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<![CDATA[International]]>
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RSSHubi@diygod.me (DIYgod)zh-cnFri, 22 Apr 2022 17:35:22 GMT120<![CDATA[Lawsuits aimed at greenhouse-gas emissions are a growing trend]]>
Going to court for the climate Lawsuits aimed at greenhouse-gas emissions are a growing trend
And better science could make them more precise
I N AUGUST 2018 ClientEarth, an environmental organisation based in London, paid €20 ($23) for ten shares in Enea, a power company based in Poland. The trans action bought the lawyers at Client Earth a tiny stake in Ostroleka C, a one-gigawatt coal-fired power station Enea was about to build 120km north of Warsaw. It also bought them the standing they needed to stop the company from building it.
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The lawsuit ClientEarth filed against Enea’s directors a couple of months later alleged that, in pursuing the project, they were failing to act in shareholders’ best interests. Ostroleka C, the lawyers argued, was destined to become a stranded asset: one which, in the increasingly decarbonised world of European electricity generation, would be unable to operate profitably. It therefore presented an “indefensible” financial risk. In July 2019, a judge in Poznan ruled in their favour. Construction was abandoned a few months later. Enea and its partner, Energa, wrote off the 1bn zloty ($250m) invested in it. There will probably never be another coal-fired plant built in Poland.
Lawsuits to fight carbon emissions began to make themselves felt in the mid-2000s. After the Paris agreement of 2015 they reached a new level (see chart). The Sabin Centre for Climate Change Law in New York and the Grantham Research Institute in London collate data on cases which cite climate science, climate policy, emissions reduction or efforts to adapt to the consequences of climate change as a significant factor. More than 1,000 of the 1,951 cases on the Grantham institute’s list were filed post-Paris.
This is in part because Paris brought a broader awareness of climate change. But it is also because the 2015 agreement made things actionable in a way that they had not been before. The deal in Paris committed governments to keeping the increase in average global temperature since the 19th century well below 2°C. Climate science allows the greenhouse-gas emissions compatible with that goal to be quantified.
Those two things give imaginative lawyers a lot to work with. And because Paris is a global agreement, they have a lot of venues to work in. The Grantham list includes cases in 41 countries and 13 international or regional courts and tribunals.
There are three reasons the trend is likely to continue. One is that as more countries put their Paris pledges, and the updates to them made in Glasgow last year, into law there are more opportunities for lawyers to pounce. A second is that success breeds success. According to the Grantham data, as of 2021 58% of cases outside America which had been concluded had outcomes favourable to the parties seeking more action on climate. Only 32% of results had been unfavourable.
The third is that more lawyers are getting interested and more activists are trying to interest them. Organisations and individuals fed up with the slow pace of change brought about by political dealmaking and activism on the streets see the courts as a promising new front in the fight against emissions.
Most of the cases to date have been attempts to get governments to live up to what are seen as their commitments. This approach’s most striking success has been in the Netherlands. In November 2013 the Urgenda Foundation, an environmental organisation, and 900 Dutch citizens sued their government on the basis that its emissions targets were too weak to keep the country safe. In December 2019 the Dutch Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling in their favour. The government was ordered to ensure that emissions at the end of 2020 were at least 25% lower than 1990 levels, rather than the 17% it had adopted. The revised target was met—just.
In a review of climate litigation published in July 2021, Joana Setzer and Catherine Higham, who work on climate governance at the Grantham institute, identified 37 subsequent cases that built on Urgenda’s approach in challenging a government’s climate strategy. The approach has had successes in France, Ireland and, most impressively, Germany.
In February 2020 a group of young Germans led by Luisa Neubauer, a climate activist, sued their government for failing to set climate targets that were in line with the Paris agreement goals. A year later the Federal Constitutional Court found in favour of the plaintiffs; it ruled that the government had a duty to protect future generations and that the nation’s emissions budget could not be consumed by one generation at the expense of the next. As a result of the ruling, Germany’s climate-change act was amended to aim for a 65% reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, relative to 1990 levels, instead of the 55% previously required.
The Paris agreement was specifically designed not to be binding on America—if it had been, it would have needed ratification by the Senate, something it would not have achieved. But that has not stopped lawsuits alleging that the government is failing to live up to commitments on the climate which plaintiffs claim to find in the country’s constitution. In August 2015, 21 American citizens aged 19 or younger (as well as a plaintiff listed as “Future Generations”) filed Juliana v United States, a suit against the federal government alleging that it had violated their rights to “life, liberty and property” by allowing “dangerous levels” of fossil fuel to be burnt. The case is still ongoing.
As in Poland, so in Japan
If most of the cases to date have been against governments, though, lawsuits against companies associated with large emissions, especially fossil-fuel companies, and the institutions which finance them are multiplying. Sometimes, as with Ostroleka C, these are based on the interests of shareholders; sometimes they are based on damage to the environment or the rights of the public; sometimes they are based on specific harms caused by past emissions or brought about through misinformation. Those involved frequently draw parallels between these cases and the lawsuits which clobbered Big Tobacco in the late 1990s and the class-action suits that bankrupted dozens of companies selling asbestos insulation from the 1960s on.
For ClientEarth and similar organisations the idea is not just to change the behaviour of single companies. They want to mount “strategic” lawsuits designed to change the way that whole industries think. The Enea suit is a case in point. After its Polish success, ClientEarth used similar tools in a campaign against a coal-fired plant that J-Power, a Japanese utility, was building in Ube. It developed a financial-risk assessment and, with Japanese investors, wrote formal letters to the board, as it had done with Enea. “Having established the principle in Europe…the letter in Japan brought a director from the company to me,” says James Thornton, ClientEarth’s CEO. “The end of the meeting, essentially, was him saying ‘I see your point’.” In April 2021 J-Power announced that it was abandoning its plans for the plant, citing competition from renewables.
As the number and diversity of climate lawsuits grows, companies are taking them more seriously. Financial-risk disclosure statements filed annually to America’s Securities and Exchange Commission show that the lawyers and auditors working for some companies increasingly consider climate litigation to pose a material risk. On reviewing statements filed by several fossil-fuel companies between 2014 and 2021, The Economist found that prior to 2016 those which mentioned climate litigation at all made only passing reference to it. Some continue in this vein: ExxonMobil does not explicitly mention climate litigation in any of its filings, despite being a defendant in numerous cases.
Since Paris, though, several big fossil-fuel companies, including Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell, have been systematically including climate lawsuits as a potential material risk. Having made scant mention of such litigation previously, in 2016 Chevron listed “private” climate litigation as a “potential” risk. By 2020, the company was referring to a risk of “increased investigations and litigation” related to climate change. Shell’s disclosures refer to climate lawsuits for the first time in 2017. In its 2021 filing it had a paragraph on the various climate lawsuits that had been brought against it, including 21 pending in America as of December 31st 2021. It concluded that there was “a high degree of uncertainty” regarding outcomes, “as well as [the lawsuits’] potential effect on future operations, earnings, cashflows and Shell’s financial condition”.
One of the cases it was referring to was that brought by Milieudefensie, another Dutch environmental organisation, in April 2019. Like the Urgenda case which inspired it, this suit began in The Hague’s district court; it also used some of the same lawyers and arguments. Its thrust was that, like the Dutch government, Shell had a duty of care towards Dutch citizens under the country’s civil code and the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to life. By failing to take adequate steps to avoid dangerous climate change, the plaintiffs said, Shell was unlawfully endangering lives.
In May 2021 the court found in favour of the plaintiffs and ordered Shell to reduce its emissions in 2030 by 45% relative to 2019 levels. Remarkably, the 45% cut was not just to the emissions for which the company and its suppliers were directly responsible, but also to those produced when consumers burn Shell’s oil. Shell has appealed. Pending a new decision, though, it must comply. That ruling is widely expected to trigger similar cases elsewhere. Tessa Khan, a climate and human-rights lawyer, says she expects it to do for oil and gas companies what the Urgenda case did for governments.
Dude, where’s my shoreline?
The impact of such litigation extends beyond the fossil-fuel companies being sued. The Network for Greening the Financial System, a group of 114 central banks and financial regulators, deems climate litigation to be a “growing source of risk” above and beyond the legal fees and potential damages to be paid to plaintiffs. Being caught up in a high-profile lawsuit and its associated news cycle can have reputational costs that spill over to others in the same sector. In a report published in November 2021, the NGFS concluded that the risk of litigation should be factored into a company’s credit risk.
It may also affect a company’s value. Dr Setzer and her colleagues are collecting data on the effects that new litigation and judgments have on public companies’ share prices. It would be wrong, though, to assume that the market’s response is always to the company’s disadvantage. Shell’s shares have not fared too badly since the Milieudefensie decision. Mr Thornton likes to point to the fact that Enea ’S share price rose 3.2% the day after the judge ruled against the company on Ostroleka C. That suggests some investors thought the stranded-asset argument was a good one, though others may just have liked the certainty which comes when a problem goes away.
Corporate defendants argue that providing a structure for the transition away from fossil fuels is a matter for policymakers, not judges. Donny Ching, Shell’s legal director, points to the complex trade-offs that are needed in a world where, as the Paris agreement allows, different countries move at different speeds in different sectors. “Leaving [these trade-offs] in the hands of a court, I think, is really oversimplifying it,” he says.
In America, New Zealand and other jurisdictions some judges have agreed and dismissed cases on those grounds. Others have found in favour of the plaintiffs but declared that the fix was outside their remit and bounced the issue back to legislators. The Milieudefensie case, where the judges mandated quantitative emissions-reduction targets, is a notable exception.
Fossil-fuel companies also argue that having a patchwork of legal decisions in different courts and different countries will not add up to a cohesive and effective solution to climate change. Not all judges are convinced, though, that the limitations of any single ruling constitute grounds for inaction. As Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court said when ruling on the Neubauer case, the fact that “no state can resolve the problems of climate change on its own…does not invalidate the national obligation to take climate action.”
Companies are also going to the courts themselves, in America and elsewhere. Early in 2021, after the Dutch government decided to phase out coal by 2030, RWE and Uniper, two German energy companies, sued it for anticipated unfair losses. Three other energy companies have made similar arguments in cases about the pace of decarbonisation requirements in America, Italy and Slovenia. ExxonMobil is using an obscure Texan rule to pursue Californian municipal officers involved in a case against the oil giant which alleges that it participated in climate-misinformation campaigns. The company says the case violates its first-amendment rights.
The past use of misinformation is the basis of a number of other cases. Another source of harm sometimes cited is a company’s failure to adapt to climate change it could have foreseen. Arkema, a chemicals company, was sued over a chemical fire at a Texas plant that spewed toxic smoke for days after hurricane Harvey in 2017: the ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit alleged that it had not properly prepared for the risks of storms and floods, which climate change is exacerbating.
Seeking damages for what has gone before is not a strategic response to future emissions, which is why Ms Khan says she hopes the Milieudefensie ruling will inspire “cases that seek to change business models rather than extract compensation for past harm”. But when it comes to the costs of adapting to damage already on the way, some plaintiffs feel that such compensation could come in very handy.
In 2008, in one of the earlier examples of this approach, the village of Kivalina, precariously located on a stretch of low-lying Alaskan coastline, argued in a suit against more than 20 energy companies that it needed $95m-400m to move the whole settlement somewhere safer. More recently, San Francisco and Oakland sued BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell in pursuit of funds to help them adapt to future sea level rises.
Fractional culpability
The UN Environment Programme’s finance initiative argues that by making future costs material today such suits could lower the barriers to adaptation. But for that to happen the plaintiffs have to win. So far they have not. Kivalina’s case was thrown out; the California cities’ suit, after bouncing around various lower courts, was sent back to them by America’s Supreme Court in June 2021 . It is likely, though, that some such case will eventually make it to the Supreme Court; oil companies seem to quite like the prospect.
One of the problems with such suits is that, even if a case can be made that climate change has or will produce specific harms, finding someone to blame for them is hard. That is what makes the case against RWE brought by Saúl Luciano Lliuya, a Peruvian farmer and mountain guide, particularly interesting.
Mr Luciano Lliuya’s beef is that his property is at risk of being damaged by a dwindling glacier in the mountains above it; a lake fed by the glacier’s meltwater is threatening to break its banks. In 2021, a paper by researchers at Oxford University found that emissions due to human activity were responsible for 85-105% of the 1°C warming in the region since 1880.
At the time that Mr Luciano Lliuya filed his case RWE was Europe’s largest emitter. According to a much cited 2014 report led by Richard Heede, a researcher with the Climate Accountability Institute, an environmental organisation based in Colorado, RWE is one of 90 “carbon majors”: companies that are collectively responsible for 63% of the carbon dioxide and methane emitted between 1751 and 2010. Mr Heede’s analysis lays 0.47% of all historical emissions at RWE’s door. So Mr Luciano Lliuya’s lawyers are suggesting the company should pay 0.47% of what it would cost their client to protect his property. The case was initially dismissed, but in 2017 a German appeals court deemed it admissible. Evidence is currently being gathered for what legal scholars believe will be a landmark test of how well various forms of attribution science hold up in court.
If sophisticated approaches like that in the Oxford study find favour in this case or others, suits seeking money to deal with future harms may leave behind the coastal properties which have dominated the arena to date (rising sea levels are an easy form of damage to attribute to climate change). As temperatures continue to rise and extreme weather events become progressively more extreme, the odds that they were caused by climate change increase. To wit: after temperatures in the Canadian village of Lytton hit a whopping 49.6°C in summer 2021, attribution models suggested it was “virtually impossible” that such an event would have happened in the absence of climate change. The day after the record was set, with temperatures and drought levels still exceptionally high, a wildfire burned Lytton to the ground.
Asked whether that remarkable event has yet been used as the basis of a lawsuit Mr Thornton says he doesn’t know. But, he adds, it's not a bad idea. There are doubtless already lawyers on the case. ■
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Thu, 21 Apr 2022 14:43:55 GMT/content/7reqsirrthp5dqfkho7h9sgbb2hmdhun
https://www.economist.com/international/2022/04/21/lawsuits-aimed-at-greenhouse-gas-emissions-are-a-growing-trend
<![CDATA[Why so much of the world won’t stand up to Russia]]>
Friends like these Why so much of the world won’t stand up to Russia
Rising food prices and a history of Western hypocrisy and selfishness aren’t helping
WHEN THE leaders of the world’s two biggest democracies held a virtual meeting on April 11th, Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister (no. 1) approvingly quoted President Joe Biden (no. 2) back to himself: “Democracies can deliver,” Mr Modi declared. But when it came to the war in Ukraine, just what it was that democracies should be delivering went unspecified. Both men worried about the plight of Ukrainian civilians. Although Mr Biden left no doubt whom he blamed for their suffering, Mr Modi sounded less certain. Rather than point a finger at Russia, he called for “an independent inquiry” into the horrors reported from the Ukrainian town of Bucha.
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India is perhaps the most inconvenient of the serial abstainers from the West’s campaign to punish Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, for invading Ukraine. But it is far from alone. In Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, even longtime allies and clients of America are rebuffing its entreaties to impose sanctions on Russia or merely to criticise it.
Few countries have been as brazen as Pakistan, which, under its since-ousted prime minister, Imran Khan, signed a trade deal with Russia shortly after the United Nations voted on March 2nd to deplore the invasion and demand that Russia withdraw. But many are refraining from either openly criticising or penalising Russia, owing to commercial incentives, ideological commitments, strategic ambitions or simple fear. Turkey, for example, has economic reasons to cling to the sidelines—it buys 45% of its gas from Russia—but it also has citizens endangered by the war. On March 13th Turkey’s foreign minister announced he was negotiating with Russia to extract dozens of Turkish residents from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which was being crushed to rubble by Russian bombs. A month later, many remain trapped.
For its part, India has a number of reasons to avoid antagonising Russia: its tradition of neutrality in global conflict, its strategic priority of confronting China, its dependence on Russian military equipment. As an added incentive, democracy itself may argue for staying on the fence: “pulling the lion’s tail” by refusing America or Britain plays well with the domestic audience. For all these reasons, when asked why India will not ally with America in this democratic cause, the mandarins who run its deep state and shape its foreign policy respond with looks of cynical scorn.
It is tricky to gauge the degree to which countries resisting Russia’s isolation might undermine the sanctions regime organised by the West. But considered as a bloc, the 40 countries that opposed or abstained from the UN resolution condemning the invasion will probably matter more in terms of geopolitics than economics. Together they account for a quarter of the world’s GDP and 20% of its exports. Yet they are not very important to the Russian economy. Their median GDP per person is about a third of the global average, suggesting they may not muster demand for much more than the quarter of Russian exports they already consume. And they lack the capacity to provide the more sophisticated goods and services Russia once bought from the West.
On the surface, Russia has had several lonely weeks at the UN. The invasion struck so egregiously at the organisation’s foundation—”the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members,” as the charter reads—that nations rallied to support not just the first resolution but a second criticising Russia for menacing civilians. The first passed with the support of 141 of the 193 member states, the second with that of 140. Last week the UN’s members went beyond mere exhortation by kicking Russia off the Human Rights Council. It was only the second time any country had been ejected (after Libya in 2011) and the first time for a member of the Security Council. Russia, which had warned before the vote that even abstaining would be seen as an unfriendly act, announced afterwards that it was leaving the council. “You do not submit your resignation after you are fired,” retorted the Ukrainian ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya.
But the margin on the vote was far narrower: 93 to 24, with 58 abstentions. Support for Ukraine in much of the world is thin, diplomats caution, as is the patience of abstainers, which could curdle into opposition. The pattern of abstentions speaks in part to concerns that sanctions on Russia are driving up food and energy prices. A European diplomat summarising their view says, “Two elephants are fighting, and the little guys get hurt.” He continues, “There’s a big attack from many sides on sanctions being the problem, not the aggressor in this war. That’s something we have to push back on constantly, and it’s coming from everywhere, including the Indias and Pakistans of the world.”
A related objection is that the West is obsessing over a European conflict that is not a true global concern, while downplaying or ignoring conflicts and human-rights abuses elsewhere. To these critics, a self-righteous inconsistency on questions of international law is a hobgoblin of great powers. “There’s a good deal of what you might call geopolitical whataboutism,” says Richard Gowan of the International Crisis Group (ICG), a think-tank.
In recent years, the reluctance of rich countries to invest in mitigating climate change and the slow and uneven distribution of covid-19 vaccines had already reinvigorated the Non-Aligned Movement, the organisation of states that professed neutrality during the cold war. “There’s been an underlying trend that I’ve observed around the UN in the last couple of years, which is that a lot of the countries from the global south have been increasingly co-ordinated in articulating criticisms of the West,” Mr Gowan says. These countries, he continues, “have been feeling more a sense of unity and common purpose than was the case in much of the post-cold war era.”
Particularly across the Middle East, and in Turkey, the West’s concern for Ukraine’s sovereignty is seen as self-serving and hypocritical, partly in light of America’s war in Iraq and the NATO-led bombing of Libya in 2011, which toppled its dictator, Muammar Qaddafi. The warm European welcome granted to Ukrainian refugees, compared to that accorded Syrian refugees, prompts eye-rolling. These sorts of concerns are of long standing among Arab states. What has been surprising is the degree to which even American clients have felt free to act on them.
Some diplomats were stunned when Iraq’s ambassador to the UN abstained from the resolution condemning the invasion, citing his country’s “historical background”, in an apparent jab at the American invasion to which he may owe his job. Even Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), despite having only weak ties to Russia, have assessed more cost than benefit in standing with the West. They do not want to antagonise a crucial partner that has co-operated with OPEC to prop up oil prices. Moreover, they see a chance to send a signal. They want more help from America dealing with problems in their backyard, such as the missiles and drones fired from Yemen and the Iranian-backed militias spreading mayhem from Beirut to Baghdad. “If you’re not there for us, we won’t be there for you,” an Arab official says. In the Middle East, only Israel and Libya voted to boot Russia off the Human Rights Council; the abstentions by the Gulf states were a particular disappointment to Western diplomats.
Russian propaganda in the region feeds grievances against the West. Russia’s state-run media, such as the Arabic service of the network RT or the Turkish edition of Sputnik, are popular, and its foreign ministry has a cadre of diplomats who, unlike their Western counterparts, speak Arabic fluently. “Every time I turn on the television, there’s a Russian making the case for the war,” says a Western ambassador in Jordan. While the big Arabic channels, which have reporters on the ground in Ukraine, have not shied away from recounting the war’s horrors, their coverage is often interspersed with pro-Russian or anti-Western takes. Last month Sky News Arabia, based in the UAE, ran a segment about how “duplicitous” Western countries were trying to “demonise” Mr Putin.
The enemy of my frenemy
With the exception of Russian fellow travellers such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, Latin American countries supported the first two UN resolutions condemning Russia for the war. But several, including Brazil and Mexico, balked at kicking Russia off the Human Rights Council, and there is little appetite in the region for joining the sanctions regime. Signalling independence from the West is an old game in Latin America, where some states seek to balance American power in the Western hemisphere “by laying out the red carpet for US adversaries”, as Benjamin Gedan of the Wilson Centre, a think-tank, puts it. In early February Argentina’s president, Alberto Fernández, endorsed this strategy when he sat down for lunch in Moscow with Mr Putin as Russian forces massed to invade Ukraine. Referring to the International Monetary Fund, Mr Fernandez told him, “I am determined that Argentina has to stop being so dependent on the Fund and the United States, it has to open the way to other countries, and Russia has a very important place there.”
Since the invasion, Russia has been at pains to encourage that attitude. In late March Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, remarked that certain countries “would never accept the global village under the command of the American sheriff”. Citing Argentina, Brazil and Mexico among others, he added, “These countries do not want to be in a position where Uncle Sam orders them to do something and they say, ‘Yes, sir.’” On April 5th Russia added Argentina to its list of 52 “friendly countries” with whom it will restart direct flights. Still, Argentina, the current president of the Human Rights Council, voted to remove Russia.
Brazil’s strongman president, Jair Bolsonaro, has made no secret of admiring Mr Putin and his “masculine qualities”. Mr Bolsonaro also happened to pay a visit to Moscow in February, and hailed the two countries’ relationship as a “more-than-perfect marriage”. It is a marriage fertilised, apparently, by fertiliser. Though Brazil joined in condemning the invasion, Mr Bolsonaro has since said he cannot cut ties with Russia because of the “sacred” importance to Brazil of imported fertiliser, more than a fifth of which comes from Russia. Mr Bolsonaro now says Brazil will remain neutral in the conflict, a position in harmony with his political opponents and, polling suggests, the public. Similarly, Mexico, despite having condemned the invasion, has a long-held policy of non-intervention and a habit of shrugging off events far beyond its borders. It doesn’t help that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador shows little concern for democracy. He is also playing to his leftist party, elements of which set up a friendship group with Russia following the invasion.
It is in Africa that Russia has found the most outright sympathy. Almost half of African countries—25 of 54—abstained or stayed away from the first UN vote. The history of colonialism makes some reluctant to throw support behind what is seen as a Western cause. But others are acting out of growing affinity with Russia. That is true of South Africa, the other big democracy to shrug off the West’s call for unity. It has abstained in all the UN votes.
In southern Africa many countries see Russia as the successor of the Soviet Union, which armed and trained the guerrilla armies that fought colonial powers and segregationist regimes. Such nostalgia partly explains South Africa’s swerve towards Russia during the presidency of Jacob Zuma, from 2009 to 2018. But South Africa’s relationship with the West was also strained by the bombing of Libya. In 2015 leading figures in the African National Congress published a foreign-policy paper lamenting the collapse of the Soviet Union because it had “altered completely the balance of forces in favour of imperialism”, meaning America and the West.
Arms across the sea
Mr Zuma’s departure from office—he is now on trial for corruption—has not cooled the ANC’s ardour for Russia. President Cyril Ramaphosa mouths Kremlin talking points, arguing that NATO is responsible for the conflict because of its eastward expansion. He has also criticised Western sanctions on Russia. One reason may be pecuniary. Although overall trade between the countries is puny, Russia is South Africa’s second-largest market for apples and pears and its fourth largest for citrus fruit. Even as Russian-flagged ships were being turned away from European and American ports, the Vasiliy Golovnin, a freighter, docked in Cape Town on April 4th. South Africa is also reportedly pursuing a $2bn-a-year deal to buy gas from Gazprom, a Russian state-owned energy firm.
In other parts of Africa, support for Russia reflects its success in spreading influence by selling weapons or supplying mercenaries. Russian guns-for-hire have been seen in five of the 17 African countries that abstained on the first UN vote: the Central African Republic, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique and Sudan. Many more of the abstentions or no-shows are buyers of Russian arms. These include Algeria, Angola, Sudan and Uganda, according to data collected by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a think-tank. Eritrea, a gulag state, was among the five countries in the world that voted with Russia on March 2nd.
As the conflict grinds on, the West will increasingly confront the question of how aggressively to use its own leverage to prod fence-sitters onto their feet. Some countries might be encouraged to see an opportunity to repair relations with the West. That could be the case with Pakistan, particularly now that Mr Khan has been ousted in a no-confidence vote. Trade with Russia is meaningless to Pakistan, and its armed forces, which tend to call the shots, are showing signs of discomfort with its deep and growing dependence on China.
General Qamar Bajwa, the commander-in-chief, has lately sounded surprisingly conciliatory to the West. In a speech on April 2nd he nudged China to fix its border troubles with India, and then said that Russia’s “aggression” against Ukraine could not be condoned and “must be stopped immediately”. He also noted the war showed how a smaller country could defend itself by having stronger morale and making clever use of simple technology—an allusion to Pakistan’s struggle with India, its larger neighbour.
The West has even greater leverage with India. All told, Russia, with a GDP just over half of India’s, accounts for barely 1 % of India’s trade. Trade with the West is of vastly greater importance, as are India’s ties to America via people-to-people exchanges. Under a law authorising sanctions against countries making “significant transactions” with Russia, America placed sanctions on China in 2018 and Turkey in 2020 for buying the S-400 missile defence system. India has bought the same system, but the Biden administration has so far danced away from the question of whether it will apply the same standard. “We have not yet made a determination,” Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, said when asked about such sanctions at a press conference after the meeting between American and Indian officials on April 11th. Meanwhile, India is not merely refraining from criticising Russia but increasing its purchases of Russian oil.
Mr Biden’s strategy is clearly to woo India rather than pressure it, an approach that has appeared so far to bear little fruit. Pressed in the same exchange with journalists as to why India was not moving to reduce any dependence on Russia, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the minister of external affairs, sarcastically thanked reporters for their “advice and suggestions” and then shot back, “Believe me, we have a decent sense of what is in our interest and know how to protect it and advance it.” ■
Correction (April 13th): A previous version of this article misstated the results of the vote on Russia's membership to the Human Rights Council. It was 93 to 24, with 58 abstentions, not 93 to 58, with 24 abstentions. Sorry
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Sat, 16 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT/content/97p1clbo1ajgcfut5ihmjsst9oqvpu0k
https://www.economist.com/international/why-so-much-of-the-world-wont-stand-up-to-russia/21808737
<![CDATA[Russia’s brutal mercenaries probably won’t matter much in Ukraine]]>
Vladimir’s army Russia’s brutal mercenaries probably won’t matter much in Ukraine
But they continue to prop up strongmen elsewhere
LOOK ONLY at the top of the photograph of four men posing in military garb and the mood seems light. One man smiles. Another puffs on a cigarette while staring straight into the lens. But glance down at their feet and you see a severed head on the concrete floor. Before beheading their victim, the men had made a video of themselves laughing as they smashed his hands and feet with a sledgehammer. The incident took place in Syria in 2017. The victim is reported to have deserted the Syrian army, and his killers were probably Russian. At least one has been identified as an operative from Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary outfit with connections to Russian military intelligence that, not for the first time, is reportedly operating in Ukraine.
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The most high-profile Russian mercenary group, Wagner has ties that lead right to President Vladimir Putin. It first came to prominence in Ukraine in 2014 as Russia tried to break off the Donbas region in the east. Then, Wagner provided one of the services Mr Putin values from mercenaries: deniability. Its men could pass more plausibly than Russian soldiers as separatist fighters. Since then the group has deployed to a host of countries, including Syria, Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic (CAR), as well as dabbling in Sudan and Venezuela, always to prop up or install strongmen favoured by Mr Putin.
In Ukraine today, Mr Putin can no longer hope for deniability from Wagner, nor for much benefit from another service he prizes from mercenaries—lowered casualty counts among soldiers whose families might wonder why their loved ones were sacrificed. Since Russia already has some 190,000 troops in Ukraine, even a few thousand Wagner mercenaries have small chance of changing the outcome of the war. But they may make its conduct still more savage. For service in Ukraine, Russian recruiters have reached out to those who were turned down in the past for having too little experience or suspect backgrounds. “They’re taking anyone and everyone,” says Ilya Rozhdestvensky, a Russian journalist with long experience tracking mercenaries.
The group reportedly takes its name from Hitler’s favourite composer, Wagner, the call sign of its founder, Dmitry Utkin. Mr Utkin is a veteran of Russia’s military intelligence, the GRU, who fought in both Chechen wars and later commanded an elite Spetsnaz, or special forces, unit. Wagner’s ties to the Russian armed forces go on. Its training camp in Russia is near a GRU facility. In Libya, Syria and Venezuela, Russian military aircraft transported Wagner operatives in and out; in Libya the Russian armed forces also reportedly kept them well supplied. A shopping list of military hardware including tanks, an advanced radar system and hundreds of Kalashnikov rifles was found in a Wagner document recovered in Libya. Some of the gear could probably have been provided only by the Russian armed forces.
Wagner operatives often use passports issued by a special desk linked to the Ministry of Defence—the same desk that issued the passports of the two men who attempted in 2018 to assassinate Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy, in Britain. In 2020, when Belarus surprisingly arrested 33 Russians who seemed to belong to the Wagner Group, Mr Putin took a personal interest and worked to secure their release. “They’re not independent at all,” summarises Kimberly Marten of Barnard College at Columbia University.
Like all mercenary outfits in Russia, the Wagner Group does not officially exist, because Russian law does not permit mercenary activities. Yet in 2018 Mr Putin acknowledged its existence, suggesting its work was fine provided it took place outside Russia’s borders. “They have every right to work and promote their business interests anywhere in the world,” he said. Small wonder that Russia’s authorities have shown little interest in holding Wagner forces accountable for their behaviour, including the torture in Syria.
Some 10,000 men are believed to have served with Wagner since its inception, most of them former Russian soldiers with combat experience. Recruiters are said to prefer those with specialised military skills and without criminal records. The work is well paid: mercenaries in Africa receive as much as $4,000 per month.
Though Wagner mercenaries have been dispatched on missions that served Russia’s geopolitical interests, the organisation has also made plenty of money along the way. In most places Wagner operates, such as Mali or CAR, it is paid by the local government. Sometimes the deal is sweetened with control of gold or diamond mines granted to Wagner or to companies linked to the group’s main backer, Yevgeny Prigozhin. In Syria Mr Prigozhin was cut into oilfields; in Mali Wagner is reportedly pocketing $10m a month.
At times, Mr Prigozhin appears to have had tensions with some Russian officials, such as the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu. In 2018 American air strikes killed about 200 Russian mercenaries who attacked an American-backed Kurdish outpost near Deir al-Zour in eastern Syria; Russia’s regular army reportedly did little to avert the slaughter. Yet Wagner seems to have recovered from such setbacks, perhaps thanks to Mr Prigozhin’s connections in the Kremlin.
Mr Prigozhin served time in a Soviet prison as a young man, and upon his release he opened a hot-dog stand in St Petersburg. From that humble start he diversified into restaurants that drew the city’s elite. After Mr Putin became president in 2000, he began bringing high-powered guests to Mr Prigozhin’s establishments; President George W. Bush reportedly dined on duck-liver pâté, black caviar and steak with morel mushrooms at New Island, a Prigozhin-owned restaurant floating in the Neva river. Juicier contracts for Mr Prigozhin to feed the armed forces soon followed. He was later entrusted with more serious missions, including the mercenary group that became Wagner and the internet “troll farm”, the Internet Research Agency, that was indicted by Robert Mueller, a special prosecutor, for spreading disinformation online to interfere with the American presidential election in 2016.
For all its lucrative business, Wagner’s record is mixed. It served Mr Putin’s purposes in the Donbas in 2014 and after. And in Syria, Wagner mercenaries are believed to have played a key role in recapturing the city of Palmyra from Islamic State and in helping Russia’s armed forces to keep Bashar al-Assad in power. But in 2019, when Wagner was hired to fight jihadists in northern Mozambique, its fighters beat a rapid retreat after at least seven of them were killed. In Libya about 1,000 Russian mercenaries have fought for Khalifa Haftar, a rebel general, against the unrecognised government. They have not overthrown the government and have been accused of war crimes, including murdering civilians. In CAR, about 2,000 Wagner mercenaries are propping up President Faustin-Archange Touadéra, but are far from vanquishing the rebels out to topple him.
In the past six months about 1,000 Wagner operatives have arrived in Mali. They have already been accused, in a UN report, of taking part with Malian soldiers in trussing up about 30 people, dousing them in petrol and burning them alive. Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, says Russian mercenaries with Malian forces summarily executed some 300 suspected Islamist fighters, an incident it calls “the worst single atrocity reported in Mali’s decade-long armed conflict.” Meanwhile, jihadists continue to advance.
Mission creeps
Reports of Wagner’s arrival in Ukraine appeared just days after the invasion. Ukraine’s security services announced that mercenaries had been dispatched to assassinate Volodymyr Zelensky, the president, and other officials. Yet there has been no independent confirmation of that, and analysts and journalists who track the group reckon their use for such a sensitive mission is improbable. Mercenaries do not appear to be fighting beside the Russian soldiers who invaded from Russia, Belarus and Crimea. Ukraine has released information about only two fighters with Wagner connections among the many Russians taken prisoner; those men said they fought with the group in the past, but came to Ukraine with the regular Russian army.
A view to a paycheque
Instead, mercenaries are reportedly moving into the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk that were already occupied, to reinforce separatists trying to break through Ukrainian lines. On March 28th the British Ministry of Defence said it expected Wagner to deploy more than 1,000 mercenaries in eastern Ukraine, including senior leaders. So far, those heading to Ukraine do not appear to be from the core group. “They’re using the old Wagner infrastructure—the base, the recruiting channels,” says Ilya Barabanov, a Russian journalist who has reported extensively on the group. “But it’s not what we’re used to calling ‘Wagner’.” Ukraine’s military intelligence says the mercenaries are a new incarnation of Wagner called “Liga”, Russian for “league”. They are being offered more than 200,000 roubles ($2,367) per month, several times more than regular soldiers typically get.
Russia may also be turning to Syrians and others who once fought beside Wagner. Mr Shoigu, the Russian defence minister, claimed to Mr Putin that 16,000 “volunteers” from the Middle East were ready to fight in Ukraine. Videos from CAR also show armed African men declaring they want to fight for Russia. Though there is little evidence of more than a trickle to Ukraine so far, foreign fighters might add more bulk than mercenaries alone. Yet they may not prove particularly motivated. Many would probably be “press-ganged” into it, as they were when Russia sent Syrians to back Mr Haftar’s failed push in Libya, argues Ms Marten. During a decade of civil conflict, Syrian soldiers showed more aptitude for stealing household appliances and selling drugs than fighting.
Western intelligence suggests some Wagner mercenaries may be leaving Libya for Ukraine. Perhaps even a few are departing from CAR. But for now the signs of redeployments are limited. “No one cancelled the other commercial contracts,” Mr Barabanov notes. Indeed, well after the war in Ukraine began, Wagner sent more mercenaries to Mali, says a French military official. “We think that there will be no major impact to deployments in Mali and CAR,” he adds. Even if more Russian mercenaries do arrive in Ukraine, their record suggests they may contribute less to the momentum of the conflict than to the lengthening list of war crimes. ■
]]>Fri, 08 Apr 2022 16:00:00 GMT/content/5h6j52pdjt1p7dvdnqbvlqsll0vb6dn8
https://www.economist.com/international/2022/04/08/russias-brutal-mercenaries-probably-wont-matter-much-in-ukraine
<![CDATA[How, if at all, might Russia be punished for its war crimes in Ukraine?]]>
Atrocities against civilians How, if at all, might Russia be punished for its war crimes in Ukraine?
It is worth trying, even if success is likely to be limited
Russian troops retreating from Kyiv have left behind a landscape of atrocities. The mayor of Motyzhyn, a suburb of the capital, was found blindfolded and shot, apparently by Russian forces, along with her family. An eye witness told Human Rights Watch, a charity, that Russian soldiers threw a smoke grenade into a basement in Vorzel, near Irpin, then shot a woman and her child as they emerged into the light. Another saw soldiers round up five men in nearby Bucha, forced to kneel and pull their shirts over their heads, and shoot one in the head before 40 witnesses. In all, said Ukraine’s prosecutor-general on April 3rd, 410 civilians had been killed around Kyiv. Many more will be found.
The renewed evidence of Russian atrocities has produced renewed condemnation. “Genocide”, Ukraine’s president and Poland’s prime minister called it. The American president, Joe Biden, said what had happened in Bucha was a war crime and that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, should face an international tribunal for it. The un secretary general asked for another investigation (several are already under way), and Ukraine said it would set one up with the eu. The former un chief prosecutor for war crimes in Yugoslavia and Rwanda demanded that an international arrest warrant be issued against Mr Putin. For its part, Russia said the whole thing was faked, then blamed the Ukrainians for it, demanding a un Security Council meeting to discuss the “heinous provocation of Ukrainian radicals in Bucha”. It is possible there were or will be atrocities by Ukrainian forces, though not on the same scale. But Ukraine will, presumably, investigate them, unlike Russia. In this particular case, the decomposition of the victims’ bodies shows they had been killed long before Ukrainian forces recaptured Bucha.
The evidence from the battlefield confirms that Russians have committed at least three types of criminal offence in war. The first are war crimes. The Geneva Conventions, which Russia has signed, define war crimes to include wilful killing, wilfully causing great suffering, deliberately targeting civilians and destroying or appropriating property. Summary executions at Bucha would be war crimes. So would the bombing of the Mariupol theatre which was the city’s largest air-raid shelter and had the Russian word for children written in letters large enough to be seen from the sky. The Geneva Conventions determine what are international legal obligations in all military actions. It does not matter that Russia has not formally declared war in Ukraine.
Second, Russia’s invasion was itself a crime, regardless of the way in which it has been carried out. It is a crime of aggression. This is spelled out in the statutes of the International Criminal Court (icc), which tries individuals for actions under international law. The icc defines aggression to include invasion, military occupation, the annexation of land, bombardment, the blockade of ports and other actions that contradict the UN charter. Lastly, the scale of the Russian actions around Kyiv (and elsewhere) strongly suggests that Russia is guilty of crimes against humanity. The icc defines this as participation in and knowledge of “a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population”. Thousands of Ukrainians have been killed and over 4m driven abroad.
Proceedings have begun in several international courts to bring the perpetrators to justice. Two have made initial rulings in Ukraine’s favour. In the first, on March 16th, the International Court of Justice (icj), which adjudicates on inter-state disputes, ruled that Russia “shall immediately suspend the military operations that it commenced” on February 24th. The issue before the court seemed arcane: Ukraine said Russia’s argument that it had launched an invasion to prevent a Ukrainian genocide in Russian-speaking breakaway regions was bogus under the un’s genocide convention. The significance of the ruling was not just that the court agreed with Ukraine, but that it broadened its conclusion to demand Russia’s full withdrawal.
The other ruling came at the European Court of Human Rights, which is part of the Council of Europe, a governmental human-rights body. On April 1st it confirmed an earlier ruling that Russia must “refrain from military attacks against civilians and civilian objects, including…schools and hospitals.” Ukraine had brought the case under European human-rights laws. The court added that Russia had acted wrongly when it forced refugees from Mariupol to flee to Russia, rather than to a place of their own choosing.
But it is one thing to make rulings, another to bring to an international court any Russian, let alone its head of state. Russia was thrown out of the Council of Europe on March 16th because of the invasion and has stopped responding to the European court’s demands. Since 2016, the country has not recognised the authority of the icc, either. That does not rule out the icc prosecutor bringing a case or issuing arrest warrants against individual Russians. But if Russia ignores the warrant, the next step would be to refer the case to the UN Security Council - and Russia could then use its veto. Russia does accept the authority of the other international court, the icj, at least in theory. In practice, though, it did not show up at the court’s hearings and (obviously) has ignored its ruling. As with the icc, the only way of enforcing icj rulings is through the un Security Council. If Mr Putin remains in power, therefore, or even if he resigns but continues to be protected by successors, international justice will not be seen to be done.
Legal proceedings will grind on and are likely to deal further setbacks to Russia’s legal case and diplomatic standing. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s allies will have to find other means of stepping up pressure on Mr Putin. These include more sanctions and more lethal weapons to Ukraine.
Even before the horrors revealed by Russia’s retreat from Kyiv, nato allies had started to offer heavier weapons. The New York Times reported on April 1st that the Biden administration planned to transfer Soviet-made T-72 tanks to bolster Ukrainian forces in the Donbas region. These would be the first tanks provided to Ukraine by America, which had previously insisted its military aid was purely defensive. On March 16th Britain started to provide the Ukrainians with its advanced Starstreak anti-aircraft missile; on April 1st a video showed a Starstreak apparently bringing down a Russian helicopter. Other advanced weaponry seems likely to be on offer soon. So is another round of sanctions, the fifth in all.
Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, made up of heads of government of eu countries, says more sanctions are “on their way”. They will include easy ones, such as closing loopholes, imposing more restrictions on individual oligarchs, banning Russian ships from eu ports and more fully isolating Russian banks cut off from the swift international payments system. But this time the eu could also include embargoes on energy supplies, something long demanded by Mr Zelensky but resisted by gas-importing eu states. The defence minister of Germany, Europe’s largest gas buyer, called for the eu to discuss banning imported Russian gas. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, went further and said he would support banning all Russian oil and coal coming into the eu, a position also taken by the leader of a junior partner in the Italian government. Like Germany, Italy is dependent on Russian energy. Further energy restrictions are already coming into force: on April 3rd Lithuania became the first eu country to ban imports of Russian gas. Russia’s war crimes seem to have stiffened resolve among Ukraine’s Western allies. They seem to be saying, in the words of Antony Blinken, America’s secretary of state, “We can’t become numb to this. We can’t normalise this.” ■
Editor’s note: This story was updated on April 5th to make clearer that Russia is unable to prevent war-crimes charges being brought by the ICC, though it could then stymie subsequent actions.
]]>Mon, 04 Apr 2022 20:52:23 GMT/content/urom8gn1ngbhbq4dgdfg7upjgds8jua9
https://www.economist.com/international/2022/04/04/how-if-at-all-might-russia-be-punished-for-its-war-crimes-in-ukraine
<![CDATA[The invasion of Ukraine is not the first social media war, but it is the most viral]]>
#PutinsWar The invasion of Ukraine is not the first social media war, but it is the most viral
Ukraine is the most wired country ever to be invaded
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YOU HAVE probably seen the videos from Ukraine. There is the one where Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, stands outside Kyiv’s government quarter in dim light, holding his smartphone with the camera pointed selfie-style at himself and several senior officials. “We are all here,” he declares, days after Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, sent his tanks across the border. Or the one a Ukrainian soldier took, showing his mates in a snowy field firing anti-tank missiles, set to a thumping techno soundtrack. Or the one where a Ukrainian woman approaches a group of Russian soldiers and tells them to put sunflower seeds in their pockets so that something useful will grow from their bodies when they die.
Each spread online, generating millions of views and likes, reposts and remixes. They became part of the instant digital annals of the war, alongside pictures of Ukrainian tractors towing abandoned Russian tanks, which is now a global meme, and audio of Ukrainian soldiers at an islet in the Black Sea telling an approaching fleet, “Russian warship: go fuck yourself”, which is now a rallying cry at protests as far away as Tokyo.
The war in Ukraine is not, as some commentators rushed to declare, the “first social-media war”. Israel and Hamas have long sparred on Twitter as well as IRL. During Mr Putin’s previous invasion of Ukraine, in 2014-15, digital sleuths used selfies that Russian soldiers posted online to prove their presence on the battlefield in the Donbas region. (Russia subsequently barred soldiers from carrying smartphones while on duty.) Nor is the war in Ukraine the first conflict to appear on a new generation of social networks such as TikTok, which launched in 2016. Videos from the war in Syria have long circulated there; those interested could also find plenty of clips from Nagorno-Karabakh, the disputed enclave that Armenia and Azerbaijan fought over in 2020.
But Ukraine has become the most vivid example yet of how social media are changing the way that war is chronicled, experienced and understood, and how that, in turn, can change the course of a war itself. “Anyone who thinks it is a sideshow isn’t paying attention to war and politics in the 21st century,” says Peter Singer, co-author of #LikeWar, a book about the intersection of social media and modern conflict.
Online chatter can spur rapid shifts in public opinion, especially when pre-existing beliefs are reinforced. Posts on social networks have become a crucial source of information for gatherers of open-source intelligence (OSINT) and conventional media alike. Social media can be used as an “instrument” for governments to achieve wartime aims, says Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation, who has used Twitter to push for a “digital blockade” of Russia by global technology firms. Along with rallying NATO and delivering arms to Ukraine, the White House recently held a briefing on the war for 30 young TikTok influencers. “Whether you like it or not, there are a lot of people on these apps,” says Victoria Hammett, who attended as part of Gen-Z for Change, an activist group.
The war in Ukraine has saturated those apps. “What’s new is the scale of it,” Mr Singer argues. The sheer horror of the war naturally attracts attention. European audiences are especially fascinated because Ukraine is on their doorstep, and they, too, fear Vladimir Putin. Race and psychology may add to the mix: Western audiences may identify more with Ukrainians than Syrians, and thus more readily watch, share or like posts about Ukraine.
But Ukraine is also more wired than other recent war zones. Some 75% of Ukrainians use the internet, according to the International Telecommunication Union, part of the UN. Internet access has remained stable in all but the most brutally besieged Ukrainian cities, thanks in part to satellite coverage. When Russian bombers began pounding Syria on behalf of Bashar al-Assad in 2015, 30% of Syria’s population was online. In Afghanistan at the time of the American withdrawal, the figure stood at less than 20%.
The evolution of social media and communications technologies plays a role too. The shifts can be seen in Ukraine itself: when Russia began its war in 2014, just 4% of Ukrainian mobile subscribers had access to networks of 3G speed or faster; this year, more than 80% are on high-speed networks, according to Kepios, a research firm. In 2014 just 14% of Ukrainians had smartphones, reckons Kepios; by 2020 more than 70% did, estimates GSMA, a telecommunications industry body. When Mr Putin launched the recent invasion, 4.6bn people were using social media globally, more than double the number in 2014. Where users once saw content from those they follow in chronological order, they now consume an algorithmic news-feed that promotes the items attracting the most interest. Social networks had limited capacity to display videos or livestreams in 2014, but are now heaving with them, a shift Ukrainians have made the most of. “Everyone is filming and posting every last bombing,” says Maria Popova, a communications executive who now co-ordinates a volunteer movement to gather and disseminate information from Ukraine.
Such recordings are the latest stage in the long evolution of the imagery of war. Before the camera, artists had to convince audiences they had witnessed the events they depicted: “I saw this,” Francisco Goya wrote under one of the etchings in his classic series, “The Disasters of War”. Photographers began documenting conflict in the mid-19th century, but cumbersome equipment and processes made capturing combat impossible. Instead, pictures tended to show the aftermath of the fighting, such as in “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”, Roger Fenton’s iconic image of a cannonball-strewn road during the Crimean War. The invention of lightweight, 35mm cameras made it possible to operate at the frontlines. During the Spanish Civil War, photojournalists took searing pictures of battle that helped mobilise support for the resistance to Franco, such as Robert Capa’s defining snapshot of a Republican soldier falling dead. With the Vietnam war, conflict came to television. Cable news carried the first Gulf war live. As the critic Susan Sontag wrote in 2002, “The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images.”
Today’s instantly shareable, smartphone-fuelled photographs and videos take things a step further. Nathan Jurgenson, a social-media theorist, dubs such images “social photo” and “social video”, and reckons their power depends less on the information they convey than on the experience they express. They function more as a means of communication than of documentation. “Images within the social stream evoke more than they explain; they transmit a general alertness to experience rather than facts,” Mr Jurgenson writes. Coexisting alongside traditional photojournalism and television, social photo and video add a rawer, darker, more personal quality to the picture of war outsiders see. “News reports give you the big bits, but a lot of what I’m seeing [online] is everyday life as the war makes it, like the lines for bread,” says Simon Kemp of Kepios. “Those scenes make it a lot more like, ‘Fuck, that could be me’—it makes it more human.”
Ukrainians have adapted deftly to the new information environment. It helps to have a charismatic, social-media savvy leader in Mr Zelensky, a former TV star. His messages often break with the formal presidential approach and embrace the intimate aesthetic of social media, in contrast to his older, staider foe in Moscow. “It’s organic for him to use technology,” says Mr Fedorov, who ran digital operations for Mr Zelensky’s presidential campaign in 2019. “He wants to share, wants to spread the word, wants to convey his emotions—like a normal person.” Officials across Ukraine have adopted the same approach. Vitaly Kim, the governor of Mykolaiv, a frontline region in southern Ukraine, posts regular selfie-style videos to his channel on Telegram, a messaging and publishing platform that is widely used in both Ukraine and Russia.
The Ukrainian government has taken to social media to pursue various aims. On March 17th Dmytro Kuleba, the foreign minister, sought to embarrass Nestlé for refusing to cease all operations in Russia by posting a meme-style image that contrasts “Nestle’s positioning”—a picture of a healthy child—with “Nestle’s position”—a picture of a dead child. The digital ministry launched a chatbot on Telegram that allows citizens to send videos and locations of Russian forces; it receives around 10,000 messages a day, which Ukraine’s army uses to supplement traditional intelligence. “Wherever they may be, we see them,” Mr Fedorov says. The government uses social media to spread everything from information about evacuation trains to stories about heroic soldiers. The tales have been no less powerful even when untrue: the soldiers from the islet in the Black Sea were not killed after delivering their famous line, as Ukraine’s government originally reported, but captured, a fact that has done little to dent their reputation as martyrs.
The government has had plenty of help. Across Ukraine, public-relations specialists, designers and other media types have banded together through bottom-up networks that emerged within hours of the invasion. “Everybody is an information warrior these days,” says Liubov Tsybulska, an adviser to the Ukrainian government who helps co-ordinate several teams of them, each with a specific focus. One group packages content aimed at Russians; another produces patriotic clips for a domestic audience; a third focuses on TikTok; a fourth churns out memes; yet others work to archive photos and videos from social media for what they hope will be future war-crimes tribunals. Part of the aim is to make sure the world gets its information about Ukraine directly from Ukraine, says Serhii Didkovsky, a PR strategist who belongs to another network of creative professionals. “We want a Frenchman sitting in Paris, looking at the Eiffel Tower, eating his croissant, to understand that he can do all of that because the Ukrainian army is defending him,” Mr Didkovsky says.
Just as Ukraine has shifted towards the West geopolitically in recent years, so has its online life. When Russia invaded in 2014, Ukraine’s internet culture, like its economy as a whole, was oriented towards Russia. The most popular social network was VK, a Russian platform. In recent years, Ukraine’s tech scene has boomed; many developers and designers work for Western technology companies. “We have lots of people who know how to design content for the global internet,” Mr Didkovsky says. Ukrainian users speak to Western audiences in a common digital language. A travel photographer who posts as @valerisssh became a viral sensation with videos that applied popular TikTok memes to her life in wartime Chernihiv with humour and pathos. One appropriates an Italian song often used on the platform for videos of users cooking pasta to take her followers on a tour of her family’s bomb shelter.
That has helped win hearts and minds in the West. Americans already tended to dislike Russia, and they have been swift to embrace Ukraine. At the end of last year 55% of Americans saw Ukraine as “friendly” or “allied”. Two weeks after Mr Putin’s bombs began falling, more than 80% of Americans did, a greater share than those who thought the same of France or Japan, both longtime allies. Diplomats in Europe say similar shifts in public opinion there have helped galvanise support for tougher sanctions against Russia and a more liberal approach to refugees from Ukraine. The real-time storytelling has also helped boost morale amongst Ukrainians. “We witness how a new narrative about Ukraine is being born and it gives us strength, gives us courage,” says Ms Tsybulska.
Russia has floundered on the information battlefield inside Ukraine as much as on the physical one, despite its reputation as a pioneer of disinformation. Russian occupying forces have handed out fliers appealing to “comrades” and taken over local radio stations to broadcast speeches by Mr Putin. “They’re using crap from the second world war,” says Kristina Berdynskykh, a prominent Ukrainian journalist originally from Kherson, a city currently under Russian control. “Information isn’t spread that way any more.” Residents in occupied cities continue to stream Ukrainian television and radio online and through Diia, a Ukrainian government app. They use Telegram to organise protests and share recordings of the Russian occupiers. Videos of unarmed protesters challenging Russian soldiers have gone viral, including one of a lone man trying to stop a tank with his bare hands.
In the West, Russian narratives have gained little traction. That may be because the reality is too stark to spin. Western platforms have also taken tougher stances towards the disinformation spread by Russian state media. But Russia has also made less of an effort to reach western audiences, reckons Carl Jack Miller of Demos, a think-tank in London.
The preponderance of Ukraine-friendly messages on Western users’ news-feeds hardly means the information war is over. “The narrative that Ukraine has won the information war is complacent and not necessarily backed up by anything empirical,” Mr Miller argues. Independent researchers say that social networks’ unwillingness to share data makes it difficult to assess how information is spreading online. That is especially true of organic content, and of newer platforms, in particular TikTok. “There is no systemic, reliable way to look across these platforms and see what the information ecosystems look like,” laments Brandon Silverman, co-founder of CrowdTangle, a social analytics tool.
Inside Russia, Mr Putin has kept a tight grip on the narrative by tightening the flow of information. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have all been banned; users on TikTok cannot create new content. Wartime censorship laws make calling the war a war punishable by up to 15 years behind bars. Russian authorities have created Telegram chatbots for citizens to inform on those spreading “incorrect information”.
Russian disinformation campaigns seem to be targeting Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, crafting messages that tap into pre-existing anti-Western or anti-American sentiments, says Mr Miller. A team at Demos used semantic analysis of accounts pushing pro-Putin hashtags on Twitter and found a preponderance of activity in South Africa and India. Public opinion on the conflict in Asia is not as definitively anti-Russian as in the West. Cyril Ramphosa, South Africa’s president, recently tweeted that “the war could have been avoided if NATO had heeded the warnings” about its eastward expansion.
As the physical war settles into a bloody grind of attrition, so will the one for attention online. Westerners “like the stories about tractors and tanks, but not the stories about pregnant women suffering”, Ms Tsybulska sighs. “Tractors and tanks are entertainment, but if you acknowledge the suffering, we all have to do something.” Photographs did not bring about an end to war by making suffering visible, as some hoped they would in the 19th century; neither will social images now. Yet they will continue to be taken, posted and shared. As Ukraine demonstrates, real life is increasingly lived online, both at peace and at war.
]]>Sat, 02 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT/content/bu9k8rbb8kfbut9i6iddu816govbnfdf
https://www.economist.com/international/the-invasion-of-ukraine-is-not-the-first-social-media-war-but-it-is-the-most-viral/21808456
<![CDATA[How Vladimir Putin provokes—and complicates—the struggle against autocracy]]>
New cold war, new compromises How Vladimir Putin provokes—and complicates—the struggle against autocracy
As in the old cold war, ugly trade-offs are inevitable
THE STRUGGLE between autocracy and democracy is “the defining challenge of our time”, President Joe Biden said in December at a virtual “Summit for Democracy”. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine offers evidence he was right. With missiles and tanks, an autocrat is trying to snuff out a freely elected government.
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Further, the core of the coalition against Mr Putin, consisting of America and most of Europe, is solidly democratic. In short, the pushback against Mr Putin would seem to fit Mr Biden’s framing—a “battle between democracy and autocracy”, as he said in his state-of-the-union speech. But geopolitics is never so neat.
Though Mr Putin’s most important backer, China, is authoritarian, several democracies are ambivalent. India, a big buyer of Russian arms, refuses to condemn him. South Africa, whose ruling party had a long friendship with the former Soviet Union, lays some blame for the war on NATO. Brazil’s president, whose “masculine qualities” Mr Putin once praised, professes neutrality. Israel says it is temporising in hopes of playing mediator.
And Mr Biden is also seeking help from authoritarian regimes, provoking worries that, just as the West overlooked abuses by anti-communist allies during the cold war, it will make ugly compromises now to counter Mr Putin. Doing so would pose diplomatic and political challenges. Compared with claiming compromise was necessary to resist the spectre of communism, it may prove trickier to argue—to allies abroad and voters at home—that one should curry favour with autocrats in order to confront autocracy.
Consider Turkey, a country of vast strategic importance where democracy is under siege. Western criticism of Turkey’s strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has gone quieter since the war began.
While sympathising with Ukraine and selling it remarkably effective combat drones, Mr Erdogan has opposed sanctions against Russia and kept his airspace open to Russian planes. He has also thrown Mr Putin a financial lifeline, suggesting that trade between Turkey and Russia be carried out using roubles or gold. Ordinary Russians fleeing persecution at home have found a haven in Turkey. Yet so have Russian oligarchs fleeing Western sanctions. Two superyachts belonging to Roman Abramovich, a billionaire friend of Mr Putin, have docked there.
Western officials are urging Turkey to take a tougher line on Russia. Turkish democrats fear Mr Erdogan will demand a steep price, such as Western leniency towards his habit of locking up his critics and muzzling the media. On March 1st Mr Erdogan suggested that Turkey be given a fast track to European Union membership. A week later, he urged Mr Biden to lift sanctions against Turkey’s defence industry, imposed after Mr Erdogan bought an S-400 air-defence system from Russia. America has since offered a way out, suggesting that Turkey send the S-400s to Ukraine. That is unlikely to happen for technical and political reasons, not least Turkey’s fear of retribution from Russia. But America may yet cut a bargain with Mr Erdogan. America put up with an undemocratic Turkey during the first cold war because it was an ally. It may do so in the new cold war, too.
Among the Western countries, liberal ones face a version of this dilemma. Poland is a lot more democratic than Turkey, but in the past few years its government has interfered with judges and harassed opposition media. Because of this, the EU froze €36bn ($40bn) in pandemic-recovery funds earmarked for Poland.
Today, however, Poland has welcomed the largest share of Ukrainian refugees and allows weapons for the Ukrainian resistance to cross its territory. Facing the threat that Russia, its oldest foe, could be on its border, it is keen to reconcile with the EU. That could spur the ruling Law and Justice party to temper its judge-nobbling and press-stifling. But the opposite is also possible. Poland’s Western partners may overlook abuses because of the essential role it is playing over Ukraine. “It would be very odd to be pressuring the Polish government on the rule of law right now,” says an analyst close to the Biden administration. “But Warsaw should understand that countering autocrats requires strengthening our own democracy.”
For their part, critics fear that Law and Justice will use the spectre of further Russian aggression to wrap itself in the flag, tighten its grip over Polish institutions, and step up attacks against “enemies” within, such as liberals, feminists and gay people. “Perhaps we need to change our approach even more thoroughly,” a presenter on Polish state TV recently mused. “Can a frontline state allow itself to tolerate attacks on its system of values?”
The war has caused energy prices to soar, prompting the West to reconsider its relations with autocratic petrostates. (Of the 13 members of OPEC, a club of oil exporters, 11 are rated “not free” by Freedom House, an American watchdog; two are rated “partly free”.) Unlike his predecessor, Mr Biden has infuriated Gulf rulers by stressing human rights. He once promised to make the Saudi regime “the pariah that they are”. Now he is asking it to pump more oil—a message reinforced by Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, who visited Riyadh on March 16th. Mr Biden may have to go further to make nice with Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, whom he has accused of ordering the dismemberment of a Washington Post columnist in 2018. The prince is cosying up to China to demonstrate he has options. He is considering pricing oil sales to China in yuan instead of dollars, the Wall Street Journal reports. The prince wants more help with his ill-fated war in Yemen and immunity from prosecution in America.
Another oil-fuelled autocracy, Venezuela, hopes the war in Ukraine will help it escape an embargo. Many democracies refuse to recognise Nicolás Maduro, an election-rigging despot, as president. Mr Putin has propped up Mr Maduro with planeloads of weapons and cash, plus some troops, largely to show he can meddle in America’s backyard. But now everyone’s calculations are changing.
Mr Maduro can no longer count on Mr Putin, who is cash-strapped and far more concerned about conquering Kyiv than coddling Caracas. Mr Biden cares more about stopping Mr Putin than unseating Mr Maduro. Hence the extraordinary scene on Venezuelan television on March 7th, when Mr Maduro described meeting a White House delegation two days before. “The two flags looked beautiful,” he gushed, “united, as the flags of the United States and Venezuela should be”.
The Biden administration says the main aim of the visit was humanitarian. Mr Maduro released two imprisoned Americans. He also promised to return to talks he abandoned last year with the much-persecuted Venezuelan opposition. But the two sides talked about oil, too. The delegation to Caracas reportedly made any sanctions relief contingent on Venezuela exporting some oil to the United States.
Both sides are wary. But a limited rapprochement seems possible, and would surely strengthen Mr Maduro’s grip on power. His meeting with American officials was “de facto recognition” that he is in charge, says Temir Porras, a former chief of staff to Mr Maduro. The strongman has “got something that he always wanted”. Republicans accuse Mr Biden of showing weakness by reaching out to despots. Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida, said that the meeting “did tremendous damage” to the opposition.
Sympathy for the devils
Democracies have a long history of deals with nasty regimes. Some were plainly necessary. To defeat Nazi Germany the West worked with Josef Stalin, prompting Winston Churchill to remark: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference of the Devil in the House of Commons.” Others seem shameful. America’s cold-war support for anti-communist kleptocrats in strategically peripheral places, such as Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire (now Congo), finds few defenders today.
The struggle against Mr Putin will force the West to reconsider many of its ties with lesser malefactors. But the new cold war is different from the old one. Communism was a universal ideology that inspired revolutions in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Putinism is a howl of nationalist and reactionary rage. Neither Russia nor China offers “a compelling worldview capable of attracting mass popular support worldwide”, notes Stewart Patrick of America’s Council on Foreign Relations. This makes them less of an existential threat to the free world than the Soviet Union was, and so reduces the incentive, or rationale, for making bargains as distasteful as those made to keep communism at bay.
As sanctions crush Russia’s economy, the Kremlin’s support for its own autocratic clients may wither. Strongmen in Mali and the Central African Republic may survive, since the Russian mercenary operations that protect them appear to be self-financing. (The CAR has a lot of diamonds.) But Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus may be wobblier. Mr Putin has saved both tyrants in the past, sending troops to crush Syrian rebels in 2015, and goons to help Mr Lukashenko put down protests against a stolen election in 2020. Both men are keen to keep Mr Putin in their corner. Mr Assad, who is seeking to end his isolation from his fellow Arabs, is said to have sent Syrian “volunteers” to help Russia in Ukraine.
Mr Lukashenko helped Mr Putin by letting Russia launch its southwards push for Kyiv from Belarusian soil. Belarusian troops were supposed to join in, but the Belarusian opposition says they are reluctant to follow orders from an unpopular despot to attack blameless fellow Slavs. Belarusian rail workers have reportedly sabotaged rail links with Ukraine to stop supplies from reaching the invaders.
So far, the war itself is demonstrating some of democracy’s strengths and autocracy’s drawbacks. Ukraine’s fighters have astonished their adversaries, and its people’s commitment to their freedom has inspired the world. For his part, Mr Putin was able to start his ruinous war on a whim. His flunkeys are scared to bring him unwelcome news. He seems sincerely to have expected many Ukrainians to welcome his troops. And his regime, like most autocracies, is corrupt, rendering his army weaker in the field than on paper. Budgets have been looted; Russian kit is breaking down for lack of maintenance or spare parts.
Yet the result of the war is unpredictable, and so too will be its effect on global democracy. If Mr Putin achieves something resembling a victory, that could inspire strongmen everywhere. If he loses, that could inspire those who stand up to them. When Mr Biden reconvenes his democracy summit later this year, much will depend on the courage of Ukrainians, and the support they receive from democracies, with all their flaws. ■
]]>Sat, 26 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT/content/hekg1aj889hn3a5ruhmh6ngkfrne3h4l
https://www.economist.com/international/how-vladimir-putin-provokes-and-complicates-the-struggle-against-autocracy/21808339
<![CDATA[America returns to containment to deal with Russia and China]]>
Democracy v autocracy America returns to containment to deal with Russia and China
Strategists are relearning the lessons of the cold war
THE AIRSTRIKES that pummelled the Ukrainian military base near the town of Yavoriv early on March 13th were notable not just because they killed some 35 people, nor even because they expanded hostilities to the far west of Ukraine, a region previously largely unscathed by Russia’s invasion. Most important, the base, ironically named the International Peacekeeping and Security Centre, had been used until recently by America and other NATO countries to train Ukrainian troops (a session led by the Americans is pictured). It is a mere 18km from Poland, a NATO member, and has become a staging post for the weapons and other supplies that NATO countries are funnelling to Ukraine. For those who fear the war may expand beyond Ukraine’s borders, the attack was the most worrying evidence yet. For Western leaders, especially, it was a reminder of the difficulty of preventing their confrontation with Russia from escalating.
The West has long experience of keeping a hostile power in eastern Europe at bay without resorting to war. In 1947 George Kennan, a celebrated American diplomat, argued in an anonymous article in Foreign Affairs that Russia’s hostility was the product of its insecurity, yet its foreign policy would nonetheless respond to the “logic and rhetoric of power”. America should therefore adopt “a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interest of a peaceful and stable world.” This view became the foundation of America’s strategy against the Soviet Union during the cold war.
Kennan’s ideas about “containment” are being avidly reread in Washington as the West embarks on a new contest with Russia. “I am very fearful that we are looking at a very long-term conflict,” said Liz Truss, Britain’s foreign secretary, during a visit to Washington on March 10th. For Robert Gates, a former American defence secretary, the war “has ended Americans’ 30-year holiday from history”; the United States must confront not just Russia but China, too. “A new American strategy must recognise that we face a global struggle of indeterminate duration against two great powers that share authoritarianism at home and hostility to the United States,” he wrote in the Washington Post.
What form the contest takes will depend, in the first instance, on the outcome of the fighting in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, has been denied a swift military victory, thanks to the stiff resistance of Ukraine’s forces. A coup in the Kremlin or a popular uprising that removes him cannot be counted upon. Speaking to Congress last week, Bill Burns, the director of the CIA, expected more bitter fighting. “I think Putin is angry and frustrated right now. He’s likely to double down and try to grind down the Ukrainian military with no regard for civilian casualties.” Even if a mooted diplomatic deal can be reached soon, a prolonged period of rivalry between the West and Russia seems inevitable, at least for as long as Mr Putin remains in power.
If he can take control of Ukraine, a bloodied Mr Putin may be tempted to seek more conquests. In any case, he is likely to be faced with stubborn resistance, both armed and non-violent, from recalcitrant Ukrainians. If he faces a stalemate or, as some now dare to believe, begins to retreat, he may lash out at Ukraine’s Western supporters in the hope of changing his fortunes. Whatever happens, says Alina Polyakova of the Centre for European Policy Analysis, a think-tank in Washington, there will be no more “resets” with Russia of the kind Barack Obama attempted, or the pursuit of “stable, predictable relations” that Joe Biden advocated last year. “We are in here for the long haul, a kind of twilight struggle with Russia,” she says.
Ms Truss is adamant that Mr Putin must lose: “If we let Putin’s expansionism go unchallenged, it would send a dangerous message to would-be aggressors and authoritarians around the world.” Yet the means of achieving this are limited because of the danger of nuclear escalation. Mr Biden promises that America will defend “every inch” of NATO’s territory. But he is just as explicit in saying that American forces will not defend any inch of Ukrainian land, for fear of starting “World War III”. Hence the resort to a strategy that seeks to stop Russian imperial aggression but stops short of direct military intervention: an indirect contest that involves arming Ukrainian forces, exerting crippling economic pressure on Russia and treating it as a pariah. “We’re back to classic containment,” says Richard Fontaine of the Centre for a New America Security, a think-tank, “We are defaulting to a policy of preventing Russia’s expansion, weakening it and hoping for a change of political leadership in the long run.”
The long and the short of it
As Russia heads towards Stalin-era levels of internal repression and economic isolation, Kennan’s analysis of how to deal with the Soviet dictator offers a starting point for policymakers. His “long telegram” from Moscow in 1946 argued, “At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.” Russian rulers “have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own.” The result is a belief that Russia cannot live in peace with the West, and must disrupt if not destroy it. In his subsequent essay in Foreign Affairs, expanding on his cable, Kennan argued that the Soviet Union “bears within it the seeds of its own decay”, and that American pressure could hasten “either the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.” Yet Kennan came to oppose the form of containment America adopted. He thought political and economic action—not military build-up and confrontation—should be the principal tools. He supported the Marshall plan of American aid to post-war Europe but disliked the creation of NATO. Years later, he thought the expansion of the alliance after the fall of the Berlin wall had been a “tragic mistake”.
Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University points out that Russia today is a much lesser foe than the Soviet Union had been. It is “a wounded empire” rather than a superpower with a global ideology. Its leadership is personal rather than collective (after Stalin); its economy lacks the imperial possessions and client states of the Soviet Union, which formed a near-autarkic system. “Russia is a much more fragile economy, and political and social order, than the Soviet Union,” he says. “It’s not held together by any ideology other than rabid nationalism, but chiefly by greed and corruption and fear.”
He proposes three objectives for a new containment strategy: the military liberation of Ukraine by providing it with any and all weapons it needs (short of chemical, biological or nuclear arms); the weakening of Russia through crippling sanctions so that it can no longer pose a threat; and the re-armament and revitalisation of the West to confront not only Russia but also China. The Biden administration is more cautious. Militarily, it does not want America to become a “co-combatant”. Russia has given warning that convoys supplying weapons to Ukraine are legitimate targets; the attack on the base in Yavoriv may have been intended to ram that point home. Thus far America has provided Ukraine with shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, but has rejected the notion of being the intermediary for the delivery of Polish MiG-29 jets to Ukraine, deeming that “escalatory”. It will not provide Patriot anti-aircraft batteries, because these would require Americans to operate them. By the same token, it has repeatedly refused to try to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
How far a country can support a proxy war against a nuclear power is uncertain, but history suggests the boundaries are wide. Chinese “volunteer” forces fought against American troops in the Korean war of 1950-53. Russians manned anti-aircraft batteries and, perhaps, flew missions against American aircraft in the Vietnam war of 1955-75. During the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan in 1979-89, America provided resistance fighters with anti-aircraft missiles and much else besides. “The United States and the Soviet Union were at daggers drawn but usually did not stab each other directly,” explains Mr Fontaine.
If Russian forces keep grinding forward—capturing Kyiv, say—pressure will grow for the West to do more to help Ukraine. One priority will be to preserve the rump of the Ukrainian government in the west of the country. As Dr Polyakova argues, a government-in-exile quickly becomes irrelevant in its country’s domestic politics. The Atlantic Council, a think-tank in Washington, DC, asked a panel of experts to assess 11 options for Western assistance to Ukraine, rating them according to military effectiveness and risk of escalation. The best ones included providing combat drones; electronic-warfare equipment; “counter-fire” systems to find and destroy Russian artillery; and air-defence systems to destroy aircraft, rockets and missiles, including the Close-in Weapon System (often used on ships) and Israel’s Iron Dome.
The Biden administration has continued to ratchet up economic sanctions on Russia but here, too, there are limits. Not all Russian banks are cut off from the SWIFT system of financial messages, for instance. European countries continue to buy large quantities of Russian oil and gas. Russian gas even continues to flow across the front lines of the war in Ukraine. Yuriy Vitrenko, the boss of Naftogaz, Ukraine’s state-owned oil-and-gas company, thinks that a good way to squeeze Russia further would be for European countries to make payments for Russian energy into an escrow account, to be released to Russia when its forces leave Ukraine. That would both deny Russia money to pursue its war and create an incentive to end it, says Mr Vitrenko.
Don’t rattle too hard
Such are the pressures on Russia that some worry about “catastrophic success”: a military or economic collapse in Russia that pushes Mr Putin to take greater risks. The biggest worry is that he might resort to nuclear weapons, which he has not been shy about threatening. “We have to be mindful that Putin, if he feels cornered, could be dangerous,” says a senior American defence source. But, he adds, there is no sign of Russia changing the readiness of its nuclear forces. Mr Putin’s threats, he thinks, are a warning to NATO not to attack Russia’s exposed flanks as he sends most of his ground and air forces into Ukraine. That is one reason why America has been cautious in reinforcing NATO’s military presence on its eastern front. “We don’t want to signal to Putin that somehow NATO intends to take offensive action, because that could make him quite nervous,” says the source.
For Daniel Fried of the Atlantic Council, the contest with Russia may come to resemble the early years of the cold war, ”a messy, confrontational, and uneasy period when Americans for almost 20 years feared nuclear war.” Even as America seeks to contain Russia, he argues, it should keep talking to Mr Putin about arms control. Michael Green, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, another think-tank, says the emerging containment strategy needs two more elements. One is a sharp increase in America’s defence spending if it is to contain both Russia and China. “The US defence budget is just about the lowest it has been as a percentage of GDP in the post-war era,” he notes. A second requirement is strengthening the “economic underpinning” for America’s alliances, particularly in Asia, through further integration and trade liberalisation. Right now, he says, Team Biden has “zero plan”.
The ever closer partnership between Russia and China is yet another reminder of the early cold war, except that these days it is China, rather than Russia, that is the biggest rival to America. Some China hawks say America risks being drawn too deeply into Europe’s crisis and should instead focus on the Indo-Pacific. Biden administration officials retort that the weakening of Russia and the strengthening of European allies will ultimately “pay dividends” in Asia. One notes that America’s military commitment in Europe mostly concerns ground forces, whereas defending Taiwan and containing China in the Indo-Pacific is mainly a task for the navy and air force. Arne Westad of Yale University sees America reviving a cold-war tactic to split Russia and China: “Inflict major pain on the weaker partner, then China and now Russia, and have a higher level of interaction with the stronger partner, to get them to rethink their strategic positions and test the cohesion of their relationship,” he explains. “That was part of the reason the Sino-Soviet alliance broke up.”
As America and its allies in Europe and Asia take on Russia, many see the hope for a revival of the West. Among the most optimistic is Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University, who coined the notion of the “end of history” after the fall of the Soviet Union. Writing in American Purpose, an online magazine, he predicts that Ukraine will not only stop Russian forces but inflict “outright defeat” on them. This will make possible a “new birth of freedom” and re-energise global democracy, he writes: “The spirit of 1989 will live on, thanks to a bunch of brave Ukrainians.”■
Our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis can be found here.
]]>Mon, 14 Mar 2022 19:23:39 GMT/content/0hhlcv5v9b8csf34mtpt6acad4irssup
https://www.economist.com/international/2022/03/14/america-returns-to-containment-to-deal-with-russia-and-china
<![CDATA[Vladimir Putin has rallied the West]]>
Democracies united Vladimir Putin has rallied the West
Russian aggression is prompting rare unity and severe reprisals
Since the fleeting days after the unifying attacks of September 11th 2001, the century has not been kind to expectations that the world’s democracies would work together effectively. America’s costly wars and erratic leadership, Germany’s preference for engagement over confrontation, Britain’s rejection of the European Union, the backsliding of Poland and Hungary: even before President Joe Biden bungled America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, such interrelated developments weighed on hopes that he would reinvigorate not just nato but also, perhaps, the promise of liberal democracy itself. His one bold thrust in that direction—a new trilateral pact with Australia and Britain, to contain China—managed to blindside and anger Emmanuel Macron of France, reinforcing the conviction in the Elysée Palace that Europe should develop “strategic autonomy”.
A combination of Vladimir Putin’s viciousness and Ukraine’s courage appears to be changing this dynamic in ways Mr Putin clearly did not anticipate. The invasion is less than a week old, but already by February 27th it had succeeded, in one respect, where years of persuasion by Barack Obama and bullying by Donald Trump failed. Germany committed itself to dramatically boosting its military spending, to above 2% of gdp. Calling the invasion “a turning point in the history of our continent”, Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, declared: “It is clear we will need to invest significantly more in the security of our country to defend our freedom and our democracy.”
Hours after Mr Scholz spoke, the eu said it would close its airspace to Russian aeroplanes and send military aid to Ukraine, in the first such commitment by the 27-nation bloc to a country under attack. Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Stoere, said its $1.3trn sovereign wealth fund, the largest in the world, would sell off its Russian assets. bp, a British oil company, said it would get rid of its nearly 20% stake in Rosneft, an oil producer controlled by the Russian government. Two courier companies, Federal Express and United Parcel Service, suspended services in Russia.
On both sides of the Atlantic, foreign-policy analysts expressed astonishment at the swiftness and severity of the international response, including new sanctions aimed at crippling Russia’s economy by freezing the assets of its central bank. With China falling silent on Russia’s action and few countries besides the likes of Syria rallying behind it, America moved to underscore Mr Putin’s isolation. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, America’s ambassador to the United Nations, said that the White House would seek an emergency meeting of the un General Assembly and a vote, perhaps as soon as Wednesday, on a resolution deploring Mr Putin’s invasion. Under un rules, Russia has no power to veto such a resolution, as it did a draft resolution by the un Security Council on February 25th—although a vote by the General Assembly is not binding.
It is impossible to gauge the durability of the global reaction, whether the rare American political consensus in support of the Biden administration’s policy or nato’s concerted action. But appearing on “Fox News Sunday”, Condoleezza Rice, who was secretary of state under President George W. Bush, said Mr Putin has “managed to unite nato in ways that I didn’t think I would ever see again after the end of the cold war”. Citing Germany’s support for sanctions and increased military spending, Ms Rice added that he had “stirred up a hornets’ nest.”
Since the end of the cold war, Germany has vexed successive American presidents by failing to meet nato’s military-spending target of 2% of gdp for European members. But Mr Scholz called for Germany to make an investment greater than that “from now on”, proposing to enshrine the commitment in the country’s constitution. “Putin wants to establish a Russian empire,” Mr Scholz said, in an address to parliament. The question before Germany, he said, was “whether we can summon the strength to set boundaries to warmongers like Putin.”
Mr Scholz also proposed to invest €100bn ($113bn) this year in a special fund to modernise the armed forces. He announced specific procurement plans, to include armed drones from Israel and possibly F-35 fighters from America. He cited the utility of these fighters in amplifying nato’s nuclear deterrent, which has long been a politically toxic subject in Germany. Earlier, on February 26th, Germany had broken with its long-standing policy against sending weapons into conflict zones, saying it would dispatch anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to help Ukraine.
Claudia Major, of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, a think-tank, calls Mr Scholz’s proposals “a revolution in German defence policy”. She says the announcements represent a recognition of the failure of the co-operative security policy Germany had pursued with Russia since the end of the cold war. It had done so in the belief that talking and trading with Russia would lead it to respect human rights and embrace a peaceful role within a community of nations. Now, Ms Major says, a new era of confrontation has begun.
Although there is no reliable polling yet on the public mood, Mr Scholz’s measures are backed by all mainstream parties in the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament. More than 100,000 people of all ages took to the streets of Berlin on February 27th to protest against the war. They gathered on the wide boulevard leading from the Victory Column to the Brandenburg Gate in the city’s centre, waving Ukrainian flags and holding signs, often in blue and golden yellow, that read “No Putin”, “No World War 3”, “We Stand With Ukraine”. Some signs bore pictures of Hitler and the warning “History repeats itself”.
Ms Major, who was born in East Germany, compares the shift in public sentiment to the one that occurred when the wall came down in 1989. “The refugees have arrived in Berlin,” she says. “The idea that we have war in Europe, and it has arrived at our doorstep and it might actually enter our house—it’s a fear that people feel.” She adds, “I really feel like Germany woke up. I think today they kind of realised what we in German call the Zeitenwende, the change of time, the change of an era.”
Our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis can be found here
]]>Sun, 27 Feb 2022 22:44:30 GMT/content/42g6q37r9qd7ek24m6m863j4k16p1f3i
https://www.economist.com/international/2022/02/27/vladimir-putin-has-rallied-the-west
<![CDATA[The West struggles to respond forcefully to Russia’s war in Ukraine]]>
Containing the Kremlin The West struggles to respond forcefully to Russia’s war in Ukraine
America and its allies do not want to risk a broader conflict or harm their economies by imposing crippling sanctions
“PUTIN’S AGGRESSION against Ukraine will end up costing Russia dearly, economically and strategically. We will make sure of that.” With these fighting words, President Joe Biden announced on February 24th that America would impose sweeping economic sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. The measures freeze the American assets of Russia’s biggest banks, hamper its ability to raise debt, restrict its import of high-tech goods and seize the wealth of its elites and their children. Britain and the EU announced similar steps.
But those who imagined that sanctions would cripple Russia’s economy overnight are likely to be disappointed, if only because much of the world still wants its oil and gas. And the West has signalled that, for all its horror at Mr Putin’s wanton aggression, it will not act militarily against a nuclear power. Instead, America and Europe seem to hope that opprobrium, economic pressure, the grind of war and, perhaps, discontent at home, will eventually convince Mr Putin to pull back—or at least not advance further.
Mr Biden denounced the brutality of Russia’s “war without a cause”, and hailed the unity of the West in the “contest between democracy and autocracy”. Yet the West is confronting a sobering failure: its ever-greater resort to sanctions as a tool of foreign policy has only a limited impact. One reason is that they also inflict pain on those who wield them, often unevenly.
After months of threatening “massive” sanctions, Mr Biden says he never pretended that sanctions could deter Mr Putin from going to war. Instead, he says they are now intended to sap Russia’s strength in the long term, to the point of turning it into “a secondary power”. He predicted: “Some of the most powerful impacts of our actions will come over time as we squeeze Russia’s access to finance and technology for strategic sectors of its economy…Between our actions and those of our allies and partners, we estimate we’ll cut off more than half of Russia’s high-tech imports.”
The West’s response, however, remains far from exhaustive. Mr Biden was keen to highlight the fall of the Russian currency and its stockmarkets. But he was discomfited by the increase in energy prices as Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, briefly soared above $100 a barrel for the first time since 2014. A notable exclusion from the sanctions were Russia’s big energy companies. And America’s financial restrictions are allowing “energy payments” to continue. “My administration is using the tools—every tool at our disposal—to protect American families and businesses from rising prices at the gas pump,” said Mr Biden, warning oil and gas companies not to “exploit” this moment to raise prices. He said that personal sanctions against Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, were “on the table”, but there was no sign of them.
After a day of frenetic consultations among Western leaders, several of Ukraine’s calls for tougher action were left unanswered. These include the severing of Russia from the SWIFT system of financial transactions, the imposition of a no-fly zone over Ukraine, and the closure (by Turkey) of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles straits for Russian vessels sailing between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, implored the world to act firmly: “If you my dear European leaders, my dear world leaders, leaders of the free world, don’t help us today, if you do not strongly help Ukraine, then tomorrow war will knock on your doors.”
For all the support given to Ukraine in the form of money and weapons, America has drawn a clear line between countries that are in NATO, which must be defended, and those that remain outside, like Ukraine, which must fend for themselves. That may give countries like Sweden and Finland renewed cause to consider joining the alliance.
Even within NATO’s domain, the allies have been at pains to indicate military restraint. They will be doubly cautious now that rival planes, ships and ground forces are operating in close proximity along the borders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Mr Biden said America was sending more troops to Europe and would help defend “every inch” of NATO territory, but would not be drawn into the fighting in Ukraine. “Let me say it again. Our forces are not and will not be engaged in the conflict with Russia in Ukraine. Our forces are not going to Europe to fight in Ukraine, but to defend our NATO allies and reassure those allies in the east.”
NATO’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, said that “peace in our continent has been shattered”. NATO had activated its “defence plans”, which give commanders more leeway, but has not yet deployed the NATO Response Force, its 40,000-strong rapid-reaction force. As NATO leaders prepared for a video summit on February 25th, Mr Stoltenberg admitted: “We don’t have all the answers today.” He emphasised the importance of “deconfliction”, ie, avoiding the risk of inadvertent clashes, between NATO and Russian forces, and that “what we do is defensive, is measured and we do not seek confrontation.”
American hawks, such as John Bolton, a national-security adviser under Donald Trump, blame the war on Mr Biden’s “weakness”. In Mr Bolton’s view the feebleness dates to the time of George W. Bush, who did not stop Mr Putin from going to war in Georgia in 2008. It is especially true of Mr Trump, whom Mr Bolton served and who this week praised Mr Putin as “very savvy”. Mr Bolton said: “There’s a lot of tough talk in Brussels. And all that tough talk won’t buy you a cup of coffee.” In his view, America should have deployed troops to Ukraine months ago to act as a deterrent; now it’s “too late”.
Meeting in Brussels, national leaders of the EU’s 27 states castigated Russia for the “unprovoked and unjustified military action”. They agreed on the need for “massive and severe consequences”. Sanctions are also to be meted out against Belarus, which aided Russia with its attack. However the details of the measures have yet to be revealed. Some EU members—notably Germany and Italy—are less hawkish than hardliners in Poland and the Baltics.
In general, Western sanctions aim to hit Russia in areas where they have a clear balance of economic power, such as finance and technology. The penalties on big Russian banks will make life difficult but not impossible for Russia. It has built up large reserves, sought to make itself less dependent on the dollar and can probably rely on China to help evade the restrictions. The financial shock will be counterbalanced by the bumper revenues brought by high prices for oil and gas. Calls to cut Russia off from SWIFT met resistance from several European countries, and might anyway have carried the risk of contagion in already turbulent markets. The details of sanctions on tech exports to Russia remain unclear, but their impact is likely to be felt cumulatively over years rather than days.
Faced with a wall of denunciation—including an initial round of sanctions from Japan, Australia and South Korea—Russia found some solace from China, to which it has cleaved ever more closely. Hua Chunying, the Chinese foreign ministry’s chief spokesperson, declined to describe Russia’s action as an invasion, and instead blamed America: “They started the fire and fanned the flame. How are they going to put out the fire now?” And India sat uncomfortably on the fence: it has moved closer to America in recent years to offset China’s power, while remaining a long-time friend of Russia’s and a large buyer of its weapons. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, appealed for “an immediate cessation of violence”. That is unlikely. And the longer the war drags on, the more awkward India’s position will be. Some in Washington think that the ever-closer relationship between Mr Putin and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, will force India to strengthen its ties with the West. But that will probably take time. For now, the West has few good options to stop Mr Putin’s war.
All of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis can be found here
]]>Fri, 25 Feb 2022 00:58:40 GMT/content/t09qn1a1nrgodpf7n3coajdrfkbnfc8g
https://www.economist.com/international/2022/02/25/the-west-struggles-to-respond-forcefully-to-russias-war-in-ukraine
<![CDATA[How Russia has revived NATO]]>
Crisis in Ukraine How Russia has revived NATO
Ukraine has forced America and its allies to bond. But the country’s future is still uncertain
VLADIMIR PUTIN’S giant oval table in the Kremlin is as extreme as it is kitsch. Sitting far from foreign visitors may be his way of social distancing. But it also betokens the gulf that separated Russia’s leader from his guest, Emmanuel Macron of France. It may also illustrate what diplomats say is Mr Putin’s worrying isolation from the world. None can claim to read his mind as he masses some 130,000 troops on the borders around Ukraine. Is he about to launch the biggest war in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall? Or is it all a big bluff?
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On February 7th Mr Macron was the first heavyweight Western leader this year to visit Moscow to divine Mr Putin’s intentions. Before arriving the French president said he did not believe in “spontaneous miracles”. After five hours of talks, there was no clear outcome. Visiting Kyiv the next day, Mr Macron said Mr Putin had pledged that Russia “would not be the cause of an escalation” on the border. The Kremlin denied this, and brushed off the notion that Mr Macron could negotiate anything. “France is a NATO member, but Paris is not the leader there. A very different country runs this bloc,” said Dmitry Peskov, Mr Putin’s spokesman. “So what deals can we talk about?” In sum, the only interlocutor that matters is America.
Mr Putin, for his part, launched into yet another blistering attack on NATO. And Ukraine, he said, must abide by the so-called Minsk protocols of 2014-15—or, rather, Russia’s interpretation of them. “Whether you like it or don’t like it, bear with it, my beauty,” the Russian leader said crudely, perhaps quoting the lyrics of an obscene song about rape and necrophilia. Mr Macron has long wanted warmer relations with Mr Putin. The danger, if his high-stakes diplomacy goes wrong, is that he will be seen as a dupe or, worse, as an accessory to Russia’s violation of Ukraine.
Yet there is little alternative to talking to Mr Putin. Russia has assembled the densest concentration of military firepower that Europe has seen in decades. Ukraine is surrounded on three sides. Russian amphibious assault-ships are gathering in the Black Sea. On February 5th America said Russia had deployed 70% of the force it would need to invade Ukraine: an attack could start “any day”. NATO worries that large military exercises in Belarus, starting this week, may provide cover for an assault, perhaps alongside a nuclear exercise. Nuclear-capable Russian bombers have flown patrols close to Poland.
NATO will not fight for Ukraine. Instead America and Europe have mustered a three-pronged response: deterrence, by arming Ukraine and threatening unprecedented economic sanctions if Russia attacks; reassurance of allies by deploying extra forces to central and eastern Europe; and diplomacy to stay Mr Putin’s hand.
Olaf Scholz, Germany’s new chancellor, will visit Kyiv and Moscow next week on the heels of Mr Macron. There has already been a meeting of the “Weimar triangle” (the leaders of France, Germany and Poland). The “Normandy” format (officials from France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine) was set to confer on February 10th. If successful, this may be followed by a Normandy summit. As long as Russia keeps talking, the Europeans all hope, it will not start shooting.
Mr Macron has greater ambitions. With the departure of Angela Merkel, Germany’s veteran chancellor, he can claim to be Europe’s senior statesman. Beyond averting war, he wants to settle the status of Ukraine, shove Europe back onto the diplomatic stage and ultimately establish greater “European sovereignty” and a new security order on the continent.
On the military stand-off, Mr Macron warned of the risk of “incandescence”. But French and German diplomats have been warier of declaring that Russia’s build-up signalled an “imminent” invasion, as America and Britain have tended to argue.
European officials now espy a narrow path to avoid conflict. It passes through the Normandy format, the one forum where Russia and Ukraine can negotiate directly. For all of Mr Putin’s demands about halting NATO’s eastbound expansion and even rolling back its current military deployments, what most seems to vex him is Ukraine. The country has shifted towards the Western camp since 2014, when a revolt ousted its autocratic Moscow-backed president, Viktor Yanukovych. This prompted Mr Putin to annex Crimea and foment a separatist revolt in the eastern Donbas region.
At the barrel of a gun Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s next elected president, accepted the Minsk accords. These were deliberately vague. On the security side they mandated a ceasefire, a withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front lines, an exchange of prisoners and the removal of “foreign troops”, meaning Russians. On the political side Ukraine agreed to make constitutional changes to decentralise power, hold local elections and give Donbas a special status. Ukraine would then be allowed to regain control over its border.
How “special” that status would be was left undefined, as was the precise sequence of steps and the question of whether the 1.5m people of Donbas displaced by the conflict should have a say in its future. In effect, Ukrainian law would not apply there. Donbas would have its own local militias. In the eyes of Russia the purpose of Minsk was to create a Trojan horse to give it control of Ukraine.
Mr Poroshenko’s attempt in 2015 to push a mild version of the constitutional changes through the Rada (parliament) prompted fierce protests from nationalists, resulting in the death of several national guards. But defying expectations of its collapse, Ukraine muddled through, ducked and dodged, survived and consolidated. It stabilised its economy and built up and modernised its army. As the first line of its national anthem goes, “Ukraine is not yet dead.” Though he could not implement the Minsk accords, Mr Poroshenko could not ditch them either. As the Ukraine crisis flares again, European leaders are urging his successor, Volodymyr Zelensky, to re-engage with Minsk.
But implementing the accords has become a lot harder. Russia has tightened its grip over the separatist territories. It has built up a force estimated at 40,000 men, eliminated some of the unrulier commanders and installed its own leaders. It has distributed hundreds of thousands of passports to residents of Donbas, many of whom voted last year in Russia’s parliamentary elections.
Bringing Donbas back into Ukraine on Russia’s terms could spell the end of Ukraine as a sovereign state, or so many Ukrainians fear. One worry is that constitutional change leading to “federalisation” would give Donbas—and thus Russia—a veto on Ukraine’s West-leaning policy, notably its ability to join NATO. Another is that it will corrode the country from within, by giving Russia more ways to meddle in its affairs. As Zerkalo Nedeli, an online Ukrainian weekly, points out, forcing Ukraine to enact Minsk is “a slow and painful execution—not by shooting, but by injecting it with lethal poison”. With his own popularity rating dropping below 25%, an energy crisis looming and the cost of living rising, Mr Zelensky would face mass protests if Ukrainians see it as a sell-out.
Avoid the Finnish line
Yet some veteran Ukrainian politicians, including Arsen Avakov, a former interior minister, and Mr Poroshenko, believe that Ukraine is stronger than it may appear. They think Mr Putin would struggle to force Ukraine to surrender its sovereignty. After nearly eight years of war Ukraine’s army, one of the largest in Europe, is hardened. This, along with firmer backing from abroad, may explain why Ukraine’s elite is relatively calm. “My message is: don’t trust Putin and don’t be afraid of Putin,” says Mr Poroshenko. “Strength and resolve is the only language that works.”
Ukraine may be able to cope with a version of Minsk that falls short of Mr Putin’s demands. It could, for example, agree to negotiate with the newly appointed heads of Donbas, provided that Russia removed its proxy forces. Or it could agree to hold elections and dress up decentralisation, which has already taken place in the rest of Ukraine, as the “special status” for Donbas, as long as Ukrainian laws apply. In the meantime Mr Putin may calculate that waiting for Mr Zelensky to falter and for the economic crunch to take effect may be less dangerous than fighting. Russia would need at least 700,000 men to capture and occupy Ukraine, some analysts reckon.
A peculiarity of the crisis is that, even though no one in NATO thinks Ukraine is fit to join the alliance soon, if ever, the body cannot be seen to close its “open-door” policy in the face of Russian threats. Some European diplomats think the circle could be squared if Ukraine itself were to declare its neutrality, as Austria and Finland did after the second world war. Asked about “Finlandisation”, Mr Macron let slip that it was “one model on the table”, but insisted that creative negotiators would have to “invent something new”. Russian diplomats have said they might entertain the idea.
The trouble is, Ukraine has written into its constitution the ambition to join NATO. Moreover, Finland and Sweden are as close to NATO—and as interoperable with it—as it is possible to be without actually being members. Indeed, Russia’s brutish behaviour is kindling a debate within both countries about joining. What is more, Finland, Sweden and Austria are all members of the EU, which Mr Putin dislikes, too.
The Normandy process gives France and Germany a chance to claim a place at the talks with Russia, which have hitherto been dominated by America and NATO, if only because Russia submitted new treaties to those two entities. The French, although they are members of NATO, have unsurprisingly bristled at being merely “debriefed” by the Americans.
Two years ago Mr Macron had announced the “brain death” of NATO due to a double malady: under Donald Trump America was no longer willing to guarantee Europe’s security; and some members, such as Turkey, were acting unilaterally in Europe’s “neighbourhood” without consulting their allies.
Since then, however, NATO has revived admirably. Under President Joe Biden America sounded the alarm about Russia’s build-up and co-ordinated the Western response. “Putin has single-handedly given NATO a vitamin injection,” says Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference, an annual transatlantic talkfest that begins on February 18th. NATO’s three decades of angst about its role after the end of the cold war has been dispelled. Having performed “out of area” operations in the Balkans and counter-insurgency in Afghanistan, it is going back to basics: the territorial defence of allies. The theological rivalry between institutions in Brussels over whether the EU should have an autonomous defence capability has for the moment been stilled.
In this crisis the EU has been sidelined, perhaps inevitably. Ever since France blocked the idea of a European Defence Community with a pan-European army in 1954, European integration has been pursued mainly by economic means. Yet France now pushes hard for the EU to build it own military capacity.
The brain comes alive again
Atlanticists have long worried that the EU would at best duplicate already scarce military capabilities and at worst split America from the EU. The ensuing compromises have created an alphabet soup of European structures and initiatives but little extra military muscle. For instance, since 2007 the EU has had two battlegroups of about 1,500 soldiers each, supposedly ready to deploy at short notice. It has never used them, although it has mounted other ad hoc missions. In fending off Russia it is NATO members, individually and collectively, including France, that have taken up the cudgels to send troops to reinforce their eastern European allies.
“The European Union cannot defend Europe,” says Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general, noting that “80% of NATO’s defence expenditure comes from non-EU members”. NATO’s military heft derives mainly from American muscle. But it is more than that, Mr Stoltenberg says. Britain, Iceland and Norway, which are not in the EU, are vital to securing Europe’s northern flank, along with Canada. Similarly, despite tensions with its NATO allies, Turkey supports Ukraine and anchors the alliance in the south-east. In return, NATO helps give America an unrivalled network of friends and allies. Europe and North America, Mr Stoltenberg says, must stand in “strategic solidarity”.
But for all of NATO’s primacy, it cannot solve the problem of Russia. To begin with, the alliance does not include Finland and Sweden. Though they are not covered by NATO’s Article 5, which states that an attack on one ally is an attack on all, they are nominally protected by the mutual-defence provision in article 42 (7) of the EU treaty. Moreover, it is the EU that co-ordinates and imposes economic sanctions. The EU is also vital in building a more resilient energy system, including an internal market that lets countries trade electricity and natural gas. In Ukraine the EU has provided billions of euros in aid to help reform the corruption-riddled economy.
Within both NATO and the EU there have been fewer disagreements than expected. No one questions the principle of “massive” sanctions against Russia if it invades Ukraine. After some reluctance, Mr Scholz accepts that Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, would be mothballed. All understand the danger of a belligerent Russia that seeks to redraw the international borders of Europe by force.
What if Russia embarks on a smaller action—something short of an invasion? And how to react to non-military “grey zone” actions, such as a cyber-attack and subversion? Mr Biden carelessly said that a “small incursion” might elicit a lesser response. But there has been little detailed discussion of such eventualities. Many allies fear that would expose divisions; a full-scale attack would probably not.
We won’t be snowed over
Mr Macron sees the Ukraine crisis as a chance once again to promote the idea of “European sovereignty”. Some people in Paris speak of a “refounding moment”. In a recent speech to the European Parliament he hailed the EU’s growing sovereignty, defining it broadly, from the collective European purchase of vaccines to the euro-zone’s monetary policy. But he also spoke of building “a new order of security and stability” in Europe—agreed on by Europeans, non-EU NATO allies and America—and then proposed to Russia.
What he means is hazy. Some suggest he is referring to such things as the need for a new arms-control regime in Europe after Mr Trump’s withdrawal in 2019 from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Treaty and to the erosion of confidence-building measures, including advance notification of large military exercises. None of this is EU business. These points have anyway been included in America’s and NATO’s recent responses to Russia. What is more, the French government does not want to be drawn directly into nuclear arms-control talks with Russia, lest its own force de frappe is called into question.
America is back. For how long?
More than most of his predecessors, Mr Macron understands the suspicion and resentment that all this can cause. He has become more willing to consult other EU members than in the past. Jacques Chirac, who resented the EU’s enlargement to eastern and central Europe, once said that governments in that region would do better to “shut up”. Mr Macron, in contrast, says the “traumas” of countries that lived under Soviet rule should be understood.
Strikingly, the French are not alone in talking about European sovereignty. The idea pops up, for instance, in the coalition agreement of Mr Scholz’s government. Estonians have joined the French-led European Intervention Initiative, a forum for strategic thinking and planning. So has Britain. The idea that Europeans have to do more for themselves is strengthened not only by Russian brutishness, but also by doubts about America’s commitment.
Mr Trump may return to power in 2025. In any case, all recent American presidents have wanted to edge away from Europe and the Middle East to concentrate on the contest with China in Asia. Indeed, some see America’s new effort in Europe as a signal not only to Russia but also to China, to deter it from attacking Taiwan.
“Do we have a Plan B for what the EU will do if NATO were to lose its main partner?” asks Mr Ischinger. “I hope it will never happen but it’s a matter of serious responsibility to consider it.” Without the American hegemon, though, it is still hard to envisage the Europeans mustering a coherent response. Foreign- and security-policy decisions in the EU require unanimity. Different countries’ priorities diverge. Southerners want to focus on the Mediterranean and migration; easterners put Russia first.
Moreover, political and strategic instincts differ, too. France favours wielding military power but is wary of a NATO dominated by America; Germany embraces the alliance but for historical reasons is shy of using force. And Britain has left the EU entirely. “It is the European dilemma,” says a German diplomat. “European sovereignty is impossible. But it has never been more necessary.” ■
All of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis can be found here
This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline "How Russia revived NATO"
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