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Russian aircraft on display at the Kubinka military training ground in Moscow. (Pavel Pavlov/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

At first, the Russian pilots all thought it was a scam. But they agreed to go along with it anyway, especially after the initial payments came through.

Last summer, a group of Ukrainian volunteers, working closely with their countrys intelligence service, apparently came close to persuading three Russian aviators who were in the midst of bombing Ukraine to defect with their warplanes in exchange for $1 million a piece. It was a bold, months-long operation, like a movie, in the words of one of the Russian marks, a trio of exceptionally well-trained airmen who seemed amenable to betraying their motherland for a sum of money theyd otherwise never see in their lifetimes.

What looked like a legitimate plan to switch sides proved anything but. None of the pilots defected in the end. There is strong evidence that most if not all of them were found out by Russias Federal Security Service (FSB), one of the successor agencies to the Soviet KGB. Russian propaganda says the whole saga was in fact orchestrated by the FSB from the start. The Ukrainians insist the FSB only got involved late in the negotiations, after sincere commitments were made by each pilot. Kyiv also maintains its failure to acquire Russian warplanes was nonetheless a mitigated success: It gleaned valuable technical information about Russias air force and compromised three military officers, at least one of whom has not flown combat missions since. A complex intelligence operation thus devolved into a remote game of dueling counterintelligence narratives with both sides claiming victory.

Various types of Russian military aircraft fly over Red Square in Moscow in preparation for the World War II Victory Parade, May 4, 2022.(Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images)

Yahoo News met the main Ukrainian volunteer here called Bohdan to protect his identity who conceived and initiated this elaborate scheme to hijack Russian warplanes. We examined hundreds of encrypted chat messages between his team and the three Russian pilots: Igor Tveritin, 48, Roman Nosenko, 36, and Andrei Maslov, 33. Their identities were independently confirmed by Yahoo News, but its not clear where they are currently located and could not be reached for comment.

The remarkable level of detail provided by Bohdan both undermines the Russian recast of the events while also giving a rare window into how these behind-the-scenes, spy-vs.-spy operations unfold as Russian and Ukrainian forces batter each other on the frontlines.

We gave these Russian pilots a chance to make the right choice and stop bombing civilians, Bohdan told Yahoo News. Even if they were intercepted by the FSB at some stage, we managed to eliminate all three war criminals without getting up from the table.

In each case, the plan was risky but straightforward: The pilot would fly his multimillion-dollar aircraft into Ukrainian airspace, where it would be met by Ukrainian interceptors and escorted safely to a designated landing strip. One offered to drug his own navigator preflight. Another proposed reporting nonexistent technical malfunctions to hoodwink his co-pilot and Central Command. Ukraine would not only grant all of defectors full amnesty but outfit them with new passports, as well as ones for chosen members of their families, with whom theyd be comfortably resettled somewhere in Europe.

The plot was reminiscent of the Cold War case of Viktor Belenko, a Soviet pilot who in 1976 defected with his MiG-25 from Russia's far east to Japan. Then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush hailed the plane acquisition as a major intelligence bonanza.

An unexploded bomb in front of a destroyed building in Mariupol, Ukraine, on June 2, 2022. (AFP via Getty Images)

The Ukrainian volunteers say the operation still ranks as a modest achievement for Kyiv. Tveritin, Bohdan claimed, is now grounded, based on call data from the last quarter of 2022. All three pilots also provided valuable Russian military secrets in the course of establishing their bona fides, including sharing images and recordings of the cockpits and instrument panels in their cutting-edge planes Su-34s, Su-24s, and Tu-22M3s as well as details of their air bases. And all it cost the Ukrainians was a few thousand dollars and a lot of patience.

A civilian with a background in the IT industry, Bohdan recently met with Yahoo News at a hotel lounge in downtown Manhattan. He explained that he and his colleagues were motivated to approach the Russian pilots by a law signed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in April 2022, according to which his government would generously compensate any Russian who voluntarily gave up the Kremlins military hardware. Fighter jets, bombers and fixed-wing attack aircraft were worth $1 million; helicopters were worth $500,000. Bohdan said he and his team spent their own money on the operation and never asked the Ukrainian government to reimburse them even though, at advanced stages, Ukraines domestic security service (SBU) got involved; so did Kyivs Special Operations Forces (SSO), which guided the logistics how to get the Russians to Ukrainian territory.

A third party involved in the operation shared with Yahoo News extensiveencrypted WhatsApp and Signal chats he had with Tveritin, Nosenko and Maslov, from late March to July of last year, as well as the documentary evidence they provided of themselves and their aircraft. All three pilots Bohdan found using open-source methods. Initially, I managed to acquire the database of the pilots who fought in Syria, he said. In this database, I saw the details, including who was the flight commander, who was the navigation officer. I was able to structure it in a way to identify whom to contact. There was no contact information in this database, so I had to perform additional research through paid services to understand well, de-anonymize and identify each person.

Tveritin Igor Yurievich (Vesti 24 via informnapalm.org)

Igor Tveritin, the oldest pilot, married with three children, was born in Melitopol, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. His skillset is by far the most sophisticated, as Tveritin was originally trained to fly the Tupolev Tu-160 strategic bomber, a supersonic aircraft capable of launching nuclear missiles, akin to the American-made Rockwell B-1 Lancer.

When Bohdan first made contact with him, at the end of March 2022, Tveritin was based at Engels Air Base a bomber air base that was struck twice by Ukrainian drones in December despite being far from the frontlines. In fact, he can be seen standing in front of his then-bomber, the Valery Chkalov(named after a famous Soviet test pilot), in a video recorded by Russian news outlet Vesti in 2013. Tveritin told reporters that firing a missile is the main dream of a military pilot, we all aspire to this. The Valery Chkalov was known for also firing cruises at rebel targets in Syria as of 2015, the year Russia directly intervened in that countrys civil war on behalf of dictator Bashar Assad. At some point, Tveritin was reassigned to fly missions in a Tu-22M3 strike bomber in Ukraine.

I dont want to die, Tveritin texted Bohdan in Russian on April 29. I am a realist, no one knows how things will work out. I agree to your conditions, but let there be two transfers of $7,000. That makes me calmer.

On May 1, Bohdan asked him to confirm his identity and location by making a five-second video of the aircraft with a slip of paper with number 377 in the background or written on your hand. Tveritin obliged.

A Tu-95 strategic bomber from the Russian air force prepares to take off from an air base near the Volga River. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)

Bohdan used a crypto exchange to anonymously wire the funds to a Russian Sberbank account. Once Tveritin collected that money, hed be on the hook to the Ukrainians. He only grew more nervous as they steadily worked through the logistics of how, where and when the pilot would defect and how hed somehow get his wife and children safely out of Russia.

Tveritin was especially worried about his family, and asked for an advance of $50,000 5% of the $1 million for his airframe. He also stated that it would arouse suspicions if he removed three young children from school at the same time, especially as the whole family was living on a military base where we are all boiled in the same pan, all is transparent.

Bohdan told Tveritin that Ukraine was ready to make arrangements to get Tveritins family out, which would precede his own defection. A problem for them, as for all three pilots and their relatives, was the lack of passports allowing for international travel, leading to circuitous escape proposals. First, theyd have to go to either Armenia or Belarus, both of which accept Russian internal passports. Once there, theyd receive new documents, obtained for them by the Ukrainians, to enable travel to one of the Baltic states.

Belarusian guards in the Brest region of Belarus, near the border with Ukraine. (Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images)

I dont know how safe your method is, Tveritin told Bohdan on May 20. Please, understand my concern. If they leave Belarus with their documents, they will notice in Russia that they crossed the border. I dont want to have the same story as Skripal, he added, referring to the Russian double agent who was poisoned in England by assassins of the GRU, Russias military intelligence agency. I need documents with different names and surnames and entrance records to Belarus. This is a matter of principle for me.

Bohdan countered that changing everyones names would be riskier than getting them valid passports under their real names. Tveritin said he preferred to resettle in Germany.

Bohdan also promised to open a bank account in Tveritins wifes name and deposit $150,000 before the family made it to Belarus.

Another outstanding issue was how, where and when Tveritin would fly to Ukraine. He was understandably afraid of not only being interdicted by his Russian comrades but of being shot down by Ukrainian air defense systems, which would mistake his plane for an incoming enemy. Tveritin planned to fly at a very low altitude to avoid being shot down by either sides air defense systems.

A Russian Tu-22M3 bomber. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)

A big wrinkle was that Tveritin would be apprised of his flight mission only a day before it was set to take place, and given his takeoff time only three to five hours in advance.

Tveritin bristled when Bohdans group gave a landing approach in Kharkiv, the region in northeast Ukraine where some of the heaviest fighting was taking place at the time.

When you approach Kharkiv, you will be intercepted and escorted by our two fighters and you will keep communicating with them via a certain frequency, Bohdan wrote.

Are you serious about Kharkiv? the pilot shot back. Kharkiv is almost surrounded. Apart from the concentration of all kinds of air defense there. The sky in that area is densely protected and pushing an aircraft to fly there will be suicide! So Bohdan proposed an alternate route.

By late May there was another snag one that Bohdan believes was decisive in the scuttling of the operation. Ukraines defenders in the port city of Mariupol had finally surrendered their last position, meaning the city was now fully under Russian control. Tveritin made it clear that he was one of the Russian bombers routinely pulverizing Mariupol in the weeks and months prior. The situation has become difficult for me, he wrote Bohdan on May 23. Your people surrendered Azovstal and we stopped flying there. Now we fly less, towards Odesa and Mikolaiv, well to the west of Mariupol.

Rescuers sifting through the debris of buildings destroyed following the bombardment of Kharkiv, April 16, 2022. (Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty Images)

A new flight and final plan was introduced in which Tveritin would approach from Russian-occupied Crimea, headed toward southwestern Ukraine.

Still another matter to be resolved was what to do with Tveritins crew. His 130-feet-long Tu-22M3 has a pilot, a co-pilot and two technicians. Tveritin planned to report errors in his instruments, confusing all three, then dip into a low altitude, shouting at his crew, if they objected, that all systems were still functioning normally. While his young co-pilot was still discombobulated, Tveritin would change course and blame it on a faulty flight navigation instrument. By the time anyone was the wiser, Ukrainian planes would have intercepted their bomber, escorting it down.

Soon it became clear that Tveritin was no longer keen on the plan or rather, he appeared a little too keen. This combat aircraft will not help you much, he messaged Bohdan. You do not have pilots of that sort. Thats why I am your only hope. Only I can lift this bird into the air. Tveritin seemed to be suggesting that he be seconded into Ukraines air force and fly missions against his former compatriots. That hint, especially from someone so concerned for his safety and that of his family, suggested to the Ukrainians that the pilot may have been discovered by FSB and now communicating under their control.

This is when we began to suspect they were playing him back to us in a double cross, Bohdan told Yahoo News.

From there on, Tveritins chatter fizzled out. And then he was gone.

Sukhoi Su-24 bombers at the International Army Games 2017 outside Tyumen, Russia. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)

Bohdan first made contact with Andrei Maslov, based in Lipetsk, western Russia, on May 4, 2022. A pilot of a Su-24 tactical bomber, Maslov and his navigator Igor Kupchinsky had won a bronze medal during a military aviation competition in Russian-occupied Crimea.

When first approached, Maslov appeared to suspect that Bohdan was himself an undercover FSB officer looking to entrap him. He refused to accept a wire transfer via crypto exchange and said hed only take cash dollars or euros only delivered to him by hand. I am sure handing over cash is not a problem for you, Maslov told Bohdan.

Bohdan arranged for a courier to deliver $4,000 in cash to Maslov at a train station. There will be two girls. The password is: From Maxim, Bohdan wrote. One girl will be with a cap and a bright T-shirt. The second is shorter ... in blue jeans and a khaki jacket. The girls will ask for the last digits of a phone number: 2200.

Maslov agreed to meet and said hed be wearing a blue military jacket and blue summer pants.

Maslov would defect with his Su-24 and a woman, but not his wife. (Yahoo News is declining to identify the pilots friends or family members out of an abundance of caution.)

My wife is out of the question, said Maslov. Its a complicated relationship. I am planning to depart with another woman but have not discussed moving with her yet.

A Ukrainian Su-24 bomber lands during an air force exercise at Starokostyantyniv military airbase. (Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty Images)

Yahoo News was able to confirm the identity of this other woman as a 28-year-old pediatric fitness instructor specializing in, among other things, childrens yoga. In order to get her an international passport, Bohdan asked for her internal one. It was shortly thereafter he realized Maslov was burnt even before Bohdan approached him. For one thing, she was way too attractive for this guy, Bohdan told Yahoo News. She looked like she belonged with an oligarch. For another, Bohdan and his team found her on Instagram: She had been in Turkey in 2021, proving she did indeed have an international passport up until recently. Further investigative digging found her still-valid passport was reported destroyed at around the time Bohdan started communicating with Maslov.

In mid-June, Bohdan messaged Maslov: We have started the process of submitting documents in order to get a travel passport for your girlfriend and the base is informing us that she already possesses a valid travel passport. How would you explain this situation, Andrei?

Andrei couldnt. He said hed get to the bottom of it.

I have checked, he responded shortly thereafter. There was a passport, but her ex-boyfriend destroyed it.

Andrei, Bohdan wrote back, are you sure you trust her entirely and there is no risk of information leakage? Otherwise, this fact may jeopardize our implementation.

I absolutely trust her, Maslov replied. I have not provided details to her. She only knows that we are going to travel abroad together. She is an orphan. She does not ask too many questions. She trusts me.

Bohdan said his side obtained her call data and found that she had repeatedly communicated with an officer from FSBs counterintelligence department. We also found out all her girlfriends were hookers called by the FSB for their special projects. Moreover, she had been in Barcelona during the time of the Catalan referendum in 2017. One wonders what, or who, she was doing there.

Maslov continued to talk to the Ukrainians off and on from that point, but it was now obvious to the latter that hed never pull the trigger. Then he too disappeared.

The Sukhoi Su-24M is a supersonic, all-weather attack aircraft of the Russian air force. (aviation-images.com/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

One of the most intense conversations we had was with Roman Nosenko, Bohdan said. He was the toughest.

I will move my family, Nosenko wrote on April 30, but what will happen to it there if this is not a joke. ... The money is huge, it looks like a scam. What are the guarantees that I will not be scammed? F***, this is like a movie.

Nosenko confirmed to Bohdan that he flew the Su-34 Fullback and the Su-24 Fencer bombers, both of which have two-man crews. When asked to provide proof in exchange for $2,000, Nosenko shared images of hisFencer. As requested, he held up to the camera, in front of the plane, a piece of paper with the number 339 written on it.

Nosenko said that he had little information on his targets claiming: We carry the payload to a point. After that it does its own thing. They dont give us the details. This suggests they were using standoff munitions of some kind, possibly Kh-59 cruise missiles or Kh-31P anti-radiation missiles. As with Tveritin, Nosenko stated that his operational plans are not shared with him in advance. The direction we fly in cannot be predicted, its always different. It gets known only at the last moment.

Nosenko also admitted to not feeling particularly patriotic about Russias invasion of Ukraine. I dont need this war either! he messaged.

Before we continued with the next phase of the operation, Bohdan told Yahoo News, we started asking Nosenko a lot of technical questions that were important for the Ukrainian intelligence such as how many types of aircraft are in his unit, how often they go on flight missions, and what regions they fly to in Ukraine. He gave us the names of commanders of different units we double-checked all the info, and it all checked out.

Russian aircraft in formation over St. Basil's Cathedral during the rehearsal for the Victory Day parade in Moscow, May 4, 2019. (Tatyana Makeyeva/Reuters)

His defection plan was similar to Tveritins: Hed drop to an extremely low altitude upon approach, switch to a secure communications channel with Ukrainian interlocutors and land safely in a designated airfield.

Nosenko agreed to leave Russian-controlled airspace, fly over my troops at high altitude and then start descending over the frontline. Nosenkos biggest fear was Ukrainian air defenses. Ive heard they are handsomely paid for shot-down planes, he wrote. I would be more confident if I knew at least the areas of their deployment in order to confidently go around them and start maneuvering on time.

As Nosenko had only one other person in the cockpit with him, his navigator, he decided it would be easiest to tranquilize him by drugging his coffee before they took off. He mulled the sedative he wanted to use. I cannot buy it without a prescription, Nosenko lamented. With the wrong dosage, one can end up with a stroke.

Whereas Tveritin had too many family members to exfiltrate from Russia, Nosenko had just one: his wife. Her escape wouldnt be easy under any circumstances because she is a military psychologist and therefore also a member of Russias armed forces. Yahoo News was able to establish that Nosenkos wife was attached, as of 2020, to a military unit in Morozovsk, in the Rostov region, home of Russias 559th Bomber Aviation Regiment, which operates the same model aircraft as her husbands: Su-24s and Su-34s. In fact, Nosenko claimed he and his wife were in the same unit. We even uncovered photos of her conducting team-building exercises with soldiers at the military base in Morozovsk.

Belarusian border guards patrol the crossing point between Belarus and Ukraine in the Brest region, Feb. 15. (Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images)

The same route was proposed for her travel as for Tveritins wife and children: Shed leave Russia and go to either Armenia or Belarus, acquire a new passport there, and then proceed to one of the Baltic states. I dont know about the wife, Nosenko messaged Bohdan on May 11. Its hard. She would have to defect from the Kremlins military too.

After a 24-48 hour period in Belarus she will receive a European permit for residence in one of the Baltic states, Bohdan wrote. Upon her arrival she similarly will have a rented apartment and all amenities at her disposal. She will confirm to you the availability of money on her bank account, and only after that you will be taking off.

Nosenko turned over their personal documents to Bohdan, including their internal passports, which allow for travel only in Russian Federation territory and countries with no visa requirements. Still, he was nervous. I have already said that I will allow her to go only when the documents are ready and I am sure about everything, Nosenko wrote Bohdan. It is not a kitten I am sending you, he wrote, referring to his wife.

Yet somehow Nosenko persuaded her to fly to the Belarus capital of Minsk in exchange for another installment of $4,000 to cover travel and expenses. Bohdan promised Nosenko that upon her arrival, a bank account in her name would be opened with $150,000 on deposit.

By June 24, the wife was indeed in Minsk and had been there for about three days. If nothing changes, she will fly tomorrow to Moscow. Still no money has arrived on the card, Nosenko wrote Bohdan.

The same day, Bohdan messaged Nosenko back. We trust you, he wrote, but we have one question regarding your wife. The number you gave us for her is not her main number. So now, we can see that she had calls with an FSB man, Yevgeny Kashlach.

Bohdans team, which by now consisted of Ukrainian intelligence officers, had acquired her phone records and determined she had recently rung a Russian security officer.

Residents of the Belarusian capital of Minsk. (Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images)

At that moment we talked with Roman and told him directly that his wife has been talking to counterintelligence, Bohdan told Yahoo News. We said we cannot continue for now because we have questions, and then he agreed to talk to his wife.

A military psychologist might understandably talk to FSB officers attached to military counterintelligence as part of their day-to-day work requirements. But the fear was she might be dropping a dime on her husbands plan to defect with one of Russias prized bombers. It was 50-50 she was either doing her job or ratting him out, Bohdan explained.

It was about a month into his conversation with Nosenko, who, assuming his offer to defect was originally legitimate, was by now too far deep into the operation to claim innocence. He understood that we could record him. He understood that he had provided information. And he understood that he already could go one way only. But his wife was in a different situation. She was still clean at the time.

It remains unclear if Nosenkos wife informed on her husband, persuaded him to turn himself in or if one or both spouses had been working for the FSB from the beginning. Bohdan believes that by the time she went to Minsk, she was under surveillance, if not being controlled by the Russian security service. They clearly wanted to see who would come to Belarus and with what kind of documents, Bohdan told Yahoo News. When no one turned up because we suspected her, the FSB cottoned on to what was happening and terminated the operation.

Then they preemptively claimed success.

Police and the Russian National Guard patrol Red Square in Moscow. (Alexander Nemenov /AFP via Getty Images)

Success for the FSB took the form of Russia firing missiles at Ukrainian airfields, whose locations, it later claimed, were only disclosed by Bohdan and his team. In reality, those air fields had already been bombed since the start of Moscows invasion.

Russian state media publicly joined the fray. The news channel RT channel ran a 10-minute segment on what it depicted as an elaborate sting operation from the get-go and an unmitigated failure for Ukraine. RT claimed to interview two of the pilots, neither of whom can be identified from the footage (one wore a face-obscuring helmet on camera, the other had only the back of his head filmed). They did produce some of the messages Bohdans team had with the pilots, along with audio recordings of phone calls.

More compellingly, RT exhibited surveillance footage of the two women sent to hand-deliver Maslovs $4,000. They also claim to have arrested an unnamed man who hired them. This could mean Maslov was himself working for the FSB from the beginning or that he was being monitored, Bohdan told Yahoo News.

We may never know what happened to Tveritin, Maslov and Nosenko. Bohdan insists Tveritin is not currently flying sorties in Ukraine a claim Yahoo News cannot independently verify but cant be sure about Maslov and Nosenko. If they were working with the FSB from the get-go, then they may well be decorated heroes. If they were unmasked midway through genuine plans to defect, there is almost no chance any of them would ever set foot in the cockpit of a Russian fighter jet again. Theyd be imprisoned or killed for treason.

If this saga signifies anything, it is that war doesnt just make orphans, widows and corpses; it furnishes opportunities premised on self-interest. Russia is notoriously corrupt, and it is plausible that three Russian pilots, more interested in self-enrichment than in conquering their next-door neighbor, set out to make a pile of cash at great risk to themselves and their families then were exploited by Russian intelligence to try to and catch the very same Ukrainians who made them an offer they couldnt refuse.

Read more:
'This is like a movie': Ukraine's secret plan to convince 3 Russian pilots to defect with their planes - Yahoo News

Early in March, news outlets reported that almost a year after Russia first used Kinzhal (Kh-47M2) hypersonic missiles in Ukraine, Moscow had used six more of its hypersonic weapons as part of a particularly severe attack that also included Kh-22 anti-ship missiles, S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, and Iranian Shahed drones. Of note, Ukraines theater missile defense could not prevent the six Kinzhal missilesamong many of the other missile variantsfrom getting to their targets. The missile fusillade ultimately caused at least nine civilian deaths.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this attack led to a substantial increase in reporting about hypersonics, with coverage from the BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and NPR among other outlets. The alarmism captured in this reporting indicates the broader misunderstanding concerning the characteristics of hypersonic weapons that matter in both the Ukraine context and (as I wrote earlier in the Bulletin) the broader strategic context involving Washington, Moscow, and Beijing.

This alarmism has two strands.

The first concerns the ability of the Kinzhal missile to evade Ukraines air defenses. This is driven by its speedaccording to CSIS, the Kinzhal rapidly accelerates to Mach 4 (4,900 kilometers per hour) and can travel as fast as Mach 10 (12,350 km/hr)and its maneuverability. Regardless of the speed and maneuverability of Russian missiles, the ability of hypersonic and non-hypersonic missiles to make it through air defenses should be unsurprising. In the best case, of course, Ukrainian air defenses would prevent all missile attacks to make it to their target, but missile defenseeven at the theater levelremains a difficult technical challenge to conquer. The general ineffectiveness of missile defense technology is not intrinsic to the hypersonic-ness of some of Russias missile systems.

Moreover, Russias decision to throw one of its most advanced weapon systems at targets in Ukraine when other, cheaper, more vanilla capabilities would appear to be sufficient seems a strategic misstepmaking some observers wonder why Moscow took this particular decision.

The second strand of alarmism pertains to the perceived imbalance in hypersonic capabilities between the United States on the one hand and Russia and China on the otherexacerbated perhaps by the apparently close ties between Moscow and Beijing.

Robyn Dixon and David Sterns reporting in the Washington Post is indicative of this concern, noting, Globally, Russias use of the hypersonic missilesKinzhal means dagger in Russianrenewed alarm over the Kremlins sophisticated arsenal, and it highlighted that Putin possesses difficult-to-intercept, nuclear-capable weapons that the United States and its allies do not yet have.

The alarm is misplaced.

The notion that the United States is behind in the hypersonic weapon arms race is off-base because it fails to consider the varying strategic challenges posed by the current distribution of military capabilities among the United States and its near-peer adversaries.

Indeed, the proposed application of hypersonic weapons by the United States focuses on its conventional rather than nuclear use. As a consequence, the requirements for the weapon systemin terms of its accuracy, for exampleare entirely different from those that Russia and China are developing, and, thus, you can expect that their relative technology readiness levels might be different. This is reflected both in the diverging test schedules of hypersonic capabilities and deployment timelines across all three countries.

But perhaps most important is the very different strategic pictures that Washington, Moscow, and Beijing face. Bearing in mind that the primary characteristic of a hypersonic weapon system germane to strategic competition is its maneuverability, which enables it to evade missile defenses, Russia and Chinas deployment is perhaps unsurprising given Washingtons focus on developing strategic missile defense (ostensibly focused on North Korea and Iran). If nothing else, the capability represents a hedge against US strategic missile defense systems reaching maturity.

Russia and China do not have a reciprocal focus on missile defense, so there is little that hypersonic weapons would add to the US militarys toolkit that is not already supplied by existing capability. The existing nuclear triad of the United States holds its adversaries at risk, with or without hypersonic delivery vehicles; Russias capabilities, with or without its hypersonic capabilities, do the same. Indeed, if speed is the characteristic of interest, then ballistic missiles can reach speeds significantly greater than those of hypersonic weapons. At the margins, research and development spending focused on the latest materials science challenges is appropriate, but hypersonics rhetoric reminiscent of the 1950s missile gap is unhelpful.

Clearly, there is something about the hypersonic moniker that draws the journalist, the policy-maker, and probably the laboratory scientist, but it serves us to be clear about what the characteristics of these weapon systems are and how they either alter the status quo or do not. In terms of the broader dynamics of strategic competition, these capabilities still do not appear to move the needleand particularly not if the recent use in Ukraine is representative of the broader use case.

Rather than focusing on matching capabilities and engaging in arms-racing behavior, both analysts and policy-makers ought to focus on the consequences for strategic stability of Moscow and Beijing developing these technologies. For example, there are good reasons to think that future variants of hypersonic weapons might evade existing early warning systemsreducing still further the already limited amount of time that civilian leaders have to order a second strike.

The Bulletin elevates expert voices above the noise. But as an independent, nonprofit media organization, our operations depend on the support of readers like you. Help us continue to deliver quality journalism that holds leaders accountable. Your support of our work at any level is important. In return, we promise our coverage will be understandable, influential, vigilant, solution-oriented, and fair-minded. Together we can make a difference.

Read more from the original source:
Why the alarm over Russia's use of hypersonic missiles in Ukraine is ... - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Foreign affairs related to Russia and China have become hot topics in Utah. Russias war against Ukraine has divided Republicans nationally and provoked different levels of concern within Utahs congressional delegation. Meanwhile, a recent Associated Press story about Utahs ties to China has raised eyebrows. Were not experts on these matters, but that never slows us down.

The far right and the far left are strangely united in opposing American assistance to Ukraine. When these extremes agree, should we be skeptical or take seriously their opinions?

Pignanelli: Isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent. Ronald Reagan

The amazing legacy about isolationism is the stunning consistency of the policy it is always wrong. Leaders of the movement over the centuries possessed an incredible ability to ignore the weight of history.

Former PresidentDonald Trump, Gov.Ron DeSantisand other Republicans are splitting from others inside the GOP tent who support aid to Ukraine. PresidentJoseph Bidensupports arming Ukraine but bungles his messaging, thereby aiding opponents. It is both frustrating and frightening that leading national politicians do not understand history and what is at stake.

America is not the worlds policeman to insert itself into never-ending scrapes. But on occasion, political realities demand engagement. Unfortunately, prior isolationism caused the nation to commit grave mistakes that cost lives and treasure. When our enemies sense weakness in military preparedness and presidents, they always strike in some fashion. This is especially acute when a president believes a personal relationship with a tyrant will prevent ill will.

Global foes are watching the action in Ukraine. The U.S. is more than just aiding a small democracy, we are sending a message of strength. History documents unequivocally if we falter, a bloodier and expensive conflict awaits us.

Isolationists enjoy the benefit of emotion, but realists possess facts. Our future depends on the latter prevailing.

Webb: I cant understand the opposition to arming and supporting Ukraine as it fights off the Russian invasion and suffers Russias war crime atrocities. I believe the isolationists are damaging Americas interests and making a bigger, broader war in Europe more likely. Theyre also emboldening China as it threatens Taiwan.

Vladimir Putinclearly wants to reunite the old Soviet Union by any means necessary, including invasion and subjugation. Ukraine is the first domino. If he conquers Ukraine and sees weakness and timidity in the U.S. and our NATO allies, we really could end up in a hot shooting war because we are fully committed to defend NATO countries as though America itself were being attacked.

It makes great sense to help Ukraine stop Russias imperialistic schemes cold and prevent a broader war. Providing potent weapons and funding to end the war quickly is an excellent investment that will save money and resources in the long term. It makes no sense to allow the war to drag out. Get Ukraine the weaponry it needs and get it over with. Obviously, we should not put boots on the ground, and Im not advocating an open checkbook.

Helping Ukraine thwart a Russian takeover also sends a clear message to China, making it less likely to invade Taiwan.

Sen.Mitt Romneyis strongly committed to supporting Ukraine. The rest of the delegation should be as well.

The Associated Press story outlined many examples of Utah/China connections. Were some Utah leaders nave to be friendly with the communist nation?

Pignanelli: Utahns are decent and do not hate the people of another country just because our governments have differences. Implications that Utah officials are traitorous is ridiculous.

Webb: Lets put this in a little perspective. It wasnt long ago that friendly U.S./China relations were considered highly desirable. China was viewed as an enormous market for U.S. goods and services. Businesses were encouraged to develop relationships.

The conventional wisdom was that the more interaction we had with China, culturally and commercially, the more likely China would liberalize and become more like Western countries.

That didnt happen, of course. China is now Americas biggest adversary, both militarily and commercially.

I believe Utah leaders interaction with China was done with the best of intentions. In retrospect, it does look rather nave. But we didnt know how truly malign Chinas leadership was until we saw the crackdown on Hong Kong, the threatening of Taiwan and the extent of Uyghur persecution.

Will these foreign affairs matters become big issues and make a difference in the 2024 elections?

Pignanelli: The isolationist faction inside GOP ranks is increasing while conservative cable news commentators are agitating against American involvement in Ukraine. This emotion is percolating among many delegates which could drive election rhetoric.

Yet, I was heartened by legislators sporting the Ukraine flag on their lapels during the session. Most Republicans possess a clearheaded understanding of global politics that could be tapped by officials supporting Ukraine. Delegates may force incumbents into uncomfortable positions unless they craft a compelling message as to why this is important and not just an isolated tribal fight.

Webb: This is extremely important. Personally, I wont vote for isolationist candidates, including those who dont want to help Ukraine.

Republican LaVarr Webb is a former journalist and a semiretired small farmer and political consultant. Email: lwebb@exoro.com. Frank Pignanelli is a Salt Lake attorney, lobbyist and political adviser who served as a Democrat in the Utah state Legislature. Email:frankp@xmission.com.

Originally posted here:
is American isolationism bad in Russia-Ukraine war? | Opinion - Deseret News

NATO members and other western countries are stepping up their supply of weapons to Ukraine. The UK recently pledged to send 14 Challenger 2 tanks, while the US has promised 31 Abrams tanks, and is sending older models to get them to the battlefield as soon as possible. Germany has dispatched 14 of its renowned Leopard 2 tanks.

Other nations have or are in the process of sending anti-tank and anti-air systems, artillery pieces, drones and tanks. These modern sophisticated weapons will be key to the success of Ukraines spring counter-offensive which is believed to be poised to begin.

But providing all this different equipment made in different countries brings its own challenges. Ukrainian troops need to learn how to operate the new equipment and they will need supplies and replacement parts. And troops fighting on the ground will need to learn how to tell them apart in a confusing and fast-paced environment.

To try to overcome the challenge of identification, the US government has issued a deck of playing cards with pictures of various different pieces of hardware to help try to minimize friendly fire incidents.

According to a report in the New York Times, the deck has images of 52 different NATO-made tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, artillery pieces and other weapons systems. Major Andrew Harshbarger, of the US Armys training and doctrine command, said the idea was to enable soldiers to quickly identify enemy equipment and distinguish the equipment from friendly forces.

Both sides have been plagued by the problem of friendly fire. In December, Russian news agency Tass reported that Ukrainian army units shelled each others positions in a battle at Kremennaya, in the east Ukrainian region of Luhansk.

Ukrainian sources, meanwhile, have reported several friendly fire incidents involving Russian units attacking each other. These include, according to a report late last year from the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) Russias air defense systems engaging their own aircraft.

While the ID card system will undoubtedly help Ukrainian forces from destroying new equipment sent by its allies, it will not prevent this entirely. Battlefields are fast-moving and confusing environments where decisions have to be made in split seconds often with very little corroboratory information.

An additional problem that may make the battlefield a more dangerous place is that communications between equipment from different suppliers are not always possible. This adds to the problem of telling friend from foe in the heat of battle.

The problems of identification on the battlefield and resultant friendly fire incidents are nothing new on the battlefield. In the 19th century, armies wore brightly colored uniforms in order to be seen through the smoke that was generated by the heavy musket and cannon fire that characterized warfare at this time.

Even with the improved radio communications of the second world war, there were often friendly fire incidents, particularly when ground attacks were conducted by aircraft. The relatively fluid and fast-moving battlefield, particularly in northwest Europe after D-Day in June 1944, led to many accidental attacks on friendly forces.

One of the most famous of these was the attack by US Army Air Forces on Saint-L in July 1944. Many of the US heavy bombers used dropped their payloads short of the German lines, killing more than 100 US troops, including General Lesley J. McNair at that stage the most senior US officer to be killed in combat in the war.

Friendly fire incidents can be devastating for morale in the field. When they are deployed, armed forces fully expect to be targeted by the enemy but they expect support from their own forces. So when they are bombarded by their own artillery or bombers, it can cause a collapse in fighting spirit.

And troops that survive friendly fire incidents are often left with a serious mistrust of whichever of the services the air force, for example, or artillery groups that had mistakenly attacked them instead of supporting them. This was particularly a problem during Americas involvement in the Vietnam War where US troops were fighting in support of South Vietnamese units and friendly fire incidents were not uncommon.

The information emerging from the battlefields is that Russian forces are suffering more from friendly fire incidents than Ukraine. This suggests certain things about the organization of Russias combat units.

After the initial invasion by a force thought to be between 170,000 and 190,000 experienced troops, replacements and reinforcements have mainly been poorly trained, inexperienced conscripts.

Many of the Russian units now fighting alongside each other in the field have never operated together before. There are also many fighters from militias in the pro-Russian enclaves in Luhansk and Donetsk as well as mercenaries from the Wagner Group. This has led to misidentification and increased the chance of friendly fire incidents on the Russian side.

According to a report from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) in November 2022, Alexander Khodakovsky, the military commander of the breakaway Donetsk Peoples Republic (DNR), estimated that at that stage, 60% of Russian losses since the battle for Mariupol in May last year were due to such incidents.

The ISW quoted one episode where a Russian patrol returning to its base near Donetsk on November 5 drove into a ditch that had been dug by army subcontractors which they had not been made aware of.

The report concludes: The frequent replacement of Russian military leaders, promotion of inexperienced soldiers, and cobbled-together Russian force composition exacerbate the fragmented nature of the Russian chain of command and ineffectiveness of Russian forces and likely contributes to frequent friendly fire incidents.

The US has issued these sorts of cards before but almost always to identify the sorts of weapons US troops would be fighting against. But the latest deck has the opposite purpose and shows how seriously they are taking this problem.

Matthew Powell, Teaching Fellow in Strategic and Air Power Studies, University of Portsmouth

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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US deals Ukraine playing cards to avoid friendly fire - Asia Times

Historians arent supposed to make predictions, but Yale professor Timothy Snyder has become known for his dire warnings and many of them have been proved correct

Last September, seven months after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder took a 16-hour train ride from Poland to Kyiv. Snyder knew the city well: hed been visiting since the early 1990s, when he was a graduate student and the newly post-Soviet Ukrainian capital was dark and provincial. In the decades that followed, Kyiv had grown bigger and more interesting, and Snyder, who is now 53, had become an eminent historian of eastern Europe. On disembarking at the Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi station, he found the city transformed by war. There were sandbags everywhere, concrete roadblocks and steel hedgehogs designed to stop Russian tanks. Air raid warnings blared from phones in pockets and handbags.

Not everything was unfamiliar. The first months of the war had gone relatively well for the Ukrainians a fact that surprised many observers, but not Snyder and by September, Kyiv was no longer in imminent danger of occupation. Life, while not normal, was regaining some of its prewar rhythms. You could get a haircut at a barbershop, or hear standup at a comedy club, or sunbathe on the shores of the Dnieper River.

Snyder had come to speak at an annual conference, Yalta European Strategy (YES), which was founded in 2004 to promote ties with Europe. Funded by a Ukrainian oligarch, the conference had become an occasional stopover for the gladhanding global elite. Bill and Hillary Clinton, Gordon Brown, Elton John and Richard Branson had all participated in previous years, and the roster for the 2022 meeting included the American national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google.

Though he is not a natural gladhander, Snyder had attended the conference before. His first visit came in 2014, a few years after he published Bloodlands, a provocative and emotionally devastating account of Nazi and Soviet atrocities, which established him, in the words of one reviewer, as perhaps the most talented younger historian of modern Europe working today. The book was a crossover success, and in the years that followed Snyder began to write more about contemporary issues, including the climate crisis, healthcare and Ukrainian politics. But it was his writing about two figures, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, that turned him into one of the most prominent American intellectuals of the past decade.

Snyders mainstream breakthrough, in 2017, was On Tyranny, a bestselling little book that helped make him the house intellectual of the centre-left anti-Trump movement sometimes known as #resistance liberalism. The book earned him regular invitations to appear on television. (Whether or not you talked to your friends about it, everybody you know has been reading and re-reading On Tyranny, Rachel Maddow said on her show.) The news Snyder brought his audience was almost unremittingly bleak, yet it also offered a strange kind of reassurance. You are not wrong to feel that the situation is grievous, Snyder told them. Take it from an expert in political barbarism: things are exactly as bad as they seem.

Snyders dire warnings were easy to caricature as bourgeois-liberal doomerism, yet Trumps attempts to overturn the 2020 election allowed him to claim vindication for what his critics had seen as hyperbole. On 9 January 2021, three days after a mob laid siege to the US Capitol, Snyder published an essay in the New York Times that made another prescient prediction. Trumps failed putsch was more like the beginning than the end of something, Snyder argued. Since Trumps big lie that he won the election was now a sacred cause for which people had sacrificed, it would remain a potent force in American politics unless a concerted effort was made to stop it.

Snyders view of Putin was still more ominous. In Putins Russia, Snyder sees a corrupt autocracy that has turned to neo-fascism in an attempt to regain its imperial glory. He was one of the few anglophone commentators to anticipate Russias 2014 invasion of Ukraine a prediction that even his friends scoffed at and warned in his book Black Earth that a new Russian colonialism threatened European stability. In his opinion, the full-scale invasion that started last year was not, as some saw it, a minor regional conflict, but rather an atrocity of epochal significance: It is about the possibility of a democratic future, he wrote in Foreign Affairs.

Over the past year, Snyder has been one of the most eloquent interpreters of the war in Ukraine. He writes and speaks frequently about the conflict including, in mid-March, to the UN security council. He has established a project to document the war, and more controversially, has raised more than $1.2m for an anti-drone defence system. A course on Ukrainian history that he taught at Yale last autumn has had hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, and he has become one of the most famous western intellectuals within Ukraine itself. He used to be a celebrity in historical circles and among intellectuals, his friend, the Ukrainian rock star Sviatoslav Vakarchuk, told me recently, but now even ordinary people know a lot about him.

It was a sign of Snyders standing that the YES conference was only the second-highest-profile stop on his Kyiv itinerary. The main reason for his trip, Snyder told me, during one of three long conversations we had recently, was a private meeting with Ukraines president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The Ukrainians, Snyder said, think Im much more important than I actually am. Zelenskiy, he went on, thought of me mainly as somebody who had some kind of voice. Im not under the illusion that Snyder stopped himself. Well, no, thats not true. He said: My wife and I have read On Tyranny. Thats the first thing he said when I met him.

Sitting in green leather wingbacks in Zelenskiys presidential office, the men talked for more than two hours. They discussed Shakespeare, the Czech playwright and politician Vclav Havel, and the Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov. They talked about freedom, too, the subject of a new book Snyder is working on, and particularly about Zelenskiys decision to stay in Ukraine once the invasion began. Zelenskiy said that while most western observers had expected him to flee, he had never felt as if he had any real choice. Thats an argument that he helped me to make, Snyder told me. Being free means that you actually end up in situations where you wont actually feel like you have a whole bunch of options.

Snyders fascination with what he has described as Zelenskiys choiceless choice is not surprising: he had predicted that, too, on the eve of the war. As an academic and a public intellectual, Snyder has long operated on the belief that there are moments in the world where your actions are magnified. It may be that you can take things that were going to swerve in a particularly bad direction, and you can push them with relatively little effort. Zelenskiys decision, like the Ukrainian resistance writ large, was for him a vivid demonstration that this belief was well justified.

Unusually for a serious historian, Snyder often draws analogies between the past and the present. More unusually still, he routinely makes predictions about the future. What he calls his Cassandra mode is different from his historical work, but not entirely disconnected. History isnt the boring recitation of stuff that we all know but have forgotten, he says. Its a constant, exciting discovery of things that actually happened, which werent anticipated and which were probably considered wildly improbable at the time. The first world war, the Holocaust: a lot of the things which seem absolutely foundational were regarded at the time as ridiculous, absurd, impossible. And once you know that, then you can have the intuition that, well, maybe in this moment right now theres something happening which people arent seeing.

Snyder was raised in a Quaker family in south-western Ohio, and he retains a midwestern faith in the virtue of saying plainly what you mean. His unadorned prose has the sturdy simplicity that one associates with Shaker furniture. Unlike most academics, he also feels a deep responsibility to explain his ideas as straightforwardly as possible. Its very, very easy to hide behind the notion that, Oh, what I do as a philosopher or psychologist or cell biologist is just really complicated, he says. I honestly dont believe thats true.

Snyder dislikes the scholarly tendency to hide judgments under a cloak of pseudo-objectivity. He has a strong moral feeling his wife, Marci Shore, calls it a save-the-world impulse that can be traced back to his parents. Shore told me that Snyders mother has this very calming sense of moral clarity. Its like, there are no perfect decisions in the world. Theres no space of innocence. Given the situation as it is, you make the choice and you go forward. Snyder, she says, is much the same way.

Shore, who is also a historian at Yale, noted her husbands deep confidence in his abilities. Over email, she told me a story about the birth-preparation class she and Snyder had taken when she was pregnant with their son. They were living in Vienna, and the midwife spoke to the class in Wienerisch, the colloquial Viennese dialect. After the class, the couple agreed they had understood only about 60% of what theyd heard. The difference between us can be gleaned in this small but revealing detail, Shore wrote. Tim was calmly persuaded that the 60% we did understand was the important part, whereas I was convinced that the 40% we didnt understand was surely what was crucial.

As Snyders public profile has risen, he has attracted an increasing number of critics. His judgments have been controversial in part because his own politics are difficult to pin down. To Ukrainian nationalists, he sounds like an American leftist. To American leftists, he sounds like a Ukrainian nationalist. His books carry blurbs from an unlikely coterie that ranges from George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo, to Henry Kissinger, author of the bombing of Cambodia. In Snyders focus on the evils of nazism and Stalinism and his advocacy of US military support for Ukraine, some people see the makings of a barely reconstructed cold warrior, yet he opposed the Iraq war and is anything but blithe about the USs claims to moral supremacy. His memoir-diatribe Our Malady lambasted the USs privatised healthcare system, and lately he has been speaking out against Republican-sponsored laws that limit discussion of the USs racist history in schools.

Perhaps the most common critique of Snyder over the past decade has to do with the stridency of his public arguments, which often see him presenting beliefs, and even speculations, as incontrovertible facts. Earlier this year, after an FBI counterintelligence official was indicted for violating sanctions against a Russian oligarch, Snyder wrote on his Substack: We are on the edge of a spy scandal with major implications for how we understand the Trump administration, our national security, and ourselves. Two weeks later, he ridiculed discussions about a potential nuclear escalation in the Ukraine conflict as wrong, and embarrassingly so in moral and strategic terms. That is the most important thing to say about nuclear war: its not happening, he claimed.

This rhetorical self-assurance is a crucial feature of his mainstream appeal: for audiences disoriented by some of the most politically turbulent times theyve ever seen, Snyders authoritative tone suggests a firm hand on the tiller. Yet it also supplies grist for critics who think Snyder is too ready to see catastrophe lurking around every corner. The cultural critic Lee Siegel accused him of being a one-man industry of panic, a prophet whose profitability depends on his prophecies never coming true. The political scientist Daniel Drezner, in the New York Times, described On Tyranny as overwrought and potentially self-defeating because of its hyperbole. And in the Nation, Sophie Pinkham described The Road to Unfreedom, Snyders 2018 book about Putin and Trump, as the apotheosis of a certain paranoid style that has emerged among liberals in Trumps wake.

Shore told me that her husband possesses a kind of strange composure that allows him to absorb criticism without emotional disturbance. Snyder, for his own part, told me that he doesnt see much value in addressing his critics directly. He nevertheless makes no apologies for stating clearly what he thinks will happen. And while Snyder is proud of his foresight he has often been correct he also insists that his predictions are not a parlour game to rack up points. Central to his understanding of history is a conviction that events are not predetermined by broad structural forces such as economics or technology. His dire analogies and doomy premonitions are not meant to make people depressed or complacent. Quite the opposite. To make predictions is to emphasise the unpredictability of the future, to remind readers that they might still have the freedom to change history.

In February, I went to New Haven to watch Snyder teach at Yale. His morning class, on a cold and sunny Valentines Day, was an undergraduate seminar on mass incarceration in the US and USSR. He was teaching the course with the philosopher Jason Stanley, a close friend of his who had likewise become a pillar of the anti-Trump #resistance. The course was held in a classroom with dark wood wainscoting, a black marble fireplace, and gothic-arch windows inset with scenes from the Bible. Through the window it was possible to see the 14-storey tower that had been renamed in honour of the universitys recently deceased chief investment officer.

Though Snyder can sometimes seem, in print, like an author unfamiliar with the concept of self-doubt, in person there is still a trace of the lanky, somewhat diffident undergraduate that one of his professors recalls from his university days. He has a dry humour and a talent for extemporaneous eloquence, but no one would mistake him for a commanding presence. He speaks softly and dresses in textured grays and browns that might as well be camouflage on a north-eastern American college campus in winter. Amplifying this self-effacing air is a sense, which hangs about him like a penitential sackcloth, that there is too much to do, too many legitimate requests on his time. I cant physically process the email, he told me at one point. Im just a history professor. I dont have staff.

When he arrived in the seminar room, Snyder provoked no murmur or hush among the students. With his thinning white hair, his lively blue eyes, and his air of relaxed reticence, he made for a distinct contrast with Stanley, who showed up to the course in black clothes and black sunglasses, and quickly started cracking loud jokes with the students nearest his chair.

The subject for the days class was late-19th-century scientific racism, but Snyder said that he wanted to start with a reminder about some philosophical arguments connected to the subject at hand. Without notes, he launched into a brief lecture that touched on Platos Parmenides, the Book of Genesis, the idea of dialectic in Hegel and Marx, and the treatment of history by the French-American polymath Ren Girard, before wrapping around to WEB Du Bois. Shore had told me that socialising and speaking in public can be draining for Snyder, but it was clear in the seminar room that he was enjoying himself. He spoke quickly and fluently, gesturing with his hands and unspooling his arguments in transcription-ready sentences.

A few hours after the class ended, Stanley explained the detour to Plato. Earlier that morning, he told me, Snyder had texted to say that he wanted to remind the students of some earlier thinkers. I said, What are you talking about, Parmenides? as a joke, Stanley recalled. He took it as a dare. Thats very standard. Tim is extremely competitive.

Snyders friends sometimes marvel that the eldest son of a veterinarian from Ohio with no familial ties to eastern Europe became a leading expert on the region. His family can trace its ancestry back many generations on each side in the US, and he grew up not far from the farms where his grandparents grew pumpkins, soya beans and corn. His parents were Quakers who served in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador before returning to Centerville, a prosperous suburb outside Dayton, to raise their family.

Snyder says that his parents were very leftwing, and not just by American standards, an inclination that set them apart from the conservatism that prevailed in the suburbs and countryside of south-western Ohio. In the midst of an overwhelmingly Republican milieu, they hung posters celebrating leftwing Latin American causes on their walls and regularly sat down with their three boys to write letters to prisoners for Amnesty International on Sunday afternoons. When Snyder was in the ninth grade, the family traveled to a Quaker dairy commune in Costa Rica. That was our idea of tourism, he said.

An alienated and mostly indifferent student in high school, Snyder bucked against his parents leftist politics by flirting with libertarianism. He remembers debating the virtues and vices of the Soviet Union with his mother. Her starting point would be, Well, they were on the right side with Nicaragua. They were on the right side with Cuba. It wouldnt be Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. Still, there were limits to his rebellion. I would have never thought, Im for Reagan. Even at my most midwestern buttoned-up, that would have been a different tribe.

When Snyder arrived at Brown University in 1987 as an undergraduate, he thought he might end up as a lawyer working on nuclear arms control. Two classes would get him interested in history. One was a survey of European intellectual history taught by Mary Gluck. The other, on postwar eastern European history, was taught by Thomas W Simons Jr, who would soon after be appointed ambassador to Poland. That course started less than two weeks after Nicolae Ceauescu, the Romanian dictator, was executed in Bucharest on Christmas Day 1989. I thought Id get 15 or 20 students, Simons told me. A hundred and thirty showed up. Snyder says he was obsessed with the course, so much so that he suggested Simons turn his lecture notes into a book. Simons hired him the following summer to help him do just that.

After graduating, Snyder attended Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship. Timothy Garton Ash, one of his DPhil advisers, recalled Snyder as a very reserved young man who nevertheless stood out from his peers for his moral intensity, analytical clarity and intellectual boldness which saw him pushing an argument as far as it would go, or possibly even a little farther.

In his dissertation, on the Polish Marxist thinker Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, and especially in his second book, The Reconstruction of Nations, which hed largely completed by the time he got hired at Yale in 2001, it is already possible to see Snyder engaging with the major themes that would shape his subsequent work. The first was that eastern Europe was not an ahistorical no-mans land trapped between Europe and the Soviet Union, but a place with its own agency and its own history. The second was that history could be shaped by individual human choices. The third was the importance of ideas as a primary mover of historical events, particularly the fraught idea of the nation.

Since college, Snyder had nurtured what he describes as larger ambition to be it sounds very pompous, but to be an intellectual, a writer. Bloodlands, published in 2010, marked the first major inflection point in his public career. By that time, he had already been writing occasionally for non-academic audiences. But his powerful account of the human toll of Nazi and Soviet horror won him his first major audience among non-academic readers.

Snyder took as his subject the political mass murder of 14 million people that occurred between 1933 and 1945 in a swath of eastern Europe that stretched from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states. From this simple formula, Snyder drew several arguments. He suggested, for instance, that the Nazis and the Soviets treated the countries of the bloodlands the term alludes to an Anna Akhmatova poem as proximate colonies. He also argued that too much of the previous research on the killings had seen them through the eyes of the major powers. More fundamentally, his book proposed that the events that transpired in these countries ought to be seen as central to 20th-century European history.

Among academics, Bloodlands won praise for Snyders wide learning: he speaks five languages, reads five more, and belonged to the first generation of western scholars to gain widespread access to eastern European archives after the fall of communism. There was also criticism. Some reviewers balked at his juxtaposition of the Holocaust with Stalins crimes, while others notably Richard J Evans, in a particularly vehement article accused him of failing to explain the causes of the events he was describing. (In Black Earth, his far more controversial follow-up to Bloodlands, Snyder seemed to have both criticisms in mind: its subject was the causes of the Holocaust.) Yet Snyders provocative efforts to reframe European history brought new energy to what was already coming to be seen as settled history. That whole history had been told as a story of Russia and Germany, and of course, the Holocaust, Garton Ash told me. Bloodlands, he said, put the spotlight on east-central Europe in a way which changed the historical perspective.

Snyder believes that doing good history requires taking bad ideas seriously, and he applies the same principle to his writing on current events. Bad ideas matter, he says. They have their own coherence and their own power. Shortly after he published Bloodlands, he noticed that Putin, who was serving a term as prime minister, was speaking with concerning frequency about the essential unity of Russia and Ukraine. In 2013, Putin visited Kyiv for the 1,025th anniversary of the baptism of Prince Vladimir the Great. In Kyiv, Snyder says, Putin gave this wacky speech saying that Ukraine and Russia were one because of the baptism, and no one could do anything about it because it was beyond politics. It was a spiritual truth: basically God made it so.

The Maidan uprising began that November in Ukraine. It was sparked by the sudden refusal of Ukraines president, Viktor Yanukovych, under pressure from Russia, to sign an association agreement with the European Union. The protests grew to more than half a million people, and by January the protesters were locked in an increasingly deadly standoff with the state. On 3 February 2014, Snyder published an op-ed in the New York Times under the headline Dont Let Putin Grab Ukraine. Citing Putins increasingly vocal desire for a Eurasian Union to rival the EU, as well as Russian officials who had been openly discussing the partition of Ukraine, he warned that Putin might try to engineer a coup in Kyiv. If that failed, he suggested, Putin might see armed intervention as the only way to save face.

Snyder says his warning was a judgment call based on his sense that Putin was driving the Ukraine policy more than people realised. When I read those angry things that he published in Russian newspapers about civilisation, his anger didnt seem to be tactical. It seemed to somehow come from someplace deep. The other factor that triggered Snyders suspicion was a very visible uptick in anti-Ukrainian propaganda, along the lines of, Theyre Nazis. Theyre gay. Theyre gay Nazis. On Russian television, in November and December of 2013, it became very carnivalesque, and that got me thinking that something was in the works.

Snyders concern about Russian aggression was not widely shared. Western news reports from the time repeatedly assured their readers that Putin would not be so rash. (Most experts [] dismiss the possibility of military force, the Times said, a week after it ran Snyders op-ed.) Serhii Plokhii, a Ukrainian historian at Harvard who is friendly with Snyder, told me that hed been certain the op-ed went too far. Yet just a few weeks later, after Yanukovych fled the country, Russia seized Crimea and sent troops into eastern Ukraine. Plokhii, laughing at the memory, said he spoke to Snyder not long afterward. I told Tim: OK, I thought you were a complete nut.

Snyder says that at the time of the invasion, there had been a tendency to treat Russia as though it were merely a failed or corrupted version of a western liberal democracy. Both the American and the German view of Putin was about denied agency. Theyre like, Oh, well, theyre trying to have a transition, but its hard for them, poor souls, therefore they have to invade Georgia or Ukraine. By contrast, he said, if you say Putin is a guy who reads, and changes, and pulls in ideas, youre saying, OK, hes not an idiot. Hes not predictable. He makes moves we wouldnt expect. This is one of the reasons Snyder insists on calling Putin fascist: It sounds weird, but to say that he is influenced by fascism is to give him credit. Hes not just a historically determined piece in this story of transitions. Hes been doing something different for more than a decade.

Two years after the annexation of Crimea, Snyder noticed that Russian politicians and state media outlets were spreading the same kinds of propaganda and misinformation about the US that it had about Ukraine. Though it is not true, as Snyder claimed recently on Twitter, that he broke the story of Trump and Putin, he was early in devoting sustained attention to the incipient relationship between the two men. In April 2016, he argued that Trumps weakness and vanity made him an easy mark for Putin, who had already started cultivating him as a future Russian client.

By that autumn, it was becoming clear that Russia was behind the hack-and-leak campaign that generated weeks of unfriendly headlines for Hillary Clinton in the final stretch of the presidential campaign. Citing Putins rehabilitation of Ivan Ilyin, a 20th-century Christian fascist philosopher, Snyder argued that there was a logic, and even a political philosophy, behind the apparent chaos of the cyber-attacks. If democratic procedures start to seem shambolic, he wrote in the New York Times, then democratic ideas will seem questionable as well. And so the US would become more like Russia, which is the general idea. If Mr Trump wins, Russia wins. But if Mr Trump loses and people doubt the outcome, Russia also wins.

A few days before the election, Snyder flew back to his native Ohio to canvass for Clinton. They assigned me literally the neighbourhood where I grew up, he recalled. I was struck by how people didnt want to have a conversation. I mean, Im an introvert, but I was a harmless-looking white guy, and I had a lot of trouble getting people out to talk. When he got home, he told Shore that Trump was going to win Ohio. Still, he thought Clinton would prevail overall. I think there was a certain amount of white naivete, he says.

Tim always kind of believed in America more than I did, Shore says. Hes not used to being wrong, like really wrong. And he really didnt think Trump was going to win. When I told the kids the next morning, my daughter, who was four at the time, said, Maybe Daddy forgot to tell someone to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Snyder was stunned by Trumps victory, but it also provided the immediate impetus for On Tyranny. Flying home from Sweden after the election, he started writing a list of lessons for thwarting tyranny on an aeroplane napkin. The list included advice such as Do not obey in advance and Defend institutions. He posted it on Facebook when he got home, and the post went viral. Snyders editor told him they could publish it as a short book if he added some context to each lesson. The result which saw Snyders plain declarative sentences become plain imperative exhortations that drew from the history of European political terror more closely resembles a samizdat manifesto than one of his heavy historical volumes. Thanks to its urgency and its brevity, the book became a totem for Americans horrified by their new president. On Tyranny sold more than half a million copies during Trumps term of office, and spent nearly two years in total on the New York Times bestseller list.

The exaltation of Snyder among centre-left liberals prompted an equal and opposite reaction within certain quarters of the American left. For these critics, Snyders portentous analogies and breathless warnings smacked of historical naivete and ideological convenience. To imply that Trump was a Hitler in waiting was not only to overlook the native horrors that American politics had conjured in the past it was also to neglect the ways that a bipartisan programme of neoliberalism had created the conditions that led to Trumps election. Writing in August 2017, Samuel Moyn and David Priestland, historians at Yale and Oxford, criticised the views that democracy is under siege and totalitarianism is making a comeback as forms of hysterical and counterproductive tyrannophobia, a barely veiled shot at Snyder. The sky is not falling and no lights are flashing red, they wrote.

It is not hard to guess why On Tyranny became a target for leftists annoyed with efforts to draft them into an anti-Trump popular front. The 2016 election witnessed the first serious resurgence of socialism in the US in half a century, and many on the left were not in a mood to make nice with the mainstream liberals who had failed to stop Trump at the polls. Yet Snyder was never a neoliberal triumphalist. Nor was he complacent about the USs failures. I honestly think this is just something people want to be true, because it would be comfortable if true, he told me. In previous writings, he had denounced free-market fundamentalism, and in the epilogue of On Tyranny itself, Snyder wrote that the danger of Trump was that he would usher the US from a naive and flawed sort of democratic republic to a confused and cynical sort of fascist oligarchy. What Snyder hoped for was something different from either option a renewal, as he would put it in his next book, The Road to Unfreedom that no one can foresee.

Snyder admits that when he wrote On Tyranny, he did not sufficiently account for the ways in which Trump was a familiar type in American history: My take was that this was new and dangerous. I was probably a little bit wrong about the new part. But he says he was correct about the extent to which people would tell themselves, Americas exceptional and nothing bad can happen here. Throughout Trumps presidency, he continued to warn that Trump would try to hold on to power unlawfully, and in the essay he published a few days after the siege of the US Capitol, he didnt pass up the chance for a moment of self-congratulation. It was clear to me in October that Trumps behavior presaged a coup, he wrote, and I said so in print.

Even Moyn, who calls his colleague an extraordinarily gifted human being, doesnt dispute Snyders right to claim prescience. In their 2017 op-ed, he and Priestland had asserted that there is no real evidence that Mr Trump wants to seize power unconstitutionally, and there is no reason to think he could succeed. Moyn told me he still holds that view today, even after the 6 January siege. I dont believe that democracy was ever on the brink, he said. Yet he also acknowledged that It almost doesnt matter for me to say I dont think it provided that vindication, because everyone else thought it did. In the popular mind, he conceded, Snyder won the debate about Trump.

Right up until the attack came, Snyder was still unsure whether to expect another Russian invasion of Ukraine. There wasnt a propaganda rollout the way there had been in 2014, he says. My normal intuitions come out of Russian propaganda, and they were starving me. In late February, he was in New Haven, teaching two courses at Yale plus a third, on freedom, at a prison in central Connecticut. After the war began, on 24 February, he and Shore cancelled the family holiday theyd been planning. It didnt feel morally right, he said.

Jason Stanley told me that the war was not abstract to Snyder: One always has to remember that. These are his friends. Tim takes friendship extremely seriously. These are people hes known for decades. Yet it is also true that the war represents a stark illustration of the themes that have shaped Snyders work over the past three decades. Most obviously, Ukraines surprisingly successful defence efforts offer an instance of the sort of geopolitical agency that he has, in his work, tried to restore to the historiography of eastern Europe. Putins war has also provoked crucial questions about Ukrainian nationhood and the Ukrainian state, of precisely the kind that Snyder has spent his career investigating. And while Snyder predicted that the outcome will be decided by material factors humanitarian support, debt forgiveness, weapon deliveries he also sees the war as a fight about ideas. To Snyder, Putins repeated claims about the spiritual unity of Russian and Ukrainian nations are not mere propaganda meant to obscure a hard-nosed strategic calculation. They are part of a deeply held neo-imperial vision that Putin has cobbled together from his reading of Ilyin, from Soviet history, and from a more general sense of Russian greatness.

This emphasis on ideas has led Snyder to be criticised by some in the realist school of international relations. Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a thinktank, counts herself an admirer of Snyders historical work, but she also says that his understanding of world affairs is almost indelibly shaped by what he thinks are the big important ideas, whereas I would say that Russias invasion of Ukraine was motivated as much by trying to prop up its falling security in the region. The dispute is not academic. If you believe, as Ashford does, that Russia is motivated by strategic fears, then every additional degree of western involvement risks exacerbating the original causes of the war and prolonging the conflict. By contrast, if you believe with Snyder that the wars roots lie in Putins fascist worldview, then victory on the battlefield becomes imperative. A lot of smart people have said it before me, but fascism was never discredited. It was only defeated, he says. The Russians have to be defeated, just like the Germans were defeated.

In 2004, as protests against corruption and electoral fraud were building into what would become the Orange Revolution, Snyder wrote that Ukraine today is the test for Europe. Nearly two decades later, it seems clear that he sees the war in Ukraine as a test not only of Europe and the US, but of himself. After he returned from Kyiv last autumn, he was asked to become an ambassador for United24, a crowdfunding effort that Zelenskiy had launched in the early days of the war. The campaigns organisers suggested that he might want to raise funds for the reconstruction of a library in Chernihiv, which had been destroyed by Russian shelling early on in the war.

I thought about that, Snyder says. I knew the library. I knew Chernihiv. I was there in September, and Id seen the ruins. It would have been a perfectly natural thing for me, as a historian, to do. No ones going to say, Oh, youre doing something wrong by raising money for the library. But Snyder didnt want to decide based on what felt politically correct or easiest for him personally. Instead, he asked his Ukrainian friends what would be most useful. They all said, Drones. The historians said, Drones. The humanists said, Drones. The peace activists said, Drones.

I asked Snyder whether hed have done the same had his friends in Kyiv said that an offensive weapon was needed a battle tank, say? No, Snyder said. You got me there. The anti-drone system was a weapon, he acknowledged. But its a weapon meant to save civilian lives at a time when Russia was openly threatening to take out the infrastructure, and to try to starve and freeze out as many people as they could. You cant stop that by rebuilding a library. You cant stop a drone by political correctness. But if they had said, Would you help us fund a tank? I would have said no. I think that probably just shows the limit of my willingness to take hits. It would probably be OK to raise money for a tank.

Even with the drone catcher, Snyder says, I knew, 100%, that people were going to say, Look at him. Hes an activist. Hes raising money for a government. He was thinking particularly of his critics in Germany, whose version of being a public intellectual is criticising other people for being public intellectuals. Snyder raised more than $1.2m for the anti-drone system in under three months. The criticism came as expected, and he says it only confirmed to him that he had made the right choice.

In Thinking the Twentieth Century, a book that Snyder helped the historian Tony Judt compose before he died in 2010, Judt argued that contemporary public intellectuals faced a choice between writing thoughtfully for a small audience or becoming what he called a media intellectual: This means targeting your interests and remarks to the steadily shrinking attention span of TV debates, blogs, tweets, and the like. These were alternatives, not complements, Judt insisted. It is not at all obvious to me that you can do both without sacrificing the quality of your contribution.

Not everyone would agree that Snyder has fully escaped the horns of Judts dilemma, but so far he has managed enough of what he calls professional hygiene to avoid too much cross-contamination. The Ukraine course he taught at Yale and on YouTube might fairly be described as pro-Ukrainian, in the sense that it offered a thoroughgoing rebuttal of Putins assertion that Ukraine is not a real country. But the millennium-long story it told was complex and surprising, nothing at all like the pithy, almost propagandistic appeals Snyder was writing on Substack.

Snyder says he feels no philosophical tension between his work as a historian and his advocacy. He also tends to downplay any concern about any potential effects of the war on his own reputation. Still, in tying himself so completely to the Ukrainian self-defence effort, he has put himself on the line in a way that is rare for a public intellectual of his stature. Wars are messy, after all, even wars that offer what he calls an unusual amount of moral clarity. And the questions that Ukraine will soon need to confront how to end the war, how to rebuild the country in its aftermath will probably need answers that cannot be provided by uncomplicated appeals to basic values.

Sviatoslav Vakarchuk, the Ukrainian musician, said of his friend, Some people think hes a romantic. I would say, hes not a romantic, hes an idealist. The distinction seems apt. Snyder is not Christopher Hitchens: he doesnt long for the existential thrill of whistling artillery and crossfire overhead. I certainly dont feel like the Ukraine war is a fulfilment of my destiny, or anything like that, he told me. Yet his faith in the power of ideas has an important corollary: an idea that costs you nothing is worth exactly what you paid for it. As he put it, during our last conversation in New Haven, good ideas arent real unless youre willing to do some little thing to act on them.

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Putin, Trump, Ukraine: how Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our dark times - The Guardian