and security services.
☞ Ivan Timofeev, a prominent Moscow academic, warns that Russia could face a repeat of the 1917-20 experience of economic chaos, revolution and civil war.
Northern Europe:
NATO jets stationed around the Baltic and Black Seas have scrambled multiple times over the past few days to track and intercept Russian aircraft near Alliance airspace.
🇩🇰 🇸🇪 Denmark and Sweden have summoned their respective Russian ambassadors over the violation of their airspaces by a Russian reconnaissance plane:
Officials said the plane entered Danish airspace on the evening of April 29 east of the Danish Baltic island of Bornholm before flying into Swedish airspace. “The Russian ambassador is summoned to the foreign ministry tomorrow,” Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod said. … “This is completely unacceptable and particularly worrying in the current situation.”
🇫🇮 Finland will apply to join NATO on May 12.
🇸🇪 🇫🇮 The prospect of a joint announcement by Sweden and Finland together will be under discussion when the prime ministers of both countries meet to discuss security with the German chancellor on May 3.
🇫🇮 Should Finland join NATO? Consider these factors.
… Finland represents value added to the alliance. Finland has a large, well-trained, capable ground force and an increasingly capable Air Force that are already interoperable with NATO. Finland can unilaterally defend itself for days, if not weeks—something few alliance members can claim. Finland has decades of experience monitoring Russian activities along their shared 833-mile border, expertise that could improve the alliance’s situational awareness. Indeed, Finland’s addition to NATO could make defending the Baltic States easier, in that Finland gives NATO another reinforcement route beyond the narrow Suwalki Gap connecting Lithuania and Poland or sailing past the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. …
Skeptics may argue that Finland’s membership is not without risk. …
🇫🇮 🇸🇪 NATO’s Nordic Expansion: Adding Finland and Sweden will transform European security:
Integrated control of the entire area will make defense of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania easier, since Swedish territory and airspace in particular are important for such efforts. This will strengthen deterrence and make a conflict there less likely, according to studies published by both Sweden and Finland. But perhaps the most important consequence of Finnish and Swedish accession to NATO would be to increase the alliance’s political strength as the pillar of the defense of Europe and the transatlantic area. Both countries will help facilitate deeper coordination between the EU and NATO, thus contributing to better burden sharing across the Atlantic—a goal of increasing importance in light of the greater demands placed on the United States by the security situation in East Asia.
🇵🇱 Poland says it will not be a guarantor to a peace agreement with Russia that involves the surrender of any part of Ukrainian territory. It’s the first potential guarantor state to say so.
🇧🇾 The regime in Belarus seeks to introduce the death penalty for “attempted terrorism.” “Terrorism” in Belarus means opposition to the regime. Sabotage of he railways is “terrorism,” too. Bloggers have also been called “terrorists.”
🇺🇦 More than 5.5 million people have fled Ukraine since the invasion began.
Buses have been evacuating civilians from Mariupol. The evacuees are, as you’d expect, utterly traumatized:
Cowering in the labyrinth of Soviet-era bunkers far beneath the vast Azovstal steelworks, Natalia Usma felt her heart would stop as Russian bombs rained down on Mariupol, sprinkling her with concrete dust. … “You just can’t imagine what we have been through—the terror,” Usmanova said.
Russian rockets hit a strategically important bridge across the Dniester estuary in the Odessa region. The bridge offers the only link on Ukrainian territory to a large part of the region.
Putin’s top military commander, Valery Gerasimov, was wounded in Ukraine and sent back to Russia just days after he arrived to take charge of the war.
✌️The Ukrainian military says they shot down a Russian drone over the Black Sea and destroyed two high-speed Russian patrol ships near Snake Island—of f*ck you, Russian warship fame—with Bayraktar drones:
Bad luck …
🔥 A fire broke out at a Russian defense ministry site close to the Ukrainian border …
💥 A massive explosion occurred at a Russian gunpowder plant …
🤯 A railway bridge collapsed …
🔥 As many as five Russian military enlistment offices have been set on fire since the start of the invasion.
Bad diplomacy …
🇮🇱 Israel’s foreign minister says Lavrov’s comments about Hitler are “unforgivable.”
Lavrov made the remarks in an interview on Italian television. Asked how Russia could claim that it’s denazifying Ukraine given that its president is Jewish, Lavrov said, '“So what if Zelensky is Jewish. The fact does not negate the Nazi elements in Ukraine. I believe that Hitler also had Jewish blood,” and “some of the worst anti-Semites are Jews.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry summoned the Russian Ambassador over Lavrov’s comments.
☢️ ☠️ Will we be nuked?
Siegfried Hecker: Putin has destroyed the world nuclear order. How should the democracies respond?
[What] does the US do in return [if Russia uses a nuclear weapon in Ukraine]? … First, it’s going to change the face of warfare, because we haven’t had a nuclear weapon used in 77 years. But rather than immediately responding with a nuclear weapon, I think we need to assess the damage, and then decide how we’re going to respond to Russia. My immediate view at this point without knowing exactly what will happen is that that response should be a conventional military response. And the US has the capabilities to do sufficient damage in retribution with conventional military and not allow this to escalate to a potential strategic exchange. More than anything, what has to drive our thinking is we must avoid a strategic nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States that could eventually imperil the world as we know it. …
Let me conclude by stressing that what Putin has done is to blow up the entire global nuclear order. That’s really a major hinge, a turning point in the nuclear world. That’s as big a hinge as when the Soviet Union dissolved, in my opinion. We were creative in 1989 through ‘92, and we’re going to have to be creative now, as the war hopefully draws down and ends. But it’s going to take creativity, because we face a different world situation with the loss of the global nuclear order that’s been developed over so many years.
According to an unnamed “senior US defense official,” the United States does not believe there’s a threat of Russia using nuclear weapons:
“We continue to monitor their nuclear capabilities every day the best we can and we do not assess that there is a threat of the use of nuclear weapons and no threat to NATO territory,” the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told reporters.
A Russian MP, according to a British tabloid, has warned Prime Minister warned Boris Johnson that the UK is now a “prime target” for Moscow given the UK’s support for Ukraine:
The Russian lawmaker said last week: “Great Britain is a prime target for that (nuclear strike). It is an island nation, which would minimize the damage to the continent.” Prof Futter, a nuclear weapons expert from the University of Leicester warned that if Putin did launch an attack on Britain’s capital, London would not stand a chance. He told MyLondon: “We aren’t protected, basically.”
“We might be able to block bomber aircraft, but much of the Russian nuclear arsenal is based on missiles. We would see missiles coming, we have satellites in North Yorkshire and access to US and NATO early warning systems.” But he warned that this would only give the capital 15 minutes to brace itself for a strike. He said: “It wouldn’t give us time to do anything. Government officials might be OK, there is a bunker under Whitehall and some places VIPs can hide.”
According to the translation on Twitter, he says:
Consider the statement about the possibility of a nuclear strike against Russia without consulting NATO. Listen, we can carry out a nuclear strike against Great Britain without consultations with NATO. Great Britain is a prime target for that. It is an island nation, which would minimise the damage to the continent. It has weak missile defences. If they move without consulting NATO then Article V on collective defense may not be in force. I was listening to him and I thought that noose of Mr. Johnson’s neck during his trip to India suits him very well.
Military bunkers in the UK are being upgraded so they can be used to store US nuclear weapons again after 14 years of standing empty, according to US defense budget documents.
The UK announced in March that it will raise the ceiling on its nuclear warhead stockpile by more than 40 percent above its previous target and would no longer publish information about the number of warheads it maintains in an operational status.
The scenario US officials worry most about is this:
If Putin faces a humiliating defeat in Ukraine, he might order the use of tactical nuclear weapons against military units or cities to try to shock the Ukrainians into surrendering. Even if a “low-yield” detonation did not compel Ukraine to surrender, it would break a globally observed taboo on nuclear warfighting that has held, almost miraculously, since 1945. So President Biden has issued a warning to Putin in return—but it has been deliberately quieter than the Russian threats.
“With respect to any use of weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, chemical, biological—Russia would pay a severe price,” national security advisor Jake Sullivan said in March. One diplomat told me he believes Biden has asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Putin’s most important global ally, to send the same message.
Stanford nuclear scholar Scott Sagan has suggested another step—private warnings to Russian military leaders that they would be held responsible for war crimes if they used tactical nuclear weapons against civilian targets.
Would Putin really nuke Ukraine, asks Graham Allison?
… I’m betting not.
Odds and ends
🎧 Podcasts
Two recordings with Toomas Hendrik Ilves:
A presentation he wrote and read aloud for the BBC, The Bear Next Door.
An interview on Uncomfortable Conversations (skip the first ten minutes).
At the Kremlin File, with Monique Camarra:
What do Russians think about Putin’s war? A conversation with Karine Orlova.
Who’s to blame for Russia’s failure? Andreik Soldatov explains.
🛢 Oil
The EU is close to deal on Russian oil phaseout, but Hungary and Slovakia are holding up the works.
Poland urged its EU partners to unite and impose sweeping sanctions on Russia’s oil and natural gas sectors.
Russia’s oil production will drop to an 18-year low this year as Western sanctions and departing foreign oil companies complicate extraction and reduce demand.
👺 From the Russian-language media
Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Nikolai Patrushev.“The West has created an empire of lies that involves the destruction of Russia.”
Long ago, America divided the whole world into vassals and enemies … From childhood in the United States they have it hammered into their heads that America is a shining city on a hill, while the rest of humanity is just a proving ground for [military] experiments and resource extraction.
(Patrushev is something like the director of national intelligence, the national security adviser, and chief political strategist all at once. Here’s an interesting article about him: “How the hallucinations of an eccentric KGB psychic influence Russia today.”)
Chairman of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin: “Heads of state who decide on the supply of weapons to Ukraine have tarnished themselves and should be brought to justice as war criminals.”
Iranian experience and Russian ingenuity: How Russia bypasses sanctions.
Elsewhere in Europe …
Predictably, the black bloc went wilding yesterday in Paris. There was a mob in my neighborhood …
They systematically destroyed banks and real estate agencies …
We can look forward to a lot more of this in the next five years.
I’ve expressed my sentiments about this kind of violence in France many times. I haven’t anything new to say, save to reiterate that I have zero patience for it and find it baffling that so many people in France do.
Here’s an incomplete catalogue of the “riots in Paris” articles I’ve written in the past twenty years:
I wrote this one in 2018. But it describes what happened yesterday just as well:
You may remember “May Day in Paris Marred by Violence” headlines, accompanied by the clichéd stock photo of a burning car in Paris. The malefactors were the Black Bloc, a kin to Antifa. Some 1,200 Black Bloc thugs infiltrated an otherwise peaceful march of leftists and trade unionists and went wilding, throwing Molotov Cocktails, smashing windows, torching cars, ransacking shops, brandishing Soviet flags (seriously), tearing up pavement stones, and desecrating the holy symbol of capitalism (a McDonald’s). This happened near the Gare d’Austerlitz, in central southeast Paris. The news made it sound more dramatic than it was: I live about ten blocks away but had no idea it was happening until I received e-mails from concerned Americans telling me to flee for my life.
It happens every May Day—they hit the same McDonald’s, even.
I can’t for the life of me understand why these self-indulgent reprobates aren’t behind bars.