Moscow (11 September/ 33.33).

Russia waged a 2-year war of aggression against its neighbor, the Ukraine. Two years on, hundred thousand of deaths, families destroyed, Russia is no where near its 3-day goals of occupation. The Russian army slugs on, mile for mile, killed for killed. Vladimir Putin and his Siloviki continues a red army model. Heavy artillery, wave of men urging forward. The result, mass casualties. Total loss of life, and equipment.

What does Russians do if in trouble. Reversing to its all bag of tricks. Spies and sabotage. Recent Russian sabotage operations across Europe were “reckless”, Moore said, describing Russian intelligence as “having gone a bit feral”. But “in the UK that is not new”, he added, referring to the attempted assassination of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018.

Asked if Russian intelligence might be conducting similar sabotage operations against the US by abetting illegal migration across the Mexico border, Burns said: “It’s something we are very sharply focused on. Part of that is a function of so many Russian agents [being] kicked out of Europe. So, they are looking for somewhere to go instead.”

But these sometimes child like operations cause blowbacks. Operations and governments getting increasingly more sophisticated in exposing the intelligence operations and their agents.

Bangladesh, Laos, Sri Lanka are countries who are exposed to Russian interests. However, Russians have very little to offer.

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Washington/Paris/Berlin (12/8 – 28.57).

Today is the twenty-anniversary of the sinking of the Kursk. A painful experience. A true shocker. All hands are lost, the shortcomings of the Russian system fully exposed. But today is another experience. Kursk, the region. After ceremonial pageantry by the military commander, it is clear the great Red Army was ambushed.

Hoodwinked by the Ukrainians who pulled off a surprise attack, a classic attack which has all the elements of a successful deception operation. Overwhelming strength, speed and first and foremost silence. Deception played a role keeping the Russian pre-occupied. Daily the news a filled of the exchanges between the Ukrainian defenders and the Russian occupation force.

The attention was given to the aging Admiral Kuznetsov long target of the security services of the Ukraine. In an audacious caper matching a Hollywood production the wily chief of the Intelligence Service Kyrylo Budanov the ship was targeted by sabotage teams of the Ukraine. Whereas Budanov’s boys of misfits drawn the attention of the Russians away from the home front the planning for the attack was carried out.

Then the surprise attack came.

The Ukrainian defenders breaking through the lines of Russian occupation forces, the Russians fumbled, reserves were rushed to the front but to no prevail. Ambushes were set up, forward observers guided cluster ammunition against convoys driving Russian occupation forces into retreat.

Troves of occupation forces are surrendering to the Ukrainian defenders. Social media is full of videos Russian occupation forces surrendering. Drones are used to instruct the surrender.

Surrender leaflets are circulating on the internet. Estimates state approximately 3,000 prisoners were taken.

Inside the liberated towns the situation is desperate, residents feel abandoned, many shops are looted by the Russian occupiers and residents feel abandoned. Vladimir Putin holding his security briefing annoyed with the presenter but stated the area will be liberated.

Ukraine’s relentless push into Russian territory, particularly in the Kursk region, has forced Moscow to employ extreme measures. Ukrainian forces have made significant inroads into the Kursk region, causing significant distress within the Russian military.

Ukrainian troops managed to penetrate Russian positions by over 30 kilometers, creating significant disruption among Russian forces.

The chaos led to varied responses from Russian units—some offered staunch resistance while others either deserted or surrendered. Among the latter were crews operating sophisticated T-80BWM tanks.

Russia has lost at least 156 T-80BWM tanks, a figure confirmed by video and photographic evidence collected by Oryxspioenkop. The T-80BWM’s modern features include an upgraded two-layer reactive Armor called Relikt, which provides enhanced protection against advanced tandem warhead munitions and FPV drones.

A unique characteristic of the T-80BWM is its gas turbine engine, offering superior responsiveness compared to traditional diesel engines. This feature has earned it the nickname “flying tank” in Russia due to its rapid acceleration and high performance.

The Russian army has reportedly begun withdrawing convoys, suffering substantial losses in both equipment and personnel. At least 16,000 have been evacuated.

It is clear from the language that the Russian occupying force will strike back. Never since 1941 has Russian territory occupied. And the outcome is unclear for the moment.

During the meeting, Putin reiterated his stance against engaging in dialogue with Ukraine, citing the ongoing attacks on civilian populations.

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As Victoria Nuland steps down, she gets real about a world on fire.

Victoria Nuland has long been known as a relentless, even pugnacious, U.S. diplomat, with a strong belief in American power. The approach sometimes got her in trouble, but it rarely held her back.

Nuland recently left the State Department after serving at its highest levels, first as the Biden administration’s undersecretary of State for political affairs, and, for several months, acting deputy secretary of State. She previously was a career diplomat who held an array of roles under presidents both Republican and Democratic; her first posting more than three decades ago was as a consular officer in China.

In an exit interview with POLITICO Magazine, Nuland discussed her time in public service — dismissing chatter that she was passed over for a promotion — as well as her views on where American foreign policy has gone wrong and right.

Notably, she said the United States was not quick enough to realize and prevent the expansionist ambitions of both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

A longtime champion of Ukraine and the effort to counter Russia, she also warned about the perils of Donald Trump blowing up NATO if he wins back the White House in November.

“Don’t throw it out,” she said of the trans-Atlantic alliance, “because you would never be able to re-create it again.”

The following has been edited for length and clarity:

How’s life on the outside?

Life is wonderful. I am doing a lot of projects that I had put off, seeing a lot of people that I love, and I’m staying involved in ways that are meaningful. I’m speaking on foreign policy issues I care about — whether it is Ukraine or ensuring that the United States leads strongly in the world. I’m getting a chance to prepare for my classes in the fall and work with the next generation of foreign policy leaders. I’ll be at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Why leave the Biden administration, really? People said you felt passed over for the deputy secretary of State job. Is that true?

I actually didn’t compete for the deputy secretary of State job. I loved being undersecretary for political affairs. I love working with Secretary [Antony] Blinken. But as you know, I’ve done three years altogether and I’ve done eight months plus in both jobs, and so it was just the right time for me and my family to do something different.

Do you have any regrets from your time in the role?

I think whenever you finish a job like this, you wish you’d been able to do more on more issues. Travel more, touch more people, get more done faster, ensure the U.S. was leading strongly on as many continents as possible, mentor more of the next generation. And you’re always constrained by time, by resources, by the crises that overwhelm the inbox. So you always want to have done more.

Can Ukraine win this war against Russia? And how do you define winning?

Let’s start with the fact that Putin has already failed in his objective. He wanted to flatten Ukraine. He wanted to ensure that they had no sovereignty, independence, agency, no democratic future — because a democratic Ukraine, a European Ukraine, is a threat to his model for Russia, among other things, and because it’s the first building block for his larger territorial ambitions.

Can Ukraine succeed? Absolutely. Can Ukraine come out of this more sovereign, more economically independent, stronger, more European than it is now? Absolutely. And I think it will. But we’ve got to stay with it. We’ve got to make sure our allies stay with it.

And we have to accelerate a lot of the initiatives that were in the supplemental, like helping Ukraine build that highly deterrent military force of the future, like deploying these longer-range weapons to strategic effect, like ensuring that the critical infrastructure and the energy sector are protected, like building up our own defense industrial base and that of our allies and Ukraine’s again, so that we and Ukraine are building faster than Russia and China.

But can it get all its territory back, including Crimea?

It can definitely get to a place where it’s strong enough, I believe, and where Putin is stymied enough to go to the negotiating table from a position of strength. It’ll be up to the Ukrainian people what their territorial ambitions should be. But there are certain things that are existential.

Any deal that they cut in their interest and in the larger global interest has to be a deal that Putin is compelled to stick to. We can’t be doing this every six months, every three years. It has to actually lead to a deal that includes Russian withdrawal.

Putin is a master at what we call rope-a-dope negotiating, where he never actually cuts the deal. It has to be a deal that ensures that whatever is decided on Crimea, it can’t be remilitarized such that it’s a dagger at the heart of the center of Ukraine.

Was it a mistake not to push the Ukrainians harder to go for some sort of negotiated end to the war in 2022, especially the fall of 2022?

They were not in a strong enough position then. They’re not in a strong enough position now. The only deal Putin would have cut then, the only deal that he would cut today, at least before he sees what happens in our election, is a deal in which he says, “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.” And that’s not sustainable.

You’ve had a long career, especially when it comes to Europe. Where did the U.S. go wrong in its understanding of Russia?

With regard to both Russia and China, after the end of the Cold War, the prevailing wisdom among all of us — right, left and center — was that if you could knit Moscow and Beijing into the open and free global order that we had benefited from for so many years, that they would become prosperous, and they would become strong contributing members of that order. And that’s what we tried for a very long time.

That works if you have a leadership that is fundamentally accepting the current system. But once you have leaders who are telling their populations that this system keeps their country down, doesn’t allow it to have its rightful place, that has a territorial definition of greatness, that is bent on economic, political and or military coercion — that’s antithetical to this order, and then our policy has to change.

Did we realize fast enough Putin’s ambitions and Xi Jinping’s ambitions, and did we do enough to ensure that those ambitions stayed inside their own nations and didn’t spill out and coerce others? 20/20 hindsight? Probably not.

How much of it comes down to what particular guy is running the show? I sometimes wonder, could things be different if it wasn’t Putin in charge? If it wasn’t Xi? How much of it comes down to the dude at the top?

In highly centralized societies, which both China and Russia have historically been, without an electoral refresh of the kind that we all go through in the democratic world, it matters hugely, because it’s that human who’s defining what greatness means. It’s that human who’s deciding how to maintain order in that society. It’s that human — allowing them to speak, allowing a free press, allowing protests, allowing alternative political parties — who’s going to shape the options. And that constrains obviously the kind of relationship we can have.

What is the lesson we should learn about foreign policy in general when it comes to the experiences we’ve had in Russia and China?

We should always try to talk both to leaders and to people, to the extent that we’re allowed. We should always offer an opportunity to work together in common interest.

But if the ideology is inherently expansionist, is inherently illiberal, is inherently trying to change the system that benefits us, we’ve got to build protections and resilience for ourselves, for our friends and allies, and particularly for those neighbors of those countries who are likely to be on the front line of that first push.

Where do you see the Israel-Hamas war heading?

Essentially, there are two paths on the table. There is continuing this war with all of the destruction and horror and lack of clarity about how you end Hamas’ reign of terror.

The other path is the route that the administration and allies and partners and a lot of countries in the Gulf are pushing, and a lot of Israelis want, which is: a hostage deal leads to a long-term cease-fire, leads to a better future for Palestinians both in the West Bank and in Gaza, leads to Saudi-Israel normalization and a path to two states, and a region where the ideology and the violence that Hamas is offering is beaten by more opening, more opportunity, more peace, more stability.

Are you saying that because you believe it or because it’s the Biden administration’s position?

I’m saying it because, anything other than that, this is going to happen again and again and again.

If you could go back in time on that one, what, if anything, should the U.S. have done differently?

Beginning with the Trump administration, everybody fell in love with regional normalization as the cure-all for the instability and grievances and insecurity in the Middle East. And that’s a part of it.

But if you leave out the Palestinian issue, then somebody’s going to seize it and run with it, and that’s what Hamas did. I also think that both we and the Israelis knew too little about the terror state that had been established in Gaza.

You’re going to be teaching at Columbia, the epicenter of campus protests over this situation. If you could offer these protesters some advice as someone with significant policymaking experience, what would it be?

Peaceful protest is part of the fabric of who we are and the fact that we allow it, and the Chinese don’t and the Russians don’t, makes us Americans. But when that protest becomes violent, when it impinges on other people’s human rights or denigrates others, then you veer toward coercion.

So, express your views, ask for concrete paths forward. But stay away from violence, make sure that it’s actually indigenous to the campus, that you’re not becoming the tool of outside agitators. And be respectful of alternative views as you expect people to respect your views.

What if you are peaceful? And you say what you want and the people in charge just say, ‘Oh, that’s very nice, thank you,’ and then they ignore you and they keep doing what they’ve been doing for years. How do you do just keep pushing on that front? Do you join the government?

I would certainly say if you care enough to devote all day, every day to political change, come join the folks who are setting policy, commit your life to public service. I didn’t expect that that’s where my life would lead, but it’s been incredibly rewarding.

There are many, many ways to change policy, but being on the inside is not only extremely rewarding, but you can actually get stuff done.

If Trump wins, and leaves NATO or limits America’s role in NATO, does the alliance fall apart? What happens?

First and foremost, America suffers. Because if you look at every single one of the challenges we have globally, even as we make the security commitment to Europe, it is the European countries who have contributed more to Ukraine — on the security side, on the economic side, etc. It is the European countries who have to adapt their policies toward China if you want to have an impact on China’s eagerness to coerce others. It’s the European countries who we need to help fund the Haiti mission, to help defeat terrorism in Africa, and provide prosperity.

If we are not part of that family, on a daily basis, we are standing alone, our own influence in the world is greatly reduced, and we have no influence over how they choose to spend their energy and resources. And they’re less powerful in doing it without us.

What about this idea that look, we’re the U.S. at the end of the day. We’re the superpower. Whether we’re in NATO or not, people are going to come along with us. Isn’t there something to that argument?

I’ve worked for six presidents, Republicans and Democrats. I always believed that a new president with a fresh mandate from the American people should look at every global problem with fresh eyes, bring new solutions, and should have that opportunity, working with Congress, working with the American people, working with allies and partners.

That’s a different thing than turning your back on bedrock, bipartisan institutions and policies that have protected Americans and advanced our own prosperity and global influence for 70 years.

Why do you want to throw out what’s working and what benefits us for no other reason than you’ve had a fit of pique? Work within the institution to make it work better. Don’t throw it out, because you would never be able to re-create it again.

Does the rest of the world fear the United States?

Is fear what we want from the rest of the world?

Sometimes.

I think what we want from the rest of the world is they see us leading in a manner that advances their own security, advances their own prosperity, creates this community of nations that can handle global problems — whether they are terrorist problems, whether they are health problems, whether they’re environmental problems — and we do it in a primarily self-interested but unselfish way, and we’re creating that community.

They should only fear us if they’re opponents of a largely liberal democratic way of advancing human prosperity. And in that context, if they are viciously invading a neighbor, if they are coercing a little state because they can, then I hope they would fear our reaction and the reaction that we will build with other democracies who want to protect the system that favors freedom.

Do you ever plan to go back into government?

I love what I did for 35 years. I’ve always loved it. And I continue to love it. So in the right circumstances, of course.

Source: Politico

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Summary

• China, India, Brazil, S.Africa heads to meet, Putin absent
• Expansion to include Global South nations high on agenda
• Some 40 countries interested in joining
• BRICS seek to woo African nations with aid, trade

JOHANNESBURG, Aug 17 (Reuters) – BRICS leaders meet in South Africa next week to discuss how to turn a loose club of nations accounting for a quarter of the global economy into a geopolitical force that can challenge the West’s dominance in world affairs.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who faces an international arrest warrant over alleged war crimes in Ukraine, will not join leaders from Brazil, India, China and South Africa amid rifts over whether to expand the bloc to include dozens of “Global South” nations queuing up to join.

South Africa will host Chinese President Xi Jinping, Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the BRICS summit from August 22 to 24.

Spread over the globe and with economies that operate in vastly different ways, the main thing uniting the BRICS is scepticism about a world order they see as serving the interests of the United States and its rich-country allies who promote international norms they enforce but don’t always respect.

Few details have emerged about what they plan to discuss, but expansion is expected to be high on the agenda, as some 40 nations have shown interest in joining, either formally or informally, according to South Africa. They include Saudi Arabia, Argentina and Egypt.

“BRICS AND AFRICA”

China, seeking to expand its geopolitical influence as its tussles with the United States, wants to enlarge BRICS quickly, while Brazil is resisting expansion, fearing the already unwieldy club could see its stature diluted by it.

In a written response to Reuters questions, China’s foreign ministry said it “supports progress in expanding membership, and welcomes more like-minded partners to join the ‘BRICS family’ at an early date.”

Russia needs friends to counter its diplomatic isolation over Ukraine, and so is keen to bring in new members, as is its most important African ally, South Africa.

India is on the fence.

In a nod to the bloc’s African hosts, the theme of its 15th summit is “BRICS and Africa”, emphasising how the bloc can build ties with a continent increasingly becoming a theatre for competition between world powers.

South Africa’s foreign minister Naledi Pandor in a statement last week said BRICS nations wanted to show “global leadership in addressing the needs … of the majority of the world, namely … development and inclusion of the Global South in multilateral systems,” in a veiled swipe at Western dominance.

BRICS nations are keen to project themselves as alternative development partners to the West. China’s foreign ministry said BRICS sought to “reform global governance systems (to) increase the representation … of developing countries and emerging markets.”

The bloc’s New Development Bank (NDB) wants to de-dollarise finance and offer an alternative to the much-criticised Breton Woods institutions.

But it has approved only $33 billion of loans in nearly a decade — about a third of the amount the World Bank committed to disbursing just last year — and has recently been hobbled by sanctions on member Russia.

South African officials say talk of a BRICS currency, mooted by Brazil earlier this year as an alternative to dollar-dependence, is off the table.

With 40% of global population, the BRICS carbon-intensive nations also make up about the same share of greenhouse gas emissions. Officials in Brazil, China and South Africa said climate change may come up but indicated it wouldn’t be a priority.

BRICS countries blame rich nations for causing most global warming and want them to take on more of the burden of decarbonising the world’s energy supply. China was accused of blocking climate discussions at the G20, which it denied.

Source: Reuters

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At about 1am on February 24 last year, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, received a troubling phone call.

After spending months building up a more than 100,000-strong invasion force on the border with Ukraine, Vladimir Putin had given the go-ahead to invade.

The decision caught Lavrov completely by surprise. Just days earlier, the Russian president had polled his security council for their opinions on recognising two separatist statelets in the Donbas, an industrial border region in Ukraine, at an excruciatingly awkward televised session — but had left them none the wiser about his true intentions.

Keeping Lavrov in the dark was not unusual for Putin, who tended to concentrate his foreign policy decision-making among a handful of close confidants, even when it undermined Russia’s diplomatic efforts.

On this occasion, the phone call made Lavrov one of the very few people who had any knowledge of the plan ahead of time. The Kremlin’s senior leadership all found out about the invasion only when they saw Putin declare a “special military operation” on television that morning.

Later that day, several dozen oligarchs gathered at the Kremlin for a meeting arranged only the day before, aware that the invasion would trigger western sanctions that could destroy their empires. “Everyone was completely losing it,” says a person who attended the event.

While they waited, one of the oligarchs spied Lavrov exiting another meeting and pressed him for an explanation about why Putin had decided to invade. Lavrov had no answer: the officials he was there to see in the Kremlin had known less about it than he did.

Stunned, the oligarch asked Lavrov how Putin could have planned such an enormous invasion in such a tiny circle — so much so that most of the senior officials at the Kremlin, Russia’s economic cabinet and its business elite had not believed it was even possible.

“He has three advisers,” Lavrov replied, according to the oligarch. “Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.”

Under Putin’s invasion plan, Russia’s troops were to seize Kyiv within a matter of days in a brilliant, comparatively bloodless blitzkrieg.

Instead, the war has proved to be a quagmire of historic proportions for Russia. A year on, Putin’s invasion has claimed well over 200,000 dead and injured among Russia’s armed forces, according to US and European officials; depleted its stock of tanks, artillery and cruise missiles; and cut the country off from global financial markets and western supply chains.

Nor has the fighting in Ukraine brought Putin any closer to his vaguely defined goals of “demilitarising” and “de-Nazifying” Kyiv. Though Russia now controls 17 per cent of Ukraine’s internationally recognised territory, it has abandoned half of the land it seized in the war’s early weeks — including a humiliating retreat from Kherson, the only provincial capital under its control, just weeks after Putin attempted to annex it.

But as the war rumbles on with no end in sight, Putin has given no indication he intends to back down on his war efforts.

At his state-of-the-union address on Tuesday, Putin insisted the war was “about the very existence of our country” and said the west had forced him to invade Ukraine. “They’re the ones who started the war. We are using force to stop it,” he said.

Even as the huge cost of the invasion to Russia becomes apparent to him, Putin is more determined than ever to see it through, people who know him say.

“The idea was never for hundreds of thousands of people to die. It’s all gone horribly wrong,” a former senior Russian official says. With the initial plan in tatters, Putin is searching for new rationales to justify the war effort, insisting he had no choice but to pursue the invasion by any means necessary, current and former officials say.

“He tells people close to him, ‘It turns out we were completely unprepared. The army is a mess. Our industry is a mess. But it’s good that we found out about it this way, rather than when Nato invades us,’” the former official adds.

The Financial Times spoke to six longtime Putin confidants as well as people involved in Russia’s war effort, and current and former senior officials in the west and Ukraine for this account of how Putin blundered his way into the invasion — then doubled down rather than admit his mistake. All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The people who know Putin describe a leader who has become even more isolated since the start of the war. “Stalin was a villain, but a good manager, because he couldn’t be lied to. But nobody can tell Putin the truth,” says one. “People who don’t trust anyone start trusting a very small number of people who lie to them.”

‘If you don’t agree with it, you can leave’Last year was not the first time Putin had withheld plans of an invasion from close advisers. When Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, he did not inform his own security council — instead on one occasion gaming out the peninsula’s annexation with his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, and three top security officials all night until 7am.

Initially, the advisers urged Putin against sending troops into Crimea, according to a former senior Russian official and a former senior US official. “Putin said, ‘This is a historic moment. If you don’t agree with it, you can leave,’” the former Russian official recalls.

When the west, fearful of escalating tensions to a point of no return and jeopardising Europe’s economic ties with Russia, responded with only a slap on the wrist, Putin was convinced he had made the right decision, according to several people who know the president.

In the years after the 2014 invasion, Putin’s inner circle began to shrink further as he became increasingly consumed with what he saw as growing western threats to Russia’s security, the people say. His isolation deepened when the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020: for fear they could infect a germaphobic Putin, even top officials were forced to spend weeks at a time quarantining for a personal audience.

One of the few people to spend extended time with Putin was his friend Yuri Kovalchuk, a former physicist who in the 1990s owned a dacha adjoining the future president’s in the countryside outside St Petersburg.

The secretive Kovalchuk — a banker and media mogul who the US says manages Putin’s personal finances — almost never speaks in public and did not reply to a request for comment.

People who know him say he shares a passion for Russian imperial revanchism with his older brother Mikhail, a physicist whose conspiracy theory-laden rants about US plans to develop super-soldiers and “ethnic weapons” have, on occasion, popped up later in Putin’s speeches.

During the height of the pandemic, Putin was largely cut off from comparatively liberal, western-minded confidants who had previously had his ear. Instead he spent the first few months in his residence at Valdai, a bucolic town on a lake in northern Russia, essentially on lockdown with the younger Kovalchuk, who inspired Putin to think of his historic mission to assert Russia’s greatness, much as Peter the Great had.

“He really believes all the stuff he says about sacrality and Peter the Great. He thinks he will be remembered like Peter,” a former senior official says.

Increasingly, Putin became fixated on Ukraine as his relations soured with its energetic young president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

One of Zelenskyy’s early moves was to curb the influence of Viktor Medvedchuk, a close friend of Putin’s who headed the largest opposition party in parliament. Whereas former president Petro Poroshenko had used Medvedchuk as a crucial go-between with Moscow, Zelenskyy’s team sought other intermediaries in the belief that his influence on Putin had begun to wane.

But as Putin began drawing up plans for a possible invasion, Medvedchuk insisted that Ukrainians would greet Russia’s forces with open arms.

One part of the plan involved Viktor Yanukovych, a former president who has been in Russian exile since fleeing the 2014 revolution against him. He was to deliver a video message conferring legitimacy on Medvedchuk — and anointing him to rule Ukraine with Russia’s backing.

The vision was starkly at odds with political realities in Ukraine, where the pro-Russian minority that Medvedchuk represented was vastly outnumbered by those who despised him for his ties to Moscow. But it proved seductive for Putin, who authorised payments through Medvedchuk’s party to pay off local collaborators.

There was plenty of scepticism in Moscow. “If Medvedchuk says it’s raining, you need to look out of the window — it’ll be sunny,” says another former senior Russian official. “You have polls, you have the secret services — how can you do anything serious based on what Medvedchuk says?”

However, his assessment was backed up by the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, which assured Putin victory was certain — and paid large sums in bribes to officials in Ukraine in the hope that this would guarantee success.

“The FSB had built a whole system of telling the boss what he wanted to hear. There were huge budgets given out and corruption at every level,” a western intelligence official says. “You tell the right story up top and you skim off a bit for yourself.”

Dissenting voices in the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, and Russia’s general staff attempted to raise doubts. At the security council meeting three days before the invasion, even Nikolai Patrushev, security council secretary and Putin’s longest-standing and most hawkish ally, suggested giving diplomacy another chance.

“He knew what a bad state the army was in and told Putin as much,” a person close to the Kremlin says.

But just as he had in 2014, Putin overruled them, insisting he was better informed.

“Putin was overconfident,” a former senior US official says. “He knows better than his advisers just the way Hitler knew better than his generals.”

The invasion began to unravel almost immediately after Putin set it into motion. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff, had drawn up a plan to seize the Hostomel airfield outside Kyiv, giving Russian elite paratrooper squadrons a platform from which to attack Zelenskyy’s government headquarters.

Some of Medvedchuk’s collaborators worked as spotters for the advancing Russian forces, painting markings on buildings and highways to direct the invaders to key locations. Others joined in the attack on the government quarter. In southern Ukraine, they helped Russia capture a large swath of territory including Kherson with little to no resistance.

Most of Medvedchuk’s network, however, simply took the money and ran, refusing to join in the invasion — or went straight to Ukrainian authorities and warned them of the instructions they had been given, according to a senior Ukrainian official and former US and Russian officials.

Prewar predictions that Ukraine’s army would collapse had largely been based on the assumption Russia’s air force would quickly establish control of Ukraine’s skies.

Instead, amid widespread disarray among the invaders, Russia’s army shot down a number of its own aircraft in the early days of the invasion. As a result, it ran out of pilots with experience of combat operations involving ground forces who were also prepared to fly, according to two western officials and a Ukrainian official.

“It may not have been double digits, but it’s more than one or two” Russian aircraft shot down by friendly fire, says the former senior US official. “There was a lot of fratricide.”

He adds: “They may not have had pilots with combat experience who were willing to fly over Ukraine and risk their necks in that crazy environment.”

Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of Ukrainian military intelligence, adds: “It happened. From artillery units, from tanks, and we even saw it from our intercepts of their conversations. They shot down their own helicopters and they shot down their own planes.”

On the ground, Russia’s advances came at the price of huge casualties and did not help it capture any major cities apart from Kherson. By the end of March, the invading forces were in such a poor state that they withdrew from most of central and north-eastern Ukraine, which it portrayed as a “gesture of goodwill”.

The brilliant plan had proved a failure.

“Russia screwed up,” says Skibitsky. “Gerasimov initially didn’t want to go in from all sides like he did. But the FSB and everyone else convinced him everyone was waiting for him to show up and there wouldn’t be any resistance.”

‘A unique war in world history’As the consequences of his invasion became clear, Putin searched for a scapegoat to hold responsible for the intelligence blunders underpinning it. That person was Sergei Beseda, the head of the FSB’s fifth directorate, which is responsible for foreign operations and had laid the groundwork for the invasion by paying off Ukrainian collaborators, according to two western officials.

Initially, Beseda was placed under house arrest, according to the officials. His time in the doghouse, however, did not last long. Weeks later, US officials arrived for a meeting on bilateral issues with their Russian counterparts wondering, after news of Beseda’s detention leaked to the Russian media, whether he would turn up and how the Russians might explain where he was.

Instead, Beseda walked in and said, paraphrasing Mark Twain: “You know, the rumours of my demise are greatly exaggerated,” according to the former US official.

Beseda’s quick comeback demonstrated what advisers see as some of Putin’s biggest weaknesses. The Russian president prizes loyalty over competence; is obsessive about secrecy to a fault; and presides over a bureaucratic culture where his underlings tell him what he wants to hear, according to people who know him.

The steady drumbeat of propaganda around the war and Putin’s demands for loyalty from the elite have only increased the incentive for advisers to tell him what he wants to hear, the people say.

“He’s of sound mind. He’s reasonable. He’s not crazy. But nobody can be an expert on everything. They need to be honest with him and they are not,” another longtime Putin confidant says. “The management system is a huge problem. It creates big gaps in his knowledge and the quality of the information he gets is poor.”

For many in the elite, the stream of lies is a survival tactic: most of Putin’s presidential administration and economic cabinet have told friends they oppose the war but feel they are powerless to do anything about it. “It’s really a unique war in world history, when all the elite is against it,” says a former senior official.

A small number, including former climate special representative Anatoly Chubais, have quietly resigned. One former senior official who now heads a major state-run company went so far as to apply for an Israeli passport while still in his post, and started making plans to leave the country, according to two people close to him.

As the war continues to sputter, the scale of Russia’s miscalculation has begun to dawn on Putin, prompting him to seek out more information from people at lower levels, people who know him say. A cohort of ultranationalist bloggers who are critical of the military establishment have held at least two closed-door meetings with Putin since last summer; some were guests of honour at a ceremony to annex the four Ukrainian provinces in September.

On occasion, Putin has used information from his informal channels to trip up senior officials in public. Last month, Denis Manturov, a deputy prime minister, told Putin the government had signed contracts with Russian aviation factories to produce new aircraft, one of the industries worst hit by the difficulty of procuring components under the sanctions. Putin replied: “I know the factories don’t have contracts, the directors told me. What are you playing the fool for? When will the contracts be ready? Here’s what I’m talking about: the factory directors say they don’t have contracts. And you’re telling me it’s all on paper.”

Putin’s newfound scepticism, however, is limited by his unwillingness to admit the invasion was a mistake in the first place, the people say. Some of the liberal officials who oppose the war have attempted to convince him to end it by pointing out the economic damage the sanctions are likely to wreak on Russia’s economy.

But Putin tells them “he has already factored in the discounts”, another former senior Russian official says. “He says, ‘We pay a huge price, I get it. We underestimated how difficult it could be.’ But how can you convince a crazy man? His brain will collapse if he realises it was a mistake,” the person adds. “He doesn’t trust anyone.”

Asked about the discrepancy between the defence ministry’s statements and complaints from fighters at the front about poor equipment in December, Putin paraphrased a character from his favourite TV show, the Soviet espionage drama Seventeen Moments of Spring: “You can’t trust anyone. Only me.” Then he chuckled.

Existential fight continuesPutin’s state-of-the-union address on Tuesday demonstrated his determination to “solve the tasks before us step by step” as he insisted Russia’s war would go on until a victorious end.

The remarks underscored how existential the fight has become for Putin as the threat he sees from a hostile west consumes him. Putin spent comparatively little time discussing Ukraine itself, instead focusing his ire on the US, which he accused of trying to “destroy” Russia and use “national traitors” to break it up.

The speech marked his first return to nuclear rhetoric since last autumn, when he made veiled warnings to “use all the means at our disposal” in defence of Russia’s conquests and suggested Russia could carry out a nuclear first strike.

Those threats worried western countries sufficiently that the US, UK, and France, Nato’s three nuclear powers, delivered a joint message to Russia vowing to retaliate with conventional weapons if Putin decided to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, according to the former US and Russian officials.

According to two people close to the Kremlin, Putin has already gamed out the possibility of using a nuclear weapon in Ukraine and has come to the conclusion that even a limited strike would do nothing to benefit Russia.

“He has no reason to press the button. What is the point of bombing Ukraine? You detonate a tactical nuke on Zaporizhzhia,” says a former Russian official, referring to the Ukrainian-held capital of a province Putin has claimed for Russia. “Everything is totally irradiated, you can’t go in there, and it’s supposedly Russia anyway, so what was the point?”

Instead, Putin said Russia would suspend its participation in New Start, the last remaining arms treaty with the US governing the countries’ nuclear arsenals. The suspension was the most concrete step Putin has taken on the escalation ladder since the war began: Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary-general, said “the whole arms control architecture has been dismantled.”

This time, however, Putin made no threats to actually use nuclear weapons — which analysts interpreted as a sign he had begun to realise Russia’s limitations.

“The war’s been going on for a year. Putin has been saying he’s fighting the west, not Ukraine, for a long time. You can’t just keep talking about it, you need to take steps to demonstrate something tangible,” says Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter. “Otherwise in his paradigm it’s going to look like the west is wiping the floor with Russia and [he] can’t say anything in response.”

Putin’s calculation, people close to the Kremlin say, is that Russia is more committed to the war than the west is to Ukraine, and resilient enough to see out the economic pain. Senior Republicans have openly questioned how long the US can go on supporting Ukraine to the same extent and the party retains a realistic chance of capturing the White House in 2024.

In ramping up military support for Ukraine, western officials are mindful anything less than a crushing defeat for Russia risks failing to deal with the problem.

“We need to ask ourselves: How do we want to this end up? Do we want to end up in a situation when Putin will survive and he will have more time?” says an EU foreign minister. “Something like the lull between the first and second world war.”

Putin, by contrast, is betting that he can see through that strategic turbulence, people who know him say. Instead of insisting that most Russians are unaffected by the war, as the Kremlin did in its early months when life largely went on as normal, Putin has adopted mobilisation rhetoric, urging all of society to unite behind the invasion.

The scenes at a patriotic rally on Wednesday underscored how far Putin had come down that road in just a few years. At Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium, where the World Cup final was held five years ago, a soldier rapped about “the difficult hour we did not anticipate” alongside Russia’s military choir and the parents of people killed fighting for Russia made speeches to a huge flag-waving crowd. The rally’s hosts welcomed a group of children “saved” by the Russian army in Mariupol, a city in south-eastern Ukraine it razed to the ground last spring.

Then Putin appeared, shook hands with a select group of soldiers, and told Russians to take inspiration from them. “The motherland is our family,” Putin said. “The people standing up here are deciding to defend the most valuable and dear thing they have — our family. They are fighting heroically, courageously, bravely.”

Russian independent media reported that tens of thousands of state employees and students were paid small sums or forced to attend. The fact the Kremlin evidently did not think it could fill a stadium to support Putin without forcing people to go suggests officials know how difficult mobilising society around the war will be.

“Even in his own mind, he realises it’s not going to happen soon. It’s going to be a costly, lengthy process,” the former US official says. “He’s got, he thinks, the time — he’s 70 — and the resources, the oil and gas money to achieve it. And that’s what he’ll be remembered for: gathering the Russian lands the way Peter the Great did.”

But the alternative, one former senior Kremlin official says, may be too difficult for Putin to contemplate.

“It’s scary to think what happens if this ends in a disastrous defeat for Russia,” the former official says. “That means disastrous mistakes were made and the man behind it needs to exit this life, whether it’s via a bullet, cyanide, or something else. And if there’s no justice in this world, then nobody gets to have it,” he adds.

“It’s like when two chess players are playing. One of them is losing and bashes the other one over the head with the chessboard. Does that mean he won? No, it’s just an act of desperation.”

Additional reporting by Henry Foy in Brussels and Anastasia Stognei in Riga

Russia at war: a two-part seriesHow Putin’s technocrats steadied Russia’s economyOnce thought of as reformers, the president’s economic confidants have ended up as enablers of an invasion they warned against

A country Learning to Live without ImportsRather than provoking a collapse, international sanctions are causing a steady degradation of the country’s productive capacity.



Source: Informed

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