David K. Shipler's Blog, page 7

Can We Predict a Mass Shooting?

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                 Hindsight is 20/20, so looking back, the warning signs seem crystal clear: the online postings, the violent drawings, the fascination with guns, the peculiar conduct, the disquiet of his peers, even the overt threats, which were missed or minimized by educators, police, and parents. The FBI calls those advance indicators “leakage,” a common characteristic of mass shootings. The coming danger should have been obvious. Or should it?

In recent decades, threat assessment has developed into a sophisticated methodology. So why wasn’t 18-year-old Payton Gendron stopped before he murdered ten people last Saturday at a Buffalo supermarket in a mostly Black neighborhood? Why wasn’t 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley stopped before he killed four and wounded six last November in his Michigan school?

The general answer lies in the failures of many local authorities to follow a 22-year-old FBI recommendation to appoint threat assessment coordinators and teams of skilled professionals on call for quick mobilization to assess risks. The FBI’s 46-page report from back then, “The School Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective,” is a nuanced analysis that ought to be in the top desk drawer of every school administrator and police commander.

“These threat assessment teams have to be multidisciplinary,” said former Supervisory Special Agent Mary Ellen O’Toole, who led the FBI’s project. “The reason is this: A single person looking at these warning signs might deem them to be not too significant, or they may inflate them, or they may not know what to do with them.” So, she told me, the team should include specialists from the school, the mental health profession, juvenile justice, law enforcement—and ideally, an attorney who could advise on whether, say, a backpack can be legally searched.

Threat assessment is not a perfect art, and over-zealous reactions carry risks to civil liberties. Preventive arrest in advance of a crime would be egregious. But short of that, measured interventions may have prevented mass shootings in “dozens of cases across the country,” according to Mark Follman, author of  Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America, a new book reporting on a team in an Oregon school district. In the case of one boy making threats, the professionals embraced him in a “wraparound” approach of counseling, academic help, and programs in and out of school.

The FBI study is an intricate guide through labyrinths of statements, behaviors, and interactions that might raise concern. Yet it also cautions against using rigid checklists to profile or discipline reflexively. Even a threat is not reliably predictive in itself, the study warns, for it can reflect a mere transitory state of mind.

“It is especially important that a school not deal with threats by simply kicking the problem out the door,” the report advises. “Expelling or suspending a student for making a threat must not be a substitute for careful threat assessment and a considered, consistent policy of intervention.” Punishment alone can be dangerous, “for example, if a student feels unfairly or arbitrarily treated and becomes even angrier and more bent on carrying out a violent act.”

Evaluating a threat is a tricky task, and figuring out when not to punish can be as crucial as deciding when to do so. “To understand human behavior,” O’Toole told me, “you’ve got to have people trained and updated,” able to see not only the alarming signs but also to “look for mitigators that minimize the possibility that someone could act violently.” And that training should extend broadly. “There’s a lot of research on warning behaviors,” she noted, “and those warning behaviors have to be shared with parents, with people who work in schools—the janitorial staff, the people who work in the cafeteria. But you also have to share them with other students. You have to have everybody’s eyes and ears on the issue. Students will come forward.”

It’s common, after a shooting, to hear fellow students say that they had noticed unsettling demeanor or troubling remarks. Yet those who know the person best are often reluctant to report, according to a later FBI study of active shootings between 2000 and 2013. Schoolmates had seen concerning behaviors in 92 percent of the cases, spouses or domestic partners in 87 percent, and teachers or school staff members in 75 percent. And in most shootings, they had noticed the troubling  conduct more than 25 months before the attacks.

“When concerning behavior was observed by others,” the study found, “the most common response was to communicate directly to the active shooter (83%) or do nothing (54%). In 41% of the cases the concerning behavior was reported to law enforcement. Therefore, just because concerning behavior was recognized does not necessarily mean that it was reported to law enforcement.” That’s where training can sensitize people to the warning signs and induce them to communicate.

And what are some of the warning signs? In determining whether to take a threat seriously, the FBI’s school-shooter study lays out a long inventory, along with a cautionary note that some of the characteristics may be displayed by adolescents without any violent inclinations. Furthermore, no elements should be taken with special weight, or in isolation, but rather considered as accumulating factors—and only after an actual threat is made.

That’s the recommended protocol. The assessment examines four areas: a person’s personality gained from those who knew him before the threat; his family dynamics; the school dynamics and relationships; and the social dynamics including the student’s friendships, drug and alcohol use, and access to weapons.

Each area contains multiple elements of potential concern. In the personality category, for example, a low tolerance for frustration and failure, and difficulty coping with conflicts, insults, and other stresses can be revealing. Poor resilience, low self-esteem, inappropriate response to instruction and authority, need for control or attention or respect, an absence of empathy, can be considered troubling.

How parents react to a student’s threat is regarded by the FBI as a critical insight into family dynamics. The adults might set no limits and fail to monitor TV or internet use. They might “seem intimidated by their child. They may fear he will attack them physically if they confront or frustrate him. . . . the child acts as if he were the authority figure, while parents act as if they were the children.” It’s worrisome if “they appear unable to recognize or acknowledge problems in their children and respond quite defensively. . . appear unconcerned, minimize the problem, or reject the reports altogether.” Turbulence in the parental-child relationship, including domestic violence or the child’s contempt for his parent, should be part of the assessment.

 A school’s culture should be examined with an eye to how or whether a student fits in. That can illuminate smoldering grievances. Some shooters, it has emerged later, were victims of bullying, ridicule, or ostracism. “Students and staff may have very different perceptions of the culture, customs, and values in their schools. Assessors need to be aware of how a school’s dynamics are seen by students.” A school with tolerance for disrespectful behavior can be a crucible of violence, and if a student who has made a threat seems detached from school, that goes into the mix of concerns.

 In the area of social dynamics, the FBI observes, “information about a student’s choice of friends and relations with his peers can provide valuable clues to his attitudes, sense of identity, and possible decisions about acting or not acting on a threat.” Today, 22 years later, his interactions on social media would be included in the assessment. Whether he can put his hands on a firearm is a crucial question; some states have “red flag” laws permitting confiscation from someone who makes a threat.

It seems reasonable—again, in retrospect—that if the FBI’s methods of threat assessment had been properly applied, Payton Gendron’s shooting spree last Saturday might have been thwarted. A year ago, while finishing his senior year in high school, he had signaled his intent. To a question about his plans after graduation, he answered: murder-suicide. He claimed he was joking. The intervention was incomplete.

State police took him to a hospital for a psychiatric examination, and he was soon discharged. New York State’s red-flag law was not invoked, and no indication has surfaced that school or law enforcement authorities followed the FBI’s longstanding recommendations for further intervention or inquiry. We don’t yet know much about his family dynamics, but his online racist postings went unnoticed, apparently, although they were reportedly on public sites that could have been inspected without a warrant.

Nor did a proper assessment occur last November before Ethan Crumbley, 15, committed his attack in Michigan, although its indicators were visible in “a mountain of digital evidence,” prosecutors declared. He could have been the poster boy in the FBI’s threat assessment. He pictured himself on social media doing target practice with a pistol that his father had bought him as a gift. Some students had “a bad feeling” about him.

The day before the shooting, a teacher reported to school administrators that she’d seen Crumbley looking on his phone for ammunition to buy. The school tried to contact his parents; his mother sent him a jocular text not to get caught next time. The day of the shooting, a teacher noticed a drawing depicting violence and his words, “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” School officials didn’t help him. They didn’t even look into his backpack—although exigent circumstances, as defined by court precedent, would probably have allowed a warrantless search. He was allowed back in class after his parents wouldn’t take him home; they were later charged with involuntary manslaughter and are scheduled for trial in the fall. Again, none of the FBI’s carefully prescribed inquiries were followed.

In the rear-view mirror, all this looks unambiguous. Even as the FBI gives guidance on “leakage,” though, it counters with careful caveats. As dramatically terrifying as school shootings have been, they are too infrequent to provide a reliably large data base. “Seeking to predict acts that occur as rarely as school shootings is almost impossible,” the study declares. “This is simple statistical logic: when the incidence of any form of violence is very low and a very large number of people have identifiable risk factors, there is no reliable way to pick out from that large group the very few who will actually commit the violent act.”

                So, hazards lurk in both directions—complacency or denial on the one hand, overzealous risk avoidance on the other. It is a problem laced with the pervasive absence of certainty.

Russia's Technology Gaps Risk Accidental Nuclear War

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Since President Vladimir Putin of Russia announced a heightened nuclear alert level and threatened Western nations with “consequences greater than any you have faced in history,” much of the world has worried that he might go nuclear in his war against Ukraine. But even if he does not, there is another concern: an unintentional, massive nuclear war triggered by a false alarm from Russian early-warning systems, which some experts believe are vulnerable to errors.

                The risk of a catastrophic mistake has been a threat since the outset of the nuclear age, and several near misses have been recorded. But miscalculation becomes more likely in a period of Russian-American tension when leaders are immersed in mutual suspicion. They would have only minutes to make fateful decisions. So each side needs to “see” clearly whether the other has launched missiles before retaliating with hundreds of nuclear warheads. Ambiguity in a moment of “crisis perception,” the Rand Corporation has noted, can spark an inadvertent “conflict when one nation misinterprets an event (such as a training exercise, a weather phenomenon, or a malfunction) as an indicator of a nuclear attack.”

                Russia and the United States are the most heavily armed of the nine nuclear powers, which also include China, France, the United Kingdom, North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Israel—with Iran poised to join the club. But only the U.S. has surveillance coverage of the entire globe, provided by three active geosynchronous satellites, with two in reserve, whose infrared receptors can spot plumes of missiles launched anywhere from sea, air, or ground. That data is supplemented by radar on the ground, giving the U.S. the capacity to double-check that a launch has actually occurred.

                Specialists in the field call this verification by both satellite and radar “dual phenomenology,” and the Russians don’t have it reliably. They lack adequate space-based monitoring to supplement their radar.

                What they have is a “terrible and dangerous technology shortfall,” according to Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology, and national security policy at MIT and a former scientific adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations.

                He believes that Russian satellites are handicapped by their inability to look straight down and distinguish the infrared signature of a missile launch against the Earth’s terrain.

                                                                                                    Courtesy of Theodore Postol


“Imagine that you took a photograph of a complex and rocky area of ground,” he explained in an email. To pick out an ant, you’d need to find it in “some very small pixel in a vast array of pixels.” In the infrared part of the spectrum, you need multiple high-quality sensors, each with a small enough field of view to discriminate between the background and a rocket plume, and to avoid a false detection from reflected sunlight or extraneous interference.    

American satellites can look down with sophisticated sensors, so they orbit in fixed positions relative to the Earth’s surface. By contrast, Postol says, Russian satellites have to look sideways, along a line that forms a tangent across the edge of the Earth, over American ICBM missile fields in Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota. Nine Russian satellites in elliptical orbits take turns observing small areas, looking horizontally for missiles that rise above the horizon to spot their plumes against the dark background of space.

The slanted perspective is less reliable, Postol said. First, it covers only a miniscule segment of North America. Second, it won’t see missiles until they reach higher altitudes, where the rocket plumes are dimmer and harder to define. Third, “luminosity from atmospheric phenomena causes background effects that can lead to false detections.” The halo effect can be seen in a current image from a newer Russian satellite. Finally, he explained, if a missile is not launched exactly where the satellite’s tangent of sight meets the Earth’s surface, the rocket might never rise above the horizon.

That might seem to give the U.S. an advantage of surprise attack. But if Russian radar picks up a missile later, the time before impact will shrink dangerously—to just over 10 minutes from a U.S. submarine near Norway, about 17 minutes from Wyoming—with little chance to double-check that the launch is authentic. Without global coverage, Russian satellites cannot see launches from the 14 U.S. Trident submarines (each carrying up to 20 ballistic missiles with multiple warheads) until the missiles enter Russian radar. Knowing that time limitation, Moscow might let lower officials make the call. 

“There is not adequate decision-making time for leaders in Moscow to understand what might be happening if it looked like there was a general attack on Russia,” Postol observed. “They would have no ability to assess the situation. If they want to have the option to assure that that they can retaliate, they will have to pre-delegate launch authority to people in the field. If you do that, you run the risk of a gigantic, spasmodic launch of all your nuclear forces.”

 Another specialist, Pavel Podvig, agrees on the time problem but argues that geography is the main obstacle to double verification. He is a Moscow-trained physicist and arms control specialist who heads a Geneva-based project analyzing Moscow’s nuclear forces. “The radar warning comes too late to provide a useful check of the satellite information,” he wrote—although radar did exactly that in 1983.  

 In the early morning of Sept. 26, 1983, a Soviet satellite signaledthat five ICBMs had been launched from an American base. Officers in Serpukhov-15, a secret command bunker near Moscow, watched in horror as electronic maps pulsated and lights flashed. “For fifteen seconds, we were in a state of shock,” Lieut. Col. Stanislav Petrov said years later. He had to evaluate the data for his superiors, who would pass his assessment to the general staff, which would convey it to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov for a decision on whether to order a nuclear retaliation.

For five minutes, a phone in one hand and an intercom in the other, Petrov tried to make sense of the cascade of warnings. Two things didn’t add up. One, “when people start a war, they don’t start it with only five missiles,” he told Washington Post reporter David Hoffman. Two, Soviet radar didn’t see any missiles flying. Through a veil of high tension, “I had a funny feeling in my gut,” Petrov recalled. Balancing the odds at 50-50, he came down on the side of a false alarm. An investigation later found that the warnings had been triggered by sunlight reflecting off clouds.

Since then, and following the early-warning system’s decline during Russia’s economic crisis in the early 1990s, the country has surely advanced. But how far? Podvig and Postol disagree on the state of satellite technology. Podvig told me in several email exchanges that the newer Tundra satellites “appear” to have lookdown capability, and that he was “fairly confident” of his assessment. However, he stopped well short of backing up his assertion with hard information. Much of that is probably classified and inaccessible.

For his part, Postol of MIT cites circumstantial evidence of continued shortfalls. “If the new Tundra satellites were able to look down at the Earth,” he said, “only two or three of such satellites would be needed.” The Russians have nine. They orbit through staggered observation slots lasting two and a half hours each, consistent with less reliable tangential lines of observation. A tenth satellite is stationed in a geosynchronous orbit over South Asia, also seemingly aimed at the horizon in North America.

So Russia relies heavily on radar, a line-of-sight instrument that cannot detect anything over the horizon. Each of the stations on the country’s periphery projects a fan of surveillance that picks up nothing until a missile passes rapidly through it. That adds another minute for tracking a target, defining it, and calculating its trajectory.     

Also, radar can be blinded by a deliberate high-altitude nuclear detonation to create ionized air obscuring transmission and reception. (Russia could do the same against the U.S.) Radar disruption from another cause might be mistaken for a prelude to an imminent nuclear attack.

Russia’s system raises two big questions: Who decides, and on what basis? Postol imagines that short warning times and technical shortcomings support a worrisome “pre-delegation” posture that would decentralize or automate Russia’s launch authority—and heighten the likelihood of error. And what would the trigger be? Podvig arguedin 2016 that under Moscow’s doctrine dating from Soviet days, Russian commanders would delay a retaliatory launch until after “signs of the actual attack (such as nuclear explosions).”

If that wait-and-see doctrine existed, it appears to have been revised. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientistsreportedrecently that in June 2020 Putin updated the nuclear deterrence procedures, which permit a launch only under certain conditions. The first of those reads: “arrival of reliable data on a launch of ballistic missiles attacking the territory of the Russian Federation and/or its allies.” That echoes the launch-on-warning doctrine that makes inadvertent war more likely—and the early warning systems’ reliability more crucial.

Then, too, pre-delegation seems to contradict what is known of Moscow’s standing procedures. Leonid Ryabikhin, an expert in missile technology and arms control who taught at the Soviet Air Force Academy, wrote in 2019 that a nuclear launch would require encoded authorization from at least two of the three portable terminals controlled by the president, the defense minister, and the chief of the general staff.

Only if the government were decapitated by, say, a first strike on Moscow, would a backup system kick in. Known in the West as the “Dead Hand” and in Russia as “Perimeter,” it has been understood as a computer process that would launch automatically if command and control connections with the leadership were destroyed.

But is it fully automated? Not necessarily. A 2003 book by Russian Col. Valery Yarynich, who served in the central command of the Strategic Rocket Forces, reports that human intervention would still be required at “the super hardened radio command and control center,” located somewhere underground.  “The [Perimeter] system has no capability for preparing a launch order automatically without participation of the center’s crew,” he writes. “If, with[in] a certain period of time, there is no evidence of actual nuclear explosions” from seismic shock, a spike in air pressure, or radioactivity, no missiles would be launched.

 Arms control treaties that have come and gone between Russia and the U.S. have limited the numbers and deployment of various nuclear weapons but have left Moscow and Washington capable of obliterating humanity many times over. The chance of error remains unaddressed.

The probability of nuclear war by accident would be reduced if Russia and the U.S. shared surveillance information, a proposal discussed in 1998 by President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin. A brief experiment in cooperation was held from December 1999 to January 2000 to avoid Y2K computer problems at the turn of the millennium. Eighteen Russian officers spent about three weeks at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado to make sure nothing went awry.

 The permanent Joint Data Exchange Center, as it was to be named, fell victim to various tensions in the relationship following Putin’s election in 2000. By the time President George W. Bush met Putin in 2001, the late John Steinbruner wrote, “the building designated to house JDEC sat abandoned in Moscow on an overgrown lot and was reportedly being used by local teenagers as a drinking hangout.”

That was a modest venture, probably not sufficient to convey real-time data to avoid errors. For that, Postol believes, the U.S. would have to provide Russia with actual infrared sensors capable of differentiating a missile plume from background terrain. There would be no risk of technology transfer, he argued: “Possessing the sensors gives you no information about how to fabricate them and therefore does not release any sensitive technology secrets.”

That’s a voice crying in the wilderness. Imagine how hard it would be to achieve such cooperation today, just when it’s needed most.

A version of this article was previously published by the Washington Monthly.

"Sacred Hatred of the Enemy"

 

By David K. Shipler 

                As the Red Army swept westward into Germany toward the end of World War II, Russian soldiers wantonly burned villages; looted homes, committed rape, and murdered elderly women and other civilians in cold blood. Soviet Major Lev Kopelev, a German-speaking scholar of German literature assigned to the army’s Political Administration to propagandize the enemy, reported the crimes up the chain of command. He argued vehemently against the impulsive executions. He drew his pistol once and stood between a young girl and two Russian tank soldiers who were bent on raping her.

                He saved her, but not himself. Repeated calls for restraint made him a suspect, not a hero. “You engaged in propaganda of bourgeois humanism, of pity for the enemy,” said his interrogator. “You spent your time rescuing Germans and weakening the morale of our own troops; you engaged in agitation against vengeance and hatred—sacred hatred of the enemy.”

Major Kopelev was expelled from the Communist Party, arrested, tried, and sent to the GULAG for nine years. He tells the story in his 1977 memoir, To Be Preserved Forever, whose title comes from the official order stamped on secret police dossiers that are never to be destroyed.

                I have been thinking about him in these terrible days of Russian crimes in Ukraine. Russia’s troops are doing pretty much what their predecessors did back then, as we’ve learned after they’ve retreated from towns near Kyiv. I wonder if there is a Lev Kopelev among them and, if so, what will happen to him.

Lev died in 1997, so he does not have to witness his beloved nation reenacting the sins of the past. Having visited him often his Moscow apartment (on Red Army Street, coincidentally), I am sure that he would be tormented by the clash between the barbaric scenes in Ukraine and the deeper Russia that he cherished. His stubborn patriotism despite his persecution—and his unshaken belief in Stalin back in 1945—intrigued a fellow prisoner named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who cast him as the character Lev Rubin in his novel The First Circle.

                That contradiction between love of country and revulsion over its misdeeds is not unique to Russia, but it is being acted out now with epic drama. And not only around Russians’ kitchen tables, I’ll bet, but also in the ranks somewhere, perhaps just in whispers or inside soldiers’ minds.

Many competing fragments of what Russian troops were told and believed have peppered the news, based on communication intercepts and prisoners’ reports. They were told they were going on a military exercise. They were told they were liberating Ukrainians from neo-Nazis and would arrive to cheers. They were told they were heading into nests of spies and fascists. They thought they would roll through Ukraine with ease, so were unprepared for vicious combat. Which soldiers believed which tales that shaped which actions we may someday learn from someone’s memoir.

Still, the question: What has released some Russian men in uniform from the bonds of decency? Is it wartime’s “sacred hatred of the enemy” that leads soldiers to bang on the door of a Ukrainian home and demand to know where the Nazis are, then shoot dead someone who says there are none? Or is it that innocents can never be seen as innocents in light of the sacred hatred? Do those cowering women and children and elderly pose a threat simply because they get in the way of the soldiers’ story, deny the soldiers’ virtue, and so give the lie to the supposed cause of a war that has no cause?

War permits a kind of madness that can dislodge the discipline that is supposed to focus combat on actual military assets. So Russia obliterates hospitals, apartments, theaters, entire cities. That is done from a distance. Close up, one on one, something else takes place. To endure seeing your comrades blown to pieces, you might need sacred hatred. You might ride the fever of revenge by lashing out at any target of convenience, a limping old man, a tender child, a dusty car carrying civilians toward safety, a woman who steps into her front yard just to see what is going on. The veneer of civilization is thin. It is easily stripped away. And so men who might be humane back home, under that veneer, are inspired in war to herd hundreds of the helpless into a small, fetid basement for weeks, forcing them to live with the corpses of those who could not live.

                We Americans know from our own experience in Vietnam how soldiers ravaged by violence can be gripped by that fever. In 1968, a U.S Army company that had suffered multiple casualties from land mines and booby traps subjected the village of My Lai to a frenzy of rape and arson and murder, slaughtering some 300 to 500 Vietnamese civilians, including babies and the mothers who were shielding them. Not a single shot was fired at the Americans. The atrocity was an aberration but not the only case by any means, nor unique in the military’s attempts to submerge it under denial.

                Out of a misplaced patriotism, we are rarely completely candid about war. Yet truth-telling does not impugn love of country; it can be a tribute. If Russians were free to know and tell the truth, many would pay their country the tribute of doing so. That was Lev Kopelev’s tribute to his Russia in a time even more trying than today’s.

                He was a great oak of a man, over six feet tall and barrel-chested, yet disarmingly gentle, finely analytical and sensitive to the undercurrents of the Soviet Union. Here is part of what I wrote about him in Russia; Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams:

                  Kopelev’s beliefs took many years to crumble, and after they had fallen away, there remained, still, a passionate love of country. Through the 1970s, as he wrote of his wartime and prison experiences for publication in the West . . . Lev grew increasingly exposed and vulnerable. Derided in the official press as a “Judas” and a “traitor,” he was given to understand that he would probably have to choose between going east and going west, east into exile or prison, west into exile and freedom and rootlessness. He turned over and over the thought of taking a year’s sabbatical in West Germany to be with his friend Heinrich Boll, to pursue his studies of German literature. [His wife] Raya resisted, knowing that if they went, it would be not for a year, but forever. . . . But finally the pressure on Lev grew, and the barriers to departure relaxed, and they took the fateful step.

                Tony Austin of The New York Times wrote movingly of their departure on a 10:00 a.m. Aeroflot flight to Frankfurt on November 12, 1980. They arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport hours early, all they needed for a year packed into three suitcases, Lev using his walking stick, which he had ripped from a tree in the Crimea in 1957 during his years of recuperation from the camps. About fifty people had gathered near the customs counters to say good-bye, including some of the country’s finest and most independent writers. . . .

                “We go only to return,” said Lev.

                “We’ll be back, we’ll be back,” cried Raya tearfully.

                “Good luck, come back soon,” some of the friends and relatives called from behind the railing. And everyone knew.

                Six customs inspectors spent an hour examining their belongings. Selected items were put aside for confiscation: an old, slender book of Pushkin’s poems published in 1874 . . . Lev’s notes for a lecture on Goethe’s popularity in Russia . . . two address books containing names and phone numbers of friends throughout the world. An inspector took a small plastic box in his hands and opened it. Inside, Lev had placed a handful of Russian earth. It was confiscated.

                Lev Kopelev died seventeen years later in Cologne, Germany.

The War of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

 

By David K. Shipler 

                To the extent that we think we know the fears and expectations of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, they seem fraught with contradictions.

On the one hand, Putin labeled Ukraine as an incipient NATO base with malicious designs on Russia itself. On the other, he supposedly thought his “special military operation” would be a cake walk, seizing Ukraine’s capital and toppling its government in a matter of days. How could both be correct?

On the one hand, Putin portrayed Europe and the United States as formidable threats to Russian security. On the other, he disparaged the West as fragmented, decaying, polarized, and weakened by internal disorder. Those two versions cannot coexist in the real world.

                So, which of Moscow’s prophecies have proven true, and what does that imply for Putin’s future posture toward Western democracies? And which of the West’s anxieties about Russia have been realized, and how will those determine policy going forward?

It’s not good news. In the perverse calculus of war, even one side’s frustration and defeat can reinforce the convictions that led it to attack in the first place. So it might be with Putin. His terrifying assault has provoked a flood of NATO weapons into Ukraine, justifying his assessment of the risk posed by the North Atlantic Alliance. And Russia’s war of choice has galvanized most democracies in a unified front of economic punishment, surely enhancing Putin’s dogma regarding Western hostility.

Of course the West cannot do less as Russia pulverizes Ukraine’s cities and slaughters civilians. The toughest measures are warranted short of direct NATO attacks on Russian forces, which could trigger a wider war, perhaps nuclear.

As in most military conflicts, though, the cycle of action-reaction accelerates a whirlpool of beliefs that is bound to keep spinning long after the last bomb is dropped and the last shot fired. No matter how justified, the West’s counters to Moscow’s brutality feed Russia’s historical narrative of victimhood, humiliation, and paranoia. They reinforce Putin’s stated resentment toward a Western world he sees as determined to denigrate and despise and damage his motherland.

These ominous visions are apparently shared by large numbers of Russian citizens who are deafened by the silencing of honest news reporting and accessible social media. There is a reason that Putin shut down his country’s last independent journalism. Bathed only in government propaganda, most Russians cannot know of their army’s reverses and atrocities, cannot see the wreckage of Ukrainian cities, cannot hear the anguished voices or watch the tear-streaked faces of Ukrainians on many millions of television and computer screens around the world.

The vacuum of truth leaves much room for fabrication—that Ukraine is governed by Nazis, that its labs prepare for biological warfare, that it seeks nuclear weapons. We in America have seen how easy it is to manipulate swaths of the public into believing absurdities—witness Donald Trump’s fantasy about winning the last election, QAnon’s farcical tales of Democrats as child sex traffickers. And we are a supposedly free society.

 Russia has a deeper context for this sort of thing, and the Kremlin is deftly touching the nerves of longstanding suspicions and grievances, inherited by those who grew up under Soviet rule. Many in those days looked out at the Western world with both antagonism and envy in a kind of superiority/inferiority complex.

Therefore, while Putin might be surprised by his military difficulties, he might claim vindication for his darkest assessments of a Russia besieged, a Russia endangered. Since he has written and spoken of Ukraine and Russia as an ancient, inherent whole, he can fit the West’s behavior neatly into his charge: that NATO’S extraordinary efforts in Ukraine are aimed at preventing that historical destiny, that NATO seeks to splinter Russia itself, cripple its capabilities, and overthrow its government.

That last element of Putin’s narrative—that regime change is on the American agenda—was fueled when President Biden let one of his true thoughts slip out: Putin “cannot remain in power.” Unlike Biden’s name-calling, (Putin as “killer,” “war criminal,” “butcher”) this impulsive ad-lib worried more tactful officials and prompted them to walk it back and nudge Biden to clarify: "I just was expressing my outrage,” Biden said later. “He shouldn't remain in power, just like, you know, bad people shouldn't continue to do bad things. But it doesn't mean we have a fundamental policy to do anything to take Putin down in any way."

There’s always a tendency to personify policy, especially where a dictator like Putin can wave his hand, launch wars, and make huge institutions fall in line. But conflating Russia with Putin is misleading. He might like the misconception, given his evident self-regard as Russia’s new Peter the Great. Yet there is a broader societal appeal to Putin’s expansionist aims, which clearly inspire Russians who mourn and crave their honorable past. It was erased by freedom: the freedom under Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s to denounce the Great October (Bolshevik) Revolution, to reject Communism, and ultimately to dismantle the Soviet Union in 1991. A country not anchored in a proud history can be emotionally adrift and dangerous.

To fill the void, Russians still cherish the victory over Nazi Germany in what they call the Great Patriotic War, some even hold nostalgia for Stalin, and they reach back farther, to the empire’s sprawling heft under the czars. Putin taps into all those yearnings.

Could he be toppled anyway, and what then? The Kremlin does not have politics in a Western sense, perhaps not even as in the Soviet Union, where a 12 to 15-man Politburo exercised enough collective power in the post-Stalin era to temper most detours into radical adventurism. It ousted Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, after all, for various policies outside the acceptable mainstream. Today, though, Putin has no Politburo to answer to, only his tight circle of old friends and former KGB agents, a milieu of anti-Western authoritarianism. Those acolytes are terrified of telling him anything but pleasant lies, according to U.S. intelligence, a chronic problem of dictatorships.

But if a successor comes from those ranks, a regime change would not necessarily be a policy change.

It’s reasonable to speculate that an ouster would more likely come as a power-grab from within than a thrust for moderation. And moderation toward the West will be a hard road to travel given the dynamics of Russia’s severe isolation in retaliation for its war. Western companies are spooked, not only because of legal sanctions but also because of Putin’s threats to nationalize businesses and disrupt signed contracts for oil and gas payments by Europe. Even in Soviet times, representatives of such firms as Pepsico, Chase Bank, and the petroleum service company Brown and Root told me that they found the Russians hard bargainers but faithful to their word once contracts were signed. No longer.

That damage could take decades to repair. Yet in Putin’s rhetoric, the isolation becomes a blessing of forced self-reliance. Russia will build its own capacity. It will take its own reins of destiny. The argument feeds on itself, an echo of Soviet self-delusion. It relies on a suspicion of foreign enterprise that might resonate with a jingoistic segment of the population.

Without freedom of speech and pluralistic democracy, Russia can swim to the surface only with a new kind of leader—not just a new leader, a new kind of leader. But chosen how? In the early 1990s, when Russia was experimenting with a fledgling democracy, some intellectuals in Moscow dampened my optimism by cautioning that it would take an entire generation removed from the oppressive Soviet culture to implant democratic values.

Well, a generation that has lived thirty years open to the outside world has come of age, and what of it? Opponents cannot get on the ballot or even organize effectively without facing poisoning or prison. Many Russians are voting with their feet. An estimated 200,000 have already fled the country, the beginning of a brain drain that seems likely to continue unless Putin slams the borders closed, as his Soviet predecessors did. In that case, be ready to hear the clang of a new Iron Curtain.

All that adds up to the fulfillment of the most dire Western prophecies, especially those deep fears harbored in the parts of Eastern Europe once under the Russian boot, either as part of the Soviet Union or as separate countries that were satellites of Moscow. That’s why, after the Soviet collapse, they clamored to join NATO, whose expansion eastward toward Russia, in turn, helped provoke the national security fears cited by Putin in rationalizing his war against Ukraine.

Although Ukraine is not a NATO member, it has been a NATO partner in essence, benefiting from U.S. weapons and training since Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and effective invasion of Ukraine’s Donbass region. (Before the war, Ukraine was the fourth largest recipient of American military aid, after Israel, Jordan, and Egypt.) Eventual NATO membership, held out as a possibility at President George W. Bush’s insistence, gnawed at Putin and formed one of his stated rationales for invasion.

But the danger was a fantasy, and perhaps Putin knew it, using the argument only to excuse his messianic expansionism. In any case, he has contributed to the cycle. His brutal war has cast Russia into disgrace. That means hatred, probably long lasting. That means increased military spending and forward deployment by NATO in Europe. That means grassroots resistance, for Russia’s neighbors are seeing ugly images of what it means to have the Russian army arrive in town. Anyone young enough not to think much about what it’s like to live under Russian control has been given a wake-up call. Ukrainians have modeled how to translate the dread into the fight.

Even if the Ukraine war ends in some kind of diplomatic compromise, a generation of enmity toward Russia has been seeded in the West. That in turn will nourish Russia’s enmity toward the West. The whirlpool spins.  

Reading Putin's Mind

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                The great guessing game today is about Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s inner thinking. He is “surprised,” and “shocked,” we are told by numerous commentators in the West: He “expected,” he “believed,” he “thought” that his war against Ukraine would be swifter, easier, and—yes—even celebrated by Ukrainians themselves. He did not think Ukrainians would rise up to defend their country with such alacrity. He did not think the rest of Europe would unite in such a tight formation against him. He did not expect the economic sanctions to be so punishing.              

                Whether this is speculative mind-reading or solid deduction, it’s important to get right, because it will inform assessments of what he might do going forward and what might induce him to stop. That’s why intelligence agencies have teams devoted to interpreting the psychology of world leaders.

It’s wise to recognize how assertions that look ridiculous from outside can look indisputable inside, as in Putin’s charge that Ukraine was a neo-Nazi base preparing military aggression against Russia—and in President George W. Bush’s charge in 2003 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Both fictions launched devastating wars, and each side apparently believed them sincerely. Putin, whose dictatorship does not exactly reward dissent, seems to operate in the echo chamber of his narrowing inner circle. “Behind closed doors they repeat the same garbage,” said one Western analyst with access to sensitive information.

                If that is so, then the war is driven by the strong logic of self-deception. That means that it is likely to continue and perhaps conclude with false triumphalism. Putin will need a claim of victory. But to give him that, short of Ukraine’s utter demolition and defeat, will require reading a mind that may be largely illegible.

“I think Putin has been surprised by many aspects of this,” the Russian émigré writer Julia Ioffe told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “that Ukraine didn’t fall within a couple of days, by the Ukrainian resistance, and the fact that Ukrainians aren’t greeting him as liberators.” And how did she know that Putin was surprised? She didn’t say.

It’s a reasonable assumption, but an assumption nonetheless, that Putin and his military made calculations that they simply got wrong, that his cost-benefit analysis went awry, that perhaps he wouldn’t have invaded had he known.

There is a pitfall here. For Putin, that kind of balance sheet does not seem decisive. The West can load up the debit side with weapons and sanctions, but that still leaves out the “emotional, spiritual, and metaphysical overtones” of his attachment to Ukraine described perceptively by Eugene Rumer and Andrew S. Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace before the invasion.

They noted that Putin has devised historical twists to exaggerate Russian-Ukrainian kinship over the reach of a millennium; he wrote such an essay last summer. He continually denies Ukrainian identity and separate nationhood. He shares Russia’s longstanding geopolitical anxieties about nearby threats and sees Ukraine as a huge buffer, a security prize. His personal compulsions and ethereal bonds fuel his messianic drive to cure Russia’s post-Soviet humiliation and restore his nation’s scope and dignity.

Therefore, even if the risks and reverses of war had been anticipated, his volatile mix of grievance and yearning might very well have prevailed. Going forward, it is far from obvious that punishing his military and exacting more economic pain can overwhelm his zeal for conquest and expansion. Indeed, there is worry that if he feels cornered, he will lash out with chemical, biological, or even tactical nuclear weapons.

 In their responses to the invasion, Europe and the United States proved quite different from Moscow’s caricature of weakening democracies. “The biggest surprise for Putin, of course, was the West,” Stephen Kotkin of Princeton and the Hoover Institution said in a New Yorker interview. “All the nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how it’s a multipolar world and the rise of China, et cetera: all of that turned out to be bunk. The courage of the Ukrainian people and the bravery and smarts of the Ukrainian government, and its President, [Volodymyr] Zelensky, galvanized the West to remember who it was. And that shocked Putin! That’s the miscalculation.”

But how did Kotkin, a respected historian of Stalin and an expert on dictatorships, know that Putin was shocked? He didn’t tell The New Yorker, so I contacted him to ask. His answers in a phone conversation came down to a deduction—that Putin mustbe shocked—based on a mélange of publicized U.S. intelligence information, hard facts, circumstantial evidence, communications intercepts, and Russian battle plans, plus Putin’s own statements over the years.

The West’s “self-flagellation,” as Kotkin put it, fit into Putin’s narrative of democracies’ decline and disarray. From Moscow’s vantagepoint, fissures in NATO, the European Union, and elsewhere in the democratic world looked deeper than they proved to be. So, a self-congratulatory note has crept into some American commentary—not unjustified, but also premature, for we don’t yet know how resilient the West’s sanctions and military responses will be.

One piece of evidence that Putin expected a quick victory lies in the antiseptic term “special military operation,” Kotkin explained: “a special operation to land paratroopers outside the capital, take the capital in two to four days. That was not a war plan for an invasion” but for a coup to replace the government. “We have all the intercepted communications,” Kotkin noted. “They didn’t employ encryption. It was real time. The secret war plan was in real time. You were watching it unfold in real time with satellites, cell phones. All of our best military analysts pieced it together.”

That false optimism crippled the military, Kotkin said, and Putin’s ban on anyone’s use of the words “invasion” and “war” is “an indirect admission not only about the criminality of the enterprise but also because his assumptions are wrong. He’s doubling down instead of admitting the mistake publicly.”

All this says that if the West projects onto Putin a conventional method of calculating pluses and minuses, we might misread him. Even Kotkin engaged in that projection, he admitted.

“It’s very important that I got this wrong,” he told me. “I understood that the war was very unpopular in Russia, that Ukrainian society was strong and would resist, and the West was not a joke. I saw that a full invasion was costly and risky whereas a gradual ratcheting would collapse Ukraine gradually. I thought that’s what he would do.” Therefore, Kotkin expected “a low risk, high reward operation. I didn’t calculate. Instead I thought what would I do. I didn’t put myself sufficiently in his shoes and take his assumptions as seriously.”

 From here on in, if President Biden and other Western leaders guess that Putin would do what they would do, they are the ones likely to be surprised.

Young Voices from Ukraine

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Victims of war are usually caught in the present. In the midst of crisis, it's hard to think about the big picture or what comes next. But six young adults in Ukraine, during an online discussion last week, summoned up the power to reach beyond their personal immediacy into a larger time and place.

                The session, attended by young people from at least twenty-six countries, was organized by a broad array of international youth organizations and moderated by Saji Prelis of Search for Common Ground, which manages conflict-resolution projects around the globe. (Full disclosure: My son Michael Shipler is a vice president of Search.)

                If you have an hour, it’s worth spending it watching the discussion here, because you can hear and see what you cannot read: the chords of sorrow and resolve in their voices, the grieving beauty in their eyes. And by the end, which will not be an end for them, of course, you will be torn by inspiration, which they throw up against the tragedy.

                At Saji’s wise request, not knowing what oppression that elusive future will bring, I am using only their first names, even though they gave consent for their full names to appear on the screen during the live stream. Neither they nor we can calculate the dangers going forward.

Most appear to be in their twenties and early thirties. They are fluent in English. They have the innocence of idealism. They are not children, but they are young enough still to imagine and to strive. They are not yet jaded or calloused or—as far as we can see—wounded. But they understand the wounds of others and are trying to heal them, in part by seeing their struggle as being not only for themselves.

                Yulia is trapped with her two small children in besieged Sumy, near the Russian frontier, having missed the brief opportunity to escape in the first days of the war. The town is under heavy Russian bombardment. Anna, a medical doctor, crossed into Romania, where she is treating evacuees. Alina recorded a gentle but defiant message as she fled to the Kyiv train station. Yuliana, a psychologist in Lviv, is trying to help with trauma. Roman, also in Lviv, is assisting refugees flooding into the city’s train station.

                 â€œI managed to escape from Kharkiv on the second day of the war,” said Denys, on camera with a blue and yellow Ukrainian flag covering the wall behind him. “But not just to save myself. I am near the capital, Kyiv, where I can do more.” He sees this as a noble battle larger than Ukraine. “Of course we are fighting for stopping the war. But it’s now more. It’s more about freedom, it’s more about values, its more about protecting Europe from Putin’s regime.” Later, he warned that “the Russian regime will be hunting all of us who are fighting against him. He will not stop.”

                And, yes, about the future, which is why the young are “probably the most active part of Ukrainian society,” said Roman from Lviv near the Polish border, a city swollen with fleeing families. “Those are the people that are contributing the most because they know that they are to live in this country in the future. They want to live in a peaceful and beautiful country. They want to help as many people as possible, and they are acting. They are not just sitting and waiting.” And acting not only with weapons, he said, but “going out on the streets, distributing food, helping refugees find shelter, helping them across the border.”

“I would probably start calling them the generation of winners,” Denys declared. “This might be one of the most powerful, one of the most strong generations you will ever see in history. I probably lost my flat an hour ago. I don’t know if my friends are alive. . . . Of course we will have our psychological trauma, that is for sure. . . .  We are losing everything we have. . . . Coming from this hell will make us the people who will be able to solve not only problems in our country but believe our experience will be more than useful to every one of you. . . .  Whenever there is a new conflict, whenever there is someone who wants to take democracy, Ukrainians will come and help people.” He said Ukrainians should then be paid for their expertise. He did not seem to be joking.

Yuliana, the psychologist, countered this way: “I have to confess that I have been ignorant many times to the pain of other nations, to the pain of other people. . . .  This experience taught me that I will never be ignorant again. I don’t think anyone will have to pay me to help you and share my experience with you. I will be there for you like you have been here for us. And I’m very grateful for this.”

 They seem uplifted by their own intense gratitude. “We are so much thankful,” said Yulia from her besieged city, “because so many people from outside Ukraine, our international partners [have helped] to transport people, to provide shelter, to provide financial support for different activities to support local citizens as well as to support the army. This is a huge solidarity action from the outside of Ukraine from all countries around us and we do so much appreciate it.”

The help is arriving in unexpected forms. “When all of this started, we weren’t prepared,” said Yuliana. “The first two days everyone was shocked. Psychologists, psychotherapists. Life doesn’t prepare you for this.” She allowed herself a wan smile. “And we didn’t have many crisis intervention specialists. We didn’t have many psychologists who work in this sphere of traumatic stress disorder.” International professionals “have sent us information about crisis management, all the different techniques [and] have provided free supervision sessions, free teaching sessions. And that has been a huge support for us here in Ukraine.”

What tools do you use to protect yourself mentally? Saji asked her. Grounding techniques, she answered. “We talk with people. We say what is your name—because they’re just in shock—what is your name? Do you know where you are? What can you see? Tell me what you see around. Because people are so disoriented, they don’t see the colors, they don’t hear the sounds. And you have to ground them. You have to tell them, you are alive. Tell me what you see. That’s what we can do for now, because there are so many refugees, so many people arriving. What we can do now is help them grasp the reality, help them get grounded, relieve the stress, then they are either going abroad as refugees or staying here, and then they are getting longer therapy.”

For children, she continued, “my colleagues, they are organizing different groups online and in person. They are doing art sessions, music sessions.” They get kids doing something with their hands “to help them calm their nervousness down.” They record fairy tales. “When children are hiding in the shelters, the bomb shelters, they can turn on these fairy tales and listen to them. It’s comforting them.”

Funds are also needed.  â€œI feel the pain of people with mental disorders,” Yuliana said. “Now they are just left alone, their relatives just went abroad, nobody cares about them. There are a lot of homeless people staying at the hospital. I work at a mental institution, and we don’t have any money. And the doctors, the psychiatrists are spending their own money to buy the medicine for the people. I will leave this conversation and I will go to work and we will cook food together. And we will cook it with our own money, because nobody cares. Nobody cares about people with mental disorders at this moment, and we can understand it. But at the same time, it’s not being talked about. I thought maybe there would be a way to organize help, financial help, to support these institutions. I don’t know how to do it, because I don’t have any experience in donations or fundings . . . Maybe I will post about it and somebody will help me organize it.”

For Anna, the doctor working across the border in Romania, hope sounds too false a word to be spoken. “In hospital, people are so scared,” she said. “They don’t know if they will have a place where to go back. Their house is destroyed. So honestly it’s horrifying to look in their eyes. I even can’t say I hope you go soon home.” And yet, she added, “They all have hope. They all hope that they will come back. And they are ready to work and bring back Ukraine to the highest level.” She gave a real, fleeting, rare smile into her phone as she walked to the hospital.

 She added: “It’s maybe strange but I feel guilt, because I’m in Romania where it’s safety, and all my friends are in Ukraine, and I feel like I’m guilty ’cause I’m not with them. Every day I’m thinking how to do much more for my people.”

 Then the lurking future crept into Anna’s spoken thoughts. “I’m talking with my people in Transcarpathia where I’m from, and I don’t think they will ever forgive this, to even [the] Russian people. So I don’t know if you will find a peaceful way to, I don’t know, to make us, we will never be bro—.” She broke off her sentence. “I don’t know how you make a peaceful way to resolve it. I don’t know.”

That enmity toward Russians, being embedded now in Ukraine, emerged as a pledge and a worry and a sadness as some projected Ukraine’s struggle onto a large screen of a broader fight for democratic freedom. In her recording as she raced to the train station, Alina--born in Kyiv 26 years ago and a Ukrainian youth delegate to the United Nations—said this:

“The first two nights after the Russian attack I didn’t sleep at all. Part of the night I spent in the shelter. The third night I slept for about two hours with breaks, and only on the fourth night due to the nerves, tension, and fatigue I slept for around five hours without hearing alarms. I always stay and fall asleep in warm clothes, jeans, and a sweater. There is a bag with essentials and documents near the door so that in case of an alarm, I don’t waste time getting ready. All this is certainly scary, but it’s not what I want to tell the world.

“What I really wish to say is that Russia is a war criminal. Russian invasion is an attack on the whole democratic world. . . . The important thing now is the support of the international community . . . I also hope that Russia will be held accountable for its crime by the International Court of Justice. Ukrainians are standing for the whole democratic world, and Ukraine will win. Stand with Ukraine.”

The whole democratic world. A war criminal. There is a spectrum during and after war between compassion and revenge, between reconciliation and retribution. Where you stand is a measure of suffering, and your place on the continuum can move. Denys and Yuliana stood at different places, it seemed.

“This war will not end,” Denys declared, “until everyone who is now destroying my lovely Kharkiv, other cities, and who are killing Ukrainian people will be punished for this. . . .  until all the Russian troopers and Russian regime is punished for this, and it won’t be enough until Ukraine is finally free, with all the centimeters of our territory.” He continued: “I do know there are ordinary people in Russia who are also suffering. But they are also responsible for this.” Then came a litany of history: the war in eastern Ukraine for eight years. “Thousands of years of our occupation by the Soviet Union, by the Russian empire This is what you need to understand.”              

                War is not a time of empathy. But listen to Yuliana, toward the conclusion of the discussion. “It’s important to share this,” she said, her voice light and clear. “There is a lot of pain. Ukrainians are losing their children, women, men, elderly people. There is a lot of pain, and that’s why there’s a lot of hate. But overall we have – we don’t want Russian people to suffer. We also know that they have been misinformed and we have a lot of compassion, and when I watch the videos of men talking to their wives and telling them, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here, I’m scared. We have been told to do terrible things,’ I cry. And I feel a lot of pain for them too.

“I just wanted to share this perspective, that when you hear hate, when you hear a lot of strong words, it’s because of the pain. It’s not because we want evil. We are just suffering.”

Recollections of Kyiv

 

By David K. Shipler 

                An event that now seems sadly remarkable occurred in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, in 1975, when it was part of the Soviet Union. At the time, Kyiv enjoyed such a pleasant ambiance of broad boulevards and relative prosperity that Communist rulers made it one of a few “closed cities,” along with Moscow and Leningrad, where no Soviet citizen could reside without a government permit. Otherwise, millions would have flocked there to escape the deprivation of the countryside.

Now, thousands are fleeing.

In September 1975, I accompanied three American and two Soviet astronauts on a tour of tentative friendship. During a partial thaw in the Cold War, they had joined with handshakes in space during the Apollo-Soyuz mission, then came down to the hard gravity of Earth, traveling through the Soviet Union together in a pageant of hope. They were received with warm bear hugs and flower-bearing children as they tried jokingly to speak each other’s language and toasted their two countries’ exploratory steps toward cooperation.

 Russian hosts made sure to feature World War II’s Soviet-American alliance that had defeated Nazi Germany; the seven-city trip took the astronauts to significant spaces of wartime memory. Wreath-laying and somber pilgrimages at tombs and monuments were woven into the itinerary: the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Kyiv, which had been occupied by Germany from 1941 to 1943; a war memorial on the way from the airport to their hotel in Leningrad, which endured a 900-day siege; an evocative monument with religious overtones in Volgograd, the site of the ferocious battle of Stalingrad with its two million dead.

At a dinner in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, the Soyuz 19 commander, Maj. Gen. Aleksei A. Leonov, raised his glass in a passionate toast likening the rendezvous in space to the meeting of American and Soviet soldiers at the Elbe River near the war’s end. The Soviets created a collage of two photographs overlapping: the American and Soviet astronauts and the American and Soviet soldiers reaching out to shake hands at the Elbe.

                If any American president ever again wants to strive for an emotional connection with the Russians, here is some simple advice: Remember and celebrate that noble partnership of victory.

A monument was missing, however. While in Kyiv with the astronauts, I visited the place where it should have been: Babi Yar, the ravine where Germans slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews in 1941. The absence of memory had been etched in the world’s awareness by the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who wrote in a cry against Russian anti-Semitism: “No monument stands over Babi Yar./ A drop sheer as a crude gravestone./ I am afraid.”

As if to illustrate the official amnesia, a guide with the government Intourist office, trained to burnish the state’s denial that Jews were particular victims of the Nazis, tried to discourage me. It was thirty miles from the city, she lied. In fact, it lay on a trolleybus line that ran along a busy street at Kyiv’s northern edge.

Yevtushenko wrote his poem in 1961. When I got there, fourteen years later, a bulldozer was finally working the earth. “It will be finished in two months,” said the driver. The excavators had found bodies, he told me.

Initially, the monument did not recognize Jews as the primary victims; that happened in 1991, shortly after Ukraine became independent, when a large bronze menorah was unveiled. Part of the complex was reportedly damaged today by a Russian missile strike on Kyiv’s television tower nearby.

And now my personal entanglement with history comes around again. Today’s attack prompted a condemnation from Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet Jewish dissident who was jailed by the Communist government and is currently chairman of the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center. He became a friend in those Moscow days; I covered his trial by standing outside the courthouse, which was as close as I could get. Years later I met him at Ben Gurion Airport when he flew to Israel after his release from prison. And today he issued a condemnation from Israel.

For Russia to open its attack on Kyiv by hitting Babi Yar “is symbolic,” he said. The memorial’s purpose is “to preserve historical memory following decades of Soviet suppression of historical truth, so that the evils of the past can never be repeated. We must not allow the truth to—once again—become the victim of war.”

It’s curious how war evokes celebration along with lamentation. In Volgograd during the astronauts’ trip, I stood at the foot of a massive statue of Mother Russia cradling a dying soldier in her arms. It could have been a pieta in a cathedral. I fell into a conversation with a Soviet journalist from Tass, the Soviet news agency, a woman about in her fifties, solid and gray-haired, her face slightly flushed with a glow of fervor and reverence.

She pulled out a plastic jewelry box and removed the lid. Inside, cushioned on a bed of cotton, lay several rusted, corroded shell casings—from the Battle of Stalingrad, she said. She took one out as gingerly as if it had been a precious gem, wrapped it carefully in a piece of paper, and presented it to me as a gift of honor and friendship. It still stands on my bookcase, an archeological find from the ruins of heroism.

By late in the trip, all three Americans—Brig. Gen. Thomas P. Stafford, Donald K. Slayton, and Vance D. Brand, began to talk about the war as well. Slayton, a combat pilot, told the Volgograd City Council of the contrast between the ugliness of warfare and the beauties of space flight. “Let us hope,” he said, “that there are no memorials built to our children or to their children.”

A Russian Tragedy

 

By David K. Shipler

 

                As terrible as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will be for Ukrainians, it also spells suffering for Russians, who cannot shake their own society’s paranoid, authoritarian traditions. Long gone is the modicum of pluralistic politics attempted briefly under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Vanished is the relatively relaxed acceptance of multilateral interests in “the near abroad,” as Russia calls its European neighbors. Now, as if reaffirming its tragic history, Russia is firmly back into autocratic form under Vladimir Putin, with its attendant xenophobia, insularity, and belligerence.

                For all its bigness and might, Russia has a thin skin, easily penetrated by slights and humiliation. There have been plenty of those inflicted by the United States and Western Europe, most dramatically in breaking promises from the early 1990s to refrain from expanding NATO. But even with that, Putin’s pugnacious sense of victimization runs far beyond reality. It depends on a demonization of the outside world as vitriolic as in Communist times. It depends on a vertical flow of power as dictatorial as the czars’.

                Putin’s raging, wounded speech February 21 setting the stage for war brought back a memory from the 1977 Soviet Union, when a Moscow police lieutenant stopped a West German television crew from filming the smoke-damaged exterior of the Rossiya Hotel after a fire that killed at least twenty. The reporter asked why. The officer explained, “We do not want to let foreigners laugh at our misfortune.”

The remark offered a telling insight. To imagine that foreigners were eager to mock Russia over a deadly fire must have required extraordinary self-torment, a loneliness of unfathomable pain. There is every indication, 45 years later, that Russia’s leadership remains stuck in that state of mind.

The sense of persecution echoes into Putin’s current remarks. Ukraine “has been reduced to a colony [of NATO] with a puppet regime,” the Russian president declared. It “intends to create its own nuclear weapons,” and “Ukraine’s Western patrons may help it acquire these weapons to create yet another threat to our country.”  Its policy is “to root out the Russian language and culture and promote assimilation.” It is subjecting ethnic Russians to “horror and genocide” in Ukraine’s Donbass region, which—he neglected to mention—was being wracked by an eight-year civil war that he launched and fueled. Those crimes, he said, were being ignored by “the so-called civilized world, which our Western colleagues proclaimed themselves the only representatives of.” He called Ukraine’s democratic movement, which overthrew the pro-Moscow government in 2014, “Neanderthal and aggressive nationalism and neo-Nazism.”

These dystopian fantasies about Western designs on Russia’s pride and security make a volatile chemistry. Whether he believes them or not, he uses a technique once described by a Soviet professor as characterizing sophisticated propaganda: “a truth, a truth, a truth and then a lie.”

Putin mixes truth and falsehood. His list of grievances include the real NATO expansion, the imaginary “support for terrorists in the North Caucasus,” George W. Bush’s real withdrawal from the anti-ballistic missile treaty, and “the disregard for our security demands and concerns.” In sum, the Russian president asked, “Why? What is all this about, what is the purpose? All right, you do not want to see us as friends or allies, but why make us an enemy?”

Russia is not a carbon copy of the Soviet Union. Small anti-war demonstrations broke out in Moscow and other cities after the Ukraine invasion, with protesters quickly arrested, live on CNN. In Communist days, in the unlikely event of such a demonstration, no overt broadcast would have been allowed.

Still, the Russian press has been largely stifled, dissidents jailed and murdered, and opposition candidates barred from ballots. The legislature has become as supine as the Communist Supreme Soviet, voting mechanically for Putin’s agenda. 

Russian reformers have been unable to free their society from its suspicion of disorder, the lust for a strong hand at the top, the distrust of foreigners, the ethnocentrism, the fear of encirclement, the jealous secrecy, the mixed inferiority/superiority complex, and the twisting of history. These are the currents that buoy Putin and his circle of ultra-nationalists now embarked on the most dangerous game seen in the heart of Europe since the end of World War II.

Significantly, that list of beliefs overlapped both left-wing Communist and right-wing anti-Communist constituencies in Soviet times. In the 1970s, a semi-dissident undercurrent known colloquially as Russian nationalists harbored anti-Communist views yet shared most of the Communist Party’s attitudes about the West and democracy. They spurned Marxist ideology but embraced dictatorship. Their most celebrated voice, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, declared in 1973: “Russia is authoritarian. Let it remain so, and let us no longer try to change that.” Those who run the country now, even former Communists like Putin, are heirs to that Russian nationalism of decades ago.

 The top-down decision-making structure, rebuilt and fortified by Putin after the Soviet Union’s collapse, appears to leave him free from checks and balances as he executes war. If there is politics in the Kremlin, it is hidden and muted.

The difficulty of creating democracy was expected. In 1990, the waning days of the Soviet Union, after relatively free elections a year earlier, a member of the Duma, munching on hors d’oeuvres in the legislature’s buffet, offered me one of those delicious jokes that Russians loved, but one salted with sadness:

                Legislator No. 1: Do you think we’ll ever have a democracy like Sweden’s?

                Legislator No. 2: Not a chance.

                No. 1: Why not?

No. 2: We don’t have enough Swedes.

 

                Previously published by the Washington Monthly

The Origins of Cold War II

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The new Cold War, which now grips Europe and the United States, is not all Russia’s fault. A seed was sown in the American assurances broken by Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who reversed verbal pledges to refrain from expanding the Atlantic military alliance toward Russia. The Russians didn’t get it in writing, and some analysts doubt that commitments were made, but official records of conversations suggest American bad faith.

That past doesn’t excuse Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive effort to reconstruct Russia’s sphere of influence. He has ignored one commitment that actually was put in writing, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which obligated Russia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. “to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.” Negotiated in exchange for Ukraine’s relinquishing Soviet nuclear weapons stationed on its territory, it was brushed aside by Putin in 2014 when he annexed Crimea from Ukraine and began an ongoing proxy war against Ukrainian forces in the country’s east.

There are myriad reasons for Putin’s own expansionism, including Russia’s historic anxieties about the West’s political and military encroachment. Nevertheless, the past American behavior helps explain his distrust of the U.S., his sense of victimization, and his worries about national security. As exaggerated as those concerns might appear to the West, whose alliance has not threatened to attack Russia, they are amplified by Moscow’s experience with Washington after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has said that he was “swindled.”

Declassified documents tell the story of how American officials led the Russians to believe that no expansion would be undertaken by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), then later nearly doubled the size of the alliance. Russian and American transcripts and summaries of high-level meetings, posted in recent years by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, record multiple assurances in the early 1990s.

Some were explicit, others implicit and subject to interpretation. They were given repeatedly in various forms to Gorbachev, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and other Russian officials by the highest American and European leaders, including President George H. W. Bush, Secretary of State James Baker, C.I.A. Director Robert Gates, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, British Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, French President Francois Mitterrand, and NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner.

Those early discussions were conducted to avoid Soviet resistance to the reunification of East and West Germany after the fall of the Berlin wall and the demise of Communist dictatorships across Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990. The Soviet Union itself was growing fragile as its republics tasted the prospect of independence, which all fifteen of them achieved in 1991.

 The U.S. non-expansion promise was made several times during discussions in Moscow on Feb. 9, 1990, according to a State Department “memcon,”or memorandum of conversation.  Secretary of State Baker told Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze that German reunification would be accompanied by “iron-clad guarantees that NATO’s jurisdiction of forces would not move eastward.”

Meeting Gorbachev later that day, Baker reiterated the pledge. “We understand that not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction,” Baker said. “Germany’s unification will not lead to NATO’s military organization spreading to the east.” And then again: “If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.”

“To the east” lay multiple members of the crumbling Warsaw Pact, who eagerly joined NATO years later. Yet some American analysts now argue that Baker’s pledge referred only to NATO forces inside Germany or that he was merely floating a theoretical idea, not making a pledge. If so, Baker would have been committing a monumental deception, for the transcript contains no such statements.

At the time, the potential risks posed by a unified Germany weighed on both Moscow and Washington. Gorbachev worried that “history could repeat itself,” that a neutral Germany could develop into a threat once again. “We don’t really want to see a replay of Versailles, where the Germans were able to arm themselves,” Gorbachev told Baker, citing the writer Gunter Grass’s observation “that a unified Germany has always been a breeding ground for chauvinism and anti-Semitism.”

Baker also worried that an independent Germany without NATO’s protection might seek its own nuclear weapons. He asked Gorbachev which he would prefer: a united, independent Germany outside NATO or inside the alliance “but with the guarantee that NATO’s jurisprudence or troops will not spread east of the present boundary?” Gorbachev said he’d think it over (and in a later meeting agreed to a united Germany in NATO), but he was clear on one point: “It goes without saying that a broadening of the NATO zone is not acceptable.”

“We agree with that,” Baker replied.

More than a year after Baker’s assurances to Gorbachev, NATO expansion remained off the table, according to a memo from high-ranking members of the Supreme Soviet. They reported in July 1991 being told by Woerner, NATO’S Secretary General, that he and 13 of the 16 NATO members opposed expansion.

Then came the Clinton administration and an intense internal debate leading to a policy shift. Lynn Davis, Under Secretary of State for International Security Affairs, advocated expansion to advance democracy in Eastern Europe and prevent the rise of ultra-nationalism. “Twice before when such opportunities presented themselves in Europe,” she wrote, “the United States sought to avoid responsibility. But then threats to our vital interests required our return to Europe and to assume a leadership role. We confront a similar historical moment.” She called for a two-phase enrollment of Eastern European countries. Only in the second phase, depending on their “progress toward democracy,” would they be granted the treaty’s defense protection under Article V, which provides that an attack on one is considered an attack on all.

Davis was right that NATO membership would produce a modicum of democratic stability. But democracy is eroding in Hungary and Turkey, for example, and right-wing nationalism is on the rise elsewhere in the alliance.

 In October 1993, Secretary of State Warren Christopher visited Moscow. In a perceptive briefing memo beforehand, James Collins, the top diplomat at the U.S. Embassy, warned Christopher that the issue of NATO expansion was “neuralgic to the Russians. They expect to end up on the wrong side of a new division of Europe if any decision is made quickly.  . . .  it would be universally interpreted in Moscow as directed against Russia and Russia alone—or ‘neo-containment,’ as Foreign Minister [Andrei] Kozyrev recently suggested.”

Containment of Moscow’s influence, as conceived by the diplomat George Kennan, shaped American policy during Cold War I, yet Kennan warnedthat “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era,” because it could “impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”  

 Subsequently, as the expansionist hawks in Washington won their case and the policy was changed, the Russians were not mollified by Clinton’s repeated reassurances of American respect for Russia’s security. Yeltsin, who was often drunk, had made confusing statements, once telling Polish leader Lech Walesa that he wouldn’t mind Poland’s joining NATO, and then reversing himself. But he was clear enough with Clinton during a Kremlin meeting on May 10, 1995.

“I see nothing but humiliation for Russia if you proceed,” Yeltsin declared. Note the word “humiliation,” an element too rarely considered in foreign policy.

“For me to agree to the borders of NATO expanding towards those of Russia—that would constitute a betrayal on my part of the Russian people,” he said, calling it “a new form of encirclement.”
Note also the word “encirclement,” a longstanding anxiety in Russian history. “Russians have a sense of fear,” Yeltsin told Clinton.

The Russian leader suggested an alternative: “that Russia will give every state that wants to join NATO a guarantee that we won’t infringe on its security. That way they’ll have nothing to fear from the East.” He proposed “no blocs, only one European space that provides for its own security.” A nice promise, probably not credible to policymakers in Washington, much less to East Europeans who had lived under the Russian thumb.

“Let me be clear, Boris,” Clinton said. “I’m not bargaining with you.” NATO would expand gradually, “but don’t ask us to slow down either, or we’ll just have to keep saying no.” For East Europeans impatient for NATO membership, Clinton explained, “it’s part of being accepted by the
West. But they also have security concerns. That’s were it gets complicated. They trust you, Boris. . . . But they are not so sure what’s going to happen in Russia if you’re not around.” A prescient remark.

Yeltsin’s proposal and warning had no impact on Clinton’s policy. The President conceded that “Russia does not present a threat to the NATO states.” But since its creation after World War II, he argued, the alliance remained essential to American and Canadian links to European security.

NATO’s growth began late in Clinton’s presidency, in 1999, when membership was granted to the former Soviet satellites of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, all “to the east.”

Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia followed in 2004 during the Bush II administration. Other East European countries then joined, bringing today’s total number to 30, up from 16 in the days when Baker made his “not one inch” assurances.

Ukraine is not among them, and Putin wants to keep it that way, as a huge buffer between NATO members and Russia. So he has massed some 130,000 Russian troops with armor, artillery, and missiles on three sides of Ukraine.

Moreover, he wants to turn back the clock 25 years to the pre-expansion days, demanding NATO’s retreat westward—that is, to revive Washington’s pledges from that bygone era. “They said one thing and did another thing,” Putin declaredrecently. “They played us, simply lied.” But without NATO membership, would Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic and the others be safe from Russia? It’s hard to imagine.

Understandably, then, the rollback demand has gone nowhere with the Biden administration. Facts on the ground, even broken promises, cannot easily be undone, and the ground of international relations is littered with broken promises. Welcome to Cold War II.

                Previously published by the Washington Monthly.

The Supreme Court vs. Health and Safety

                                                     By David K. Shipler               

                When the Supreme Court blockedthe Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test mandate for large employers, its three most conservative justices also issued a little-noticed concurring opinion with ominous implications. In it, they gave voice to an expansive interpretation of the “non-delegation doctrine,” which holds that Congress cannot delegate its legislative powers to the executive branch. When agencies issue broad regulations, the argument goes, they are effectively legislating, thereby violating the Constitution’s separation of powers.

                How far the Court will take this reasoning is an open question. But its most outspoken champion, Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the concurring opinion, was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in an alarming pronouncement: that even if the law allowed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), to issue the mandate—which existing law did not, the 6-3 majority ruled—such a statute should be overturned.

                “On the one hand, OSHA claims the power to issue a nationwide mandate on a major question but cannot trace its authority to do so to any clear congressional mandate,” Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito declared. “On the other hand, if the statutory subsection the agency cites really did endow OSHA with the power it asserts, that law would likely constitute an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority.”

With two more votes on the Court, that position could hobble the federal government’s ability to apply health, safety, and environmental laws across the board. Indeed, a case involving the Environmental Protection Administration, to be argued next month, might provide an opportunity for a ruling of considerable scope.

Gorsuch has made clear his hostility to regulators and lawmakers who enable them. His OSHA opinion cited an article impugning the motives of legislators who might delegate merely to avoid accountability for controversial decisions. He then wrote the following, quoting himself in part from an earlier case:

                “If Congress could hand off all its legislative powers to unelected agency officials, it ‘would dash the whole scheme’ of our Constitution and enable intrusions into the private lives and freedoms of Americans by bare edict rather than only with the consent of their elected representatives.”

                Not all six conservatives are on board with this, judging by the lineup of justices. Gorsuch’s concurring opinion was not signed by the other three—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Furthermore, there was no mention of the non-delegation doctrine in the companion case involving health-care employees. By a vote of 5 to 4, with Roberts and Kavanaugh joining the three liberals, the Court upheld the administration’s vaccine mandate for facilities receiving Medicare and Medicaid payments.

Interestingly, the dissenting opinion in the health-care case, written by Alito, did not address the non-delegation doctrine but argued only that the law didn’t authorize the mandate. Why? Reading tea leaves on the Court is highly speculative, but since Barrett signed the dissent, perhaps she was unwilling to reach the constitutional question, at least in this instance. Unlike the OSHA concurring opinion, this one had no contention that a law allowing the mandate would be unconstitutional.

Nevertheless, the next case, West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency, opens a window for conservatives who don’t like government regulation. Here is a fundamental ideological dispute between liberals who value more government intervention in the private economy vs. conservatives who work to keep government small and ineffectual. The pendulum swings dramatically from Republican to Democratic administrations, as from Donald Trump’s emasculation of federal enforcement agencies to Joe Biden’s restoration of their authority.

The Court could hold the pendulum at the right-hand limit of its swing. Oral arguments are scheduled for February 28 on the EPA’s powers under the Clean Air Act to limit greenhouse gases. The very fact that the case was accepted, which required the agreement of at least four justices, suggests a Court poised to rule broadly.

That is because the matter could have been considered premature, in that it involves EPA rules not yet issued. The case began after the Trump administration repealed the previous Obama administration’s 2015 Clean Power Plan setting limits on power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions. Trump discarded the plan and substituted the more relaxed Affordable Clean Energy Rule; both actions were vacated by the D.C. Circuit. With neither plan in effect, the Biden administration has told the Supreme Court that litigation would be appropriate only after a new regulation is issued.

But conservatives see the broad issues as ripe for consideration. One is whether the federal government can constitutionally override or replace the police powers of the states. Another is the separation of powers at the federal level.

West Virginia’s polemical brief sets the stage for a consequential ruling. “Seven years ago,” the state begins, “the Environmental Protection Agency tried to name itself the country’s central energy planning authority by reshaping the power grids and seizing control over electricity production nationwide.” The agency “weaponized a statute intended to improve pollution controls at regulated facilities, using it to bankrupt industries that the agency disfavored instead.” The language seems designed to appeal to Gorsuch and his allies.

The brief explicitly raises the non-delegation question. It argues that statutes pass constitutional muster only by containing constraints on executive-branch agencies, and it quotes amply from a Gorsuch dissent on that point in an earlier case.

West Virginia contends that the D.C. Circuit Court’s reading of the law makes it appear to lack the essential constraints. Under the lower court’s interpretation, the state’s brief contends, the statute authorizes the EPA to impose such rules on the entire economy as limited electricity use, rolling brownouts, and “caps and quotas for all emitters, including manufacturing plants and private homes.”

The Supreme Court could—and probably will—strike down or narrow the D.C. Circuit’s permissive interpretation of the law. But it could go farther. Judicial reviews of regulatory actions usually focus on whether the statute authorizes the agency to act as it has. And there are enough gray areas in generally-worded statutes that the reality usually lies in the eye of the beholder. As the multiple opinions in the vaccine-mandate cases illustrate, some judges—especially conservative activists these days—seem to begin where they want to end and work backwards to justify their conclusions.

It’s possible that the Court will overturn or undermine the 1984 precedent Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council,  which gives deference to regulatory agencies in areas where Congress is vague or silent. In a modern, complex society, after all, the legislative branch cannot be expected to anticipate every specific issue arising in applying the law. Agencies with professional expertise need the latitude to translate their authorizing statutes into real-life, day-to-day enforcement.

Justice John Paul Stevens recognized this when he wrote the opinion in Chevron: “If Congress has explicitly left a gap for the agency to fill, there is an express delegation of authority to the agency to elucidate a specific provision of the statute by regulation. Such legislative regulations are given controlling weight unless they are arbitrary, capricious, or manifestly contrary to the statute. Sometimes the legislative delegation to an agency on a particular question is implicit rather than explicit. In such a case, a court may not substitute its own construction of a statutory provision for a reasonable interpretation made by the administrator of an agency.

“We have long recognized that considerable weight should be accorded to an executive department's construction of a statutory scheme it is entrusted to administer, and the principle of deference to administrative interpretations.”

John Paul Stevens, it might be remembered, was nominated by a Republican president, Gerald Ford, in the days when nonpartisan integrity on the bench was a hallmark of the republic. No longer. Among the well-known handicaps facing the country, add the portent of a government weakened in its ability to combat global warming, protect consumers, and defend the health of its citizens. 

                Previously published by the Washington Monthly