Unfortunately, Washington's Broadcasting Board of Governors, founded in 1995 to oversee the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, has greatly diminished America's capacity to fight the Putin propaganda machine
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April 17, 2014 7:00 p.m. ET
Vladimir Putin's action against Ukraine validates the historic relationship between propaganda and aggression. Having seized control of major broadcasters, his henchmen are censoring websites and telling Russians in Ukraine that "fascists" in Kiev are planning to round them up and kill them. Russian provocateurs whip up protests against Ukraine's government. U.S. correspondents report that Ukrainians and Russians are being "brainwashed" by Russian disinformation.
All this is designed to motivate Russian armed forces and secure public support on both sides of the border for Mr. Putin's efforts to "protect" Russian Ukrainians not only in Crimea but throughout the country. Moscow has a virtual monopoly on the narrative. The question is how far must Mr. Putin go before the West, and particularly the U.S., returns to the airwaves in full force to counter the Kremlin's propaganda.
Unfortunately, Washington's Broadcasting Board of Governors, founded in 1995 to oversee the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, has greatly diminished America's capacity to fight the Putin propaganda machine. Since 2008, the BBG has shut down all shortwave and most TV broadcasts by the Russian and Ukrainian services of VOA and RFE/RL. The Putin regime has played a role as well. Just last week, the Kremlin shut down the last VOA AM broadcasts in Moscow after a BBG subcontractor failed to renew its contract with a local station.
Reaching modern audiences requires multiple media: Internet, cell phones, television and radio—using all frequencies: AM, FM and shortwave. As outdated as it may sound, radio remains an important weapon in the fight against oppression. Governments can track individual citizens' Internet usage, but those citizens can listen to radio anonymously. Radio broadcasts can be jammed, but consistently only in urban areas. Meanwhile, shortwave has undergone a technological revolution. Digital Radio Mondiale makes possible crystal clear broadcasts of sound, as well as—with the latest DRM receivers—text and video, which can be received anonymously and not easily jammed.
Since the 1940s and '50s, the U.S. government has had two types of broadcast services "where the free flow of information is either banned by government authorities or not fully developed"—the Voice of America, which explains American life and policy, and the "freedom broadcasters" like RFE/RL and Radio Free Asia, which supply a surrogate domestic free press. These are not duplicative missions.
These broadcasts, which Alexander Solzhenitsyn called the most powerful American weapons in the Cold War, provide local and world news, editorials, history, alternative political ideas and religious and cultural programming, all of which face censorship in totalitarian and harsh authoritarian regimes. Connecting with foreign audiences tells them that they are not alone and there is hope for political change.
It was a mistake for the BBG to shut down services that for six decades the Russian people depended on for outside information. Whether it was a cost-saving measure or part of the Obama administration's Russian "reset," the administration seems confused about these services. Their mission is not to be a government-sponsored CNN, but rather a strategic instrument of national-security policy. Fortunately, Congress is exploring reforms to enable these services to re-emerge as a meaningful element of American power.
To that end, a full-time director of U.S. International Broadcasting should be appointed by the president with Senate confirmation, and accountable to the National Security Council. Under that director should be two separate presidentially appointed directors: one for the VOA and another for the freedom broadcasters. The two services could share administrative and technical assets, and be funded according to national strategic need. Historically, their cost has been relatively small ($206 million for VOA and $93 million for RFE/RL in 2012) but their impact immeasurable. When U.S. "hard power" assets are being cut is no time to cut the most cost-effective assets of soft power.
In international affairs, perceptions count more than reality. Mr. Putin's Russia and other authoritarian regimes invest huge sums in propaganda and perception management. Who, then, will give people in these regimes the facts that will make the manipulation of publics and armies more difficult? Who will supply the news that only a free press can? Who will explain the actual goals of U.S. foreign policy? Al-Jazeera, China Radio International, Russia's state-run press? Or will it be media run by a government whose people demand that it tell the truth?
Mr. Lenczowski, founder of The Institute of World Politics, is the author of "Full Spectrum Diplomacy and Grand Strategy" (Lexington Books, 2011).
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- Kathleen Parker
- Opinion Writer
Has the West got Putin yet?
By Kathleen Parker, Published: April 18 E-mail the writer
The new “agreement” between Russia, the United States and our allies is exactly what the former KGB agent ordered.
This isn’t to say it’s not a good “prospect” for ending tensions in Ukraine, as President Obama said. But neither should it surprise anyone that Vladimir Putin is willing to step back from that country — not to ease economic sanctions but to satisfy his own designs.
Kathleen Parker
Parker writes a twice-weekly column on politics and culture.
The handwriting was on the palm of Nina Khrushcheva’s hand, not that she needs notes.
Khrushcheva, who appeared recently in this space, has been right about all things Putin since anyone thought to query Nikita Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter.
Earlier this year, when all wondered whether Putin would take Crimea, Khrushcheva said he would. When all worried that he might move into eastern Ukraine, she said he wouldn’t. Her reasoning was that Putin didn’t really want the hassle and expense of invading another country. At least not right now.
Khrushcheva also predicted that Putin would bring things to a close when he was ready, on his terms — even if they appear to be others’ terms — with his own objectives accomplished. His overall strategy wasn’t to absorb economically stressed Ukraine (let the West pump its money into those dire streets) but to appear that he might invade in order to earn grace when he didn’t. The sin of annexing Crimea thus would be forgiven.
As a strategy, it seemed a circuitous route to a dubious and doubtful end, but perhaps it takes a Russian mind to understand a Russian mind. It can’t hurt either that Khrushcheva grew up listening to the former premier, who, once ousted, became persona non grata in the Soviet Union. She also bore witness to the propaganda machine that rewrote Russia’s and Nikita’s history.
For further context, though Khrushcheva was by lineage Nikita’s great-granddaughter, her mother was adopted by the former premier as his daughter and Khrushcheva was born and treated as a granddaughter. Khrushchev was especially fond of the bookish scamp who eventually left for the United States to attend Princeton University and today teaches international affairs, politics and propaganda at the New School in New York.
Obama is wise to reserve judgment on Putin’s sincerity — we’ll know when we know — but a betting man would do well to put his money on Khrushcheva’s crystal ball. Her understanding of Putin’s psyche is several notches above the talking points that news consumers have heard repeated ad nauseam. Yes, Putin wants to restore the Russian empire to its former superpower status. But to the finer points of his massive ego, Putin is a muscled beach boy trying to build the biggest pyramid. It actually matters to him that his dog is bigger than yours.
To Putin’s mind, he has emerged from these “diplomatic negotiations” — translated in Russian to mean “I did it my way” — as a tough statesman, generous in his restraint yet just scary enough to hold the world’s attention.
Many Russians, meanwhile, may feel their wounded pride somewhat salved by having rescued their brethren in Crimea. From their perspective, Putin has put their once-great nation back in play. As Putin knows (and we seem to have forgotten), it is helpful in the game of geopolitical chess to be a little bit feared.
This approach may not be the intellectual’s preference, but the jungle remains unschooled. Much as I hate to be the iconoclast, the lion and the lamb aren’t ever going to lie down together, except for the latter to be eaten by the former. However, lest spirits flag in this season of rebirth, the Easter Bunny is real.
As is, alas, that wascally wabbit, Edward Snowden. The traitor/hero (take your pick) just happened to ask Putin on Russian TV whether that country spies on its citizens the way the United States does. Of course not, Putin assured his new best fugitive friend. One, Russia isn’t as rich as the United States, he said. And, two, Russia is bound by the rule of law. Such propagandist grandstanding is so comical that outrage seems farcical.
Khrushcheva, her DNA a repository of the propaganda gene, snickers.
“I just can’t get incensed about propaganda the way Americans do,” she told me. “Here [in the United States], there is some fake Protestant belief that we engage in truth, but of course no one does. But it’s the usual dance, American media have to react, Obama has to show resolve.”
I didn’t say Khrushcheva is a diplomat, but she probably ought to at least have a cubicle in the West Wing.
Read more from Kathleen Parker’s archive, follow her on Twitter or find her on Facebook.
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Jospeh Nye
By most accounts, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been the winner in the Ukraine crisis, at least so far. His annexation of Crimea, which Nikita Khrushchev arbitrarily transferred to Ukraine in 1954, has been widely applauded at home, and he has largely shrugged off Western governments’ responses. But, from a longer-term perspective, Putin’s victory is not quite so certain.
The current crisis in Ukraine began with President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to reject a European Union Association Agreement, opting instead for a deal with Russia that included desperately needed financing. This outraged Ukrainians in the country’s more pro-EU western regions, spurring protracted popular protests that ultimately toppled Yanukovych’s corrupt but democratically elected government.
But not all Ukrainians were averse to pursuing closer ties with Russia. Indeed, Yanukovych’s decision pleased many Russian speakers in Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions. And it was to Russia that Yanukovych turned when, after months of peaceful demonstrations in Kyiv, violence broke out and demonstrators were killed, spurring him to flee Ukraine.
For his part, Putin not only provided sanctuary for Yanukovych and refused to recognize the new government in Kyiv; he began to help organize – and incite – resistance among Crimea’s ethnic Russian majority. By deploying Russian troops (often masked and without insignias) from the Black Sea Fleet’s base in Sevastopol, which Russia had leased from Ukraine, Putin was able to take control of the peninsula with no loss of life.
When Western leaders expressed outrage over the forced changes to European borders, Putin remained unfazed, citing NATO’s use of force in Kosovo 15 years ago, and their subsequent support for its formal secession from Serbia, as an example of their hypocrisy. The West shot back with targeted sanctions against a few high-level Russian officials, to which Putin responded with sanctions of his own, barring entry to selected Western politicians.
All in all, a few Russian banks have had their accounts frozen; some shipments of sensitive goods have been halted; and the ruble and the Russian stock market have suffered losses. But the overall impact of the West’s response has been moderate.
The West’s reluctance to intensify sanctions stems largely from European countries that retain strong economic ties with Russia. While the United States – which trades little with Russia – and the EU have vowed to develop a framework for additional sanctions, to be activated if Putin sends forces into eastern Ukraine, designing them in a way that does not hurt Europe will not be easy.
Nonetheless, Russia has paid a high price for its actions in terms of its international standing. The goodwill and soft power generated by the Sochi Olympics were immediately depleted, and Russia has now been all but expelled from the G-8. In the United Nations General Assembly, Russia had to face an embarrassing vote in which 100 countries condemned its actions. And, at the end of the nuclear security summit in The Hague, US President Barack Obama cited Russia as a regional power whose aggressive policies toward its neighbors displayed weakness.
What is Vladimir Putin’s objective in the Ukraine crisis? (photo: ©www.kremlin.ru)
Does any of this matter to Putin? The answer depends on what his objectives are.
If, as some observers claim, Putin’s aggressive actions stem from feelings of insecurity, he has had mixed success. By this account, Putin feared diminished influence in a neighboring country with which Russia shares deep historical ties. But, despite Russia’s obvious influence among eastern Ukraine’s Russophones, the overall impact of the annexation of Crimea has been to reduce Russia’s influence in the country, while reinvigorating Putin’s bête noire, NATO.
Putin may also have worried that a successful revolution in Ukraine might encourage a revival of the protests that caused him so much trouble in 2012, when he re-assumed the presidency from Dmitri Medvedev. In the wake of his annexation of Crimea, Putin’s domestic approval rating has soared, and the chances that any protest would succeed in genuinely undercutting – much less toppling – his administration are very low.
Others claim that Putin’s primary motivation was to restore Russia’s global “great power” status. After all, Putin, a former KGB agent in East Germany, has lamented the Soviet Union’s dissolution as “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century.”
In fact, Putin often has been described as angry with the West, beset by a sense of betrayal and humiliation from what he perceives as unfair treatment of Russia. For Putin, gestures like including Russia in the G-8, the G-20, and the World Trade Organization, and inviting a Russian ambassador to NATO discussions in Brussels, could not make up for NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders, the placement of anti-ballistic missile sites in Eastern Europe, or the dismemberment of Serbia. The overthrow of Libya’s Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi and ongoing efforts to undercut the Kremlin’s client, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, have only made matters worse.
If status was an important motive for Putin’s actions in Crimea, the West’s response may have a greater impact than many now believe. Before the Winter Games in Sochi (where the G-8 was scheduled to meet in June), Putin cited increased soft power as an important goal for Russia – an objective that his use of hard power in Ukraine has made much more difficult to achieve.
In this sense, Obama’s declaration that Russia is a regional power acting out of weakness, no less than Russia’s suspension from the G-8, may have hit Putin where he is most vulnerable. His actions in Ukraine have undoubtedly brought Russia tangible gains in the short term. But they also imply less obvious costs. It remains to be seen whether Putin’s bold move was worth it.
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April 18, 2014 6:55 p.m. ET
Le Monde reported a few days ago that the eastern Ukrainian town of Slovyansk, "where no one stops in normal times," was the "epicenter of an historical drama that goes beyond it: the Ukrainian state finds itself between life and death." Vladimir Putin has been chewing off pieces of eastern Ukraine in professional special-forces operations.
What most news coverage isn't reporting is the failure of several major Ukrainian military efforts to retake the public centers seized by the Russians. As Piotr Smolar writes in Le Monde, the new Ukrainian government has revealed itself to be "without a real army, unable to lean on Western military support, incapable of insuring itself by the loyalty of the [security] services (SBU) or of the police."
Donbass militia armoured military vehicles in the town of Slavyansk, eastern Ukraine. Zuma Press
This Ukrainian government—which has to assure the legitimacy of an election that will take place nationwide in little more than a month—is now under assault by foreign troops. It cannot survive without the forces that Max Weber defined as the very essence of the modern state.
What is happening now in these dreary provincial towns really is a matter of life or death for Ukraine. The country didn't exist as an independent state until 1991, and it may not survive as one into next year.
There was a heady sense of liberation this winter when the Maidan protesters in Kiev won, but the new government cannot survive the revelation that it is making empty threats against aggressors it can never fulfill. Beyond what the Russian attacks can gobble up in eastern Ukraine, Moscow can expose the new government as unable to cope with a crisis of national survival.
It is easy to deride Kiev's responses, but its new leaders are in the same situation as the Russian provisional government of 1917 after the fall of the czar. They are a disparate collection of politicians and activists, floated to the top of the govenrment by waves of still surging change, who must improvise the means of self-defense in a government rusted away by corruption, with an empty treasury, a foreign army penetrating deeper into the country, and friends from abroad who offer plenty of free advice but never act.
President Obama, David Ignatius wrote on April 17 in the Washington Post, GHC +1.81% Graham Holdings Co. U.S.: NYSE $675.00 +12.03 +1.81% April 17, 2014 4:05 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) :32,113 AFTER HOURS $675.00 0.00 0.00% April 17, 2014 4:29 pm Volume (Delayed 15m): 138 P/E Ratio 36.69 Market Cap $4.99 Billion Dividend Yield 1.51% Rev. per Employee $249,13368067066010a11a12p1p2p3p4p5p 04/18/14 Charles Fairbanks: An Independ... 04/02/14 Agreement on Audit Reports Pro... 04/01/14 Washington Voters Head to Poll... More quote details and news »GHC in 
Your Value Your Change Short position "appears, for now, to have averted war. Each side can reasonably claim success." Is that so? The agreement reached on Thursday in Geneva does say occupied buildings and squares "must" be vacated, in return for an amnesty and all sides' promise to refrain from "violence, intimidation or provocative actions." In other words, Ukraine's attempt to assert its sovereignty on its own soil must stop.
Your Value Your Change Short position "appears, for now, to have averted war. Each side can reasonably claim success." Is that so? The agreement reached on Thursday in Geneva does say occupied buildings and squares "must" be vacated, in return for an amnesty and all sides' promise to refrain from "violence, intimidation or provocative actions." In other words, Ukraine's attempt to assert its sovereignty on its own soil must stop.
And so Ukraine will come under the tutelage of the other powers that met in Geneva. Which ones specifically—the United States, the European Union, or Russia? The answer becomes clear not in the text of the Geneva agreement but in events on the ground.
Leaders of Mr. Putin's puppet "People's Republic of Donetsk" immediately announced that they had no intention of fulfilling the agreement. And why should they? They didn't participate in the negotiations. And who will persuade them? Only Russia possibly could, because Russia put them there, arms them, pays them and gives them instructions.
Under the Geneva agreement, we give Russia concessions in the hope that Moscow will be able to influence the puppet government it imposed. Geneva will in practice give Russia an international benediction for interfering in eastern Ukraine. Henceforth Russia has one more lever. The first, in use since the invasion of Crimea, is covert action with military special forces. The second will now be the international effort to negotiate a "solution."
It is a diplomatic masterpiece—for Mr. Putin. With the Geneva agreement, Russia has advanced considerably toward its goal of federalizing Ukraine and creating puppet domains carved into its eastern border, like South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made this clear in his revealing news conference.
The agreement specifies that "the announced constitutional process"—of drafting a new Ukrainian constitution—"will be inclusive, transparent and accountable. It will include the immediate establishment of a broad national dialogue, with outreach to all of Ukraine's regions and political constituencies, and allow for the consideration of public comments and proposed amendments."
Mr. Lavrov explains: "That is the essence of our agreement of today. . . . It is important that those who took over power in Kiev as a result of the coup . . . listen to [the regions'] worries, sit with them and begin negotiations on settling concrete problems of security in this or that settlement." So, for Russia, Geneva implies Ukrainian government recognition of the secessionist "governments" put "in power" by mobs of a couple of hundred people, in provinces of millions, and sometimes controlling only the buildings they sit in.
Russia wants the "federalization" of Ukraine. Federalization is newspeak for partition. Until Geneva, we kept this demand at bay. Russia hopes to reach it by what the U.S. has now agreed to. Russia's foreign ministry said of the Geneva agreement's disarmament provision that it includes "the militias of the right sector and other fascist groups, who participated in the February coup in Kiev."
The Geneva agreement will break down, probably soon, amid more Russian military moves and threats. Then, with our endless appetite for negotiation, we will go back to the table, no doubt to make more concessions.
So far all the American and European countermeasures, including Thursday's agreement, belong to a virtual reality native to politics: things you do to seem to be doing something, not to achieve any aim. They don't deflect Mr. Putin but further discredit the public space indispensable to a republican government.
The saving grace, if there is one, is that in the past week some in Europe are beginning to wake up to what is really happening. For the first time there is a note of real urgency in European journalism close to some governments. The question is finally being asked: What if an independent Ukraine does not survive?
With Ukraine's partition, occupation or dissolution into chaos, the order America helped to establish in the region after 1991 will also come tumbling down. And the crash will reverberate world-wide. If President Obama will not defend the arrangements achieved by three earlier presidents over 20 years, everything our efforts and sacrifices achieved since the end of the Cold War will be eroded as quickly as sand castles with the tide.
Mr. Fairbanks is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He served as deputy assistant secretary of state in the Ronald Reagan administration.
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Journalist Carlotta Gall shreds the Pakistani general’s blueprint in her book “The Wrong Enemy” by arguing that Pakistan is “perfidious, driving the violence in Afghanistan for its own cynical, hegemonic reasons.” She writes of a Pakistan that is more an active participant in the conflict than an invisible hand governing by proxy, the more common perception among most of those who have followed the diplomatic wrangling in the region.
In November 2001, American planes bombed Taliban front-line positions in northwestern Afghanistan while, according to Gall, “hundreds of Pakistanis: scores of military advisors and trainers, members of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence” secretly assisted the Taliban. As many as 3,000 Pakistani troops and advisers were trapped at the Kunduz airfield, a 12-hour drive from the Pakistani border. Pakistani military airlifts evacuated most of them, while “nearly a thousand low-level Pakistani fighters were left to fend for themselves.”
Gall’s attention to detail partially lifts the veil on the shadowy operations of the ISI, best known for its clandestine support of anti-Soviet Afghan fighters during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. But “The Wrong Enemy” reduces a decades-long national security strategy to a tactical level, oversimplifying the psychology of Pakistan’s relations with the Taliban and distracting from the real question at hand: Why does Pakistan want to influence Afghanistan?
Gall rightly says that Pakistan supports the Taliban as a hedge against pro-India Afghan groups but neglects to provide important context for such actions. For example, she does not mention major Indian investments in the Afghan economy and the proliferation of consulates in Afghanistan since 2001 that serve to provoke Pakistan. Nor does she consider the cash and arms being exported to Afghan groups by Iran, Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region. Thus, she misses the critical role that regional dynamics have played in the 13-year, NATO-led campaign in Afghanistan and most certainly will play in the country’s future.
Although Pakistan has never been the lone player in Afghanistan’s proxy conflicts, it remains the most problematic one for the United States. Gall asserts what many privately think: Washington looks the other way when Pakistan supports militants as long as those militants don’t threaten the United States. The American pattern of dealing with this double game is to mollify Pakistan in public but keep stronger messages private. This changed in May 2011 when the United States discovered and killed Osama bin Laden at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
While convinced that the ISI protected bin Laden, Gall struggles to provide proof. She offers only one plausible example of Pakistan’s alleged complicity. Documents in the Abbottabad compound contained communications among bin Laden, Afghan Taliban leader Mohammad Omar and Hafiz Saeed of the jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba. Given that the ISI closely monitors the two latter men and their organizations , Gall argues, it must have known of their interactions with bin Laden.
Most of her other evidence relies on shaky hearsay at best and her sources’ gut feelings at worst. A former Pakistani domestic intelligence chief told Gall, “Nobody can believe he was there without people knowing.” A retired Pakistani general “got a feeling” that former president Pervez Musharraf knew that bin Laden had moved to Abbottabad during his term. The evidence? The way Musharraf said something on television.
Failing to unlock the bin Laden case does not detract from Gall’s broader chronicling of the war in Afghanistan, which she masterfully conveys through stark images and gritty war reporting. In 2004, Gall traveled to the pro-Taliban village Shurakai, where “there were no roads in this part of the country, and we relied entirely on the mujahideen who knew every track and ambush spot. They led us along dry river beds and desert tracks across a moonscape of fine white sand.” She shares chilling firsthand images of Afghan suffering: “Putrefying flesh was still entangled amid the bright scarlet blossoms of a pomegranate tree.” If you have never visited Afghanistan, “The Wrong Enemy” will take you there.
Gall’s Afghanistan will always have a Pakistani bogeyman, and for good reason. Pakistani militants are stronger and closer to both al-Qaeda and Afghan militants, making the security of Afghanistan and Pakistan more intertwined. The United States, too, remains indefinitely present in this hyphenated part of the world, where, Gall presciently warns, militant Islamism is “a juggernaut that cannot be turned off or turned away from” and will tie the United States to the region for decades to come.
Shamila N. Chaudhary is a senior adviser at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior South Asia fellow at the New America Foundation.
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Polish Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak, right, at the Pentagon on Thursday. (Photo: EPA/Michael Reynolds)
Poland and the United States will announce next week the deployment of U.S. ground forces to Poland as part of an expansion of NATO presence in Central and Eastern Europe in response to events in Ukraine. That was the word from Poland’s defense minister, Tomasz Siemoniak, who visited The Post Friday after meeting with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon on Thursday.
Siemoniak said the decision has been made on a political level and that military planners are working out details. There will also be intensified cooperation in air defense, special forces, cyberdefense and other areas. Poland will play a leading regional role, “under U.S. patronage,” he said.
But the defense minister also said that any immediate NATO response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, while important, matter less than a long-term shift in the defense postures of Europe and America. The United States, having announced a “pivot” to Asia, needs to “re-pivot” to Europe, he said, and European countries that have cut back on defense spending need to reverse the trends.
“The idea until recently was that there were no more threats in Europe and no need for a U.S. presence in Europe any more,” Siemoniak said, speaking through an interpreter. “Events show that what is needed is a re-pivot, and that Europe was safe and secure because America was in Europe.”
How likely is such a reversal on defense spending? Siemoniak said there was widespread support at a recent meeting of European defense ministers. “Now they’ll go back to their presidents, prime ministers and ministers of finance, and this will stop being easy,” he admitted. “But the impetus is very strong.”
The strongest impetus, he said, is not even Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, but President Vladimir Putin’s bald lies about Russian actions there and his exposition of a new doctrine allowing Russia to intervene in any country where Russian-speaking populations are, in Russia’s judgment, under threat. This poses a potential danger to the Baltic nations, which are members of NATO, and even more to Moldova, Belarus and central Asian nations that are not, he said.
Like President Obama, Siemoniak said it’s too soon to judge the agreement reached Thursday in Geneva to defuse tensions. He said he believes that Russia’s “special operation in eastern Ukraine didn’t go as planned” and that Putin may have decided to play a longer game.
“He holds different instruments that he can use to influence events in Ukraine,” Siemoniak said. Putin will keep in reserve the option of an outright military incursion, “but the political, military and financial costs would be gigantic.” The 46-year-old minister mused that until recently NATO was wondering what mission it would have, if any, once its troops came home from Afghanistan.
“Now we have an answer to that question,” he said.
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Concerns have been especially acute in the three Baltic nations that were once part of the Soviet empire and now fear that they could be next on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hit list.
NATO has long resisted placing much of a footprint in the Baltics, worried that doing so would jeopardize ever-precarious cooperation with Moscow.
Now that that cooperation is on life support, NATO announced this week that it plans to substantially boost its air, sea and ground presence in the Baltic states.
After meetings with U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Polish Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak said in an interview with Washington Post editors Friday that he expected a plan to dispatch U.S. ground troops to Poland, and likely the Baltics, to be announced next week.
The decision has been made on a political level, and military planners are working out details, Siemoniak said.
A Pentagon spokesman said in a statement Friday that the United States is “considering a range of additional measures” to bolster air, maritime and ground readiness in Europe. “Some of those activities will be pursued bilaterally with individual NATO nations. Some will be pursued through the Alliance itself. All of them will be rotational in nature,” Rear Adm. John Kirby said.
NATO has been deliberately vague about plans for the positioning of its ground forces in Eastern Europe, a strategy that is in part intended to keep Moscow guessing but also reflects the lingering divisions within NATO over how far to go in provoking the Russian bear.
Like Ukraine, the three Baltic nations — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — have significant Russian-speaking populations, people who Putin has suggested should, by all rights, be living in Russia. But unlike Ukraine, those three nations joined NATO in 2004.
The decision to increase the NATO presence has brought some relief in the lightly defended Baltics, but also questions about why NATO did not act earlier to try to deter Russia with a more robust show of strength on its eastern flank.
“Of course, we always wanted to see a more permanent presence from our NATO allies here. But before, it was not considered so urgent,” Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet said in an interview. “Now, the circumstances have changed.”
Paet said that as part of NATO’s renewed commitment to the Baltics, NATO warplanes would, for the first time, regularly police the skies from an Estonian air base. Other measures are still under discussion, he said, including the stationing of U.S. ground forces in his country — a development that Paet said he would welcome.
NATO is a mutual defense organization, meaning that an attack on one nation is considered an attack on all. But for years after the tiny Baltic nations joined the alliance, NATO stalled in developing plans for how to defend its newest members. The alliance also avoided training exercises in the Baltics, out of deference to Putin’s complaints that NATO was reaching too far into his orbit.
The defense plans were drawn up only after Russian forces entered Georgia in 2008, and major training exercises remained largely off the table until the recent crisis.
Kurt Volker, the U.S. ambassador to NATO under presidents Obama and George W. Bush, said the delay was a mistake and that the alliance still is not doing enough to deter Russian advances.
“It’s a reactive stance. We’re saying to the Russians, ‘You do more, and we’ll do more,’ ” Volker said. “Frankly, Russia’s not impressed by that.”
Other NATO members have openly campaigned for the alliance to seize on the current crisis to make a major and lasting statement in Eastern Europe. Poland has been the most outspoken, with Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski calling for the alliance to permanently station 10,000 troops in his country.
“For a long time, we’ve been considering the prospect of NATO, post-Afghanistan,” said Siemoniak, the Polish defense minister. “Now we have an answer to this question. It is that NATO must be able to respond to what is happening in Europe.”
Russia has argued that any mass deployment of NATO forces in Eastern European would violate the 1997 Founding Act, which covers the terms of cooperation between Moscow and NATO. Polish officials say that with 40,000 Russian troops allegedly massed on Ukraine’s eastern border, that deal has been voided.
But that view is not widely shared in NATO, and the alliance has been careful to avoid doing anything that could give Russia a pretext for escalation. Germany, which has extensive economic ties to Russia, has led the push for restraint.
“If we go down the direction of military threats, it’s easier to call our bluff,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, a senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund, who favors the use of stiff economic sanctions.
But Stelzenmüller said German officials understand what makes Eastern European leaders so nervous, given the seemingly erratic nature of Putin’s recent behavior.
“The logic that Putin seems to be operating under is not the same logic that led us to believe that we could cooperate with and have pragmatic compromises with Russia,” she said.
When Putin held a televised question-and-answer session Thursday, it was evident that NATO’s push into Eastern Europe still rankled.
“We were once promised in Munich that after the unification of Germany, no expansion of NATO would happen to the east,” the Russian president said. “Then it started to expand by adding former Warsaw Pact countries, former U.S.S.R. countries. I asked: ‘Why are you doing that?’ They told me, ‘It is not your business.’ ”
If NATO had expanded further still to Ukraine, Putin said, Russia would have lost critical access to the Black Sea.
But Ukraine did not join NATO, and now the country’s territorial integrity has been compromised.
Baltic officials say they do not believe that Russia is planning operations in their countries like the one in Ukraine, and they cite the threat of a NATO response as a key reason.
“Article Five is absolutely a red line,” said Andrejs Pildegovics, Latvia’s state secretary for foreign affairs, referring to the provision in NATO’s charter that guarantees collective defense. “All allies should have full protection.”
But there is no question that Baltic officials are deeply apprehensive about what could happen if Russia succeeds in breaking off even more of Ukraine, after annexing Crimea last month.
This week, the head of Latvia’s national security committee accused Russian agents of quietly surveying Latvian opinion on the country’s eastern border — behavior that mirrors the lead-up to the Crimean invasion.
About a quarter of Latvia’s 2 million people are ethnically Russian, but Latvian voters in 2012 rejected a referendum that would have made Russian the country’s second official language. In the nation’s Russian-heavy east, there have been periodic calls for greater autonomy from the capital, and officials are worried that those calls will now grow louder, courtesy of covert Russian backing.
“There’s a huge difference between Ukraine and the Baltics,’’ said Tom Rostoks, a political scientist at the University of Latvia. “But after Crimea, we got the idea that almost anything could happen.”
Ernesto Londoño contributed to this report.
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A map of the historical region of Novorossiya. (Laris Karklis/The Washington Post)
During an epic question-and-answer session with the Russian public Thursday, President Vladimir Putin dropped a reference that is likely to be obscure to many in the West. Talking about the Ukrainian elections and ethnic Russians in that country's east, Putin took a detour through history.
"I would like to remind you that what was called Novorossiya back in the tsarist days – Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolayev and Odessa – were not part of Ukraine back then," Putin said. "The center of that territory was Novorossiysk, so the region is called Novorossiya. Russia lost these territories for various reasons, but the people remained."
Putin's comment might be taken as it was portrayed – as an aside, or a little tidbit of information – if it weren't for the fact that Novorossiya has been brought up so often in recent days by pro-Russian activists, who have reportedly been chanting the word as they argued against staying with Kiev. Someone has even set up a Web site that appears devoted to bringing the historical region back.
If nothing else, Putin's comments are relatively accurate, historically: Novorossiya was won from the Ottoman Empire in the late 18th century. Its name, which means "New Russia," is a reflection of that. It became a part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the early years of the Soviet Union, and remained a part of Ukraine after the collapse of communism.
Talking about Novorossiya fits in with Putin's broader habit of talking about a golden era of Russian empire, and using history to justify modern action. It's a similar action Putin made with Crimea, though in this case, the historical justification is a little harder to make: Crimea only became part of Ukraine in 1954, and you have to wonder what's to stop Turkey from deciding that its own claims on Novorossiya, earlier still than Russia's, are more valid?
In the modern world, things are more complicated. As the map below to the left shows, Crimea's large ethnic Russian population is not matched in any of the regions that once made up Novorossiya. However, as you can see from the map on the right, it makes up a big portion of the GDP of Ukraine.
(Laris Karklis/The Washington Post)
It's not clear right now whether Putin has any real plan to annex Novorossiya, or whether it is just talk. But if Putin is hoping to foment chaos in Ukraine, it would appear that Crimea has shown him that history can be potent weapon.
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“Our army has been systematically destroyed and disarmed,” Deputy Defense Minister Petro Mehed said at a briefing this past week, “and its best personnel dismissed.”
In the east, militants have occupied buildings in more than a dozen cities and on Saturday showed no signs of giving up their positions. The army was sent in and looked more anemic than ever when small knots of civilians managed to block armored personnel carriers simply by standing in front of them.
Ukraine’s position is dire. The new government found the treasury empty when it took over Feb. 27. The Ministry of Defense was so desperate for money that it went to the public for help.
People across the country have responded by pulling together for the Support the Ukrainian army fundraising drive, trying to repair the damage done by years of thieving governments. Children have held fairs and bake sales to raise money. Adults have delivered food and water to tent encampments. Community groups have collected shoes, clothes and canned goods.
Ukrainian businesses and individuals had raised more than $9 million for the military as of Friday, the Defense Ministry reported. Of that, $2 million came from cellphone users who made 50-cent donations from their accounts by calling a designated number.
Ukraine’s military budget was $5.3 billion last year, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Sweden, with a population a fifth the size of Ukraine’s, had a budget of $6.5 billion. And Ukrainians have little idea how much of the budget actually reached the military.
A recent investigation found that one defense factory was stealing $81 of every $100 order, Deputy Prime Minister Vitaliy Yarema said. “If the stolen money had been used for modernization of the Ukrainian army,” he told reporters, “there would not be a problem.”
Nearly two weeks ago, pro-Russia separatists invaded the Donetsk regional administration offices and have occupied them since. The following weekend, several more government buildings in the east fell to well-equipped men in green uniforms who are widely believed to have been organized by Russia. After police — criticized as specialized at raking in bribes rather than putting down violence — failed to restore order, President Oleksandr Turchynov ordered the army in.
The troops have had little effect. The militants have refused to honor an international agreementreached Thursday in Geneva by Ukraine, Russia, the United States and the European Union asking the militants to disarm and go home. And an estimated 40,000 well-equipped Russian troops have settled into positions along Ukraine’s eastern border, their presence forbidding, their intentions unclear.
When the new government took over, it found a military and security agency organized around loyalty to ousted President Viktor Yanukovych and riddled with people closely tied to Russia’s security service, the FSB, Andriy Parubiy, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, said in a recent interview. Not only was the treasury empty, so were military fuel tanks.
And there was Russia, Parubiy said, intent on making the government fail and seeing it replaced by one deferring to Moscow. Before the government could have its first meeting, the regional parliament building in Crimea had been overrun by shadowy forces. Less than three weeks later, Russia had annexed the peninsula.
Ukraine needed a nimble, modern army to protect itself against a Russian army that had invested a great deal in equipment and training since a mediocre showing in a 2008 conflict with Georgia. Ukraine had the rusting remnants of a Soviet machine. Decisions were being made in Kiev during the Crimean crisis, Parubiy said, but communication systems that could relay them to the field did not exist.
Debilitated by corruption
The state of their military shocked Ukrainians, even though they knew none of their institutions had resisted the pervasive corruption.
“The army became impoverished from the inside — money and materiel were stolen,” said Pavlo Podobied, a 26-year-old resident of Kiev, the capital. “They didn’t have equipment, and meals were cheap macaroni and a small piece of tough meat.”
Podobied was born in Kherson, Russian-speaking territory near Crimea. In March, he was hearing about fears there of a further Russian incursion. Residents became alarmed when they saw how the 900 soldiers of Ukraine’s 79th Airborne Brigade there were living and working. Who would protect them?
“Local people started bringing them food, water, SIM cards,” he said. “The soldiers were depending on them.”
Podobied, who had helped form an organization called Heroika that was tending to the graves of Ukrainians who fought for independence in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution, turned his attention to the present-day army.
“We began collecting money to buy uniforms and ammunition,” he said. “Soldiers at one checkpoint had only one radio, and it broke after the second day.”
Heroika, which began its fundraising in March, recently bought 30 pairs of safety glasses for the soldiers in Kherson. “When we brought them to the base, it was like Christmas,” Podobied said. “They had only seen them in ads.”
The Ukrainian diaspora helped buy 14 American radios for the troops, he said, and a Ukrainian American traveled here to deliver them. Now the organization is raising money to buy rifle straps.
Not only did those in charge steal, Podobied said, but young men routinely paid bribes to avoid service, leaving thin ranks filled by the poor.
Ukraine has a military of about 130,000 with an army of nearly 65,000, a navy of almost 14,000, and an air force of 45,000, along with a 6,000-strong airborne force.
“Now the army is weak and can’t protect us,” Podobied said. “The people who ran it were only interested in money.”
The army has only about 30 to 40 percent of what it needs, the Defense Ministry’s deputy supply chief told reporters recently. The official, Arkadiy Stuzhuk, said body armor and helmets were in particularly low supply.
France is donating body armor, and on Thursday, U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel promised $3.5 million worth of equipment, including helmets, sleeping mats, water purification kits, generators and medical supplies.
Earlier, the United States sent Ukraine 300,000 MRE’s — meals ready to eat.
Populace chips in
Some of Ukraine’s oligarchs have chipped in for the defense effort as well. Serhiy Taruta, appointed governor of Donetsk in March, paid for the digging of a trench — with the help of his construction magnate brother — along the region’s 90-mile border with Russia.
Ihor Kolomoysky, the governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region, spent $5 million of his own money to buy fuel and batteries for the military.
Local governments and groups are also taking up collections.
Children in the city of Zhytomyr, west of Kiev, helped put on a fair, where they sold paintings and postcards they made, raising $500. The nearby Novohrad-Volynskiy Bakery delivered a load of baked goods to its local military base. Donations poured into the fund organized by the Defense Ministry.
“There’s not much I can do,” Podobied said, “but I can collect money.”
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