Let’s ditch all the “grey area” jargon – Russia’s preparations signal war
War threatens on several fronts this week. And it is time to drop the fashionable clichés and jargon about ‘conflict in the grey zone’, or ‘non obvious warfare’, or ‘non-war, war’ even. War is war.
President Putin’s troops in south west Russia are in a warlike posture, gathering menacingly in Crimea and the Black Sea.
Israel has upped the ante with an attack on the centrifuge centre at Iran’s Natanz nuclear plant last week. And some half dozen ships in the Gulf and the Arabian seas have been attacked or mined in as many weeks. Where will this escalation lead?
President Biden has just announced that the last US troops will be out of Afghanistan by 11 September – an ominous date. Allied troops in Nato, from the UK, France and Germany, will follow. Biden tried – but did not succeed – to mouth some platitude along the lines of ‘our mission is accomplished.’ Fat chance. The American pull out opens the way for a Taliban takeover and fresh civil conflict across Afghanistan, and most likely well beyond. The Taliban coming back to power in Kabul this autumn is not the same Taliban that left in November 2001. They will bring with them a different crew of Jihadi extremists, much smarter, streetwise and militarily capable than what we’ve seen before.
Biden’s move reinforces the failure of a totally discredited strategy and policy for the past 20 years – a botched and grandiose scheme based on a partial, fractured and ultimately useless employment of force and military occupation. Indeed, Biden is showing himself to be heir to the previous administration in which he served. Barack Obama’s Afghan strategy was almost over before it began, with a casual approach to a wicked problem, in which the White House policy rarely rose above the profoundly shallow.
However, Biden has decided to move swiftly on another front with the expulsion of diplomats from Russia, of sanctions and tough words over the cyber onslaught via the SolarWinds platform last year – some of which may still be ongoing. SolarWinds was supposed to be an internet repair tool, but turned out to be harvesting large amounts of data from contractors public and private, federal agencies and government departments, and international organisations connected to the UN, amongst others. Worryingly the malware or malpractice wasn’t detected by any government cyber agency, but another commercial outfit, Fire Eye.
SolarWinds has been traced to the Russian agencies, this time the FSB, and the foreign ministry spy agency the SVP.
The scale and malign impact of such attacks were stressed in a brilliant lecture last month at Gresham College by Dr Tanya Wheeler, one of the topmost experts in the field. In it she explained how the 2017 ‘WannaCry’ ransomware attack devastated huge areas of the NHS, promoted by the regime of North Korea. Exploiting the weakness in much of the NHS IT architecture – especially that based on Windows 7 – it had a potential of total destruction, ‘equivalent to an act of war.’
Because of the media narrative that feeds it, the public just doesn’t take such acts seriously enough. Today we are regaled with notions of ‘grey zones’ – something between conflict, confrontation and constructive competition. There is even a Sky News blog of the same name. We hear talk of ‘non-obvious warfare,’ or ‘war among the people’ (in its day a perfectly sound Maoist doctrine of popular insurgency) or ‘war by other means’ and, of course, following the Crimea annexation of 2014, ‘the war of the little green men, the Ninjas.’ Attached to these are notions of ‘psychological operations (PsyOps)’, ‘information manouevre’ and ‘persuasion by algorithm and AI’.
The military academies and think tanks are full of such verbiage, but that’s where this particular buck should stop. In the talk about ‘grey zones’ and the like, it is pretty clear that the armchair professors and generals are in an epistemological fog. They don’t know if they’re coming or going.
This is where we are with the Russian troop movements on the borders of Ukraine. Currently some 40,000 troops, with armour, rockets and long range artillery, motor rifle battalions, and Iskender medium-range ground attack missiles with nuclear capability are moving into forward concentration areas along the border with the Donbass provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine. Fighting has been going on here since 2014. Now the line of conflict is marked by over 200km of trenches.
President Putin’s military staff have said the armoured divisions on the Ukraine border are there to conduct major exercises for the next three weeks. A further 40,000 troops have been forward positioned in Crimea, and shallow draft amphibious craft from the Caspian fleet have been brought to Sevastopol. The troops won’t do much for the plight of the civilians of Crimea, now suffering from a drought that has steadily worsened since the Russians took over in 2014.
The military posture of the Crimea force is not hard to guess. They seem to be the strategic reserve for operations in Luhansk and Donetsk, or a thrust to grab the port junction of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov. This coincides with the warning from last week for US naval forces to keep away from the coasts of Crimea – declaring the northern Black Sea a Russian Area of Access Denial (AAD).
Roger Boyes and Edward Lucas, the highly experienced commentators for The Times, have both suggested that the Russians may aim to annex Luhansk and Donetsk – Boyes has said that the Russian armour would establish a new border in Ukraine on the Dnieper river.
Putin himself has said that Russia wishes to guarantee the safety and security of any Russian citizen whose life is in danger in this predominantly ethnic Russian area of Ukraine.
Perhaps surprisingly, Putin is undertstood to have been stung by the latest round of US expulsions and talk of further sanctions. He has also been pushed back by the closure of Russian propaganda stations broadcasting from Kiev. His own media have been blasting against President Biden’s “hostile steps, which dangerously threaten the degree of confrontation between our countries.”
These are the words of Magarita Simoniyan, editor-in-chief of Russia Today, who added: “Would taking the Donbass be seen as an asymmetric answer [that jargon bug again] to these threats?”
The pouring of 40,000 troops into the Donbas certainly wouldn’t be anything asymmetric, or an element of ‘the grey zone,’ or ‘Ninja manoeuvres.’ It would be an act of outright war.
Why would Putin risk this? The Ukrainian Army would find it hard to confront the Russian shock troops and armour in battle, but it is a lot stronger than it was in 2014. It is well trained and equipped with the latest Javelin anti-tank missiles.
Putin has a lot on his plate – with sure signs of over-commitment of his state and proxy forces – in Syria, Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh where he faces tricky foes and tricky allies, not least Turkey.
President Erdogan’s Turkey, too, has capable fighters, proxies and highly effective battlefield weaponry from drones, to ground radar and man-portable air defence missiles. It is prepared to lend or give some of these to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s forces.
On the propaganda front, Putin’s psychological warfare and persecution of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny seem to be backfiring – as he faces death in prison, his popularity and publicity are undiminished.
While the Russian Sputnik Covid vaccine seems to have scored remarkable diplomatic success abroad, at home the country is still gripped by the pandemic. Many Russians blame Putin for the failure to prevent, cure or vaccinate.
Even the signing of the Russian constitutional amendment that will allow him to stay in office until 2036 seems to be an exercise in whistling in the dark. Just two months from now the whole of the Duma, the lower house, is up for re-election. Sure, it’s a beauty contest – a glorious political game show. But the point about a beauty contest is that you have to look the part, you must appear beautiful. There must be no suggestion of deception, any hint that the Botox and rouge gild the mask of a loser. By June a messy war along the Dnieper, Crimea dying of thirst, and fresh waves of Covid will not make for a good look for the Putin Duma election campaign.
It is now a delicate matter of timing – which doesn’t offer many grounds for optimism about what is happening on the borders of Ukraine. The forces are now configured for some kind of military operation. Given the previous record of Putin military operations, the opportunity for incompetence and serious miscalculation is pretty big.
Intelligence is a major worry. We are reminded just how badly things can go wrong in a brilliant new book on the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 by Serhii Plokhy. Far from executing a brilliant piece of armed diplomacy, the Kennedy brothers were lucky to muddle through to a peaceful though unsettling conclusion, so clueless was the US intelligence. The CIA and the agencies had no idea, for example, that there were already some 43,000 Russian troops in Cuba before the crisis began, and that they already had dozens of medium-range missiles before the big strategic missiles were shipped. A chilling detail is that one of the Russia submarines was on the point of launching a tactical nuke, but for the fact that the searchlight operator got jammed in the hatch as he tried to get below before the attack could be launched.
It couldn’t happen now, surely, in the age of satellite surveillance and radio and cyber intercepts at every level? Just think back to 17 July 2014 when Malaysian Air Flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine by a Russian BUK missile assigned to Russian separatist forces. All 273 passengers and 15 crew were killed. The fire controller, and self-styled Russian warlord, thought the missile team had shot down a military transport of the Ukrainian forces.
Forces such as the mixed armoured divisions now forming up on the borders of Ukraine can only be kept battle-ready for a few weeks. Heavy-tracked vehicles, artillery, tanks, missiles and personnel carriers have what is known as the limits of ‘track mileage’ management. They can only be run for a certain distance, generally hundreds rather than thousands of kilometers in tough terrain before heavy maintenance, repair or replacement on their drive chains and tracks. In a few weeks Ukraine will be sharing the heat of high summer from the steppe.
Even the most limited operation invites another set of problems – managing occupation. The Russians in Donbas will welcome the liberators, but quite a few denizens won’t. Crimea is restive. Keeping the peace in Luhansk and Donetsk will not play well in Moscow if it costs a steady shipment of body bags back to the home country.
The use of Russian ground troops has not been entirely successful over recent years. The war on the borders of South Ossetia and Georgia in 2008 exposed serious military failings. In Syria very few Russian army units have been used – for good reason – and most of those have been military police and air force ground crew. More liberal use has been made of the private forces of the Wagner Group of Yevgeny Prigozhin, though with limited success in both Syria and Libya.
Any march into the Donbas would be a provocation. It wouldn’t be the invasion of a Nato power, which would trigger an immediate military riposte from the alliance as a whole. But it would be an attack on Nato-friendly power and ally. Moreover, it would be a fundamental breach of the Helsinki Final Act, the founding document of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE. It holds that no international border should be altered by force. This is agreed by all members, including Russia. Russia has refused to attend OSCE meetings to discuss Ukraine.
So how should Western allies respond to any threat of a Russian invasion of even a part of Ukraine? Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s president, has reacted by declining an invitation rob attend the 30th anniversary celebrations of Ukrainian independence in August – lacking even the courtesy to address her response to her fellow president, Zelenskiy – a vignette which speaks volumes for the aspirations and effectiveness of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy.
But for Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel, there is no room for weaseling and prevaricating if Russia attacks the Donbas. They must think hard, not babble too much, and forget the geopolitical gibberish of ‘grey zones’ and ‘war that’s not war.’