Editors’ Blog

As we noted a short while ago, Poland just announced that it is going to transfer its collection of MiG-29 fighter jets to the U.S. at Rammstein Air Base in Germany. Then what the U.S. does with them is up to the U.S. All they ask is that they get new U.S. jets. But Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, during Senate testimony, just said that the statement from Poland wasn’t discussed in advance or approved by the U.S. This is a very dangerous game with a lot of governments involved, each responding to their strategic situation and public opinion. At the end of the day though, funny business about who exactly is giving the planes doesn’t matter. This isn’t a technicality kind of situation. Supplying fighter jets to Ukraine is a big, big escalatory deal. And that decision has to be for the U.S. to make — because the consequences will be on the U.S. to deal with.

A few points that seem important to absorb — some of which may appear to be in tension.

I ALLUDED TO THIS in my earlier post on my list of military analysts. We’re seeing lots of imagery of downed plans, shattered tanks, captured tanks, often with detailed information about where and how they were destroyed. But that flood of information often leaves us — even if we don’t know it — unclear on the big picture. This thread notes that many of us are getting an incomplete view of the situation in Ukraine because Ukraine’s (and its supporters’) social media efforts have been so effective. The issue here isn’t deception or misinformation, though there’s certainly some of that. It’s that the supporters of Ukraine are doing a very effective job surfacing imagery every time the Ukrainian army scores a tactical victory — destroying a tank, shooting down a plane. And we’re seeing much less of the fact that Russia is continuing to make progress on the ground — just slowly. Maybe very slowly. But they are making progress.

As we’ve documented closely over the last 12 days of Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine, Republicans are offering up a confusing mix of reactions and deflections in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion. Some have praised Putin, others have condemned him. But all are mostly mad at President Biden, for a slew of reasons mostly tied to a vague assertion that he’s been weak on foreign policy since taking office.

But Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) offered up a rather unique and entirely backwards hypothesis last week when he suggested that somehow those involved in impeaching President Trump the first time might be to blame for the current war in Europe. Of those attracting his ire: retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who was himself born in Kyiv and also became an important whistleblower in the impeachment drama.

The AP has a new story about how unforced errors are potentially getting in the way of the GOP’s path back to a Senate majority in 2022. Most of us are aware of the developments the piece is referring to. You can review them here. I don’t want to get too deeply into the ins and outs of how bad this is for the GOP, whether it’s enough of a problem to keep the Democrats in power. But we know that in general this is a very real dynamic. Democrats managed to hold on to the Senate in 2010 in what was otherwise a brutal midterm rout. It happened again in 2012 — even though Democrats had to defend a ton of marginal pickups from the 2006 cycle. The dynamic is clear cut enough that it’s worth asking whether this is really a matter of “unforced” errors or whether this is what politics is like when politicians run in non-gerrymandered districts (i.e., states).

One feature of this almost two-week conflict between Russia and Ukraine is that civilians actually have access to lots of military information. Through open source intelligence, on the ground reporting and more we’re getting lots of details about battlefield losses of armor and aircraft, lines of control, shelling, ground movements, civilian and military casualties and more. But for most of us it’s pretty hard to know what these things mean. For instance, presumably it’s bad news for Russia if a couple of their planes get shot down. But are those expected combat losses or does it tell us something meaningful about the progress of the conflict? This is particularly important since Ukraine and its advocates are flooding social media with pictures of destroyed armor and downed airplanes. That makes total sense. They’re trying to maintain national morale and demonstrate their fighting capacity both to allies and to the Russian public. But assuming the photos are genuine, what do they mean? To help myself with this I’ve created the beginnings of a Twitter list specifically made up of military analysts. You can follow it here.

This new list is different from the one I’ve assembled for following the Russia/Ukraine Crisis in general. It only has a few members so far since this new list is focused on a very rarefied class of people: knowledgable military analysts with a special focus on NATO, Russia, Eastern Europe, the Russian “near abroad” etc. who are also prolific on Twitter. But I will be adding to it and would invite any suggestions.

Though it is generally out of view for those of us who don’t live in that world, the world’s militaries maintain a universe of think tanks and war colleges to study all aspects of war. Some of this work is conducted by men and women in uniform and hidden behind walls of classification and secrecy. But quite a lot of it, probably most, is done by civilian researchers and academics with a lot of it available to the public, if not widely read. Last week I mentioned following the Twitter feed of Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at one of the top national security think tanks funded and run on behalf of the U.S. Navy and Marine corps. But there’s a whole world of such researchers working either adjacent to or on behalf of various national militaries. You can read a lot of what they write and many are following developments in Ukraine with their Twitter feeds.

In a new article in Foreign Affairs, Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage explain how even if Russia loses its war in Ukraine, the international outlook that creates is a dark one. Far better than it winning. But still very dark. Looking to a post-Ukraine war world order, the authors write: “History has shown that it is immensely difficult to build a stable international order with a revanchist, humiliated power near its center, especially one of the size and weight of Russia.”

Catch up on the latest news surrounding Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court with my latest installment of The Judicial Review.

The tactic doesn’t always work, but this was a clever one.

I spent the morning planning to write a version of this post when I saw a quote from Russia’s head of foreign intelligence that made me think there was perhaps more here than I’d even suspected. Sergei Naryshkin said today: “The masks are off. The West isn’t simply trying to close off Russia behind a new iron curtain. This is about an attempt to ruin our government — to ‘cancel’ it, as they now say in ‘tolerant’ liberal-fascist circles.”

Now, on its face this is more than a bit much. Russia is in the process of trying to erase another country from the map, in effect if not through formal annexation. That seems like the more relevant meaning of ‘canceling’ in this context. This is also a reminder of the confluence of discourses between the American revanchist right (Trumpism and its earlier monikers, essentially) and Russian state revisionism. One thing we are constantly and rightly reminded of in these moments is that people in other countries, Russia in this case, understand the world very differently than we do. And yet here they are using language that is in fact quite familiar. It doesn’t seem alien at all. There’s a rhetorical symbiosis between the two worlds. Some of this was driven by the 2015–16 Russian interference campaign. But at a deeper level that symbiosis was the foundation on which that interference campaign became possible. Just as the democratic civic world has some elements of a transnational common political language, the authoritarian, revisionist international does too.