Threats

Today's D Brief: Biden-Zelenskyy chat; The Kremlin's fog machine; Macron on defense; Growing opacity in China; And a bit more.

Ben Watson

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Senior Multimedia Editor, Defense One

Russia’s top military officer vowed Thursday to defend those well-armed rebels that illegally seized eastern Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region with the help of a lightly-disguised Russian military back in 2014. “Any provocations by Ukrainian authorities to settle the Donbas problems by force will be suppressed,” Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian military’s General Staff, said Thursday in Moscow, according to the Associated Press. 

Gerasimov’s warning comes as American intelligence officials said this week that Russia has stationed at least 70,000 troops near the Ukraine border for a possible new invasion that could begin as early as January 2022. CBS News reported Thursday that as many as 100,000 Russian troops could already be involved. Russian officials have denied any plans to invade, alleging in a counterclaim that it’s in fact Ukraine that’s trying to militarily take back territory rebels seized from Kyiv. 

For the record: More than 14,000 people have died since Russia first invaded seven years ago; and Russia’s leader somewhat ominously claimed Thursday that what’s happening in eastern Ukraine “is very reminiscent of genocide.” 

Meanwhile, Russian officials still appear to be playing loose with the facts when it comes to regional tensions, according to Kyiv’s military chief. AP reported from Moscow on Thursday that “Russia’s Federal Security Service said a Ukrainian navy ship was heading toward the Kerch Strait between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, ignoring Russian coast guard vessels’ signals. The FSB charged that maneuvering by the Ukrainian ship Donbas jeopardized navigation safety.” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov rejected the allegations, and called it an “information attack from Russia” and manipulation, according to Reuters’ Idrees Ali.  

To be sure, Russia is unsettled by U.S.-supplied anti-tank missiles and Turkish drones purchased by the Ukrainian military. But Gerasimov on Thursday also said he thinks the U.S. has been practicing cruise missile strikes on Russia with its recent strategic bomber flights in the region. 

From the American POV, if Russia were to attempt an invasion again, it “would wait for the ground to freeze before sending tanks and other tracked vehicles into Ukraine,” U.S. officials told CBS News. “But for now, it is not clear if [Russia’s autocratic leader Vladimir] Putin wants to actually mount an invasion or is using the threat of an invasion to win concessions from the West.” More here.

As to Moscow’s desired concessions, it’s looking to sign some kind of legal document that would agree to “NATO’s non-expansion to the east, and non-deployment near our territory of any weapon systems threatening us,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said Thursday in state-run media TASS. And those weapons are most likely the U.S. military’s Aegis Ashore missile defense systems in Poland and Romania, according to Russian affairs analyst and Ph. D student Rob Lee.

Big picture consideration: If Moscow continues to play its cards right, outsiders won’t know what Russia truly wants with its chicanery and troop movements until it’s already achieved its goal. “If it was just coercive diplomacy, Moscow would be asking for things it could tangibly get,” Michael Kofman, who directs Russia Studies at CNA, tweeted Tuesday. “Escalating to this level, then backing down with nothing, would be a political loss. Everyone will say Putin was either bluffing or deterred. I see this as potentially more complicated.” (And that means, he joked in a lighter note on Thursday, that Russia-watchers should expect at least one bad take possibly very soon on how late 2021 is just like 1938.) 

For the record, the U.S. isn’t trying to convince Ukraine to give the Donbas to Russia so they’ll ease their pressure. “No, that’s absolutely false,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Thursday. “I know there’s been lots of churn in the press about whether or not there were concessions. There very clearly were not,” a senior administration official told reporters in a separate briefing Thursday. “I think President Biden has made very clear that he stood by our principles” in his Tuesday phone call with Russia’s leader. “He made [it] very clear that one nation can’t force another nation to change its border, one nation cannot tell another to change its politics, and nations can’t tell others who they can work with,” the White House official added. 

Also Thursday: POTUS46 rang up his Ukrainian counterpart for about 90 minutes. According to a senior White House official, “The President shared a readout of his conversation with President Putin—including telling [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, as he had told Putin, that if Russia further invades Ukraine, the U.S. and our European allies would respond with strong economic measures, provide additional defensive materiel to Ukraine, and fortify our NATO Allies on the eastern flank with additional capabilities.” 

FWIW: France just commissioned a new patrol boat for Ukraine’s coast guard. See that via Twitter, here. 

Also from Paris on Thursday: “Macron calls for EU to strengthen borders and forge closer defence ties,” via Financial Times (paywalled). That message comes ahead of French President Emanuel Macron’s six-month rotation into the role of EU president during the first half of 2022.

From Defense One

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The Combat Mission in Iraq Has Ended. But Troops Aren’t Coming Home  // Tara Copp: Train-advise-assist will continue, Pentagon says, with no force cuts planned.

General Atomics Unveils New Drone That Carries 16 Hellfire Missiles  // Marcus Weisgerber: The Mojave, marketed for special forces, doesn’t need a traditional runway to launch.

Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief from Ben Watson with Jennifer Hlad and Bradley Peniston. If you’re not already subscribed to The D Brief, you can do that here. On this day in 2017, the Iraqi military celebrated the defeat of ISIS in their country with a parade in Baghdad. 

One big worldwide problem: Nobody really knows what the true state of China’s economy is, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday after assessing the impact of a new data-security law that took effect three months ago. In a nutshell, the Journal’s Liza Lin and Chun Han Wong write, “China’s increasing secrecy isn’t the result of any single policy, businesspeople and political analysts say, but rather a combination of factors: a response to the pandemic, growing concerns about data security, and a political environment in which the outside world is viewed with suspicion.” 
This includes Beijing limiting data to global ship-tracking platforms. And that could be pretty terrible news for worldwide supply chain monitoring, as one analyst told the Journal. It’s also a terrific recipe for scams and fraud. Story here.

Get to better know how China’s state-run silencing machine works, using the case of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, as explained in a multimedia report produced by a team of New York Times and Propublica reporters on Wednesday.  
China-watchers at the FDD think in Washington say they’ve found “28 American universities and schools in 19 states that maintain academic and research partnerships with Chinese institutions that power Beijing’s defense establishment,” according to a new report published Thursday.
“Using Confucius Institutes as modern-day Trojan horses, the Chinese government managed to build an intricate web of academic and research partnerships between America’s top universities and Chinese schools that directly enable China’s military-industrial complex,” Adjunct Fellow Craig Singleton said in a statement.
What now? According to FDD, “Congress should require American universities to publish copies of both their Confucius Institutes contracts and foreign partnership agreements, and that lawmakers should direct the closure of the 34 remaining Confucius Institutes in the United States. Congress and the White House should also take steps to withhold certain types of federal funding from U.S. universities which voluntarily elect to maintain problematic partnerships with malign Chinese universities.” Read more, here.
ICYMI: The U.S., U.K., and Australia have all pulled their diplomats from attending the upcoming Winter Olympics, hosted by China. France, which is no sleeper when it comes to the espionage game, declared Thursday that it would in fact send its diplomats to Beijing. Reuters has more from Paris, here.

President Biden is expected to deliver closing remarks at the first-ever Summit for Democracy, a two-day virtual event that began Thursday and comes to a close shortly before 2 p.m. ET this afternoon. 

Al-Qaeda might be growing just “slightly” in Afghanistan, but it’s impossible for the U.S. military to say for certain since there are, of course, no more American troops left in the country, the Associated Press’s Lita Baldor reported Thursday evening after speaking with the top U.S. commander for the Middle East, Marine Corps Gen. Frank McKenzie of Central Command. 

Lastly this week: DIA tapped to be Pentagon’s open-source leader. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Defense Intelligence Agency will become DOD’s “lead agency” for open-source intelligence, “highlighting the growing importance of unclassified information drawn from social media, online material and commercial data sources in modern military operations.”
Onlookers have been pleading with the Pentagon to get serious about open source, e.g.:

Have a safe weekend, everyone. And we’ll see you again on Monday!

NEXT STORY: The Combat Mission in Iraq Has Ended. But Troops Aren’t Coming Home