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Tag Archive for: Ukraine
Tag Archive for: Ukraine
War and appeasement: why a deal with Putin will backfire
US president-elect Donald Trump’s boast that he will quickly negotiate a deal with Vladimir Putin about Russia’s war with Ukraine is likely to fail. This will be the case even though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed last month that the war ‘will end sooner’ under Trump.
The question is: in whose favour will it end?
My central concern here is that all this is occurring as the military outlook for Ukraine is grim. How long Ukraine can keep going militarily is uncertain and Kyiv may be unable to resist a demand for a Trump deal. This uncertainty is made worse by nobody knowing what Trump will actually do.
Trump grievously underrates Putin’s determination to win his war at all costs. And Putin will not allow peace talks to get in the way of eliminating Ukraine as a nation-state. He continues to assert that there is no such country as Ukraine. He also makes it brutally clear that Ukraine can never be allowed to be a member of NATO.
Last month, in reaction to the United States allowing Ukraine to use longer-range missiles (such as the 300km-range Army Tactical Missile System) to strike deeper into Russia, Putin has promised ‘an appropriate and palpable response’. But this is not the first time Putin has promised, in effect, a nuclear response.
As NATO’s former secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg has noted, if Putin wants to escalate with the use of weapons of mass destruction, he can create all the excuses he needs but ‘so far, we have called his bluff’. And the Pentagon has just announced there are no increased signs of a higher level of Russian nuclear alert.
There are, however, different opinions on this contingency. Kim Darroch, Britain’s former national security adviser, warned that allowing Britain’s long-range Storm Shadow missiles to be fired by Ukraine into Russia ‘risks a major escalation of the conflict’.
So, after almost three years of war, Putin’s views are in fact even more—not less—expansive. According to Anne Applebaum, a leading Russia expert, Putin is fighting not only to destroy Ukraine as a nation but he also wants to show that America, NATO and the West are weak and indecisive, regardless of who is the US president.
Putin believes he and his ‘closest friend’, Chinese President Xi Jinping, are the world’s leading authoritarian powers, increasingly powerful militarily and attractive not only to North Korea and Iran but also to many of the so-called global south countries.
More than 70 percent of Russians now are apparently of the view that the West, led by NATO and the US, is seeking to fundamentally destroy Russia. A large majority of Russians allegedly now see the West as an existential threat to the Russian motherland. So, Putin is about winning much more than a war with Ukraine.
Then there is the question of Putin’s personality. Unlike Trump, Putin has been Russia’s dominant authoritarian leader for practically a quarter of a century now. And there is no sign—at least foreseeable—of any credible opposition to him. He recently has implied that China and Russia have created a new geopolitical concept for world order that is stronger than a confused and inward-looking US.
As a former KGB officer, Putin was trained to believe the ‘correlation of world forces’ is logically moving towards Russia’s national interests because of the collective weakness of the West.
According to Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre in Berlin, ‘The sad truth is that the fight against the West has become the organising principle of Putin’s regime and has created too many beneficiaries to be abandoned any time soon. Trump or no Trump, Russia’s foreign policy will be guided by anti-Americanism for at least as long as Putin is in the Kremlin.’
Gabuev goes on to argue that mistrust between Russia and the West will outlast the Trump era. He also argues that while the Kremlin remains guarded in its official expectations of the new US administration, the hope in Moscow is that Trump’s presidency will be ‘a gift that keeps on giving’.
This is because Trump has pledged to end the war in Ukraine quickly and the main fear in Western capitals is that he will drastically reduce military support for an embattled Ukraine—greatly to Russia’s advantage.
But Trump’s anxiety to reach some form of a deal on Ukraine next year will not eliminate the root causes of the Kremlin’s confrontation with the West.
Rather, it will only confirm in Putin’s mind the lurch of the US to be inward-looking with Trump’s preoccupation to ‘make America great again’.
This brings us to what form such a Trump deal might involve. Trump’s vice-president, JD Vance, appears to be toying with the idea of an exchange of Ukrainian territory for a ceasefire. This might involve acknowledging Russia’s current occupation of 18 percent of the territory of Ukraine—which includes not only Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk but also Kherson and Zaporizhzhia—in exchange for a ceasefire that will be internationally supervised. By whom? Presumably, Putin will categorically reject the presence of any NATO troops on Russia’s border with Ukraine.
In my view, such a ceasefire and territorial settlement would leave Putin with the freedom to rearm the Russian military with a view to a massive attack when he is ready, which might be aimed at occupying the entire eastern half of Ukraine along the Dnipro River from Kyiv to Odesa.
But as Gabuev’s colleague Tatiana Stanovaya observes, no Western leader—including Trump—has a plan for ending the war that would be remotely acceptable to Putin. She says none of the mooted solutions comes close to meeting Russian demands for a pro-Russian government in Kyiv and a NATO that will never admit Ukraine to its membership. There are also many in Moscow who argue that Russia should not squander its current battlefield advantage for the empty promise of talks with Washington.
There are other options being toyed with in Europe. For example, there is the model of West and East Germany after World War II. The latter was a Soviet-occupied puppet regime called the German Democratic Republic, which few countries in Western Europe recognised. It existed cheek by jowl with an independent Federal Republic of Germany, which—unlike the GDR—was internationally recognised and was a key member of NATO. That model existed for more than 40 years until the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
The problem with extrapolating that model to today’s Europe is that at that time the US continued to support NATO through its large Cold War military presence in West Germany for more than a half-century and the US was also undoubtedly the strongest military power in the world. Arguably, neither of these facts exist right now.
Now we face a situation with an America that is decidedly turning inwards in focus. As Charles Kupchan (who was special assistant to the US president on the National Security Council from 2014 to 2017) argues in his book Isolationism: A history of America’s efforts to shield itself from the world, the central question is not whether the US retrenches but whether it does so by design or by default. He considers that the likelier outcome is retrenchment by default—an unplanned and perilous American retreat from global affairs.
In other words, a disruptive inward turn is now a real possibility for today’s America—more so than when Kupchan’s book was written four years ago. Trump’s clarion call of making America great again may mark ‘an unplanned and perilous American retreat from global affairs’. And there can be little doubt that Putin is about to test Trump’s mettle in this regard over Ukraine.
After congratulating Trump on his election, Putin implied he would have discussions only if the US initiated talks (he will not talk directly with Zelensky), dropped its economic sanctions and refused to offer any further support for Ukraine. In other words, Putin demands a Russian victory and the complete and utter destruction of Ukraine as a separate country.
And let’s not pretend that Putin’s ambition to restore Russia’s past empire in the ‘near abroad’—especially the Baltic countries and Poland—would be satiated if he wins in Ukraine. Far from it: this war in Ukraine is not just some distant territorial dispute, as some members of Trump’s inner circle assert. If things go horribly wrong in Ukraine, we could see a wider war in Europe.
Trump’s idea of negotiating a swift end to the war is unrealistic while Ukraine is fighting an outright invasion for its existence, not just a territorial dispute. Stopping the war now on Moscow’s terms will only further encourage Putin’s highly dangerous adventurism.
Putin’s march of folly
In a lengthy address at the annual Valdai Discussion Club meeting this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to outline his view of the world. Rambling on about a global ‘minority’ that is stymying the ambitions of the ‘majority’, he would have us believe that Russia belongs to the latter. Yet when Russia attempted to derail the final communique at the United Nations Summit of the Future this fall, countries from across the Global South firmly rebuffed the attempt.
Throughout his Valdai appearance, Putin struggled to hide the fact that what he really cares about is avoiding a ‘strategic defeat’ in Ukraine. In fact, Russia has already suffered a strategic defeat, inflicted not by the West or even by Ukraine, but by Putin himself. For the past two decades, his own myopic, destructive policies have forced Ukraine to turn toward the West for support and solidarity.
One of Putin’s first blunders came after Ukraine’s 2004 presidential election, when his ham-fisted attempt to choose the winner ended up provoking the Orange Revolution, which swept the moderate former central banker Viktor Yushchenko into the Ukrainian presidency. Putin has been trying to exert influence over the country ever since.
But the pattern is clear: time after time, the Kremlin’s heavy-handed efforts have backfired, leaving Ukrainians even more determined to align themselves with the West. Contrary to what some Western commentators and Kremlin propagandists claim, this was never a case of the West expanding eastward as part of some malevolent plot. It was the Ukrainians who were making the strategic moves, which reflected Putin’s efforts to curtail their sovereignty.
In 2008, proposals to extend NATO membership to Ukraine clearly lacked the necessary support, as both France and Germany opposed the idea at the time. Ukraine took the hint and in 2010 reaffirmed its neutral status as a means of keeping Putin at bay.
But the situation changed again in 2013, after Putin pressured Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, to reject an Association Agreement with the European Union. Closer trade ties with Europe would have boosted Ukraine’s economy and curtailed corruption by requiring it to adapt EU legal norms; but Yanukovych, in exchange for a $15 billion bailout by Russia and lower gas prices, acquiesced to Putin’s demands and abandoned the agreement. In response, Ukrainians took to the streets in what would become the Euromaidan uprising, and Yanukovych soon fled for Russia in the dead of night.
Putin’s response made his intentions all too clear. He deployed Russian special forces—‘little green men’ whose uniforms bore no identifying insignias—in Crimea, a part of Ukraine since 1954, and then illegally annexed it. Left with no other choice, Ukraine responded by ditching neutrality, seeking NATO membership and moving forward with the EU agreement. Moreover, NATO—itself feeling threatened by Putin’s brazen land grab—stationed forces in its Eastern European member states for the first time.
These were perfectly understandable responses to Putin’s acts of aggression. Again, the West was not trying to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia; Putin was doing it to himself. By the early 2020s, with Ukraine moving even closer toward the West, he recognized the grim consequences of his blunders and decided to put an end to the issue. His goal in launching a full-scale invasion was either to transform Ukraine into a Belarus-like satrapy or eliminate it as a nation-state altogether.
It soon became obvious that Putin had miscalculated yet again. He believed that a quick special operation would be enough to topple Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration and install a Kremlin-friendly regime in Kyiv. Instead, his forces encountered a determined nation that they were not prepared to fight. Almost three years later, Russia controls only around 10 percent more of Ukraine’s territory than it had in 2014, when it grabbed 7 percent. It is a pathetic result, especially considering that the occupied areas have largely been destroyed, with probably only half of their pre-2014 population remaining.
Putin’s aim is still to take full control of Ukraine and recreate Imperial Russia. But this effort will fail. Although Bolshevik forces re-established control of Ukraine after the Russian civil war in the early 1920s, even Vladimir Lenin understood that Ukraine is and must remain a separate political entity. And while Putin has rejected Lenin’s belief as a grave error, it was Joseph Stalin who made Ukraine a separate member of the United Nations.
With Putin continuing his war of aggression, the casualties will keep mounting (probably to around ten thousand per week). But the only certain outcome of his misadventure will be the hatred that Ukrainians now bear toward Russia. This will have long-lasting consequences, and it already represents a major strategic defeat for Russia. Responsibility for the situation starts and ends with Putin. The West could never have achieved what Putin has: Ukraine’s total alienation from Russia.
How and why Russia is conducting sabotage and hybrid-war offensive
Across Europe, we’re seeing more confirmed or suspected instances of Russian sabotage. It is part of a broader hybrid war campaign against NATO countries, aimed at eroding support for Ukraine and damaging Western cohesion.
In the US, Russia is refraining from sabotage, but it’s working hard on disinformation.
The head of MI5 warned in October that agents of Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, had conducted arson attacks, sabotage and other dangerous actions ‘with increasing recklessness’. His MI6 counterpart said Russian intelligence services had gone ‘a bit feral’.
The chiefs of Germany’s three intelligence branches echoed these concerns, reporting a ‘quantitative and qualitative’ increase in acts of Russian-sponsored espionage and sabotage in their country. On 22 October, Poland announced it would close the Russian consulate in Poznan due to alleged sabotage attempts.
Russia has conducted arson attacks in Poland, Germany, Lithuania, Latvia and Czechia. Other reported sabotage attempts include flying drones over Stockholm airport, jamming of Baltic countries’ civil aviation GPS systems and disruption of French railways on the first day of the Paris Olympics. Facilities linked to supplying Ukraine have also been targeted: a BAE Systems munitions facility in Wales, an air-defence company’s factory in Berlin and a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London.
Authorities have arrested suspects for plots to bomb or sabotage a military base in Bavaria and a French facility supporting Ukraine’s war efforts. Agencies disrupted a plot to assassinate the CEO of German arms maker Rheinmetall, a supplier of artillery shells to Ukraine. Latvian authorities tracked down saboteurs dispatched to several countries on paid missions. Norway’s domestic intelligence service warns of the threat of sabotage to train lines and to gas facilities supplying much of Europe.
This upsurge in sabotage activity is a rebound from initial setbacks that Russian intelligence suffered in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Its assessment of likely Ukrainian resistance and Western unity was lacking, affecting its ability to analyse and influence those factors. Some 750 Russians with diplomatic cover were expelled from Russian embassies and consulates across Europe, mostly spies.
Russia’s intelligence and security services rapidly regrouped. They have since managed to build new illegal networks and recruit criminals and other proxies through the dark web or social media platforms such as Telegram.
Sabotage operations are part of its larger hybrid war campaign. This is designed to cause fear and division in order to undermine support for Ukraine without going so far as provoking war. Russian hybrid warfare encompasses several tactics, most notably cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns.
Another grey-zone tactic is weaponising immigration. Russian authorities direct migrants into neighbouring European countries without proper documentation, instructing them to claim asylum there. The aim is to destabilise those neighbours. European officials reported Russian plans to set up a 15,000-strong force comprising former militias in Libya to control the flow of migrants. Migration routes through Libya link to other places with Russian military or paramilitary presence, notably through Central African Republic and Sudan, as well as Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.
Fostering irregular migration further supports right-wing European parties which oppose immigration and European integration and which Russia funds. These include AfD in Germany, National Rally in France and Reform UK, which all gained in recent elections and are mostly Russia-friendly and critical of support for Ukraine.
So far, Russia has refrained from sabotage in the US, although European officials have warned that uncovered plots to plant incendiary devices on planes in Europe could be test runs for similar plans in the US. Russian disinformation efforts in the US have stepped up since 2022 and expanded during the presidential election campaign. Donald Trump’s and MAGA Republicans’ reluctance to support Ukraine makes Trump the clearly preferred candidate of Russia.
In the aftermath of hurricanes Milton and Helene in the US, Russia-affiliated social media accounts pushed fake narratives claiming the Biden administration’s response had been incompetent, reflecting wider government failures and prioritisation of resources to Ukraine over domestic needs. The Justice Department has indicted two employees of Kremlin media propaganda arm RT for paying US$10 million to a media company in Tennessee to spread disinformation.
Anti-US campaigns are also active in developing countries. Some aim to discredit US-funded anti-malaria programs in Africa.
Western leaders have been reluctant to call for a more vigorous response to Russian sabotage, probably out of fear of escalation. Some media reports even suggest that fears of retaliatory sabotage actions, such as attacks on US bases, have fed into US reluctance to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles.
The West is running out of non-military options for response, since it is already imposing extensive economic and diplomatic sanctions against Moscow and has limited capacity or opportunity to retaliate in kind inside Russia. Still, a more strenuous response by Western governments is needed.
Former Finnish president Sauli Niinisto has suggested that the EU needs its own pan-European intelligence agency to help countries fend off threats, saboteurs and espionage. At the very least, the US and Europe should respond to Russian hybrid warfare by removing the shackles from Ukraine, allowing it to repel the Russian invaders from its territory.
From the bookshelf: ‘Engaging North Korea’
North Korea is again in the global spotlight. By providing first munitions and now troops to support Russia, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has expanded the scope of the Ukraine conflict while driving its relations with the West to a new low. And, by aligning with Russia, sidelining long-time patron China and abandoning its goal of unification with South Korea, North Korea has escalated tensions in Northeast Asia.
The last time the hermit kingdom was this visible was in June 2018, when its leader, Kim Jong Un, met US president Donald Trump at a summit held in Singapore amid cautious optimism that North Korea might gradually open up to the West. But in a follow-up summit in Hanoi in 2019, the gaping differences between the two parties became clear and negotiations collapsed.
The Biden administration adopted a wait-and-see policy, paying little attention to North Korea. Most foreign missions in Pyongyang closed during the Covid-19 pandemic and have not reopened.
In 2022, however, Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine dealt the North Korea a fresh hand. With rapidly depleting military resources, Moscow turned to Pyongyang, which in 2023 began exporting artillery shells and weapons to Russia, in return receiving much-needed food, raw materials and weapons parts.
In January this year, Pyongyang relinquished its constitutional commitment to Korean unification and said it would consider the South to be its principal enemy. To underline the shift, in October North Korea blew up parts of two roads connecting it to the South. Munitions exports to Russia have accelerated, and now Pyongyang has sent troops to fight for Russia in Ukraine.
In Engaging North Korea, 12 international experts put their heads together to review experience in relations with North Korea and provide pointers on how to deal with it in the future. The contributors include leading Korea experts from Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the US and Vietnam, a director of humanitarian aid and a Swedish diplomatic envoy. The two last-mentioned have hands-on experience working inside North Korea.
The authors start from the widely divergent interests behind the six-party talks, which sought to address North Korea’s nuclear program and broke down in 2009. The United States, Japan and South Korea want denuclearization, North Korea wants to keep its nuclear capabilities and have economic sanctions lifted, while China and North Korea have a special relationship based on inter-party cooperation. Japan must also deal with the domestically sensitive issue of citizens abducted by North Korean agents. The sixth party in the talks was Russia.
Singaporean and Vietnamese viewpoints are also discussed in the book, as either country may be called on to facilitate future negotiations. Should the North Korea ever consider opening its economy, Vietnam might serve as a model. With the world focusing on geopolitics, the authors remind us of North Korea’s deep humanitarian crisis. Given the range of interlinked issues, the book highlights the need to deal with North Kora comprehensively rather than piecemeal.
A fascinating chapter reviews the special role played by Sweden in keeping the door to North Korea ajar, though sometimes only minimally. It was the first Western country to recognise North Korea, in 1973. In 1975 it set up an embassy that it has kept open, although since the Covid-19 outbreak staffed entirely with North Korean nationals.
In the early 1990s, after a change of government, Stockholm was about to shut its embassy when the US asked it to represent it as a diplomatic protecting power—a representative. Washington lacked official relations with Pyongyang and wanted Sweden to serve as a neutral go-between. Sweden kept the embassy open and now serves as the protecting power for Australia, Canada, Germany and the US. It also represents several other countries in consular matters.
Engaging with North Korea is a daunting task but one that is essential for world peace. The authors liken it to the Sisyphean challenge of repeatedly pushing a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down again, but they consider the chances of success greater if countries work ‘collectively, patiently and purposefully’. They propose doing this through informal working groups rather than showy summits. However, North Korea’s recent policy shifts make even this unlikely, at least in the short term.
Its playbook consists of bluster, threats and unpredictability, which its leaders have used ruthlessly to gain strategic advantage. However, behind the enigmatic facade there is a method, usually opportunistic, to North Korea’s unpredictability.
Frustrated at being ignored by the Biden administration, North Korea predictably undertook missile launches in September and October in the run-up to the US presidential elections. We should remember that its warming relations with Russia are transactional and do not change the reality that China is North Korea’s closest neighbour and only major trading partner.
With North Korea sending soldiers to support Russia and with tensions on the Korean Peninsula at a new high, the search is on for fresh ways to deal with the hermit kingdom. Engaging North Korea is essential reading for diplomats and security specialists, especially those handling Northeast Asia and Russia’s war on Ukraine.
War risks from nuclear power plants? Just look at Zaporizhzhia
Proposals for nuclear power in Australia will have to take national security risks into account.
As evidenced in an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report released in September, Russia’s occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine continues to create high risk of a nuclear disaster. In considering future conflicts, no one can safely assume that an enemy will avoid targeting nuclear power stations.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s repeated threats to use nuclear weapons and new nuclear doctrine are alarming. But, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned at the United Nations on 25 September, the immediate nuclear risk is at Zaporizhzhia.
The Zaporizhzhia plant has been on or near the frontline since the Russian invasion in February 2022, exposed to nearby combat and, since Russian seizure in March 2022, dangerous mismanagement. There is significant risk of an accidental or intentional nuclear incident at the plant.
It is no longer tenable to argue that nuclear power plants are protected in conflicts by taboo. This must be considered as the Australian Liberal-National opposition proposes building seven major nuclear power plants and two small modular reactors in Australia.
The IAEA, the global nuclear watchdog, has been clear on the risks associated with the Zaporizhzhia plant. As established in the most recent and earlier reports, Russia’s actions during the conflict have either partially or fully compromised all seven of the IAEA’s ‘indispensable pillars’ of nuclear security. Notably, this framework was developed only in response to the invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s unprecedented wartime targeting and occupation of nuclear facilities.
Physical integrity (Pillar 1) and safety and security systems (Pillar 2) have been compromised by damage to the plant from direct attacks and nearby combat. The plant was first shelled in March 2022 when Russia seized control. More recently, on 27 June, an external radiation monitoring system 16km away was destroyed by shelling—which also compromised radiation monitoring and emergency preparedness (Pillar 6).
Drone strikes targeted the plant in April and July, and IAEA monitoring teams at the plant reported nearby explosions as recently as September. In August, fires at the plant coincided with the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk, with large amounts of smoke billowing from a cooling tower.
In 2023, Russia conducted unauthorised structural changes and Russian forces even stored explosives in proximity to a nuclear reactor. Additionally, anti-personnel mines were also laid between the plant’s inner and outer fences in 2022, and more mines were laid in January 2024.
The capacity of operating staff, (Pillar 3) has been affected by the treatment of Ukrainian employees at the plant, including physical violence and torture, some fatal, by occupying Russian military and security forces. Workers have also been denied access to critical security systems and exposed to high stress. The chain of command has become unclear, resulting in conflicting messages to workers.
Shelling and other damage to the nearby city of Enerhodar has left workers and their families in poor living conditions, intermittently without power or fresh water supply. By early 2024, Ukrainian employees were reportedly no longer permitted at the facility. It is now operating with a personnel shortage: the plant has about 5000 workers, down from the pre-war peak of 11,000. In May, remaining staff were reporting severe psychological stress.
Russia has also weakened the facility’s necessary off-site power supply (Pillar 4). Since Russia tried to connect it to the Russian energy grid, the plant has lost three 750kV power lines and five of its 330kV backup power lines. It now operates with one of each and has suffered eight complete losses of off-site power. External power supply is essential to secure operation of the plant and continued operation of safety systems. In early 2024, the plant went 23 consecutive days without a backup connection.
As for Pillar 5 (an uninterrupted supply chain), the IAEA has reported the plant’s fragile logistics for spare or replacement parts and safety equipment. This is in part due to reliance on equipment from Western suppliers. Pillar 7, the requirement for reliable communications, has been compromised by the limitations on communication between the plant and the Ukrainian energy grid operator.
Additional threats have come from the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in June 2023, an event that is widely attributed to Russia. This reduced water supply to the Zaporizhzhia plant for cooling reactors and spent fuel.
Russia has targeted other Ukrainian nuclear facilities, too. The Institute of Physics and Technology in Kharkiv, which housed a small experimental reactor, was destroyed from the air in March 2022. Moscow has also continually spread disinformation and stoked nuclear fears, most recently regarding the security of the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant after the Ukrainian advance into the region.
This is a lesson on the vulnerability of nuclear infrastructure during a conflict. Political leaders and policymakers must pay attention to it as they consider domestic energy policy.
Ukraine-style naval attack drones present challenges, but they are not revolutionary
Many believe attacks on Russian warships by Ukrainian forces using uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) represent a fundamental shift in warfare at sea. Hugh White has argued that ‘surface ships these days are just inherently very vulnerable’ and that the drone attacks prove plans for the Royal Australian Navy are on the wrong track.
Retired US Navy admiral James Stavridis remarked that the attacks are a seminal moment in military history, like Agincourt or Pearl Harbor. ‘As cheap drones go to sea in serious numbers, expensive manned surface warships will be threatened.’
Claims about the novelty and impact of these small attack drones miss the wider picture. Asymmetric threats to major surface combatants are not new. The arms race between such threats and the ability of major warships to counter them is a recurrent theme of modern naval history.
In 1914 Admiral Percy Scott infamously argued that submarines had rendered major surface combatants redundant. Following World War II, airpower enthusiasts were so confident in their technology that some claimed that ‘by the inexorable logic of military progress, the navy as a separate entity will cease to exist’. Similar concerns over the vulnerability of surface combatants shaped debates in the 1970s, and have recurred with China’s development of A2AD technologies.
Despite these threats, surface combatants have remained essential to modern naval power, and will continue to be as long as we need to make use of the sea. This does not mean new technology like these USVs is not significant. Instead, it focuses attention on how navies should adapt and respond.
It’s useful to look back at the case study of the earliest of the modern asymmetric threats to surface combatants, namely torpedo boats. Until the middle of the 19th century the only effective counter to a major enemy warship was a ship of your own of equal size and strength. This changed dramatically in the 1870s due to the invention of the Whitehead torpedo and its integration into new fast launches—the first torpedo boats. Suddenly, the largest battleship could be sunk by the most insignificant craft.
As today, the potential of this asymmetric technology was apparent to all, and it left major navies with two key questions. The first was how to counter this technology and protect major warships. The second was how to adapt a technology that seemed suited to coastal states seeking sea denial to further their strategic purposes. These are the same challenges currently facing blue water navies over small attack USV technology.
There were numerous different responses from major navies to the torpedo boat threat. The most significant and successful in the short term was the proliferation of smaller calibre quick firing artillery which could engage the fast-moving torpedo boats. It took time for this to roll out across major surface combatants, but within a decade this was seen as offering a good degree of protection for fleets operating in the littorals. The other natural approach to any new technological challenge is to attempt to adapt that technology to provide a symmetrical capability. This saw the development of fast small craft described as torpedo boat destroyers which rapidly became an essential component of any fleet, screening the heavy vessels against attack.
We are already seeing a similar process in response to threats from fast inshore attack craft (FIAC), including drones. This has been under development for over 20 years, dating back to attack on the USS Cole. The adaption of the close-in weapon system to target surface threats, and development of lightweight missiles such as the Marlet provide significant protection. There remain questions over the degree to which drones, especially ‘swarming’ drones, may be able to overwhelm such defences, but this approach is set to be the foundation of short-term responses.
We are also beginning to see ideas mirroring the second response to torpedo boats. The US Navy is one of a number that have tentatively suggested that USVs might be able to escort larger crewed vessels operating inshore, protecting against threats such as FIAC. While this process is frequently presented as a radically new development in crewed/uncrewed teaming, it follows a long history of adopting and adapting a threatening technology to provide a symmetrical capability.
Another major response to the development of torpedo boats was a focus on harbour defence. The threat posed by a torpedo boat, or later a submarine, getting among an anchored fleet was obvious, and navies devoted huge resources to protecting anchorages. Despite this, there were major issues at the beginning of both world wars.
The potential for USVs and UUVs to operate in a similar way is obvious, as exemplified by Ukraine’s attacks on Sevastopol. So far there has been limited public discussion of the security of Western naval bases against such attacks, but it’s likely that this issue will need to be addressed.
The question of how to exploit torpedo boat technology proved an even greater challenge for 19th century navies than how to counter it. Like the small USVs of today, torpedo boats lacked the range or seaworthiness to fit into the existing concept of operations for a blue water navy. One innovative approach was the development of an early mothership, HMS Hecla, designed to carry torpedo boats into theatre where they could then support the fleet in confined waters.
This approach may have proved highly effective for a short period, but as technology developed the focus shifted onto larger ocean-going torpedo boats. These continued to grow, largely due to range and seakeeping issues, until they merged with the torpedo boat destroyers designed to counter them. This birth of the modern destroyer is a classic example of how navies adopt and adapt disruptive or asymmetric technologies. However, in doing so they tend to grow in size, complexity and cost, undermining elements of their advantage.
There is an irony in the fact that the antecedents of today’s major surface combatants that are derided as being obsolete were the product of a previous round of asymmetric innovation that were themselves supposed to drive major surface combatants from the seas. It is too early to tell if we will see similar trends in the development of attack drone style USVs and UUVs, but it seems far more likely that these will evolve into the surface combatants of the future than rendering surface combatants obsolete.
Ukraine-style naval attack drones present challenges, but they are not revolutionary
Many believe attacks on Russian warships by Ukrainian forces using uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) represent a fundamental shift in warfare at sea. Hugh White has argued that ‘surface ships these days are just inherently very vulnerable’ and that the drone attacks prove plans for the Royal Australian Navy are on the wrong track.
Retired US Navy admiral James Stavridis remarked that the attacks are a seminal moment in military history, like Agincourt or Pearl Harbor. ‘As cheap drones go to sea in serious numbers, expensive manned surface warships will be threatened.’
Claims about the novelty and impact of these small attack drones miss the wider picture. Asymmetric threats to major surface combatants are not new. The arms race between such threats and the ability of major warships to counter them is a recurrent theme of modern naval history.
In 1914 Admiral Percy Scott infamously argued that submarines had rendered major surface combatants redundant. Following World War II, airpower enthusiasts were so confident in their technology that some claimed that ‘by the inexorable logic of military progress, the navy as a separate entity will cease to exist’. Similar concerns over the vulnerability of surface combatants shaped debates in the 1970s, and have recurred with China’s development of A2AD technologies.
Despite these threats, surface combatants have remained essential to modern naval power, and will continue to be as long as we need to make use of the sea. This does not mean new technology like these USVs is not significant. Instead, it focuses attention on how navies should adapt and respond.
It’s useful to look back at the case study of the earliest of the modern asymmetric threats to surface combatants, namely torpedo boats. Until the middle of the 19th century the only effective counter to a major enemy warship was a ship of your own of equal size and strength. This changed dramatically in the 1870s due to the invention of the Whitehead torpedo and its integration into new fast launches—the first torpedo boats. Suddenly, the largest battleship could be sunk by the most insignificant craft.
As today, the potential of this asymmetric technology was apparent to all, and it left major navies with two key questions. The first was how to counter this technology and protect major warships. The second was how to adapt a technology that seemed suited to coastal states seeking sea denial to further their strategic purposes. These are the same challenges currently facing blue water navies over small attack USV technology.
There were numerous different responses from major navies to the torpedo boat threat. The most significant and successful in the short term was the proliferation of smaller calibre quick firing artillery which could engage the fast-moving torpedo boats. It took time for this to roll out across major surface combatants, but within a decade this was seen as offering a good degree of protection for fleets operating in the littorals. The other natural approach to any new technological challenge is to attempt to adapt that technology to provide a symmetrical capability. This saw the development of fast small craft described as torpedo boat destroyers which rapidly became an essential component of any fleet, screening the heavy vessels against attack.
We are already seeing a similar process in response to threats from fast inshore attack craft (FIAC), including drones. This has been under development for over 20 years, dating back to attack on the USS Cole. The adaption of the close-in weapon system to target surface threats, and development of lightweight missiles such as the Marlet provide significant protection. There remain questions over the degree to which drones, especially ‘swarming’ drones, may be able to overwhelm such defences, but this approach is set to be the foundation of short-term responses.
We are also beginning to see ideas mirroring the second response to torpedo boats. The US Navy is one of a number that have tentatively suggested that USVs might be able to escort larger crewed vessels operating inshore, protecting against threats such as FIAC. While this process is frequently presented as a radically new development in crewed/uncrewed teaming, it follows a long history of adopting and adapting a threatening technology to provide a symmetrical capability.
Another major response to the development of torpedo boats was a focus on harbour defence. The threat posed by a torpedo boat, or later a submarine, getting among an anchored fleet was obvious, and navies devoted huge resources to protecting anchorages. Despite this, there were major issues at the beginning of both world wars.
The potential for USVs and UUVs to operate in a similar way is obvious, as exemplified by Ukraine’s attacks on Sevastopol. So far there has been limited public discussion of the security of Western naval bases against such attacks, but it’s likely that this issue will need to be addressed.
The question of how to exploit torpedo boat technology proved an even greater challenge for 19th century navies than how to counter it. Like the small USVs of today, torpedo boats lacked the range or seaworthiness to fit into the existing concept of operations for a blue water navy. One innovative approach was the development of an early mothership, HMS Hecla, designed to carry torpedo boats into theatre where they could then support the fleet in confined waters.
This approach may have proved highly effective for a short period, but as technology developed the focus shifted onto larger ocean-going torpedo boats. These continued to grow, largely due to range and seakeeping issues, until they merged with the torpedo boat destroyers designed to counter them. This birth of the modern destroyer is a classic example of how navies adopt and adapt disruptive or asymmetric technologies. However, in doing so they tend to grow in size, complexity and cost, undermining elements of their advantage.
There is an irony in the fact that the antecedents of today’s major surface combatants that are derided as being obsolete were the product of a previous round of asymmetric innovation that were themselves supposed to drive major surface combatants from the seas. It is too early to tell if we will see similar trends in the development of attack drone style USVs and UUVs, but it seems far more likely that these will evolve into the surface combatants of the future than rendering surface combatants obsolete.
Ukraine’s ambassador: we need more help from Australia
On the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of his country, Ambassador Vasyl Myroshnychenko has delivered a blunt and heartfelt message to Australia—Ukraine is fighting our war.
And it needs more help from Australia and like minded countries in the front line of a conflict between democracies and autocracies.
Myroshnychenko tells the National Press Club in Canberra today that Russia, China, Europe, NATO, and the Five Eyes nations thought Ukraine would be defeated in three weeks, ‘maybe five if we were as lucky.’
Two years later Ukraine is still fighting hard. ‘But,’ he asks, ‘do you want to see this war drag on for another year? Another two years? Longer? Do you want Russia to win? Is that acceptable to you?’
Days after President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed that 31,000 Ukrainian service personnel had died in the war so far, Myroshnychenko asks: ‘How many Ukrainian soldiers killed in action can the world accept? How many Ukrainian civilian deaths are too many, when they are not accidents, but deliberately targeted by Russian precision-guided missiles and drones? How much civilian infrastructure deliberately destroyed by Russia is too much?’
In short, he asks, ‘Is there a limit that liberal democracies, including Australia, will place on Russia’s unprovoked, illegal and immoral war of territorial annexation against Ukraine? Or is there no limit? How does this war end? And when?’
Zelenskyy has done a remarkable job of holding the country together and galvanising a heroic defence of the nation.
‘Australia has certainly responded to President Zelenskyy, and to the desperate defence of Ukraine, in a very meaningful and practical way. Ukraine’s front-line troops and Ukraine’s civilians clearly know exactly what Australia has given them. They are deeply grateful and will never forget Australia. The defence of Ukraine has bi-partisan support in the Australian Parliament. Ukraine needs it.
‘The Bushmasters, the artillery, the lightweight drones, the coal delivery, and all the other things make a dramatic difference. They save lives, they prevent casualties, they enable an effective defence. Australia’s contributions, when combined with everyone else’s, are vital.’
But that is not enough assistance to create the level of firepower and combat force Ukraine needs to reverse Russia’s gains and gains and end the war. Or to protect Ukraine’s civilians from Russian missiles and drones.
‘Ukraine’s people are fighting hard, but they do not have enough military, humanitarian assistance and reconstruction support to win, and thus to end this war,’ the ambassador says.
‘We have barely enough assistance. We have drip-fed and ad hoc one-off support contributions sufficient to hang on and to keep going. But is that acceptable? For how many years should this war drag on?’
‘We need of everything,’ Myroshnychenko says. ‘We need enough to end this war and to defeat Russia’s invasion. “Hanging on” is not enough.’
Russia thinks it can win and does not want to stop fighting. Ukraine has a right to its sovereignty, independence, self-defence and national security, ‘so we will not stop fighting,’ he says.
Ukraine has shown that its soldiers can match and over-match Russian military forces at sea and on land, they can effectively employ foreign military equipment and humanitarian support.
Nothing is squandered and Ukraine’s people have proven optimistic and resilient in the face of an existential threat not only to their nation but also to the international rules-based order.
‘Let us show you that we can do more, if you provide us with more,’ Myroshnychenko says.
‘Ukraine is not asking Australia, or anyone else, to send combat troops to fight for us; we can fight for ourselves.
‘But we cannot fight empty-handed. We need more, so that we can do more. We want the war to end swiftly, we do not want year after year of a Russia versus Ukraine meat-grinder.
Ukraine wants an endgame, he says, ‘and we know that is what liberal democracies want: the UN Charter to prevail, sovereign borders to be respected, no wars of territorial annexation, global security stability, international agreements to be upheld, and the global economy normalised.’
Ukraine wants its borders, its freedom, and its sovereignty restored, swiftly and irreversibly.
Australia can be more involved with like-minded nations providing tanks, air power, air defences and other equipment.
Myroshnychenko says Ukraine needs to be relieved as much as possible of the humanitarian burden to protect, nurture, and support the civilian community so it can focus on its military objectives. It eeds more humanitarian assistance, energy sources especially coal, public utility repairs, and reconstruction support. We need it now. Australia can contribute more.
He says his country needs to return to peacetime full-functionality as fast as possible. Removing Russian landmines, rebuilding agricultural and industrial capacity, restoring energy reticulation and lines of communication, and repairing war damage are all lines of effort that Australian construction, commerce, and industry are very good at. ‘We cannot wait for the war to end before commencing this work.’
‘In this regard Ukraine is deeply grateful for the continued vocal, practical, and precise support of Andrew and Nicola Forrest, and their Minderoo Foundation. They have demonstrated that supporting Ukraine’s defence and reconstruction is a whole-of-community enterprise. There is a role for private sector industry, business and philanthropy, not just for government.’
Ukraine needs an avalanche of international support, but aid is arriving in ad hoc pockets and just in time. ‘We need so much international support we can barely absorb it. We need “push” logistics, not “pull” logistics.’
‘Our artillery guns and mortars are falling silent for want of ammunition at the gun lines. We don’t have enough missiles for our target list. We don’t have enough helicopters to retrieve our front-line casualties and get them to combat surgical hospitals.’
Ukraine needs its allies to shift into overdrive, from a calculated drawing down of surplus war-stocks to a determined wartime production footing. ‘Ammunition and missile production lines that remain at low-rate production, working 38-hour 4-day weeks, is not where we need to be in 2024.’
Ukraine’s allies need to step up quickly to a wartime tempo in ammunition, missile, armoured vehicle, and drone assembly. ‘We need high-rate production, we need high-throughput explosive and propellant supply chains, and we need them now.’
Australia can contribute more to the propellant and explosives supply chain effort, Myroshnychenko says.
More than all these things is the need for ‘thought leadership’, he says. ‘Australia is very good at this, too. Ukraine needs innovative, creative, effective ways to generate a fast, slick military and humanitarian supply chain into Ukraine; a supply chain without bottlenecks.’
Australia should remain a member of the enthusiastic network of liberal democracies that will become the ‘arsenal of democracy’ for Ukraine, he says.
Contributions to Ukraine’s defence are an investment in the defence of the international rules-based order, the primacy of the UN Charter, the entitlement of a law-abiding nation to rely on its sovereignty and its sovereign borders and the freedom from armed aggression. ‘It is a direct resistance to the cynical perversion of the UN Security Council by one of its permanent members.’
Myroshnychenko says Ukraine is fighting on behalf of Australia. ‘Every Ukrainian wants to have what every Australian has, what we used to have. Just like you, we want to take our kids bush walking or camping over the weekend, but our countryside is deliberately and indiscriminately littered with unmarked Russian minefields now. Our farmers are just like your farmers: they want to get a fair price for the food and fibre they produce, and not be concerned about unexploded ordnance or transport chains attacked by military forces, which in many cases have destroyed their businesses.
‘Parents want to read a bedtime story to their kids but instead rush to winter bomb shelters when the air raid sirens sound.
‘Grandparents want to babysit for their grandchildren, instead of going to their funerals because Russians used a missile to deliberately strike a school. Our young lads want to go to football training and go out for beer on a Friday night, but they have to be in the trenches under Russian shelling.’
Ukrainian women and men on the front line are giving up their tomorrows right now too, he says, for the same values and principles as those for which Australians died: sovereignty, democracy, and freedom from armed coercion. ‘Ukraine will fight and die for those values and principles, but we cannot do it alone. We need Australia’s help, and that of all other like minded nations.
‘Ukrainians realise that our lives will never be the same as they were before the 24th of February 2022. But we will do everything possible to make sure that the next generation lives in peace and security, on its own land, without having to die for the privilege.
‘Ukrainians hope you will be able to help to a greater degree. We have already accepted the absolute requirement to set aside any desire for revenge. But we cannot settle for anything less than a just, sovereign, and irreversible peace. Surely that’s very Australian?’
Tucker Carlson, Vladimir Putin and the pernicious myth of the free market of ideas
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s interview this month with Russian President Vladimir Putin showcased a seductive but dangerous myth.
Carlson got the reaction he deserved from most mainstream foreign affairs commentators: ridicule at his Dorothy Dixers to a master manipulator of information and narrative. Over two hours, Putin systematically hit his talking points aimed at turning MAGA supporters and similarly disgruntled European voters against Western support for Ukraine.
Many of Carlson’s fellow populist conservatives, meanwhile, backed him on the grounds that the Western public will be better informed, and hence better able to judge their governments’ policies on Russia and Ukraine, if we hear from all sides. By letting Putin talk freely, they argued, Carlson filled in a piece of the picture that was missing. Audiences could then judge for themselves.
If it were just one sacked cable host fawning before a dictator, it wouldn’t be worth all the talk. But the pernicious myth from which the episode drew its strength has a much wider base. It is the so-called free market of ideas, whereby we encourage all points of view into the digital town square and let them thrash it out according to the natural laws of competition. Good ideas will flourish, and bad ones will sink.
Elon Musk cites the free marketplace, or what he terms ‘ free speech absolutism’, as the ostensible grounds for gutting content moderation on Twitter, now X—which is also Carlson’s publishing platform of choice. The idea seems to have lingering appeal in the laissez-faire sections of Silicon Valley, notwithstanding hesitant steps the big platforms have made towards better moderation, not all of which have been sustained. It’s also popular among political conservatives angry at what they believe is left-wing bias across major platforms, from news media to Facebook, which they argue should be hosting free speech.
But the wrongheadedness of this idea needs to be called out. The number one reason it’s dangerous is that the creators of information are not all equal players on a level field. Big producers of content, with the resources to shape the information environment through their superior skill, scale and tools, have disproportionate influence. Information in a globally connected environment can be pushed, aggregated and manipulated by the powerful operators.
And those who have no ethics have a disproportionate malign influence by not just flooding the space but polluting and corrupting it. That includes Russian troll farms, China’s ‘spamouflage’ networks and propagandist state television networks, though it also includes well-organised non-state movements that push often hateful political views using a keen understanding of algorithms to influence, shape and disrupt debates, often aggressively. This can create fear, encourage silence and effectively censor online users with whose views they disagree.
Nor are Western commercial outlets blameless; there’s a reason close to four in 10 Americans believe or suspect Joe Biden didn’t win the 2020 election fair and square, according to reliable polls.
Powerful players can make bad ideas stick more effectively than real people talking about real things.
Second, we don’t receive ideas rationally and based on their quality—with quality defined as the honest, accurate and impartial application of facts to reach some insight. Humans are frequently irrational, distracted, biased, poorly informed and lacking in context. And we’re therefore highly vulnerable to manipulation.
All markets can be distorted but a marketplace of ideas particularly so because an idea is not just any product. It’s a crackle of electricity between neurons that fixes pathways based on perceptions of facts in a new logical string—a process even cognitive science doesn’t properly understand.
Third, markets only work when there are rules and norms of exchange. We invent rules and norms because not everyone does the right thing all the time—and this applies to ideas as much as it does to road laws and consumer protection legislation for cars.
A malign and well-resourced media manipulator walking into a utopian paradise full of well-intentioned, truthful people championing good ideas, eschewing bad ones and claiming perfect common sense—well that’s just going to be carnage. And that’s what we had with Carlson’s interview with Putin. The wolf ate the baby rabbit.
Plenty of legitimate entities have outsized power in the information environment—governments, big companies, the news media and expert bodies. But they are subject to standards and expectations that deter them from lying outright and impose reputational consequences if they do.
Elected governments face a free press doing the job that Carlson so woefully failed to do, as well as opposition parties. For corporations, we have watchdogs to crack down on false advertising. For big institutions, we have various ethics and integrity bodies. We have, in other words, some rules. We have checks and balances that intervene in the market.
A few days after the Moscow interview, Carlson justified his approach by saying he didn’t want to ask all the questions that other journalists would ask. He wanted to give the Russian dictator the most possible time to express whatever he wanted to express.
‘I want to hear Vladimir Putin talk so that people in my country can assess what’s happening,’ Carlson told the World Government Summit in Dubai. And in a separate spiel he urged his followers to watch the interview because ‘you should know as much as you can and then, like a free citizen and not a slave, you can decide for yourself’.
And it’s having an effect, as the Wall Street Journal reported last week from the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, the premier organisation representing Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. A 35-year-old attendee, Kristin Bocanegra, told the Journal: ‘Putin in the Tucker interview was really-eye opening. We got to hear his side, his motives. He’s like a teacher. We’re told by the media that Russia is really bad, but young people today are doing our own research, not just believing what we’re being told.’
Pat O’Brien, 67, told the same reporter: ‘The war is the fault of the US. We have no business encouraging Ukraine to join NATO. That’s what triggered this whole thing.’ The Journal article made it clear this was a prevailing view at CPAC.
Finding solutions can seem overwhelming—and there are no single answers—but that can’t put us off.
First, let’s harness the fact that most people don’t want to live in a world where they can’t trust anything anymore. We can’t become paralysed by the growing view that we are coalescing in echo chambers of political polarisation, plagued by cynicism and unable to agree on common sets of facts to hold reasonable debates in good faith. Let’s move on from that.
Broadly speaking—and not everyone will love hearing this—the collective needs to intervene more heavily. We need to do so both in the consumption and the production of ideas.
On the consumption side, we must strengthen critical thinking across audiences, empowering individuals to wrestle with, and critically examine, the ideas they come across. That means education, civics, digital literacy, starting from birth and continuing through life. Governments tend to put this work in the too-hard basket because it spans many portfolios but they need to accept that it’s their job. Finland is a rare country that has done so, with counter-misinformation classes in schools that help it routinely rank as the number one country in Europe for resilience against misinformation.
The production and transmission sides are trickier because defining good and bad ideas is subjective. People are entitled to argue that military aid to Ukraine could be better spent at home. Or that supporting Ukraine is forestalling, at the cost of Ukrainian lives, a negotiated end that is inevitable.
Trying to measure the utility of an idea based on whether it improves or diminishes a society depends on your definition of a good society. But we can ask, is it fact-based? Is it transparent about its origins. How is it being shared between people? Are the intentions of the person sharing the idea clear? Is the idea at least aimed at improving the well-being of a society even if we might disagree with it?
We should stop tolerating lies. Democracies need to be better than other political systems that ingrain and accept manipulation. And at the moment, we’re not always setting much of an example. We should mark down and punish politicians and institutions that lie and bend reality, at the ballot box, with our wallets or using whatever other levers we have.
This still leaves plenty of room for rhetoricians to debate issues, but we can’t let that be a race to the bottom. Big players need to be more accountable.
The aim is not to neutralise the power of all large actors in the information environment. While connectivity has been wonderfully democratising, we’re not all experts on everything, and we need trusted institutions to give us authoritative information, whether governments, the news media, medical bodies or indeed a proven large language model.
In short, this is an unashamed argument for a heavier hand of the collective to protect our information environment and, therefore, the individual. In democracies, that should include the state, which should support public interest journalism and could even find ways to give audiences incentives to consume more diverse media.
Where we don’t want governments making judgements about fact and truth, they should create independent watchdog agencies and fund civil society groups like fact-checkers that can earn and keep the trust of the public. Taiwan, bombarded by Beijing’s disinformation, is a role model for supporting civil society.
Companies that lie or—in the case of digital platforms—fail to stop the pollution of the information environment should face pressure from public advocacy organisations that encourage boycotts. If we’re worried, as we should be, about X as a platform, then our concern about a platform like TikTok, which is massively influential with our children and is subject to control by the Chinese Communist Party, should be an order of magnitude greater.
Finally, the collective effort should extend globally. Japan to its credit elevated fighting disinformation to a top priority when it hosted the G7 last year. This should be continued and extended across all democratic multilateral groups.
Cleaning up the information environment should be an election issue, rather than just assuming a free market will sort it out for us. The aim must be to allow healthy competition without a free-for-all environment that is vulnerable to monopolies and manipulation. One person’s moderation will always be another’s censorship, but we can’t let that intimidate us. We need to ignore the slippery slope arguments on the right and the left. We need to do the hard work.
Ukraine: why we must stay the course
On 24 February, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin began his war of subjugation and extinguishment against Ukraine. He was not alone in thinking it would be a quick victory. He was certain he had the measure of ‘the West’, believing it to be irresolute, stricken with moral turpitude and in terminal decline. It would, he thought, acquiesce to another burst of resurgent Russian imperialism, as it had in 2008, when Russian forces assaulted Georgia, and in 2014, when Russia illegally occupied eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea.
Two years later, with continuing—but just sufficient and sometimes wobbly—support from the West, Ukraine has proven Putin and the sceptics wrong, albeit at enormous cost. No-one knows exactly how many Ukrainians have been killed in battle, massacred in their homes, or have died when Russia has plunged its missiles into non-military targets in deliberate breach of the law of armed conflict. Ukraine’s infrastructure and economy have been battered and its environment laid waste. The UN assesses that more than 10 million of Ukraine’s 42 million people have been displaced within and outside the country.
Conservative estimates put Russian losses at no fewer than 315,000 dead and wounded. Yet Russian forces occupy around 18% of Ukraine’s territory within the borders that were internationally recognised, including by Russia, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Russia twice had guaranteed the integrity of those borders and foresworn the threat or use of military force or economic coercion to undermine Ukraine’s political and territorial sovereignty, in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and the 1997 bilateral treaty on friendship and co-operation.
So much for the Kremlin’s solemn undertakings, past and future.
As Ukrainians keep dying in defence of their independence and more Russian lives are sacrificed to a revanchist’s obsessive nostalgia for an unrecoverable imperial glory, Australia—which already has contributed $960 million worth of direct and indirect military and financial support—must stay the course at Ukraine’s side. We should return our ambassador to Kyiv. Ukraine should have first option when we dispose of potentially useful military platforms and equipment.
Of course, the government must balance other demands, like the appalling conflict in Gaza, the needs and challenges of our immediate region, and the daily distractions of fractious democracy. But the war in Ukraine has dimensions that touch our core interests in upholding the rule of law and the resilience of our democracy.
Putin’s rationalisation of his war of choice is baseless, as Professor Timothy Snyder demonstrated in his dissection of the recent Tucker Carlson interview. We should give no credence to the Kremlin’s shape-shifting justifications for unleashing war in Europe. These have rambled across preventing ‘genocide’ against ethnic Russians in the Donbas region, through ‘denazification’ and ‘demilitarisation’ of Ukraine, to defending Russia’s unique status as a morally superior ‘civilisation’—the keeper and defender of ‘traditional’ values against Western woke-ness.
The Russian journalist, Mikhail Zygar, thoughtfully argues that the latter theme is deliberate Russian statecraft, aimed not just at a domestic audience but also seeking common cause with ‘insurgent right-wing politicians’ who are threatening mainstream leaders in countries that have been key in isolating Russia. This is a warning we ignore at great risk to the health of our own democracies, even in distant Australia.
Russian propaganda is adept at working with the grain of Western societies to sow disharmony and distrust and to fertilise suspicion about the intent and integrity of our own governments. This demobilisation of public sentiment serves the Kremlin’s cause. We must resist and arm ourselves to tackle this creeping challenge before it takes firmer hold. A good starting point would be to resuscitate ailing Russian language and associated studies at our universities, to boost ‘Russia literacy’ and comprehension of a country which remains a significant player in the world and matters to countries that matter to us. Perhaps we could even add a dose of Ukrainian studies for good measure.
The Kremlin had championed its war of aggression in Ukraine as the rightful recovery of historical lands that were part of Russia’s post-Soviet birthright. Yet now it casts this as an existential battle against the combined forces of NATO and the West that, Putin preposterously asserts, seek nothing less than the physical dismemberment of Russia. It patently is lost on the Kremlin and its strategists that it is Russia’s own policies and actions that have worsened Russia’s strategic position, not least by driving Sweden and Finland to overturn decades of armed neutrality and seek NATO membership. This simple truth ought to neutralise the addled furphy of ‘NATO expansion’ routinely peddled by Putin’s propagandists and their acolytes around the world, including, regrettably, in Australia.
The crux remains Putin’s assertion in his July 2021 essay that Ukraine has no real historical claim to independent existence. His disregard of modern history and the rule of law—including resolutions of the UN Security Council, of which Russia is a permanent member—proves Putin is committed to a long game, regardless of the ebb and flow on the battlefield. That is also evident in his making common cause with two objects of UN Security Council sanctions, North Korea and Iran, for the supply of munitions, drones, and other military materiel to support Russia’s lawless war. Why is this not cause to reject the Kremlin’s narrative and its claim to any kind of moral superiority?
Our political culture inclines us to want to solve problems that sometimes can only be managed over the long term, while weathering the short-term vicissitudes of domestic electoral cycles. Such is the challenge we face with Putinist Russia. For longer than we have comprehended, the Kremlin has believed it is at war with ‘the West’, including Australia. Putin declared as much in his seminal speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007—coincidentally, the same event at which Yuliya Navalnaya last week denounced the Kremlin’s slow-motion murder of her husband, oppositionist Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison camp on 16 February.
Putin has already ruled Russia for the equivalent of eight Australian parliamentary terms. The usual chicanery that marks Russian presidential elections means he will retain his throne this March for another six years and, health permitting, doubtless will run again and be re-‘elected’ in 2030 for six more. That totals 12 Australian parliamentary terms. Regardless of his own mortality, the highly centralised system of rule which Putin has refined over the last 24 years means ‘Putinism’ will persist.
So Australia and our similarly minded partners should understand that we must contend for at least another generation with a crucial member of the UN Security Council, of APEC, and of the G20 which, as my former UK colleague in Moscow, Sir Laurie Bristow, put it, is possessed of an ideology ‘constructed on a heady mix of entitlement and victimhood’ born of the USSR’s sacrifices in World War II and the attendant claim to ‘a buffer zone in central and eastern Europe after 1945’.
Eight years ago, I asked a prominent Russian opposition politician in Moscow how to respond to the Kremlin’s increasingly confrontational approach to its opponents and critics at home and abroad. His reply was: ‘First, put your own house in order; you were the most use to us when you were something we could aspire to become. Second, speak truth to power; do not shun the hard conversations. Third, if you do not back your rhetoric with resources, you neither are serious, nor will you be taken seriously.’
Those words resonate to this day.
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