Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 126

Keith Gessen: The Case for Negotiating with Russia

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By Keith Gessen, The New Yorker, 8/29/23

If you want to hear a different perspective on the war in Ukraine, talk to Samuel Charap. A fine-featured Russia analyst with, at forty-three, a head of gray hair, Charap works at the RAND Corporation, a think tank that has been doing research for the U.S. military, among other clients, since the nineteen-forties. In the self-abnegating architectural spirit of many Washington institutions, it rents several floors of an office tower attached to a mall in Arlington, Virginia, not far from the Pentagon. The mall has a Macy’s and a Bath and Body Works, which are not places that Charap likes to go.

Charap, who grew up in Manhattan, became interested in Russian literature in high school, and then became interested in Russian foreign policy in college, at Amherst. He got a Ph.D. in political science at Oxford and spent time researching his dissertation in both Moscow and Kyiv. In 2009, he started working at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in D.C. Russia had just fought a short, nasty war with Georgia, but the incoming Obama Administration was hoping to “reset” relations and find common ground. Charap supported this effort and wrote papers trying to think through a progressive foreign policy for the U.S. in the post-Soviet region. But tensions with Russia continued to increase. In the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and incursion into eastern Ukraine, in 2014, Charap wrote a book, with the Harvard political scientist Timothy Colton, called “Everyone Loses,” about the background to the war. In it, Charap and Colton argue that the U.S., Europe, and Russia had combined to produce a “negative sum” outcome in Ukraine. Russia was the aggressor, to be sure, but by asking that Ukraine choose either Russia or the West, the U.S. and Europe had helped stoke the flames of conflict. In the end, everyone lost.

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I first met Charap in the summer of 2017, not long after the book came out, and in the midst of a maelstrom of anger at Russia for its interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Robert Mueller had been appointed as special counsel for the Justice Department, Donald Trump had labelled the investigation a hoax, and Congress was in the process of passing a bipartisan sanctions bill against Russia. Charap was as angry as anyone else about the interference, but he thought the sanctions proposed in the bill were a mistake. “The idea of sticks in international relations is not just for beating other countries,” he told me at the time. “It’s for achieving a better outcome.” He used the example of the long-standing Iran sanctions, which had finally compelled Iran to come to the negotiating table and vastly limit its nuclear program. The sanctions on Russia, he went on, were not like that. “Sanctions are only effective at changing another country’s behavior if they can be rolled back,” he said. “And, because of the measures in this current bill, it’s going to be nearly impossible for any President to relieve them.”

In the following years, as Russia became more and more of a neuralgic subject in American politics, Charap continued to travel to Russia, engage with Russian counterparts, and look for ways to lower the temperature of the relationship. Going to Valdai—the annual conference where Vladimir Putin pretends to be a wise tsar interested in discoursing with professors on international politics—had become somewhat controversial. But, before the war began, Charap went to the conference whenever he could, and several times even asked Putin a question. “It’s my job to understand these people, and I was given firsthand access to them,” he said. “How can you understand a country if you don’t go and talk to the people involved in the decision-making?”

In the fall of 2021, Charap, along with much of the expert community in D.C., became worried that Russia was planning an invasion of Ukraine. In a piece in Politico that November, he urged the Biden Administration to work with Kyiv to make at least some nominal concessions, to see if the crisis could be defused. Two months later, as the crisis deepened, he wrote another piece, for the Financial Times. In this one, he argued that NATO should announce publicly that Ukraine was not seriously being considered for membership. “Nato cannot and should not accept being told what to do by Russia,” Charap wrote. “But Moscow’s inflammatory rhetoric should not distract from the fact that Nato is not prepared to offer Ukraine membership. If doing so could avert a war, why not find some way to say out loud what any Nato official would say behind closed doors[?]”

When I spoke to Charap around this time, he was freaking out. The disposition of Russian forces, their activities, the fact that blood supplies were being sent to the Russian encampments: none of this was the behavior of an army conducting an exercise. Even more worrisome was the tenor of Russian diplomatic communications. Their demands—not only that Ukraine promise to never join NATO but also that NATO pull its troops back to their 1997 locations—were simply unrealistic. “They’re asking the world’s most powerful military alliance to strip naked and run laps,” he said. “But the gun they’re holding is to Ukraine’s head.” Charap estimated that if an invasion was going to happen, it would happen in late February.

In late January of 2022, he co-authored an editorial for Foreign Policy in which he argued that sending anti-tank Javelin missiles and anti-aircraft Stinger missiles to Ukraine would neither deter Russia from invading nor meaningfully affect the military situation if Russia did invade. He once again urged that diplomacy be given a chance.

And then the war began. It turned out that Charap and his co-author were right about Western weapons and deterrence—the Russian Army went in despite the Javelins and Stingers that had been sent to Ukraine by NATO countries—but wrong about their military utility. The Russian Army used low-flying helicopters, vulnerable to Stinger fire, and sent armored vehicles, in a juicy column, straight down a main road toward Kyiv, where they were destroyed. Subsequent studies have pointed to Russian carelessness, timely U.S. intelligence, and, above all, Ukrainian mobility and courage as the prime factors in the debacle of the war’s first weeks for Russia. But the weapons helped.

Nonetheless, for Charap, there was more that the U.S. might have tried to prevent the fighting. In recent months, as the fighting has gone on and on, he has become the most active voice in the U.S. foreign-policy community calling for some form of negotiation to end or freeze the conflict. In response, he has been called a Kremlin mouthpiece, a Russian “shill,” and a traitor. Critics say he has not changed his opinions in fifteen years despite changing circumstances. But he has continued writing and arguing. “This is a five-alarm fire,” he said. “Am I supposed to walk past the house? Because, as bad as it’s been, it could get much, much worse.”

So far, the most active phase of negotiations to end the war took place in its first two months. During that time, there were numerous meetings between Russian and Ukrainian officials, most notably throughout March, in Turkey. At least one rumored proposal coming out of those talks had Ukraine agreeing to not seek NATO membership in exchange for Russia abandoning all the territory it had seized after February 23, 2022. Accounts differ about what happened next. It was not clear that the ever-shifting Russian delegations had Putin’s support, nor was it clear that Western countries were willing to provide the sort of security guarantees Ukraine sought in place of NATO membership. Soon these questions became moot. On March 31st, Russian troops withdrew from Bucha; Ukrainian soldiers who entered the city discovered mass graves and learned that residents had been tortured and randomly shot. Volodomyr Zelensky called what happened there “war crimes” and “genocide.” An early April visit to Kyiv from Boris Johnson, then the British Prime Minister, seems to have stiffened Zelensky’s resolve. After that, there were still occasional attempts at negotiation and mediation, but it was clear that both sides wanted to see what they could get by continuing the war.

In the spring and summer of 2022, Russia re-engaged in the Ukrainian east, trying to make progress in the Donbas region; it managed to level and capture the large port city of Mariupol, connecting the Russian mainland, through occupied Ukrainian territory, to Crimea. In the fall, Ukraine mounted a counter-offensive, which succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. Ukrainian forces overran demoralized Russian troops in the Kharkiv region; they also laid siege to the city of Kherson, forcing a Russian retreat. In the winter, Russia was back on the offensive, occupying, after tens of thousands of casualties, the small city of Bakhmut, in the Donbas. Early this summer, it was Ukraine’s turn for another counter-offensive. This one was bolstered by much-publicized Western equipment and training, but so far it has not yielded anything like the successes of last fall.

At some point, this counter-offensive will end. The question will then become whether either of the sides is ready for negotiations. Russia has been saying for months that it wants negotiations, but it is not clear that it is ready to make any concessions. Most significantly, Russia has not backed off its demand for recognition of the territories it “fake-annexed” in September, 2022, in the words of Olga Oliker, of the International Crisis Group. Ukraine has said that it needs to continue fighting so it can expel the occupying forces and make sure that Russia never threatens Ukraine again.

The argument in the U.S. has split into two profoundly opposed camps. On the one side are people—not very many, at least publicly—like Charap, who argue that there might be a way to end the war sooner rather than later by freezing the conflict in place, and working to secure and rebuild the large part of Ukraine that is not under Russian occupation. On the other side are those who believe that this is no solution and the war must be fought until Putin is soundly defeated and humiliated. As the defense intellectual Eliot A. Cohen put it, in May, in The Atlantic:

“Ukraine must not only achieve battlefield success in its upcoming counteroffensives; it must secure more than orderly Russian withdrawals following cease-fire negotiations. To be brutal about it, we need to see masses of Russians fleeing, deserting, shooting their officers, taken captive, or dead. The Russian defeat must be an unmistakably big, bloody shambles.”

The arguments seem to be based, ultimately, on three kinds of disagreement. One is about the timing and meaning of negotiations. In a Foreign Policy piece last fall, Charap’s RAND colleagues Raphael Cohen (Eliot’s son, as it happens) and Gian Gentile argued that any push by the U.S. for negotiations would send “a series of signals, none of them good.” As Raphael Cohen put it to me recently: “You’re basically telling the Russians, ‘Just wait us out.’ You’re sending a message to the Ukrainians and to the rest of our allies: the United States will put up a good fight for a little while, but in the end will walk away. And you’re telling the American public that we’re not really committed to seeing this through to the end.” Cohen added that he would feel differently if the Ukrainians no longer wanted to fight or, better yet, the Russians admitted defeat: “The bad guys have a choice in this, too. You have to get the Russians to a place where they view that they can’t win. Then we have something to talk about.”

Charap thinks this is a misunderstanding of what negotiations are and what they signal. “Diplomacy is not the opposite of coercion,” he said. “It’s a tool for achieving the same objectives as you would using coercive means. Many negotiations to end wars have taken place at the same time as the war’s most fierce fighting.” He pointed to the Korean armistice of 1953; neither side acknowledged the other’s claims, but they agreed to stop fighting to negotiate a peace deal. That peace deal never came, but, seventy years later, they are still not fighting. That armistice required more than five hundred negotiation sessions. In other words, it would be better to start talking.

Another disagreement centers on the possibility of a decisive Ukrainian battlefield victory. Charap believes that neither side has the resources to knock the other out of the fight entirely. Other analysts have also voiced this opinion, most notably General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, who in a controversial comment last November compared the situation with the stalemate that prevailed toward the end of the First World War and suggested that it may be time to seek a negotiated solution. But the other side of this debate has been more vocal. They see a highly motivated Ukrainian Army, supported by a highly motivated populace. They point to the relative cheapness, to the U.S., of a war that pins down one of its major adversaries. And they believe that, given enough time, and enough Western weapons and training, Ukraine could take back a fair amount, if not all, of its territory; sever the land bridge to Crimea; and get close enough to Crimea to deter any future Russian military operations.

The final disagreement concerns Putin’s intentions. The “fight to the end” camp believes that, if Putin is not decisively defeated, he will continue attacking Ukraine. And some believe that if not stopped in Ukraine, as he was not stopped in Chechnya, Georgia, or Syria, he will keep going—to Moldova, the Baltics, Poland. They believe that European security is at stake.

Charap, of course, disagrees. He believes that it is possible to make a ceasefire “sticky”—by including inducements and punishments, mostly through sanctions, and by monitoring the situation closely. As for the view that Putin is bent, Hitler-like, on unceasing expansion, Charap is cautiously skeptical: “We have to admit that this is a more unpredictable actor than we thought. So while I’m not prepared to accept the Hitler narrative about how far his ambitions extend beyond Ukraine, I don’t think that we can rule it out.” But ambition is one thing; capability is another. Even if Putin wanted to keep going, Charap said, “he doesn’t have the means to do it—as this war has amply shown.”

To Charap, “The strategic defeat of Russia has already taken place.” It took place in the first months of the war, when Russian aggression and Ukrainian resistance helped galvanize a united European response. “Their international reputation, their international economic position, these ties with Europe that had been constructed over decades—literally, physically constructed—were rendered useless overnight,” Charap said. The failure to take Kyiv was the decisive blow. “Their regional clout, the flight of talent—the strategic consequences have been huge, by any measure.” And, from a U.S. perspective, Charap argues, any gains during the past sixteen months have been marginal. “A weakened Russia is good,” he said. “But a totally isolated, rogue Russia, a North Korea Russia—not so much.” A year ago, Russia was not deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure; now it regularly bombs Ukraine’s energy grid and port facilities. With every day, the chances of an accident or an incident that brings NATO directly into the conflict increase. Charap is asking just how much that risk is worth.

“It’s not necessarily that I think Ukraine needs to make concessions,” he said. “It’s that I don’t see the alternative to that eventually happening.”

Earlier this year, Charap presented his position on the war at a security conference in the Estonian capital of Tallinn. During a hostile question-and-answer session, Edward Lucas, a former Economist editor, accused Charap of “Westsplaining,” and James Sherr, of the famed international think tank Chatham House, asked how he could be so sure Ukraine wouldn’t win the war outright. But the toughest question came from the Ukrainian activist Olena Halushka. “You are speaking a lot about the cost of fighting, the line of fighting here and there,” she said, in a strong but clear accent. “But what is your analytical perspective on the cost of occupation? Because if you take a look at what is happening, at all of the de-occupied territories, the patterns there are very similar. There are big mass graves, torture chambers, filtration camps, mass deportations—including the deportations of kids.” When Halushka concluded her remarks and sat down, the audience applauded.

Charap answered the other questions he’d been asked, but avoided responding directly to this one. When prodded by Halushka and the moderator, he said, “I don’t know exactly how to answer that question, except to say that of course I recognize there are horrible war crimes being committed under areas under Russian occupation. And it’s ultimately for the Ukrainian government to decide which is worse—the casualties that could occur as a result of the continued fighting,” or the brutality of the continued Russian occupation of Ukrainian land. Charap seemed uncharacteristically flustered. “I mean, I don’t know quite more what more to say to answer the question,” he said again.

It was the question—the tragic question—of how to think of the people who would be left behind if the line of contact were to freeze somewhere close to its current position. If the fighting went on, Ukrainian soldiers would die; if the fighting ceased, Ukrainian citizens would be trapped under a vicious and despotic regime.

I recently spoke with the Kyiv-based journalist Leonid Shvets, whom I have found, over the years, to have a knack for pithily formulating the views of the Ukrainian mainstream. He told me that conversations in which Americans came up with scenarios for Ukraine to surrender drove him up a wall. “Why don’t you surrender to the Chinese?” he said. “Give them Florida. You have lots of states, what’s one state less?” Florida, of course, was a complicated example. “Or, if you’re so eager to make a deal with the Russians, why don’t you give them some of your land? Give them Alaska.” He thought that anything short of total defeat for Putin would just mean that the war would start up again. “We went through this already in 2014,” he said.

“Here’s the problem,” he continued. “If we freeze the situation where it now is, not along Ukraine’s internationally recognized border but along whatever line the front happens to be at, then we acknowledge that internationally recognized borders are just a kind of fiction, which you can ignore. That’s a very bad lesson. And, second, if we put the borders in this new place, then we’re in a situation where this new border is worth even less than the internationally recognized border. Maybe a new military operation will move it even further, move it over here, or move it over there. So at that point it is just totally without meaning.”

Shvets acknowledged that people in Ukraine were exhausted after a year and a half of war. “No question, every day the war goes on is, for us, specific people who are lost, and specific houses that are destroyed. Absolutely. But we are not yet ready for defeat.” He went on: “There may come a point where we need to negotiate. But from where we are right now, that point is not visible to me.”

There are dissenting voices within Ukraine, but they are seldom heard from in public. One former official, who asked that we disguise his identity, told me, “The dialogue is not just toxic. If you are not jumping up and down with the mainstream, then you are an enemy.” The former official was not an enemy, but he did blame the Zelensky administration for its lighthearted and irresponsible attitude toward the Russian troop buildup in 2021. The former official was getting his family out of the country and making preparations for what he believed was an imminent attack. Meanwhile, Zelensky was telling people to remain calm and citing Ukraine’s sovereign rights. This, the former official said, was a grave miscalculation. “When there’s a crazy person next to you with a Kalashnikov, you don’t start talking to him about the U.N. Charter!”

The former official believes that the Istanbul talks were the best chance at a more or less stable peace. “Back then Bakhmut was a beautiful city,” he said. “Mariupol was under Ukrainian control.” But now “there is no win-win solution any longer,” he said. “Someone will have to lose.” He hoped it would be Russia. But he feared it could be Ukraine. I asked him when public opinion might begin to turn. “When every single person knows someone who has been killed or wounded,” he replied. The country was getting there.

For Charap, the Ukrainian position on when to stop fighting is decisive, but it’s an evasion of responsibility to pretend that the U.S. can’t have an opinion on the matter. “You have to do this with the Ukrainians,” he said. “You can’t do it to the Ukrainians. But to suggest that we have no ability to influence them in any way is disingenuous. Like, we feel it’s O.K. to advise them about everything under the sun, but not war termination?”

Charles Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown who served on the National Security Council staff in the Clinton and Obama Administrations, goes further. “Fighting for every last inch of Ukrainian territory,” he told me, is “morally justified. It’s legally justified. But I’m not sure that it makes a lot of strategic sense from Ukraine’s perspective, or from our perspective, or from the perspective of the people in the Global South who are suffering food and energy shortages.” He said that the U.S. Administration needs to let the Ukrainian counter-offensive play out. But at the end of this year, or maybe early in 2024, it will have to talk with Zelensky about negotiations. “I wouldn’t say, ‘You do this or we’re going to turn off the spigot.’ But you sit down and you have a searching conversation about where the war is going and what’s in the best interest of Ukraine, and you see what comes out of that discussion.”

Of course, in the wake of everything the world has witnessed since February of 2022, this is easier said than done.

The debate in the U.S. over Russia and Ukraine has become one of the most vicious foreign-policy disputes in years. “It has come to resemble the debate over Iran policy that we were having in the twenty-tens,” Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center and a longtime critic of U.S. hawkishness toward Russia, told me. “It became less a debate about actual policy than a debate where people were very quick to call names, sling dirt, accuse people of being in league with foreign interests.” In the pages of Foreign Affairs, the arguments are polite, but in the wilds of Twitter, things get ugly.

Ashford said, “There’s a lot of emotion. This is a major war. Thousands and thousands of people have died. It’s barbaric, and people get very emotionally involved with their positions.” Emotional intensity is also, she added, a useful tactic for the hawks. “It can be quite an effective way to shut down discussions over negotiations—to argue that it’s a betrayal of Ukraine, that it’s going to get people killed, that it’s what Russia wants. ”

Rajan Menon, the director of the grand-strategy program at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates for a more restrained U.S. foreign policy, is a longtime analyst of Russian affairs. He’s visited Ukraine several times since the war began and written extensively on possible solutions to the conflict. He thinks Charap’s prescriptions for an armistice are premature—that there is not yet enough will on either side to stop the fighting—but he is dismayed by the rhetorical atmosphere in the U.S. “There are people who are looking with a good-faith effort to try to see if there’s a way out of this box,” he told me. “And for their trouble they’ve basically been lambasted as appeasers or sympathetic to Putin and so on. This has got to stop.”

Charap is clearly bothered by some of the vitriol that’s been directed at him, but he chalks up the intensity of the debate to the barbarity of the Russian military. “I need to keep doing my job,” he said, which is to think and analyze and propose.

In just the last few weeks, as the Ukrainian counter-offensive continued to make agonizingly slow progress, the conversation moved closer to Charap than it has in months. In mid-August, a Washington Post article revealed that U.S. intelligence assessed that Ukraine would not be able to reach the key city of Melitopol during this offensive, and Politico quoted a U.S. official wondering whether Milley had been right, back in November, when he suggested that it may be time to seek a diplomatic solution. Congressional support, which aside from the Trumpian right had been fairly unstinting, has begun to waver. “Is this more a stalemate?” the Republican congressman Andy Harris, a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus and a co-chair of the congressional Ukraine Caucus, asked constituents at a town-hall meeting in mid-August. “Should we be realistic about it? I think we probably should.”

Some have pushed back on this analysis. The counter-offensive is not yet over, and there is a possibility that it will yet surprise everyone. “It’s been a miracle,” Olga Oliker, of the International Crisis Group, said of the successful Ukrainian resistance. “Maybe there’ll be another miracle.” The White House, at least publicly, has been of the same view. “We do not assess that the conflict is a stalemate,” the national-security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters last week.

Charap isn’t ready to call time on the Ukrainian counter-offensive, either. But he continues to worry that the Administration is being too cautious about starting work on a diplomatic solution. “Most people now recognize that Plan A isn’t working,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they’re prepared to discuss Plan B.” What would a Plan B look like? “It would be a diplomatic strategy,” he said. “It would be thinking about the choreography of how you engage.” It would be the “searching conversation” with Ukraine, and similar conversations with NATO allies. It would be trying to get Putin to appoint a representative who has authority to negotiate, and appointing such a representative on the U.S. side, with Ukrainian support.“This is the kind of pre-negotiation interaction that will be necessary to lay the groundwork,” Charap said, “and then you actually devote resources inside the government to thinking through the practicalities and getting the right pieces in place.”

He admits that such an initiative could fail: “The only way you really can know is if we actually try and it doesn’t work. You haven’t lost anything if you do that.” In Charap’s view, the risks of not trying are higher than the risks of trying. Every day, on the front lines of the biggest war in Europe since 1945, young men and women lose their lives. Many more will, before this is over. That’s one thing about which everyone is certain.

Stephen Bryen: Ukraine to cost half-trillion more if war ends now

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By Stephen Bryen, Asia Times, 8/23/23

If the Ukraine war ended tomorrow, the United States still would need to send hundreds of billions in aid to that country. The bill includes continuation of military assistance, budget support for the Ukrainian government and reconstruction assistance.

President Biden has just asked for another US$24 billion to support Ukraine, primarily for military equipment but also budget support ($7.3 billion). While Congress is increasingly skeptical about another huge chunk of money to fund an endless conflict, this is peanuts compared with what will be asked after the war ends.

The World Bank has done a revised estimate on reconstruction needs, based on data from the first year of the war (February 2022 to February 2023). The Bank says that Ukraine needs $411 billion for reconstruction over a ten-year period.

That estimate will need to be significantly increased to account for February to August 2023 and beyond. It would make sense to think that even if the war stopped tomorrow, reconstruction aid would come to $600 billion or more, or more than half a trillion dollars. 

For purposes of comparison, the war in Iraq featured a reconstruction program of $60 billion. The US also spent $90 billion over twelve years to support Afghanistan (although the war continued in that country.)

There is no doubt that most of the US assistance to Afghanistan was probably stolen or went over to the Taliban. On top of that, billions’ worth of US war-fighting equipment was left in place and is now used by the Taliban.

In the case of Iraq, most of the aid was wasted thanks to bad management, corruption and poor planning.

The US and its allies will need to cough up $60 billion annually to support Ukraine, and expect that a lot of it will be stolen. It will have to keep the funding up for 10 years.

Consider that Germany has committed to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes” at $5 billion annually. But the German government in power is likely to be replaced soon, and that pledge is about as worthless as the Weimar mark.

Likewise, the UK economy is very dodgy, and finding serious money in future will prove a real challenge. The bottom line is that most of the money will have to come from Uncle Sam. 

It may be that some Washington insiders are thinking that the best thing is to prolong the war as long as possible, because if the fighting continues the US just needs to provide military assistance and budget support for the government, but not reconstruction assistance.

In effect, that is the Biden administration policy. By continuing the war the Biden government thinks it can convince Congress to keep paying and they can keep Ukraine “alive” by forking over arms and money to pay salaries and for needed supplies.

But will Congress be willing to keep spending for an endless war? It is likely Congress will want to know where the money is going, how it is used, and how the US government accounts for its spending. 

Most Americans oppose more aid to Ukraine. We are entering an election period with the first Republican presidential debates coming soon. Ukraine is sure to be an issue and some candidates, like Robert Kennedy Jr, who identifies for the time being as a Democrat, already are speaking out against supporting the war.

This could mean Biden will have a huge problem trying to get a skittish Congress, including his fellow Democrats, to sign up for more spending on a losing proposition.

It has long been understood that Ukraine is a corrupt country. Ukrainian politicians, including Zelensky, have offshored some of their wealth (Zelensky has a villa in Tuscany on the seashore in Forte dei Marmi which he bought before he entered politics and now rents to Russian clients at 12,000 euros a month).

President Biden’s son Hunter is embroiled in an investigation of payments and other activities centered partly on Ukraine’s Burisma energy holding company and in part on transactions in China. A Republican-dominated committee in the House of Representatives has sought to tie the president to the matters under investigation.

When the “big” reconstruction money starts flowing, assuming that happens, political and military officials in Ukraine will enthusiastically help the United States line their pockets.

Ukraine’s corruption was highly visible this month as President Zelensky fired all the military recruiters in the country because they were selling recruitment passes to young men seeking to avoid the war. 

Ukraine will end up being the most costly operation ever carried out by the United States. The US Marshall Plan for European reconstruction after World War II cost the United States $13.3 billion. That amount, in 2023 dollars, would be $173 billion, roughly a third of what reconstruction would cost for Ukraine.

There will be a strong lobbying effort by some US companies that anticipate getting rich providing support to Ukraine (these in addition to the usual suspects in defense industries).

We have seen them before in the Iraq reconstruction exercise. This lobbying will provide bait to Democrats and Republicans who otherwise might walk away from the war. But will it be enough to go against the will of American voters?

Americans can rightly ask: What are we getting for these huge outlays that will seriously burden US taxpayers? The US policy on Ukraine is a disaster from many angles, but for sure one of them is the huge dollar cost in supporting this endless misadventure.

Seymour Hersh’s Intel Sources Say Putin Behind Prigozhin’s Killing

Seymour Hersh just dropped a new article at Substack. You can find it here, but it’s behind a paywall, so I will summarize the main points below.

The main assertion of the article is that a US intelligence source of Hersh’s has stated that Putin was behind Prigozhin’s death and the reason was that Prigozhin was potentially provoking NATO and that was too reckless and unacceptable for Moscow:

“Prigozhin was provoking NATO and he had to go,” the US intelligence official said. “The last thing Putin wanted to do was to give NATO further cause to shelve its growing doubts about the endless financing of [Ukraine President Volodymyr] Zelensky.” 

So, the official said, “Putin did it.” Prigozhin had become too dangerous.

The intelligence source also reveals that the plane that blew up with Prigozhin and some of his closet associates onboard was suddenly and inexplicably pulled in for service the day before the doomed flight.

It was then, the intelligence official said, that bombs with delayed fuses bombs were placed in the wheelbase. The bombs were set to explode after the wheels were retracted.

The explanation for how the plane was downed sounds plausible. However, the source does not provide any evidence that it was Putin who actually ordered or approved it. The source provides a potential motive but motive alone doesn’t prove anything. Prigozhin had made many enemies who also had motives. I’m not saying it’s impossible but I still harbor some skepticism that Putin would do such a thing right in the middle of the BRICS summit, taking attention away from the constructive strides Russia and the rest of the BRICS countries are making toward a multipolar world. Why put a black mark on your own best PR?

I welcome readers’ thoughts in the comments.

Some additional interesting nuggets from the Hersh article include the claim by Hersh’s source (presumably from the CIA) that the US/UK media reporting on the progress of the war has been terribly inaccurate and is far too credulous of what Kiev says:

“The goal of Russia’s first line of defense was not to stop the Ukrainian offense,” the official told me, “but to slow it down so if there was a Ukrainian advance, Russian commanders could bring in reserves to fortify the line. There is no evidence that Ukrainian forces have gotten past the first line. The American press is doing anything but honest reporting on the failure thus far of the offense.

“What happened to the use of cluster bombs by Ukraine? Weren’t they supposed to open the door? And Zelensky is now claiming Ukraine had hypersonic bombs. He’s been bullshitting us like this as he always does. Where are the engineers and scientists manufacturing them? In a bunker somewhere? Or in Kiev? He’s pretending—stalling as long as he can?

The source suggests that military intelligence provides similarly poor information that is being used by the White House but that more accurate intelligence exists but is somehow prevented from reaching decision makers in the executive branch:

“Here is the key issue,” the official told me. “This kind of reporting from the military intelligence community is going to the White House. There are other views,” he said, obviously referring to the Central Intelligence Agency, that do not reach the Oval Office. “What is going to happen? Will we be supporting Ukraine as long as it takes? It’s not like we are fighting the Führer in Germany or the Emperor of Japan. The other day former vice president [Mike] Pence said that if we don’t defend Zelensky in Ukraine, Russia will come after Poland next. Is that the White House’s policy?” 

The source also told Hersh that the new Defense Minister of Ukraine, Rustem Umyerov, is even more corrupt that the one who just left (Oleksiy Reznikov), but interestingly Umyerov was not on CIA director William Burns’ list of corrupt officials provided to Kiev during a visit in January.

The last interesting comment by the intelligence source was that Putin is focused on running a war that he sees as critical to his nation’s security and doesn’t care what the American public thinks of him.

Rising: Tucker Carlson Allegedly IN TALKS To Interview Vladimir Putin

Link here.

Here is Tucker Carlson’s complete interview with Hungarian PM Viktor Orban referenced in the above video:

Link here.

Andrew Korybko: The Arrest Of Igor Kolomoysky Consolidates US Influence Over Zelensky Ahead Of Likely Elections

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 9/3/23

In an ironic twist of fate, this oligarch went from pulling the Ukrainian leader’s strings to having his life ruined by the same man who he thought was his puppet.

Many observers were shocked when the SBU arrested Zelensky’s former patron, oligarch Igor Kolomoysky, on charges of fraud, corruption, and money laundering over the weekend. The Ukrainian leader then thanked the security services in his evening address “for their determination to bring every case stalled for decades to a just conclusion.” This development comes two and a half years after the US sanctioned Kolomoysky on related pretexts, thus suggesting that the latest move was endorsed by them.

His arrest is due to several converging factors that also explain why it happened at this particular time. First, the vicious blame game that broke out between the US and Ukraine last month over the failed counteroffensive threatens to derail their relations if it isn’t soon resolved. At the core of this dispute are US accusations that Ukraine is arrogantly ignoring the military-strategic advice that it’s been given. Accordingly, the US has an interest in removing those who it suspects of negatively influencing Zelensky.

It’s unclear exactly what sway Kolomoysky might have still exerted over Zelensky after the latter fell largely under US influence since the start of Russia’s special operation a year and a half ago, but it makes sense why Washington wouldn’t want to risk the chance that he could play a role in their escalating spat. This observation doesn’t explain why he was arrested only just now, however, thus leading to the second relevant factor regarding the urgent need to manage Ukrainian and US public opinion.

People in both countries are growing fatigued and frustrated with this conflict. The challenge this poses for Ukraine is that it reduces support for prolonging the proxy war, plus folks are now starting to remember some of his other unfulfilled promises like fighting corruption. As for the US, a lot of Americans no longer want to fund Ukraine, or they at least want accountability for how their money is being spent after fearing that figures in this infamously corrupt country are stealing their tax dollars.

It therefore made sense for Zelensky to finally stage a public spectacle by allowing the arrest of his corrupt patron. He killed two birds with one stone by satiating both publics at no cost to himself. In fact, the latest phase of his anti-corruption campaign actually works in his political interests, thereby segueing into the third factor pertaining to the newfound US pressure on him to hold presidential elections next spring as planned.

Zelensky will almost certainly run for re-election even though he hasn’t yet officially announced his candidacy. He’s still somewhat popular with his people, as are most leaders whenever there’s a conflict being fought on their territory (or the territory that they claim as their own in this case), but his failure to effectively fight corruption despite prior promises disappointed many. By letting the SBU arrest his former patron Kolomoysky, however, Zelensky hopes to regain some of his base’s lost trust.

These three factors – the US wanting to consolidate its influence over Zelensky as bilateral ties become more complicated; the need to satiate the Ukrainian and US publics’ anti-corruption demands; and the incumbent’s undeclared re-election campaign – account for Kolomoysky’s arrest at this particular time. Simply put, it serves both states’ interests. In an ironic twist of fate, this oligarch went from pulling the Ukrainian leader’s strings to having his life ruined by the same man who he thought was his puppet.

YouTube Hits Matt Orfalea Again, as Censorship Grows Silent But Deadly

By Matt Taibbi, Racket News, 8/29/23

When you know you’re being censored, you can protest. But what to do about silent editorial punishment, dished without announcement, by tech platforms that appear to be learning fast how to avoid public outcry?

A year ago, this site had to throw a public fit to resolve a preposterous controversy involving videographer Matt Orfalea and YouTube. The issue centered around the above video, “‘Rigged’ Election Claims, Trump 2020 vs. Clinton 2016,” which despite total factual accuracy was cited under its “Elections Misinformation” policy. YouTube in July of last year demonetized Orf’s entire channel over his content, saying “we think it violates our violent criminal organizations policy.”

As you will see if you click now, the above video, as I argued to Google, could not possibly be violative of any “misinformation” guideline, as it was comprised entirely of “real, un-altered clips of public figures making public comments.” After both Orf and I tantrumed in public — there’s not much else to do in these situations — YouTube sent Matt the “Great News!” that “after manually reviewing your video, we’ve determined that it is suitable for all advertisers”:

We thought the matter was settled.

This week, Orf discovered the video had been re-classified as problematic by a new “human reviewer,” who declared it in violation for “harmful or dangerous acts” that “may endanger participants.” Potential problems, the reviewer determined, included “glorification, recruitment, or graphic portrayal of dangerous organizations,” by which I can only presume they mean former Bernie voters like Orf and myself whose political homelessness apparently constitutes a threat.

I’ve once again sent complaints up the Google/YouTube flagpole. Perhaps Racket readers are tired of digital censorship tales. If so, I understand, I do. I want to underscore that the chief reason now for sharing incidents like this is to show the rapid progression of tactics being used not just against this site, or Orf, but everyone.

In the last 6-8 months — hell, the last 2-3 months — the landscape for non-corporate media businesses has tightened dramatically. Independent media content is increasingly hard to find via platform searches, even when exact terminology, bylines, or dates are entered by users. Social media platforms that once provided effective marketing and distribution at little to no cost are now difficult to navigate even with the aid of paid boosting tools. In other words, even if your business does well enough to pay full retail rates for marketing, a widening lattice of algorithmic restriction across platforms is making distribution for non-corporate media a nightmare anyway.

It’s an unfortunate coincidence that this situation involving Orf arrives as Racket is preparing a story about new techniques being deployed in recent months to reclassify even non-violative true content as misinformation. Like this affair, that coming story touches on a phenomenon we saw repeatedly in the Twitter Files, but didn’t delve into in detail then: the use of deamplification and “visibility filtering” as PR-friendly alternatives to outright bans.

This episode with Orf represents a crack in the system, where the user isn’t formally notified of a demonetization or deamplification decision, but somehow learns of it anyway. How often is it happening when users don’t find out? Also, are these tools being used pre-emptively, for certain topics? There are so many things we need to learn still, about how access to information is being controlled.

Until then, will YouTube do the right thing and fix this particular idiocy? Even for your company, this shouldn’t be a hard call.

If the video above somehow meets your definition of “harmful or dangerous acts,” you’ve gone crazy, in addition to rendering both of those terms totally meaningless. If you believe otherwise, could you at least explain your thinking, so the public can evaluate it?

Sincerely, the editor, etc.

Stephen Bryen: Washington Takes Big Risks to Salvage Ukrainian Army Counter Offensive, Risk of Wider War

By Stephen Bryen, Substack, 9/2/23

Tass, the Russian State news service, says that an attempt by Ukraine to blow up the Kerch Strait bridge to Crimea was prevented when the Russians blew up a Ukrainian sea drone.

According to news reports, the Ukrainians tried three times to hit the famous bridge on September 1st.

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The Russians have created a sea barrier of sunken ships to protect the bridge from sea attacks. These obstacles channel any attacking vessel and give the Russian an opportunity to interdict them and destroy them.

But there is more to the story than what is in Tass.

According to a report on the Military Channel, the Ukrainian attempt to destroy the bridge was aided and abetted by US overhead assets coordinating the Ukrainian operation.

The US fielded a Global Hawk Forte II (RQ-48) which is equipped with sophisticated sensors; a US Navy P-8A Poseidon (to track Russian ships and submarines); an Army CL-60 Artemis (Airborne Reconnaissance and Targeting Multi-Mission Intelligence System​) and a Navy EP-3E Aries II, a multi-intelligence platform based on the venerable P-3. These platforms were intended to support the Ukrainian attempt to probe vulnerabilities in Russia’s defenses adjacent to and on the bridge while also supporting the Ukrainian counter-offensive in southern Ukraine.

The Russians, at least so far, have said nothing other than they repulsed the attacks on the bridge.

The Kerch Strait bridge connects the Russian mainland to Crimea. It features a roadway and also supports the transit of freight trains. It is a vital roadway for Russian military operations in Crimea, Kherson and Zaphorize.  The bridge is important enough that, after it was seriously damaged by a Ukrainian truck bomb attack, and repaired, Vladimir Putin himself drove a Mercedes car across the bridge.

Like the Nordstream pipeline, the US has made no secret of its desire to destroy the bridge. Whether the bridge can survive is anyone’s guess. especially when the US is pouring significant efforts into its destruction.

The overall situation in the Kherson and Zaphorize regions, the focus of the main thrust of Ukraine’s counter offensive, appears to show that Ukraine will not succeed in its declared objectives to breach Russia’s defenses and re-take Melitopol. Meanwhile the Ukrainians have lost significant amounts of armor and incurred heavy casualties. Not only have these losses taken a toll, but many of Ukraine’s best units have been chewed up.

Washington’s best hope is to try and stabilize the front and bring the intense fighting to a halt, buying time for Ukraine to mobilize new forces, train them, and reequip their troops. That enterprise would take six months to a year if it happens. The plan, if it can be called that, is so far based on Russian reluctance to commit the bulk of its forces into an offensive to break the Ukrainian army. While there has been talk about Russia launching a big operation in the Kupyansk area, it has so far not materialized. Some suggest that Russia is waiting for Ukrainian forces to be reduced even further than they are already, before Russia’s generals are willing to risk a true offensive.

The problem for the Russian side is that if they wait too long they will have to repeat everything again and take losses that the Russian public might not be willing to accept. There is a lot of talk in Moscow and on social media, some by serious politicians, that Russia should nuke Ukraine and go home. Others say that Russia should attack the supply depots in Germany and Poland and elsewhere, to in effect strangle the Ukrainian army. None of these proposals have gained much traction, but that could change if the war is drawn out. Oddly, Ukrainian attacks using drones and sabotage of installations on Russian territory may backfire on Ukraine by creating significant public anger in Russia that will require strong action by the government. 

The potential for new troubles has been aided and abetted by an interview with Ukraine’s chief of military intelligence Kyrylo Budanov who says that Ukraine should take the war to Russian territory. This would mean using its main army forces to attack across Russia’s border (not just fire artillery shells, send in swat teams, or carry out arson, drone attacks and assassinations). His interview, if it is taken seriously, could have unintended consequences for Ukraine by stepping up the overall Russian response beyond the alleged limits of the Special Military Operation. For example, that could mean massive attacks on Kiev, or Odessa, or other actions designed to cripple Ukraine and its government.

Budanov makes many claims and a good many of them have to be taken with a grain of salt. However, we don’t know which ones the Russians will take seriously.

Meanwhile, Washington continues to take big risks, starting with the supply of cluster munitions and, now, depleted uranium anti-tank shells. The use of US intelligence assets to target Russia is also a risk that could lead to a bigger conflict in Europe. If the Washington escalation continues it is hard to predict what will happen in the weeks ahead.

Kevin Gosztola: GoFundMe Stops Grayzone News Website From Using Service

Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com

By Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter, 8/29/23

The crowdfunding platform GoFundMe halted a fundraiser for the news website the Grayzone and refused to transfer over $90,000 raised to the organization.

When Grayzone editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal requested an explanation on August 19, a representative with GoFundMe’s Trust and Safety Team claimed, “Due to some external concerns, we need to review your fundraiser to make sure it complies with our Terms of Service.”

Eight days later, GoFundMe had provided no additional information on their “review.”

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GoFundMe’s censorship is the latest in a series of actions by platforms against news websites that are known for opposing United States foreign policy doctrine.

MintPress News had their fundraiser taken down by GoFundMe in March 2022. The following month PayPal banned the organization and MintPress News editor-in-chief Mnar Adley from using the payment processor. Adley was given no explanation for the decision.

In May 2022, Consortium News was similarly banned from fundraising through PayPal. Consortium News editor-in-chief Joe Lauria spoke with an agent in PayPal’s “escalation department.” But again PayPal refused to share details related to the decision to prohibit Consortium News from using the corporation’s services.

These news sites are well-known for scrutinizing U.S. military branches and security agencies and the patchwork of relationships that current and former officials have formed with media organizations, think tanks, and public relations firms.  

According to Blumenthal, GoFundMe has agreed to return the funds to donors. The Grayzone has directed donors to give through a new fundraiser posted to Spotfund.

That strongly suggests that stopping donations was never about enforcing GoFundMe’s terms of service. The platform’s goal was to coerce the organization to go somewhere else to fundraise so GoFundMe did not have to deal with pressure from the Grayzone’s vocal detractors in and outside of government.

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One of the journalists the Grayzone fundraiser was intended to support is Kit Klarenberg, who British counter-terrorism police detained and interrogated at the London Luton Airport on May 19.

British police questioned Klarenberg about his journalism for the Grayzone and seized his electronic devices. He was asked about his views on the war in Ukraine. While he has not been charged with a crime, an investigation against Klarenberg is still pending.

The fundraiser was also supposed to help pay journalist Wyatt Reed, who was banned from PayPal in June 2022 and then Venmo in November that same year.

In October 2022, Reed traveled to the Donbas to report on the other side of the war in Ukraine—what the war looked like for people living in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions aligned with Russia. While Reed was in his hotel, it was shelled.

PayPal, Venmo, GoFundMe, and other crowdfunding or payment processing platforms face no requirement to be transparent with their users. They can arbitrarily revoke access to their services and follow a blueprint that was largely established in response to WikiLeaks.

As I recounted in my book, Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange, on December 3, 2010, PayPal blocked WikiLeaks. The corporation initially maintained that they had done so because the U.S. State Department had concluded that WikiLeaks’ “activities were illegal in the U.S.” (The State Department denied pressuring PayPal.)

The censorship by PayPal convinced Visa and MasterCard to also block donations to WikiLeaks. PostFinance, the financial arm of the Swiss post office, also followed suit and froze the accounts of WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange.

Bank of America banned donations to WikiLeaks on December 18. Later, it was learned that the multinational investment bank had plotted with Palantir, Berico Technologies, and HBGary Federal to disrupt WikiLeaks because Bank Of America was afraid of becoming a WikiLeaks target.

Assange has been detained at the Belmarsh high-security prison in London, awaiting possible extradition from the United Kingdom to the U.S. He faces 17 unprecedented Espionage Act charges that were brought by the U.S. Justice Department.

The journalism that ultimately spurred PayPal to block WikiLeaks is the same journalism that U.S. prosecutors have criminalized in their political case against Assange.

When faced with the financial blockade (that ended a few years later), Assange said, “What we are seeing here are dangerous moves towards a digital McCarthyism. These actions, and the others like it, are not the result of a legal process, but rather are a result of fear of falling out of favor with Washington.”

Little has changed. PayPal, Venmo, GoFundMe, etc, are all afraid of regulation or greater interference by the government. The companies preemptively ban journalists or media organizations, which are considered to be disloyal and repugnant, especially as they challenge the agenda of the U.S. and North American Treaty Organization (NATO) during wartime.

At the height of the censorship against WikiLeaks, the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) “accepted donations on behalf of WikiLeaks readers.” They did so because WikiLeaks publications were “clearly protected speech” and “no court ever ruled WikiLeaks had broken any laws.” FPF recognized companies were circumventing the First Amendment.

In 2017, FPF announced that the blockade had been over for some time. “We consider the end of the unjust financial blockade an important victory for free expression. We are proud to have been an avenue for WikiLeaks readers to express themselves for the past several years. And if a press organization faces such a blockade again, we plan on being there to fight it.”

Consortium News, MintPress News, and The Grayzone have never been notified that they were suspected of violating any U.S. law or regulation. Instead, companies opaquely deny them access to their services seemingly because they oppose U.S. imperialism and happen to enjoy a wide enough readership to make an impact through their reporting and commentary.

While suppressing such news sites, they infringe upon the freedom of readers to express themselves through their donations.

Fox News Interviews Former Ukrainian Prosecutor Viktor Shokin Whom Biden Bragged of Getting Fired

Link here.

Igor Burdyga: The problems with Ukraine’s wartime collaboration law

Photo by Nati on Pexels.com

By Igor Burdyga, Open Democracy, 8/25/23

On a cool morning, the silence of Kherson’s old city centre is broken by a huge rubbish bin being overturned on the pavement. Two men in bulletproof vests calmly scoop the contents onto the road. Dima, a local volunteer coordinator, observes the fetid heap from his porch. “Don’t worry, they’re from the council,” he says, cutting short my rising indignation.

A tractor turns the corner, followed by a dozen men and women with shovels, also wearing bulletproof vests. A few minutes later, the rubbish is in the tractor’s trailer. The group moves on as the first Russian shelling of the day starts up.

There’s a simple explanation for this strange sight: the owners of Kherson’s main garbage collection company have been arrested and their trucks seized. Alena and Dmitry Dubrovsky, who ran the company for 20 years, are facing charges of wartime collaboration for continuing to work between March and November 2022, when Kherson was under Russian occupation.

The regional police department and prosecutors claimed that last summer the Dubrovskys supported Russia’s introduction of the ruble, opened company accounts in a Russian bank and paid taxes to the occupying administration. In other words, they “carried out economic activities in close cooperation with the aggressor state” and “transferred material resources to the occupiers”. This is regarded as wartime collaboration and aiding the aggressor state, the penalties for which are up to five and 12 years in prison, respectively.

The Dubrovskys’ case is one of thousands that are testing Ukraine’s new collaboration law – a law that is currently being challenged by politicians for being too blunt in its punishment of people in occupied territories.

Kherson city court reopened in June, and the Dubrovskys’ case is the first to be heard. They’ve been in custody for four months and have pleaded not guilty. Their legal counsel refused to forward openDemocracy’s questions to the Dubrovskys or to comment on the case, which is ongoing. The prosecutor’s office also declined to comment.

Their garbage trucks remain under lock and key. The city has not been able to secure their release – even for temporary use after the Kakhovka dam explosion flooded Kherson in June.

Kherson: ‘not many collaborators’

According to the Kherson prosecutor’s office, more than 1,000 investigations into collaboration had been filed by the end of June, though only 50 sentences have been handed down so far. Another 234 investigations involve allegations of aiding Russia.

Most of these investigations were started while Kherson was still under Russian occupation, before Ukrainian forces retook control of parts of the east bank of the Dnipro river directly opposite Kherson. The local branch of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has been investigating residents – primarily those who cooperated publicly with the Russians – and trying them in absentia.

When the city was liberated, leading collaborators such as Vladimir Saldo, head of the regional occupation administration, fled alongside the Russian army. But not everyone left. Law enforcement officers have been reporting daily about their detention of policemen, public officials, head doctors of hospitals, teachers who adopted the Russian curriculum, organisers of the so-called ‘referendum’ in September 2022 on joining the Russian Federation, and other suspected collaborators.

So far, only one in every six investigations has resulted in charges, totalling 159 for collaboration and 33 for complicity with the aggressor.

Many more suspects are listed on Kherson’s ‘traitor database’, an anonymous Telegram channel that publishes data on citizens accused of ties with the Russian authorities. Between one and five new “dossiers” are released on the channel daily.

The channel administrator, nicknamed Nulledo, told openDemocracy that by the end of July the channel had identified at least 2,000 collaborators – “but as a percentage of the total population, there aren’t that many.” (There are one million people in the Kherson region.)

He finds most of his information via social media or networks associated with the occupation. Subscribers to the channel – some 35,000 of them – also send him information.

Nulledo evaded openDemocracy’s questions about payment and refused to clarify whether he works officially for Ukrainian law enforcement or security services. “I’m just helping the SBU speed up the processes a bit,” he said – but he did give us an example of his cooperation with an official investigation.

In February, Nulledo asked subscribers to help him collect evidence against a city resident, Rza Rzayev, who allegedly worked as the supply manager of Kherson’s main market during the Russian occupation. Nulledo does not explain what evidence was collected, but two weeks later police arrested Rzayev and another market worker. In June, they were accused of collaborating and aiding the aggressor, in collusion with the market’s director and chief accountant, who have fled the city. Rzayev denies the charges.

Why did people like Rzayev remain in Kherson after it was liberated? Nulledo said some stayed to look after their property, some hoped to buy their way out of any investigation, and others simply didn’t realise they had committed a crime. He hopes the Ukrainian courts will deliver justice and “everyone will get what they deserve”.

No clear definition of collaboration

Wartime collaboration was added to Ukraine’s criminal code a few days after the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022.

Andriy Osadchuk MP, the first deputy chair of the parliamentary committee that oversees all amendments to the criminal code, told openDemocracy the process of passing the new collaboration law was “historic”. It was only the second time Ukrainian MPs had been able to gather after the invasion a week before, and 300 deputies adopted the laws without discussing them. Ukraine’s parliamentary opposition had its own proposal on the new collaboration law, but there was no time for political disputes under urgent conditions of war.

“The occupiers were not only on the outskirts of Kyiv, but in eight of our regions. And there were people who were helping them, and we didn’t have a separate punishment for them,” Osadchuk said. “Unfortunately, before the big war, no one wanted to work on this. That’s why we passed what we had prepared in extreme conditions.”

Since then, Osadchuk said, nearly 6,000 cases of collaboration have been opened across Ukraine, more than 1,700 charges have been filed, and about 1,000 have already been submitted to the courts – although about half of them have been heard in absentia, without the accused present.

“All this is the result of our work that day,” Osadchuk said.

The hastily adopted law did not introduce a clear definition of what constitutes wartime collaboration. Instead, it lists eight forms of collaboration, from denying foreign aggression online to serving in the Russian armed forces – which is considered a particularly serious crime. Punishments also vary widely.

Examples of the varying punishments under Ukraine’s collaboration law:

For working an ordinary public job on behalf of the occupying forces, there’s a temporary ban on working for Ukrainian state institutions; for a managerial post, the penalty is up to ten years in prison; for working in the judicial system or the police, up to 15 years. Teachers who promoted the occupation and used the Russian curriculum can receive up to three years in prison. Referendum organisers face up to ten years behind bars, and organisers of pro-occupation rallies up to 12 years.

Just three weeks after the new law was adopted, amendments allowed those accused to be tried in absentia, or kept in custody without bail or house arrest.

Another serious offence was also added to Ukraine’s criminal code: “complicity with the aggressor state”. This is defined as any deliberate activity to help the invaders to the detriment of Ukraine. It includes implementing or simply supporting the decisions of the occupation administration, or the collection and transfer of material resources or any other assets to them.

Osadchuk admitted the wording of the two new laws against collaboration and complicity are too general, echoing each other and other national security offences, including treason.

Various authorities have since tried to explain to the Ukrainian public what kind of activity would be considered criminal, but their explanations have often been contradictory, leaving citizens confused.

Inconsistency and dissatisfaction

In the first investigations against pro-Russian politicians who met the invaders with bread and salt, the case for collaboration seemed clear.

But as Ukrainian law enforcement arrived back in liberated territories across the country, their approaches have begun to differ greatly, with charges and penalties varying considerably from region to region.

Last year, a coalition of Ukrainian human rights organisations analysed how collaboration cases are prosecuted – and found some shocking examples. In Kharkiv, social media posts supporting Russian aggression were treated as ‘mild’ collaboration (punishment: a ban on taking public sector jobs), while in Chernihiv similar episodes were considered “glorification of the aggressor” (punishment: five to eight years in prison).

The application of charges and penalties also vary at the more serious end of the spectrum. The head of the “state bank of the Luhansk People’s Republic” faced five to ten years in prison for “collaboration”; the head of a Russian bank in Kherson faced ten to 12 years for “aiding the aggressor”. The commander of a firefighting brigade in occupied Berdyansk was charged with serious collaboration (12 to 15 years), his colleague in Starobilsk with high treason (15 years to life).

“These cases run the risk of becoming a conveyor belt for statistics, which does not correspond to the demand for justice in society, nor does it prevent these crimes,” one of the authors of the report, lawyer Daria Sviridova, commented.

In a series of publications by the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, lawyers, judges and even prosecutors concluded that Ukrainian law enforcement often simply fits the actions of suspects to the wording of the criminal code.

One judge in Lviv has even urged her colleagues to stop accepting plea bargains in collaboration cases, because it means they are not evaluating evidence or delving into the motives of defendants.

“Collaboration trials can become a platform for restoring justice, public understanding and laying the foundations for future reconciliation, if these trials are held publicly and openly,” judge Kateryna Kotelva wrote in December last year.

In turn, a leading prosecutor recommended separating “humanitarian” collaboration with Russian forces – e.g. working in housing, transport or other public services, which supports basic necessities under occupation – from “deliberate” collaboration.

The case of Crimea

It is residents of Crimea – who believe that the war with Russia will end with the de-occupation of their peninsula – who have most actively opposed Ukraine’s new law on collaboration, because it potentially affects them all. If Crimea was liberated tomorrow, at least 200,000 Crimeans would face collaboration charges, according to Tamila Tasheva, the Ukrainian president’s representative on Crimea.

“All these years, we have been talking to Crimeans, explaining that they are not traitors and that a significant proportion of them are victims of an armed conflict,” explained Ihor Ponochovny, head of the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office for Crimea and Sevastopol. As of June, Ponochovny’s team has been responsible for only around 100 collaboration investigations.

By contrast, Tasheva’s de-occupation strategy proposes only individuals who actively contributed to the occupation of Crimea should face charges.

Under this plan, officials and teachers would have to go through “lustration” (an examination of their actions to ensure they were not active collaborators), while business people, accountants, doctors and so on would not be punished simply for staying in Crimea, working and paying taxes to the Russian state. That proposal has since been kicked back on the basis that Ukraine should not have a separate criminal law for each region.

Proposed amendments

Several further amendments have been suggested since Ukraine’s collaboration law was first adopted in spring 2022. Serhiy Ionushas MP, head of the parliamentary committee that oversees the criminal code, proposed reducing punishments for “non-serious” acts to community service or fines, while others have argued for increasing prison terms for lawyers who worked with Russian occupiers.

The Ukrainian government, in turn, has proposed that providing or supporting medical care, pensions, critical infrastructure, public utilities, retail, catering and agriculture should not be considered collaboration. Agriculture is a key concern, as millions of hectares of farming land remain under Russian occupation.

Ionushas and Osadchuk’s committee has now written its own amendments bill, but refuses to disclose any details, saying it is waiting for legal assessment. This new bill has been written in conjunction with the former mayor of Melitopol, businessman and MP Serhiy Minko. In conversation with openDemocracy, Minko said the existing legislation “had fulfilled its main function” – preventing people from collaborating with Russia. The new version, he said, would be less radical.

Indeed, Osadchuk claimed the intention now is to scare away collaborators from remaining in the liberated territories. “We’re going to narrow down the liability, so that punishment turns from a cannon into a sniper rifle,” he told openDemocracy.

MPs will no longer be able to adopt new amendments in a single vote, so Osadchuk predicts fierce discussions in Parliament and beyond. If Parliament does not consider them in the first reading before the end of August, then the law will not be changed until the end of the year.