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From left to right, top: former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, former President Donald Trump, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. From left to right, bottom: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Vivek Ramaswamy. Joe Raedle/Getty Images; Brandon Bell/Getty Images; Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images; Scott Olson/Getty Images; Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption

From left to right, top: former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, former President Donald Trump, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. From left to right, bottom: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Vivek Ramaswamy.

There's a common belief that foreign policy does not win presidential elections, but 2024 may be the exception.

It's a tense time on the world stage. The U.S. is playing a supporting role in two foreign wars, Ukraine and Gaza, while simultaneously trying to shift its national security focus to the challenges posed by China.

If there were any questions about the role of foreign policy in the Republican primaries, the answers came following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel. At the last debate in Miami, Republicans clashed over their support for Israel.

In a November Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom poll, 57% of likely Iowa GOP caucus-goers said the Israel-Hamas war is "extremely important" to them as they evaluate candidates.

On the campaign trail, former President Donald Trump has been tapping into these fears about foreign conflicts, boasting that he's the "only one that will prevent World War III."

The increased attention on global affairs has coincided with former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley's rise in the polls. She's been able to lean on her experience as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Foreign policy is one of the few areas where there are real differences in strategy among the candidates, particularly between those with more traditional hawkish roots and the rise of more conservative populist candidates.

The Republican field has largely lined up behind Israel, as is the typical conservative ideology, and rejected calls for a cease-fire though there have been some differences.

Trump initially criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and referred to the Iran-backed Hezbollah, another militant group in the region, as "very smart."

Those comments were widely criticized by both Republicans and Democrats. Trump later vowed to "fully support" Israel following the outcry.

Haley attacked Vivek Ramaswamy for suggesting initially that the U.S. phase out aid to Israel. At the Miami debate in November, Ramaswamy then said he would advise the Israeli leader to "smoke those terrorists on his southern border and ... I'll be smoking the terrorists on our southern border."

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie actually visited Israel after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and met with survivors, the first GOP presidential candidate to do so since the war began.

During the Miami debate, Christie said he'd tell Netanyahu, "America is here, no matter what it is you need."

While there is broad agreement about support for Israel, Republicans are increasingly divided over the idea of sending additional military aid to Ukraine.

As the war has dragged on and public interest has declined, the war has become a key indicator of how presidential hopefuls believe the U.S. should engage with the world.

And no issue in the arena of foreign policy probably illustrates the growing divide between Republican isolationists and foreign policy hawks more than Ukraine.

On the one side are candidates like Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who have both pushed U.S. leaders to focus more resources on domestic issues. On the other side, are more GOP traditionalists like Haley and Christie who argue the U.S. must stand up to adversaries like Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Republican candidates not only agree that China poses the greatest threat to the United States, but they appear to be competing for who is the biggest hawk against Beijing.

As president, Trump imposed a series of tariffs on Beijing. He now plans to go further, promising a decoupling of the U.S.-China economies.

Haley has accused the former president of being "singularly focused" on trade and missing the military threat posed by Beijing.

"China was military stronger militarily stronger when President Trump left office than when he entered. That's bad," Haley said during a speech at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

She says the U.S. needs to modernize its military and end trade relations until China takes greater action on fentanyl.

DeSantis has compared the threat posed by Beijing as being equal or greater than the one posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He's pledged to "reorient" U.S. foreign policy toward China.

But there is nuance among their positions when it comes to using military force against China.

Read the original post:
Where the Republican presidential candidates stand on Israel, Ukraine and China - NPR

This state of affairs suggests the current level of support for Ukraine is no longer sufficient to shift the balance of the war. Ukraines President Volodymyr Zelensky continues to appeal to Western countries to increase arms supplies. But due to the conflict between Israel and Hamas, and the weariness of Americans over the seemingly endless Ukrainian conflict, in which US resources are being drained, the media is increasingly discussing the possibility of a ceasefire.

As a result, the question arises: is it time to pursue a truce between Kyiv and Moscow? Several reasons point towards this outcome.

Second, the United States has depleted Europes stocks of former Soviet military equipment by convincing governments to transfer them to Ukraine. This strategic move has not only resulted in long-term contracts to shore up the production and maintenance of US military equipment but has also sidelined Russian companies.

As a consequence, the US military-industrial complex has emerged as the primary supplier of new military equipment for Europe. It is noteworthy, however, that Germany is also supplying weapons to Kyiv, posing a potential challenge to US dominance in the arms sector in the future.

03:42

Ukraine says Russian strike killed over 50 in one of the deadliest attacks of the war

Ukraine says Russian strike killed over 50 in one of the deadliest attacks of the war

What if a US under Trump or DeSantis turns its back on the Ukraine war?

Prioritising aid to Ukraine over implementing more effective inflation-combating measures has led to public dissatisfaction with the White House. European countries are also expressing war fatigue and increasingly divided on the wisdom of continuing to support Kyiv. Additionally, the effectiveness of financial aid to Kyiv is seen as diminishing due to the countrys high level of corruption.

01:03

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calls on UN to strip criminal Russia of veto power

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calls on UN to strip criminal Russia of veto power

While the US officially supports Ukraines fight, Kyivs aspirations are being hindered by the depletion of its military resources. Moreover, there is increasing discussion among Ukrainian politicians about the need to mobilise more people, including younger people and more women.

As a result, Biden is faced with the crucial task of persuading Zelensky to initiate negotiations with Putin, while also being careful not to overtly pressure him.

Even though the Kremlin holds the advantage on the battlefield, the White House dominates the information sphere. The US government should prepare the international community for a potential ceasefire and present a peace agreement between Kyiv and Moscow as a victory for the collective West.

Peter Sojka, a fellow at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, specialises in foreign relations and geopolitics

See the article here:
Why the US needs to get Ukraine to swallow a truce with Russia - South China Morning Post

NATOs policy on Ukraine is inadvertently encouraging Putin to continue the war. It is time for a change.

The alliances position thus far has affirmed that Ukraine will become a member in the long run, but not while Russia continues its war on Ukraine. NATO is concerned that Ukraines admission would trigger a direct and immediate NATO war with Kremlin forces, and that this might escalate to nuclear weapons use.

This view is a fallacy, and it sends a signal to Vladimir Putin that he should continue fighting. As long as he keeps going, NATO will not admit Ukraine as a member, and thus Putin believes that he still has a chance of winning.

NATO must send the opposite message: that no matter what he does, Putin will never succeed in defeating Ukraine. Continuing the war would therefore be pointless and devastating for Russia. Moving forward with Ukrainian membership in NATO will send this message.

This message is also crucial for Ukraines economic recovery. There is a symbiosis between military and economic support for Ukraine. For example, there is no greater economic benefit to Ukraine than opening its ports to normal shipping. Yet that can only be achieved through military security operations, such as demining, and freedom of navigation in the Black Sea. Moreover, investors will not place big bets on Ukraine unless they are sure it will be a secure country in the future.

If security measures can help Ukraine achieve GDP growth of $25bn, this would be enough to produce a $5bn windfall for the state budget, thus alleviating the need for Western budgetary support.

What are the fallacies in the current NATO approach? Firstly, NATOs Article 5 does not establish any specific requirement that Western ground troops must fight on the front lines against Russian forces.

Paragraph 1 of Article 5 of the NATO Treaty reads as follows:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently, they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in the exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

In other words, there will be a collective response to any aggression against a NATO member, but the treaty does not specify what that collective response will be. It does not state that NATO members must send troops to the front line, although that is certainly a possibility.

One should recall that NATO members have been involved in many conflicts over the past 70 years, from Algeria to Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Libya, and yet Article 5 was not invoked, and NATO as an alliance did not join the fight.

The only time Article 5 has been invoked in NATOs entire history was in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. And yet, in this case, NATOs Article 5 response was not to send troops to fight terrorists.

Instead, NATO countries sent aircraft to assist the United States by conducting air policing missions in US airspace. When the United States ousted the Taliban from Afghanistan, it did so together with UK, Australian and Polish forces as a coalition of the willing. There was no NATO role. Indeed, it was several months after a UN-authorized peacekeeping mission had been established in Afghanistan (ISAF) that NATO took on any role there and that role was not an Article 5 commitment.

In other words, Article 5 is not an automatic tripwire for the use of ground forces. It might be for example, if the Baltic states, with their small territories and population, were attacked by Russia. In that case, NATO countries would indeed have to intervene directly under Article 5, including with ground troops, to counter Russia (something already apparent from the NATO battlegroups present in all three.) There are no other options. But that is a matter for the North Atlantic Council to decide at the time, based on the circumstances.

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In Ukraine, a vast country with a large population, there are multiple options beyond the immediate use of NATO ground forces.

The second fallacy is to assume that Vladimir Putin could escalate the war in Ukraine if he wanted, but he is refraining from doing so because NATO has not offered membership to Ukraine. This is far from the truth.

If Putin had an option to escalate conventionally in Ukraine, he would already have done so. The reality is that he has lost half of Russias conventional forces fighting Ukraine, and cannot now reconstitute them. He relies on Iran and North Korea for drones and outdated artillery shells and sends untrained troops to the front as cannon fodder, simply to keep the war going.

As for horizontal escalation i.e., attacking a current NATO member this is the last thing Putin would do, as he knows it would draw an immediate alliance response directly against Russian forces.

As for nuclear escalation, Putin knows and even more importantly, the Russian military knows that any nuclear use would not achieve any military objective in Ukraine, while it would certainly draw a direct response against Russian forces. It would also spark universal condemnation of Russia, including from China and other non-Western states.

The idea that NATO membership is the trigger for Putins aggression is a third fallacy: Ukraine had little chance of NATO membership when Putin attacked in 2014 and 2022. Moreover, Russia has existing borders with alliance territory in Norway, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and the United States, and has not attacked. When Finland became a NATO member this year (soon to be joined by Sweden), Russia barely took notice. The issue for Putin is not NATO membership, but the existence of Ukraine as a nation-state.

So what would Article 5 mean in practice for Ukraine?

There are a number of ways in which the alliance can act collectively to defend Ukraine, many of which the allies are already doing. They are providing massive amounts of equipment to Ukraine, as well as providing training, finance, logistics, intelligence, operational planning, and more. This is already significant.

Some NATO nations, including the United States, have decided to help Ukraine acquire and use F-16 aircraft. This is a significant, long-term commitment to the future of Ukraine. Given the substantial logistics, maintenance, training and infrastructure requirements of a successful F-16 program, this is just the kind of signal Putin needs to see in order to come to grips with the fact that he will not defeat Ukraine.

The European Unions decision to open accession talks with Ukraine also sends a significant signal to Putin that there is no scenario ahead in which he wins. Ukraine is a part of the European family and will survive and prosper as a sovereign, independent European democracy.

Yet NATO could still do more under Article 5 than it is currently doing. Four things come immediately to mind:

It is significant that Russian forces are unable to make ground advances. Russias only reliable military tactic is to target Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure. NATO nations could agree to participate directly in Ukraines air defense to protect Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure. This might involve a combination of air defense systems stationed on NATO territory and the deployment of alliance air defense capabilities in western Ukraine and in NATO territory near Ukraine to protect Ukrainian civilians as well as potential impacts on NATO territory from Russian bombardment. At a minimum, it should be possible to keep Ukraine west of the Dnipro River (including Kyiv, Odesa, and Lviv) safe from Russian attacks.

These four steps and perhaps others could therefore become NATOs Article 5 commitment to Ukraine discussed and agreed within the NATO-Ukraine Council. It must not rule out the provision of ground troops at a later date if needed but there is no need to commit such troops today. Putin must know that escalation is on our side, even if we choose not to escalate.

Note that such a formula does not set territorial limits on the application of Article 5. To do so would relegate Russian-occupied territory to a long-term occupied status. Rather, it defines specifically the type of response NATO will provide under Article 5, without accepting any limits on NATOs support for Ukraine recovering its 1991 borders.

In this context, we should recall that NATO admitted West Germany as a member when East Germany was still under Soviet occupation and that the EU accepted Cyprus as a member, even though northern Cyprus was under Turkish control..

Now let us suppose NATO were to take these four concrete steps to defend Ukraine as soon as possible even without Ukrainian membership. It would make a significant difference in Ukraines success in the war effort, and in its future as a European democracy.

But even more important, if NATO took these steps today without any formal declaration about Ukrainian NATO membership it would not evoke any Russian response beyond what Russia is already doing. Indeed, it would expose Russias bluff that such steps, or indeed NATO membership itself, are some kind of red line.

Once these measures were implemented, however, the alliance would have then solved the potentially contentious issue of what Article 5 would mean in practice. Since there would be no mystery about what Article 5 would mean (we would already be doing it), and also no mystery about Russias response would be (we would have already seen it), we should be able to move ahead with alacrity to invite Ukraine into NATO.

The path would be clear for a membership invitation at NATOs Washington Summit in July 2024. Ratification should also be on a fast track in the case of the United States, before the January 2025 Presidential Inauguration.

Indeed, Americas 2024 Presidential election adds a yet greater sense of urgency to the discussion. With the outcome completely unknown, it may be too difficult to advance Ukraines NATO membership after the election. Yet Americas and Europes security depends on a secure Ukraine that defeats Russia. This provides all the more reason to act swiftly to bring Ukraine into our great alliance.

AmbassadorKurt Volkeris a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. A leading expert in US foreign and national security policy, he served as US Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations from 2017-2019, and as US Ambassador to NATO from 2008-2009.

Europes Edgeis CEPAs online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or viewsof the institutions they representor the Center for European Policy Analysis.

Read more:
Bringing Ukraine Into NATO Without World War III - Center for European Policy Analysis

Controlling the narrative has long been crucial to Russian President Vladimir Putin in his war against Ukraine.

In the worldview he promulgates, the U.S. is an empire of lies, the West is bent on tearing apart Russia, and Ukraine is a Nazi-run country whose statehood is a historical fiction.

Through speeches and propaganda, Putin presents this narrative to his own country and the rest of the world. It is a worldview that is negative, historically and factually false and relies on provocative rhetorical framing. It is a framing that fits well the Russian phrase that translates in English as who is not with us, is against us, forms of which have been popularized through czarist and Soviet years and have returned with a vengeance under Putin.

It is also, as I explore in my new book, a popular form of what is known as cultural othering, which can be used to gain, maintain and exercise power.

Cultural othering is the process of defining a group of people be it a racial, ethnic or national group as different and then treating them as inferior. This other group is assigned negative traits to make them appear lower to the dominant group, and to marginalize them.

Othering has long been a tool employed to assert authority over marginalized groups, such as by European colonizers in Africa and Asia, or by settlers in Native American lands.

Putin and the Russian state are very skilled at practicing cultural othering and have deployed it against Ukrainian enemies as tanks rolled into Ukraine. In the worldview of Putin, their separatist vision was based on Russophobia, fascism and neo-Nazism.

Putins othering predates the 2022 invasion. It was seen in the 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea, the 2008 conflict in Georgia and the brutal Chechen wars from 1994 onward. All represented Russian attempts to reestablish its control over others Ukrainians, Georgians, Chechens, the Crimean Tatars that under the Soviet system had been reincorporated into an idea of a Great Russia. Their crime, as seen from Moscow, was that they were undermining Putins long-held vision for a return to that great Russian empire.

The curious thing about Putins othering is it focuses on national groups that he has simultaneously claimed to be of the same people as Russia.

From Putins perspective, these would-be breakaway neighbors are former brotherly republics cleaved from Mother Moscow only by the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s an event Putin has described as the biggest geopolitical tragedy of the century. To push this narrative, Putin employs a warped view of history, invoking the Kyivan Rus the medieval state that sought to unite the people of a vast land mass and denouncing Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin as the creator and architect of Ukraine and encouraging nationalist ambitions.

Under Putinism, there are seemingly two options for countries that once formed the Russian, and later Soviet, empire.

The first involves total geopolitical and cultural submission, assimilation and acceptance of pan-Russian sameness, as is seen in Belarus under Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko. The second option is to seek national and cultural self-definition, but be subjected to the most extreme forms of cultural othering for doing so. In other words, it is the choice of being a brother or the other.

To Putin, nations that dared to break away from Russian hegemony and, like Ukraine, developed pro-Western ambitions, turned into an enemy.

Putins cultural othering of Ukraine taps into a history of Russia that goes back centuries. It was evident in imperial Russia and reflected in the literature of the time. Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, in his epic Poltava, and novelist Leo Tolstoy, in A Prisoner in the Caucasus, both glorified Russian martyrdom and heroism while employing othering language and devices against different groups of people, including the French, Swedes, Turks, the Circassians, Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians. This othering serves to portray those seeking distance from Moscow as subhuman, or at least sub-Russian.

In the Soviet period, cultural othering took the form of demonizing anyone who balked at or actively fought attempts to force a homogeneous Soviet identity over ethnic and class diversity. The punishment for resistance and disobedience was severe, especially under Josef Stalin; the gulag served as the ultimate destination for those who did not assimilate.

Meanwhile, Ukraine paid a terrible price for resistance to assimilation. Stalins human-made starvation of Ukrainian peasants from 1932 and 1933 which many historians attribute in part to an attempt to suppress or punish Ukrainian aspirations of independence killed millions of Ukrainians. And here lies an important aspect of cultural othering: Once a people are othered, their lives are degraded and dehumanized making such atrocities more acceptable to the dominant group.

Eventually to escape repressions and to survive Ukrainians, Georgians, Crimean Tatars and other others reluctantly accepted Soviet brotherhood and political and linguistic submission and cultural assimilation with Russia.

In this way, Russian leaders from emperors to Soviet chiefs have manifested Russian geopolitical and ideological hegemony. Putin is following suit.

Since coming to power, Putin has tried to reconstruct Russias former territorial and ideological might, while simultaneously positioning the country in opposition to its habitual enemy the collective West. When Ukraine chose a pro-European course, Putin saw it as the act of a treacherous enemy.

Putins rhetoric has been fusing Ukraine and the West together in one single enemy ever since. Putin often others the West and, by association, Ukraine by drawing comparisons between Russian traditional values and Western cultural decadence with its LGBTQ+ rights, gender-related debates and other identity issues. Since the beginning of the war, Putin has othered Ukraine by making it both of the West but also Nazi. That has allowed him to frame his war as liberation, demilitarization, and de-nazification. Meanwhile, religious leaders in Russia have framed the conflict as a holy war, with the aim of de-Satanizing Ukraine.

This continued othering of Ukrainians by Putin means that the war is one that goes beyond territory and ideology. Rather, what has been set up is a conflict between two cultural selves that are mutually exclusive. It is, to Putin, the Russian "us against the Western and Ukrainian them.

Read more:
Russian attempt to control narrative in Ukraine employs age-old tactic of 'othering' the enemy - The Conversation Indonesia

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AN OFFER TO become culture minister should have been a no-brainer. As head of Ukraines Institute of National Memory, Anton Drobovych had the background. And for many of the previous months, hed been stuck fighting in the most dangerous operations of Ukraines counter-offensive in the Zaporizhia region, or recuperating from serious injuries in hospital. Mr Drobovych did not reject the proposal outright; but his understanding of the political scene in Kyiv was enough to sow doubts. Could he survive re-emerging ideological tussles, briefings and bureaucratic battles? No, he resolved to return to the ranks of his assault-forces unit. I decided I had more important work on the front lines.

Mr Droboych is one of a number of Ukrainians straddling two increasingly distinct worlds: the grim reality of a trench war; and an ever more waspish political battleground in Kyiv. When Russia began its invasion in February 2022, competitive politics went into hibernation. They returned as the existential threat to Ukraine decreased later that year. Yaroslav Zhelezhnyak, an opposition MP, says there is still broad agreement on fundamental matters of national security. But a prominent MP in the presidents own party says jostling has already made Ukraine unstable. Mistakes are being made on all sides. And presidential attempts to centralise decision-making and shut down dissent are having the opposite effect.

Read more of our recent coverage of theUkraine war

Cracks have emerged not only along political lines but, most worryingly, between the military and political leadership. Relations between President Volodymyr Zelensky and his commander-in-chief, Valery Zaluzhny, are understood to be terrible. The differences of opinion were first reported in summer last year. A recent interview by The Economist with the general, in which he declared that Ukraines war had reached a stalemate, brought that problem into the open. Mr Zelensky publicly rebuked his general for the headlines. In a later interview he appeared to warn Mr Zaluzhny to stick to military affairs rather than do politics.

A senior government source suggests the open conflict in the leadership was a predictable result of a stalled counter-offensive operation that had not gone to plan. The official says Mr Zaluzhny was possibly unwise to contradict the more optimistic public positions of his president, but few inside the government could quibble with his sober conclusions. A blame game is now under way about who is responsible for the failure. The politicians are saying their generals are Soviet-trained twits. And the generals are saying the politicians are interfering twits. Victory has many fathers, but no one wants to parent a stalemate.

Another factor at play is a reported criminal investigation into the defence of southern Ukraine. This was the one area where Russian forces were able to establish a quick and hugely important victory in February and March of 2022, creating a new land corridor to Crimea in a few weeks. Ukrainian turncoats assisted the advance. Bridges were not blown up as they should have been. The army was also ill prepared. Mr Zaluzhny is, say some reports, currently named only as a witness to the probe; but that may change into something more serious. Allies say the possibility of a criminal charge is designed to keep him in line. His media engagement could be seen as an insurance policy, a general-staff source suggests.

Mr Zaluzhny has not declared any political ambitions, and his few steps into the political arena have been anything but deft. That does not mean he poses no threat to Mr Zelensky. The president, a comic performer as recently as 2019, knows how quickly Ukrainian society can make and break its leaders. Internal polling seen by The Economist suggests the president, once lauded for his role in defending the country, has been tarnished by corruption scandals in his government and by concern over the direction of the country. The figures, which date from mid-November, show trust in the president has fallen to a net +32%, less than half that of the still-revered General Mr Zaluzhny (+70%). Ukraines spychief, Kyrylo Budanov, also has better ratings than the president (+45%).

The same polling suggests Mr Zelensky risks losing a presidential election were he ever to go head to head with his commander-in-chief. Ukrainian society would probably not welcome any unprovoked challenge. For now, eight out of ten Ukrainians are against the very idea of holding elections, originally due next March. The president has also ruled them out, citing martial law. But the downward drift of his ratings may yet persuade him to change his mind. Russian propaganda will doubtless make hay if the elections do not take place.

Ukrainian intelligence sources say Russia is already trying to capitalise on the ambitions and tensions. Andriy Cherniak, a spokesman for HUR, the military-intelligence agency, claimed evidence that showed new Russian strategies for different constituencies: one to shore up support in Russia; another to undermine confidence in the West; and a third to amplify grievances in Ukraine. There is a separate disinformation campaign for Ukrainian soldiers, he says, with deep-fake videos purporting to show commanders of various levels encouraging their subordinates to surrender. Russia has not been able to do what they need to do on the battlefield, but they are having real success here.

The senior government source suggests Russian propaganda has gained traction because it has material to play with. There is corruption, he admits. Management is often ineffective. Ukraine has not put its economy on enough of a war footing. But only Russia stands to gain if the president were forced out. Some of our politicians dont worry enough about the Russian threat, and it makes me angry. They think they can challenge for power, destroy Zelensky, and it will be of no consequence. The security services had effectively eliminated most levers of Russian influence since the start of the war, he added. The most effective levers were now Ukrainians themselves.

On the front lines, Russia is enjoying a relatively good period of the war. It is satisfying much of its manpower needs by recruiting from the poor and prisons; a convicted cannibal was recently pardoned to fight. Ukraine, in contrast, is struggling to mobilise from the general population. Army bosses are recruiting at a level that just about covers natural losses on the frontline. But if the majority of those mobilised at the start of the war knew what they were fighting for, few of the new recruits are as willing, and filling the recruitment quotas is getting harder. Political tensions are unlikely to help that process.

Doubts at home and abroad about the direction of the war are also beginning to reach soldiers on the front lines. They do not appear to have changed behaviour or morale in any significant way, at least not yet. People under fire couldnt give a damn if Zaluzhny had a quarrel with Zelensky or not, one commander says. Mr Drobovych agrees. When he chats to his comrades at the front, no one is talking about the need to return to Kyiv to fix politics. The only discussion is about staying alive. For this cohort of Ukrainians, there is no doubting the risk the enemy still poses. Russia is asking a simple question of us: life or death. That will keep us fighting, regardless of what happens in Kyiv or Washington.

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Originally posted here:
Russia is poised to take advantage of political splits in Ukraine - The Economist