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Located in southeastern Ukraine, Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station (ZNPP) is Europe’s largest power plant that produced 23% of all Ukrainian electricity before Russia's invasion.  This critical energy source is amidst the chaos and destruction of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, a harrowing struggle that has wrought immeasurable suffering and upheaval upon the region. Following its capture by the Russian forces on March 4th 2022, there have been drastic disruptions to safe energy production and a heightened global concern for nuclear safety in the region. Introduction and backgroundZaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), located in the Ukrainian city of Enerhodar, was built by Soviet design in the 1980s, with its last reactor being connected to the grid in 1995.  Amongst the ten largest nuclear facilities in the world, the Zaporizhzhia power plant consists of six water-cooling and water-moderating pressurized reactors. A global nuclear scare started on February 24, 2022, when Ukraine informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that “unidentified armed forces” have taken control of all facilities of Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant located in the Exclusion zone. The IAEA appealed for maximum restraint to avoid any action that may put the country’s nuclear facilities at risk and stressed the IAEA’s 2009 General Conference decision that “any armed attack on and threat against nuclear facilities devoted to peaceful purposes constitutes a violation of the principles of the United Nations Charter, international law and the Statute of the Agency”. Later that week, on March 2nd, Russia stated that its military forces have taken control of the territory around Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant. The next day, a large number of Russian tanks and infantry broke through the block-post into the town of Enerhodar, just a few kilometers from the ZNPP. Director General Grossi, appealed for “an immediate halt to the use of force at Enerhodar and called on the military forces operating there to refrain from violence near the nuclear power plant.” By March 4th, Ukraine informed the IAEA that the ZNPP had been shelled overnight, and a fire broke out on site. Although no essential equipment was affected, the first military action      resulted in the activation of the IAEA’s Incident and Emergency Centre in full response. At the end of the day, Ukraine announced that Russian forces had taken control of the ZNPP, but the power plant continued to be operated by its regular staff.  At the time, out of the plant’s six reactor units, two had undergone controlled shut down, two were being held in low power mode, one was shut down for maintenance and one was operating at 60 percent power. ZNPP’s dire situation since March 4, 2022Before the conflict, the ZNPP had access to the grid through four high-voltage power lines, but they have now all fallen victim to the fighting. The back-up power lines connecting the ZNPP to a nearby thermal power station are also down. The plant had also previously temporarily lost direct access to the electricity grid but could then still receive power through available back-up lines, or from one of its reactors that was still operating at the time. The Russian conquest was soon followed by disruptions in the electricity supply to the nuclear power plant, one of the seven indispensable pillars of nuclear safety. Less than two weeks after Russian forces seized the plant, Zaporizhzhia lost one of its three power lines. Since then, mainly as a result of shelling or other military action nearby, the nuclear plant has suffered numerous power cuts, mainly as a result of shelling. Although it has emergency diesel generators that are available to provide backup power, a secure off-site power supply from the grid is integral to ensuring nuclear safety.  Thus, following its first complete external power outage in August, Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi set off from the Agency’s headquarters on an IAEA Support and Assistance Mission to Zaporizhzhia (ISAMZ) to undertake vital safeguards activities at the plant.  That October, Zaporizhzhia lost its last remaining external power source due to renewed shelling, and had to rely on diesel generators again to cool the reactor and support other nuclear safety and security functions. In the next week, Zaporizhzhia lost all external power two more times, receiving electricity from a backup system for the third time in a span of ten days. Similar incidents unfolded in November as well, as the IAEA Director General continued to urge for the critical need to demilitarize the zone.  Based on historical data and industry experience, the nuclear industry aims for an average unplanned outage rate of less than 0.1 per reactor per year which statistically would mean less than one unplanned outage every 10 years. Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant experienced six in the past year alone. Cold shutdown of the ZNPP reactors doesn’t remove the risk – Spent fuel pools need constant coolingThe fission reaction that generates heat in a nuclear power plant is produced by positioning a number of uranium fuel rods in close proximity. Shutting down a nuclear reactor involves inserting control rods between the fuel rods to stop the fission reaction.The reactor is then in cooldown mode as the temperature decreases. According to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, once the temperature is below 200 degrees Fahrenheit (93 Celsius) and the reactor coolant system is at atmospheric pressure, the reactor is in cold shutdown. When the reactor is operating, it requires cooling to absorb the heat and keep the fuel rods from melting together, which would set off a catastrophic chain reaction. When a reactor is in cold shutdown, it no longer needs the same level of circulation. It was announced on September 11, 2022 by Energoatom, operator of the ZNPP that it was shutting down the last operating reactor of the plant’s six reactors, reactor No. 6. The operators have put the reactor in cold shutdown and this shutdown has mitigated a risk. Spent fuel pools also need constant circulation of water to keep them cool. And they need cooling for several years before being put in dry casks. One of the problems in the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan was the emergency generators, which replaced lost off-site power, got inundated with water and failed. In situations like that you get “station blackout” – and that is one of the worst things that could happen. It means no electricity to run the cooling system. In that circumstance, the spent fuel overheats and its zirconium cladding can cause hydrogen bubbles. If you can’t vent these bubbles they will explode, spreading radiation. If there is a loss of outside power, operators will have to rely on emergency generators. But emergency generators are huge machines – finicky, unreliable gas guzzlers. And you still need cooling waters for the generators themselves. The biggest worry is that Ukraine suffers from a sustained power grid failure. The likelihood of this increases during a conflict, because pylons may come down under shelling or gas power plants might get damaged and cease to operate.  According to one of the IAEA’s latest updates (#154, April 21, 2023):  “As a result of the warmer weather, the operator has started to put reactor Unit 6 in cold shutdown which is expected to be reached by the weekend, leaving only Unit 5 in hot shutdown to produce hot water and steam for the site. The two reactors were in hot shutdown during the winter to provide steam and heating to the ZNPP as well as heating to the nearby city of Enerhodar, where many plant personnel live.” The cooling pumps for the spent fuel pools need much less electricity than the cooling pumps on the reactor’s primary and secondary loops, and the spent fuel cooling system could tolerate a brief electricity outage. Now, at least if the plant loses offsite power, the operators won’t have to worry about cooling an operating reactor with cranky diesel generators. However, the plant still needs a reliable source of electricity to cool the six huge spent fuel pools that are inside the containment structures and to remove residual heat from the shutdown reactors. The serious risk of military actions for spent fuel storage racksOne more important factor is that the spent fuel storage racks in the spent fuel pools at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant were compacted to increase capacity, according to a 2017 Ukrainian government report to the IAEA. The greater number and more compacted the stored spent fuel rods, the more heat they generate and so more power is needed to cool them. There is also a dry spent fuel storage facility at the plant. Dry spent fuel storage involves packing spent fuel rods into massive cylinders, or casks, which require no water or other coolants. The casks are designed to keep the fuel rods contained for at least 50 years. However, the casks are not under the containment structures at the plant, and, though they were designed to withstand being crashed into by an airliner, it’s not clear whether artillery shelling and aerial bombardment, particularly repeated attacks, could crack open the casks and release radiation into the grounds of the plant. The closest analogy to this scenario could be a terrorist attack that, according to a seminal study by the National Research Council, could breach a dry cask and potentially result in the release of radioactive material from the spent fuel. This could happen through the dispersion of fuel particles or fragments or the dispersion of radioactive aerosols.  This would be similar to the detonation of a “dirty bomb,” which, depending on wind direction and dispersion radius, could result in radioactive contamination. This in turn could cause serious problems for access to and work in the plant. According to the IAEA’s latest update at the time of writing this analysis (#155, April 28, 2023): “IAEA experts present at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) were again forced to shelter this week after missile attack warnings, with the sound of continued shelling in the distance as military activity continues in the region. In addition, one landmine exploded near the site, Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said today…The increased military presence and activity in the region again underlines the importance and urgency of agreeing on the protection of the plant, Director General Grossi added.”What is going on and what can be doneWe need to begin to realize and emphasize that the need for compromise extends beyond Russia alone. There has been a certain reticence around the acknowledgement that Ukraine, despite being the “aggrieved” country, must also be willing to make concessions.  To designate Russia as the sole provoker of hostilities at the Zaporizhzhia plant is an objective falsity. It would be illogical for Russia to shell the plant once it has already seized control, unless there were provocations from the Ukrainian side. Interestingly, in spite of countless calls to pacify the region from Ukrainian and international diplomatic leaders, The Times of London on April 7, 2023 published a report detailing a failed Ukrainian attack on the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) that took place in October 2022. Ukrainian special forces launched an attack on the ZNPP, deploying US-provided HIMARS rockets at the site — an attempt that ultimately failed because of a stronger Russian counteroffensive. Any sort of projectiles nearing the site of a nuclear power plant is an inherently hazardous and potentially catastrophic assault, regardless of the origin of the launch.   Given the high stakes involved and the potential for irreparable harm, it is imperative for even Ukrainian forces to exercise restraint and refrain from any military action that could escalate the conflict, including airstrikes on Zaporizhzhia, even if it is under Russian control. Taking into account the tumultuous events that have transpired at Zaporizhzhia this past year, for the sake of preventing a global nuclear disaster, it is pertinent to prioritize nuclear safety. Counterintuitive as it may seem, it may be more prudent for Ukraine to strategically withdraw from the ZNPP site and attempt to repatriate it later in the war, when more comprehensive diplomatic negotiations can happen and Russia potentially depletes its resources.  War, in our opinion, is the worst enemy of nuclear safety. This is an unprecedented and volatile situation. Only through active, pragmatic engineering and nuclear diplomacy can an amenable and lasting solution to this vexing problem be found. In the foreword of President John F. Kennedy’s book, Profiles of Courage, his brother, Robert Kennedy said, President Kennedy was fond of quoting Dante that “the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality” (December 18, 1963).  The potential catastrophic consequences of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant conflict demand action and a willingness to take a stance.  For Ukraine, taking a stance can mean stepping back and protecting the world from a nuclear calamity. The failure to do so risks being condemned to the “hottest places in Hell,” not in a figurative sense, but in a literal one. As the memory of the Chornobyl Disaster of 1986 still lingers, the potential danger posed by Zaporizhzhia's six reactors far surpasses that of the single reactor that caused the Chornobyl disaster. In the unfortunate event of an explosion, the repercussions would be hexfold that of Chernobyl's catastrophic aftermath, marking a somber moment in the history of nuclear power. Despite the uncertainty surrounding the outcome of the  Russia-Ukraine conflict, the end of this protracted war is imminent. Even if we are facing problems that, as Robert Kennedy put it, people “fifty, even ten years ago, would not have dreamed would have to be faced,” it is of utmost importance to prioritize humanity above political objectives.  Following Dr. Henry Kissinger’s advice, Ukraine may like to exercise diplomacy, which “is the art of restraining power”, rather than brute force to repatriate its own Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, considering the high risks associated with military action on site. Ukrainians should not shame their military officers if they retreat from Zaporizhzhia, but rather, commend them for their strategic investment into the future prosperity of their country, their continent and possibly, their planet. A true measure of a hero lies not in their victories, but in their willingness to fight for what is right, even in the face of overwhelming odds. Right now, possibly accepting status quo at Zaporizhzhia is, at least in our opinion, what is the most right, but most certainly what is imperative. With Russia’s adamant military politics, Ukraine would be bravely resisting aggression on behalf of the world, on behalf of a future.  We realize that the IAEA has called on Russia and Ukraine to set up a “safety and security protection zone” around the plant. However, the IAEA is a science and engineering inspectorate and technical assistance agency. Negotiating and establishing a protection zone at a nuclear power plant in a war zone is entirely unprecedented and totally different from all past IAEA efforts. Establishing a protection zone requires negotiations and approvals at the highest political and military levels in Kyiv and Moscow.  It could be accomplished through backchannel, Track II-type diplomacy, specifically nuclear safety-focused engineering diplomacy. In the meantime, the IAEA needs strong support from the United Nations Security Council in the form of a resolution, mandate or the creation of a special commission. Admittedly, this is only a stopgap measure. In parallel with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s effort under the leadership of its Director, General Rafael Mariano Grossi, we believe that the U.N. Security Council should immediately empower a special commission to mediate between the warring parties. It could be modeled after the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission in 2000, and appoint a prominent, senior international statesman as its head. We believe the person should be of the caliber and in the mold of the legendary former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Dr. Hans Blix of Sweden. Blix led the agency at the time of the Chernobyl accident in 1986 and commands respect in today’s Russia and Ukraine. The great Prussian military theorist Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz once said: “War is a mere continuation of policy by other means.”  These words still resonate today, reminding us that the quest for peace is not just about putting an end to violence, but about forging a path towards progress and prosperity. It is incumbent upon us to recognize that bringing an end to this conflict is not merely a cessation of violence, but a catalyst for the advancement of policy. As we strive towards resolving conflicts and achieving a lasting peace, it is our duty to recognize that this effort is not merely a tactical move, but a transformative one. By embracing a policy-driven approach, we can internalize the true nature of conflict, and use it as a means to move forward and effect real change. So let us be bold, but at the same time be pragmatic, and let us remember the words of Clausewitz as we work towards a brighter future for all. Let us see war not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end – a means to build a world where conflict is a thing of the past, and policy is the key to progress. President John F. Kennedy’s bold vision for political courage and making compromises in his aforementioned book, Profiles of Courage, also beautifully applies to this very context of Ukraine preserving its principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity while tactfully compromising with Russia over safeguarding Zaporizhzhia: “We shall need compromises in the days ahead, to be sure. But these will be, or should be, compromises of issues, not of principles. We can compromise our political positions, but not ourselves. We can resolve the clash of interests without conceding our ideas... Compromise does not mean cowardice. Indeed it is frequently the compromisers and conciliators who are faced with the severest tests of political courage as they oppose the extremist views of their constituents.”

The political crisis currently experienced by Israel has its origins in the structure of the political system of this country, institutionalized since the twenties of the last century, in British Palestine, through the installation of an electoral system first adopted by the Jewish community authorities, which was growing with immigration, and then by the State of Israel since its establishment in 1948. It was a parliamentary proportional representative system, with a single national list, with an entry band for Parliament that varied from 1% of the votes to the current 3.25%. This system worked regularly while the big parties of the time –Labor and Likud (liberal nationalist)– received a large percentage of votes that allowed them to choose minor partners for the government coalition and at the same time they were led by politicians who possessed high levels of legitimacy by their foundational roles in Israel, such as were Ben Gurion and Begin. Around the 1980s, electoral parity began to emerge between the possible government coalitions led by both parties, and this situation gave rise to governments of national unity led by Shamir and Peres. Later, the big parties lose electoral support, and the government coalitions are increasingly weak. This is because the leader of the party that wins the first electoral majority wins just over a quarter of the votes, while to achieve a coalition that includes more than 50% of the parliamentary seats, he must pay high 'prices' to the small parties and depends more and more on them in order not to lose the government. This is the current case of the Netanyahu government. The attempt at electoral reform in the 1990s, which separated the election of the Prime Minister from the parliamentary election - from the coalition supporting the government - failed, as it reinforced both ideologically and electorally the smaller parties. Ultimately, at the beginning of this century, the previous system was restored with an increase in the percentage of votes required for entry into Parliament. At the same time, Israel lacks a written Constitution and instead has a series of basic laws that outline the structure of the State and safeguard the rights of citizens and minorities. In the 1990s, the Israeli constitutional void was filled through judicial activism by the Supreme Court, which carried out a process of judicializing politics and exercised its authority to limit government actions and legislation that it deemed contrary to the prevailing legal system. Some politicians viewed this as an attempt by the Supreme Court to assert supremacy and curtail the popular will expressed through parliamentary elections. Meanwhile, the weakness of the major political parties and the personalistic and populist tendencies - which were accelerated during the years when electoral reform led to the separation of the election of the Prime Minister from that of the Parliament (Knesset) - led to Israel holding five national elections between 2019 and 2022, in which the major parties had great difficulty in generating stable government coalitions. The latest election, on November 1, 2022, granted the first majority to the Likud, and its leader, Netanyahu, formed a government coalition that they themselves described as "completely right-wing." The coalition includes, outside the Likud, three ultra-Orthodox parties and two religious nationalist parties. One problem with it is that it contains many ideological contradictions among its members and also generates serious disputes over the leadership of each of the sectors. An additional problem is that it includes a party - the Jewish Power party, led by Ben Gvir - that is openly anti-Arab in racist terms. Among the electoral proposals of this bloc of parties, which make up the current government, the one for judicial reform stood out, whose central content was to remove from the Supreme Court of Israel its role and authority with respect to the revision of legislation, as well as over the actions of the Government and its power to curb everything that it considered undemocratic and in opposition to the existing basic legislation. This would be accomplished through a series of laws that would change the judge election commission, removing the Supreme Court's right to veto judge appointments, and introducing a representative majority of the governing coalition on this commission. Another proposed law would give Parliament, with a 61-vote majority, the power to override any political decision of the Supreme Court. Beyond these, it is proposed to weaken the control authority that the Attorney General's Office has regarding appointments and government acts, and a series of measures that would practically eliminate the political powers of the Judiciary within the current Israeli system of checks and balances (brakes and balances designed to prevent any of the branches of the State from acquiring supremacy over the other two). The argument of Netanyahu and his coalition allies is that they have the power to carry out this judicial reform or revolution, since the people have wanted it and have manifested it through their vote in the last election. Beyond this, Netanyahu and his allies make “identity politics” arguments, which maintain that Israel, although governed by Likud-led coalitions, remains in the hands of the former Ashkenazi elites originating from historic Labor; and this means the discrimination of Eastern Jews from the institutions of power, such as the Supreme Court and the judicial system, the academic elite, the financial elite, the high-tech elite, and even certain military elites. The speed with which Netanyahu and the government coalition attempted to legislate this reform caused an unexpected popular protest to emerge from civil society, without clear political leadership, as the parliamentary opposition was practically dragged along by the popular protest. In addition, it should be noted that the protest is focused not only on the reform itself but also on Netanyahu's personal interest, as he is facing three corruption trials and the disqualification of Deri, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox Sephardic party Shas, from serving as a minister in the current coalition. The massive protests and strong international criticism, especially from the US and the European Union, along with a climate of instability that weakens the value of the national currency - the Shekel -, the withdrawal of capital, and threats in the area of internal and international security, have strengthened the protests and created coalitions among sectors that seemed irreconcilable before these recent events. Thus, reservists in elite units have stated that they will not continue to serve in their military roles under a Netanyahu dictatorship since, if everything depends on a parliamentary majority without balance between the powers, that majority forming the government coalition would delegate its parliamentary authority to him and the government would be in the hands of the prime minister, whom the protest activists consider a future dictator. Faced with this, the massive protests have included blockades of central roads and the paralysis of activities. Added to all this is the fact that the Minister of Security (Defense), Gallant, demanded that Netanyahu stop the reform legislation because the security situation - facing Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza - during this month of Ramadan is perceived as dangerous and it is a bad period to add internal instability. Netanyahu prevented Gallant from making a public statement explaining all of this, although Gallant did so while Netanyahu was on an official visit to London. Netanyahu reacted by declaring that Gallant would no longer lead the Ministry of Security (Defense), but he did not send him the dismissal letter. When Netanyahu fired Gallant on Sunday night, a large crowd took to the streets across the country to protest this measure, and the next morning, in a special meeting, the Histadrut (General Federation of Labor), in coordination with the associations of industrialists, merchants, and bank directors, declared a general strike that paralyzed Ben Gurion airport and large sectors of the entire country. As a result of all this and after a day of intense negotiations within the government coalition - facing the religious nationalist parties, who, due to past issues and settlement problems in the West Bank, were the ones who most demanded the reform, and alongside the Minister of Justice, Levin, who is the author of the reform plan - Netanyahu declared that the reform is on hold for the next month to make way for a conciliatory negotiation that produces an agreed reform of the Israeli legal system, in negotiations that will be guided by President Herzog. It is clear that legislating a Constitution at this time, with the multiple fractures of Israeli society aligning in two polarized blocs, is a pipe dream. It is also necessary to understand that behind the attempt at judicial reform-revolution, there is an ineffective political system that must be reformed and updated in order to face the multiple challenges of Israel in the 21st century, which are very different from those of a century ago when this system began to be institutionalized.

AbstractThis essay analyzes the failure of Vladimir Putin’s military in Ukraine in terms of five key factors. The first of these is Putin’s monopolization of control over the armed forces, which has driven critical voices and honest debates out of military and defense matters. Second is the failure of reform: Efforts to overhaul the bloated, ill-equipped post-Soviet military have not produced a twenty-first century fighting force that can match the world’s best armies or counter their capabilities. Third, Russia’s military has been unable to attract talented young people. Fourth, Russia’s mammoth defense industry produces too few weapons, and those it does turn out cannot match sophisticated Western arms. Finally, the operations in Georgia, Crimea, and Syria were conducted against feeble adversaries and said zero about how Russian forces would perform in a conventional land war against a resolute, well-armed enemy. In short, the Russian military is a reflection of the state that created it: Autocratic, security-obsessed, and teeming with hypercentralized decisionmaking, dysfunctional relations between civilian and military authorities, inefficiency, corruption, and brutality. Before and even shortly after Russian president Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, most experts predicted that Russia’s military would make short work of its southwestern neighbor’s defenders. The conventional wisdom held that while Russia’s forces had fallen on hard times after the Cold War, Putin’s more than two decades of rule had transformed them into an effective military machine. In early 2014, Russian troops in unmarked green-camouflage uniforms had taken Crimea from Ukraine with little bloodshed or even exertion. Two years later, one analyst called the intervention of the Russian Air Force on the side of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria “the most spectacular military-political event of our time.” In 2021, another commentator pointed to successful campaigns not only in Ukraine and Syria but also in Georgia (2008) while crediting Putin with having “overseen a thorough transformation of the Russian Armed Forces.” Flawed appraisals such as these are based on a misunderstanding of Russia’s military landscape. The Russian military is a quintessential reflection of the state that created it: Autocratic, security-obsessed, and teeming with hypercentralized decisionmaking, dysfunctional relations between civilian and military authorities, inefficiency, corruption, and brutality. We should note five key points. The first is that Putin’s monopolization of control over the armed forces and refusal to allow an independent legislature have driven critical voices and searching, honest debates out of military and defense matters. Second is the failure of reform—as the world can now see, efforts to overhaul the bloated, ill-equipped post-Soviet military have not produced a twenty-first–century fighting force that can match the world’s best armies or counter their capabilities. Third, Russia’s military has been unable to attract talented young people. Senior officers stubbornly refuse to delegate authority, robbing juniors of chances to develop initiative and leadership qualities, while most noncommissioned officers (NCOs) and their troops are poorly prepared. Fourth, Russia’s mammoth defense industry—largely owned and run by the state—produces too few weapons, and those it does turn out cannot match sophisticated Western arms. Finally, the operations in Georgia, Crimea, and Syria proved nothing: They were conducted against feeble adversaries and said zero about how Russian forces would perform in a conventional land war against a resolute, well-armed enemy. In a constitutional democracy, the legislature and the executive are both involved in controlling the armed forces. The chain of command is codified, as are respective institutional responsibilities vis-`a-vis the military. Laws likewise prescribe the potential uses of the military in various domestic and external scenarios. The national legislature passes the defense budget and supervises its disbursement, the chief executive acts as commander-in-chief, the defense minister is not a serving officer, and civilians—including those in the media and defense-focused NGOs—offer advice and scrutiny. In authoritarian states, the executive directly controls the military while the national legislature (if one exists) and regional authorities have no say. There is no safe place for independent security-policy experts, scholars, or journalists to function. The Kremlin runs the Russian armed forces, and today the Kremlin means Putin. He has few confidants. Since 2012, his principal advisors in the security realm have been Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu (who has no military background) and General Valery Gerasimov, the armed forces chief of staff. They serve entirely at the pleasure of the president—who summarily dismissed each man’s predecessor. Putin’s frustration with the Defense Ministry’s handling of the “special military operation” in Ukraine (to say “war” or “invasion” can bring a Russian citizen years in jail) has led to the marginalization of Shoigu, who nonetheless has kept his job despite strident criticism from prominent Russian nationalists. When Putin came to power in 2000, the military and its top brass held considerable sway over foreign and defense policy, military reform included. Since then, Putin has wrestled control of all military and security forces into his own hands. During Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov’s tenure (2007–12), bloodless purges removed from the general staff officers who disagreed with the Kremlin’s ideas about military reform, who were thought too independent-minded and unwilling to give Putin constant support. Serdyukov cut the Central Military Administration staff by more than 30 percent, mostly getting rid of generals and colonels. For the last dozen years, Russian generals have been Putin’s servants. Their careers depend not merely on their professional competence but on their personal loyalty to him. On paper the Defense Ministry answers to parliament and its committees on defense and security, but in practice the ministry answers to the Presidential Administration alone. The president decides whether, when, where, and how to deploy the military, at home or abroad. Putin is a centralizer; while Russia remains nominally federal, local councils have lost capacity to perform even traditional tasks such as calling up reservists, as recent events have shown. Journalists who have dared to write objectively on defense issues have been hit with heavy jail time even for open-source reporting. Membership in NATO—a defensive alliance espousing liberal-democratic principles—may constrain an authoritarian such as Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán from seeking to “adjust” his country’s borders, but Putin faces no such obstacle. He dominates the Collective Security Treaty Organization (comprising ex-Soviet republics), while the “dictators’ club” that is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in no way constrains his grip on the Russian military. For more than a decade, Russia’s army has been indisputably Putin’s army; no trace of institutionally balanced civilian authority, transparency, or accountability impedes his control over it.Reform InterruptusAt the Cold War’s end, Russian political and military leaders were aware of their forces’ shortcomings. For most of the 1990s, however, little happened beyond a reduction in force size. Generals opposed structural changes, political elites lacked the will to push back, and resources were scarce. The Russian army won the First and Second Chechen Wars (1994–96; 1999–2009) against a tiny breakaway region, but with an operational performance that was embarrassing. The August 2008 defeat of Georgia, another small and underfunded neighbor, also underlined Russia’s military deficiencies. Systems for command, control, communications, and intelligence performed so poorly that at times officers had to borrow war correspondents’ cellphones to reach troops. The air force admitted that it had four aircraft downed during the twelve-day conflict (the Georgians claimed to have shot down 21), losses that would have easily been avoided had unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones) been on hand to fly reconnaissance. Russian sources acknowledged that tanks and warplanes had seen no overhaul since the Afghan War (1979–89), “smart” weapons and modern communications systems had been unavailable, and the Defense Ministry had relied on “favorite suppliers” known for making obsolete armaments. In response to such weaknesses, the reform program begun in 2008 sought to turn a Soviet-legacy military still based on mass mobilization into a leaner, more professional force ready for combat. Even if Ukraine has laid bare their limits, the changes made since 2008 have been considerable. With carte blanche from Putin, Defense Minister Serdyukov pensioned off or cashiered enough stubborn senior officers to break institutional resistance. The military’s structure was rationalized and streamlined. The number of large units shrank from 1,890 to 172, while 65 military colleges became ten and sixteen Soviet-era military districts became four. A main purpose of the defense reforms was to bridge the deep qualitative gap between Russian and NATO military personnel that the brief Russo-Georgian War had highlighted, or at least to improve the training and combat readiness of the nonelite troops who have always filled most Russian units. Modernizers also wanted to stabilize the army’s troop strength at a million. Russian official data are best treated with skepticism, but it appears that the total personnel strength of the Russian armed forces (land, naval, and air) has been between 700,000 and 900,000 over the past decade. Serdyukov reduced the size of the officer corps, phased out praporshchiki (roughly equivalent to warrant officers), and drastically increased the number of “contract” (professional) soldiers. In a bid to make professional soldiering more attractive, money went to improve the working conditions, housing, welfare, and pensions of servicemen and their families. Shoigu carried on the reform process, raising the number of contract soldiers to 410,00 by 2020, when conscripts in uniform numbered only 260,000. The conscripts are a token of Russia’s limitations: The Kremlin would like to have a fully professional military but cannot afford it, so the draft is needed to fill the ranks. The reform plan called for a half-million contract soldiers by 2019, but only 405,000 were said to have been signed up and that figure is likely inflated. As of 2012, contract soldiers were paid 25 percent more than the average Russian civilian, and military benefits were comparatively generous as well. But inflation has been a key problem. Its erosion of contract soldiers’ pay and benefits has made military careers less enticing and driven down applicant quality: The military has been chasing not only fewer but less desirable recruits. Without able contract recruits, the dream of a high-quality, NCO-enabled Russian military can never come true. A traditional weakness of Soviet or Russian armies going back to czarist days has been the absence of career NCOs. A modern military relies on professional “noncoms”: They enjoy significant autonomy; keep commissioned officers and enlisted personnel working together; and give to the troops training, discipline, and (not least) hands-on leadership “at the sharp end.” Russia’s military reform recognized the need for a professional NCO force; within ten years after the Georgian campaign, contractors predominated in what were considered NCO billets. But questions remained about the depth of their training and the degree of initiative accorded them in an army where the idea of delegating authority downward has long been a foreign concept. In 2009, the Defense Ministry established an NCO academy, but the two-thousand graduates that it produces each year do not seem to have been enough to transform army culture. In 2010, seventy-thousand of the junior officers whom Serdyukov had discharged had to be recommissioned in order to keep doing what in the West would be classed as NCOs’ jobs. The available data suggest, and the war in Ukraine has confirmed, that Russia is a long way from fielding the kind of proficient NCO force that is essential to a modern military, and which Ukraine itself is increasingly displaying through its own performance under arms. Reform never even touched other areas. These include combat medicine, something that Western armies have worked hard on in recent decades. Quickly bringing together wounded soldiers and critical care is key, but the Russian military with its history of tolerating high casualties has focused little on this. Young Russian army doctors who resigned their commissions protested that they had been issued “practically nothing” to work with in terms of equipment and could “provide only first aid.”Generals and SoldiersLack of trust in subordinates and reluctance to delegate mark every command level of the Russian military. The Soviet-era practice of waiting for orders to filter down from headquarters—a custom meant to leave no room for independent thinking and creativity—often results in missed opportunities on the battlefield. Serdyukov dismissed or eased out about a third of senior officers, including the last group of critical thinkers who might have disagreed with Kremlin policy. He made senior generals’ promotion prospects depend on their ability to read the signs emanating from the Presidential Administration. Even at the top of the military hierarchy, generals are wary of taking initiative for fear of angering superiors who now include Putin himself. Nonetheless, it seems that some in the high command did question Putin’s plan going in, especially the idea of a lightning strike to seize Kyiv, warning that Russian troops and equipment were not up to the task. When the doubters turned out to be correct, the Kremlin apparently allowed these generals to draw up a new strategy. They then turned the conflict into a war of attrition based on the old Russian standby of overwhelming firepower. When massed artillery and aerial bombardment failed too, as fighting around the vital southern city of Kherson and Ukrainian breakthroughs in other sectors showed, Putin shook up his roster of senior commanders three times. In April, in June, and again in September, the Kremlin changed generals in search of better combat performance. In early October, Putin gave General Sergei Surovikin the task of turning the war around even as Ukrainian forces carried on with counterstrikes around the flanks and into the rear areas of surprised Russian formations. Surovikin’s qualifications include experience in complex combat environments as well as a reputation for “total ruthlessness,” “corruption and brutality,” and mistreating subordinates. In other words, he promises to be a perfect fit for Putin and his army. We can also see Putin’s distrust of his high command in his ever deeper personal involvement in military decisions. As the Ukrainians counterattacked in September 2022, he told his generals that he himself would now set strategy. His micromanagement of the war extends to making low-level tactical decisions and giving orders to frontline generals from the Kremlin. According to Western intelligence sources, the Russian president “is making operational decisions at the level of a colonel or brigadier,” helping to determine the movements of forces and ordering stands “at all costs” (an approach that leads to troop and equipment losses as units banned from making tactical retreats fall prey to encirclement). Putin’s heightened involvement likely stems from his realization that early in the war his commanders kept him in the dark about how badly Russian forces were faring against unexpectedly nimble and fierce Ukrainian resistance. But should Putin, who has no military background, ever have expected his forces to do well in Ukraine? Starting in 2008, military education and training of all ranks did improve. There were more drills, including large-scale joint exercises featuring tens of thousands of personnel from different Russian services. Beefed-up flight hours for military aviators and improved maintenance routines for their aircraft reduced mechanical failures and combat losses in Georgia and Syria. To put all this in context, however, it must be stressed that outside a few elite units, Russian training and maintenance standards across the board have never been more than modest, and hardly reach the levels that characterize the world’s top militaries. Despite pay raises, the Russian armed forces have been unable to attract the best and brightest of young Russians in the face of competition from the civilian labor market. Housing remains a problem for officers with families, and for years pay has not kept up with inflation. In many units, conditions are poor and junior officers are treated with contempt as superiors play favorites. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many officers with employment opportunities outside the military resign their commissions. The 2018 decision to revive the post of zampolit (political officer) in units as small as infantry companies harks back to the Soviet era and signals that the state doubts its soldiers’ loyalty. Mandatory military service has been unpopular. Many of those who can afford to avoid it (by bribing army doctors to declare them unfit) do so, while the most desperate flee the country or even deliberately injure themselves to evade the draft. The brutal hazing of raw recruits, sometimes with tragic results, remains a problem despite efforts to curtail it. In 2008, the period of mandatory active service was halved to a single year, which means that after training a soldier is available for just six months of duty. Most troops that the army considers combat-ready are not draftees, though (perhaps surprisingly) conscripts make up about a quarter of elite commando units. The army planned to reduce its intake of conscripts to 150,000 by 2021, but missed that goal. As the Ukraine war grinds on, unwilling draftees will become more common, and the army will increasingly have to rely on poorly trained and motivated soldiers. Putin’s 21 September 2022 call-up of 300,000 reservists put new focus on manpower issues just ten days before the beginning of the fall conscription period. Many experts believe that mobilizing hundreds of thousands of reservists will prove exceedingly difficult. So far, the call-up has fallen disproportionately on ethnic minorities. These include nomadic reindeer herders from northeastern Yakutia (5,600 kilometers from Kyiv) as well as the Crimean Tatars, long repressed by Soviet and Russian regimes and vocal opponents of the peninsula’s annexation. Even if those mobilized are actual reservists, it is likely that only a fraction of them have had regular training in the years since they left active duty. It will be months before these troops can add to Moscow’s war effort. In a September 29 video call with advisors, Putin publicly admitted “mistakes” such as call-ups of fathers with children, people with chronic illnesses, and some over military age. Mobilized soldiers, some of them middle-aged, have complained that they were kept in “cattle conditions,” had to buy their own food, and received ill-fitting boots and uniforms as well as old, poorly kept weapons. The president left it to regional governors and officials below them to fix the problems, not mentioning that his own policies have undermined local governments’ capacities. During the first week after the mobilization declaration, at least 200,000 young Russians and their families absconded to neighboring countries including Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia, as well as farther afield. The absconders were joining millions of their fellow citizens, many of them young and highly educated, who have voted with their feet against Putin’s war. In recent years, elite troops and private military firms in Moscow’s employ have done much of Russia’s fighting. The best known among the latter is the Wagner Group, a mercenary outfit possibly named for the German composer and established in 2014 by Dmitri Utkin, a former special-forces lieutenant-colonel, and Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch from Putin’s inner circle with multiple Soviet-era criminal convictions. The unit is allegedly overseen by Russia’s military-intelligence agency, the GRU, in which Utkin served. How Wagner gets paid remains murky, but funds likely come from state sources as well as oligarchs. Wagner operatives in their insignia-free uniforms were the “little green men” who first appeared during Putin’s Crimea takeover, and since then have taken part in armed conflicts in Syria as well as several African states including Libya, Mali, Mozambique, and Sudan. Reportedly, more than a thousand Wagner mercenaries have deployed to Luhansk Oblast in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and have suffered heavy casualties. Wherever they go, human-rights violations and war crimes follow.Failings of a State-Run Defense IndustryThe Russian state is the main owner of the industries that yield most of its income (energy, banking, arms, and transport) and is directly involved in running them. As state-owned corporations, defense companies enjoy cheap credit, debt relief, and freedom from competitive market pressures. Although the state has invested heavily in the defense industry and has seen success in some areas, on balance Russia’s arms makers have failed to narrow the distance—and especially the quality gap—between their wares and those of the world’s leading weapons producers. Starting around 2005, Moscow’s defense reforms and ambitious armaments programs began to demand serious military-spending hikes. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London broadly agree that the Russian military budget swelled from about US$20 billion in the late 1990s to more than four times that amount in 2015, before subsiding to its current official figure of $65.9 billion (or 4.1 percent of Russia’s 2021 Gross Domestic Product). In nominal terms, this is less than a tenth of annual U.S. defense spending, but there is reason to think that these figures grossly understate the real volume of Russian military expenditures. Using Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) measures, Moscow’s effective military expenditures may be as high as $200 billion per year. In recent years, only the United States, China, and India have had defense budgets that exceed Russia’s. Russia’s State Armament Program of 2011–20 aimed to breathe new life into the defense industry by commissioning it to manufacture or refurbish 70 percent of the military’s weaponry. Official sources claim that the industry achieved this. It developed new artillery, introduced some highly accurate cruise missiles, delivered several hundred new tanks (including the highly touted T-90M), and updated hundreds more with improved armor and electronics. Almost five-hundred new fighter jets, mainly Su-27s and MiG-31s armed with radar-guided missiles, were to boost Russian airpower to a new level, with hundreds of new combat helicopters and modernized older warplanes securing Moscow’s domination of the skies. The latest State Armament Program, which began in 2020 and is to end in 2027, is more modest and focuses on advancing mobility, logistics, and the optimization and standardization of extant weapons systems. Over the past decade, Russia has become the world’s second-largest arms exporter behind the United States. Russia’s share of sales in this market from 2017 through 2021 was 19 percent while the U.S. share was 39 percent. Seeing the mediocre performance and vulnerability to Western weapons (such as the U.S.-made Javelin antitank missile) of Russian arms in Ukraine, countries that have been buying military hardware from Russia (the top three customers are China, India, and Egypt) may think twice about purchasing from Moscow again. The systemic and structural challenges that beset Russia’s defense industry are not going away. Supply-chain problems delay deliveries. Money to replace outdated machine tools and pay for research and development is lacking, while neglect of quality control is common. A recent analysis concluded: Centralized and inefficient bureaucracies, weak intellectual property rights and rule of law, poor investment climate, pervasive corruption, and insufficient funding are among the problems that hinder swift progress in fields that are particularly dependent on creating a breeding ground for creativity and the free exchange of ideas.Russian arms makers are a long way from producing weapons that can compete with Western weapons in technological sophistication and general quality. Large-scale building of precision-guided munitions, targeting systems, and heavy-strike long-range drones is beyond the reach of Russian industry. The onset of conflict with Ukraine in 2014 cost the Russian military-industrial establishment its longstanding and beneficial ties to Ukrainian weapons producers. Now sanctions have cut off Russia’s access to the Western optics and electronics that are key to advanced modern weapons. Expanding existing factories will be hard, as funds and other requisites are not there. Ambitious plans announced with much fanfare and bluster have often come to little or nothing. In 2008, the first year of military reform, there was a proposal to create autonomous mobile forces teaming airborne, naval-infantry, and special-forces components, but nothing has come of it. The widely publicized program to produce a fifth-generation fighter, the Sukhoi Su-57, is now more than twenty years old and has generated nothing but a few prototypes. The Su-57 is the first stealth aircraft Russia has ever attempted. Meant to be capable of both air-to-air and air-to-ground combat, it is supposed to be Russia’s answer to the U.S.-built Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, thousands of which are being produced for the United States and multiple allies around the world, including nine or more NATO countries. Technical setbacks, India’s decision to pull its financing, and a December 2019 crash (the first publicly known) make it doubtful that the Su-57 will be ready for full-scale production anytime soon. Since Soviet times, the security sector has been among the most troubled parts of the economy when it comes to graft and corruption In the twenty-first century, Russia has become, in Karen Dawisha’s fitting formulation, “Putin’s kleptocracy.” Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for 2021 gave Russia a corruption score of 29, putting it far closer on the 100-point honesty scale to the world’s most corrupt country (South Sudan with an 11) than to its least corrupt (Denmark, Finland, and New Zealand with an 88 each). As defense minister, Serdyukov made it a major goal to root out or at least curb the bribery and fraud often tied to arms procurement, as well as the misuse of funds set aside to improve living conditions for the troops. Putin fired Serdyukov in 2012 because of the latter’s links to a Defense Ministry official charged with embezzlement. Large-scale corruption continues, with often hundreds of millions of dollars disappearing. A Russian military prosecutor recently admitted that about a fifth of the Defense Ministry’s budget was stolen; other officials said that it could be as high as two-fifths. Few experts would disagree with former Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev’s recent claim that the corruption—and the fear of telling Putin about it—had left Russia with a “Potemkin military.”Under Arms and UnderwhelmingHow are Russian forces doing in Ukraine? It is impossible to discern precisely because most Western sources are Ukraine-friendly, while both Ukrainian and Russian media have incentives to bend the truth. That said, Russia’s military performance has been far below what most experts expected. Experts have been surprised because their assumptions were faulty. The Russian military’s track record going back to 2008 may have looked impressive on the surface, but it was compiled against weak adversaries. Georgia is very small, and its miniscule army was poorly organized to boot. In Crimea, Moscow’s troops faced little resistance. In Syria, much was made of Russian airpower’s renewed capabilities, but it was up against insurgents whose air-defense capabilities were modest at best. Russia also sent into these lesser-scale operations mostly elite troops and special forces, not average soldiers. In short, the Russian military experienced nothing like the demanding combat environment that it has met with in Ukraine. As of this writing, the war in Ukraine is almost a year old. The course of the fighting has undercut the many experts who claimed that post-2008 Russia had clawed its way into the first class of the world’s military powers. So far, Russian forces from the top down have failed most of the tests facing them in Ukraine. Military planners seldom do well to underestimate an opponent. After seizing Crimea, Putin predicted that Kyiv could be taken in two weeks; in 2022, he shrank that figure to two days. The Russian high command underestimated how many soldiers it would need to attack Ukraine while overestimating the number of locals who would welcome them. Conquering a city such as Kyiv, with its three-million people spread over 839 square kilometers split by a large river and its tributaries, would have required a massive number of collaborators. Once the plan for a quick air-mobile strike at the Ukrainian capital’s downtown collapsed amid firefights with fast-reacting Ukrainian forces at Antonov Airport northwest of the city on February 24 and 25, Russia’s campaign fell apart. Misconceived operational plans, careless logistics, and the lack of combined-arms coordination all suggest deep deficiencies in Russia’s high command. The invaders handled their tanks poorly, trying to drive them forward without proper logistical support or infantry escorts to keep Ukrainian drones and ambush teams at bay. In the skies, overcautious Russian pilots “punched below their weight,” failing to translate their superior airpower into gains on the ground. Russian troops struggled to use their communications systems and failed to disrupt their enemies’ access to satellite signals. Stories of Ukrainian soldiers using smartphones in combat to call their trainers in the United Kingdom for advice, like the ability of those defending the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol to stay in electronic touch with Ukrainian intelligence throughout the five-week siege in April and May, hint at Russian ineptitude. Troops’ general sloppiness—their neglect of small but important tasks such as properly inflating truck tires, for instance—proved costly to Russia’s war effort. As the war drags on, it is unlikely that fresh Russian officers and soldiers dispatched to Ukraine will be better prepared and equipped, or will perform better, than those whom they replace. Nuclear threats could easily backfire: If Russia were to “go atomic,” it might lose its remaining allies, misgauge wind direction and have fallout drift back over Russian territory, or find itself directly at war with a NATO alliance capable (even without nuclear weapons) of inflicting massive destruction on Russian military assets. Further, Russia’s stocks of tactical and medium-range nuclear warheads are, like many Russian weapons, Soviet leftovers. They have been sitting in scattered storage sites for decades. The work of rendering these warheads operational would involve much effort and risk of human error. There is a good chance it would also be detected by Western intelligence given the known locations of stockpiles, the limited number of units even capable (on paper) of handling and firing these warheads, and the travel distances to the theater of conflict that would be involved. The underlying theme of the assault on Ukraine has been the yawning gap between what Putin and his forces want to do, on the one hand, and what they can do, on the other. Ambition is not ability. A Revitalized Ukrainian Army Just a few years ago, Ukraine’s military itself was facing daunting challenges. An ambitious reform program was launched in 2006, but it failed amid political instability, corruption, and inadequate resources eaten by inflation and the 2008 global financial crisis. This top-down overhaul was also poorly conceived: Ukraine was striving to create an all-professional force with cutting-edge technology and advanced command and control in defiance of institutional and funding constraints. Moscow’s 2014 aggression against Crimea and the Donbas shook authorities out of this reverie and into a push for swift change in the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU). Under President Petro Poroshenko (2014–19), naval and defense-industry reform succumbed to infighting and embezzlement, but the creation of an autonomous special-forces command with four-thousand troops was a success. The 2014 events showed that large numbers of soldiers would be needed to defend Ukraine against Russia. The draft, abolished in 2013, was brought back in 2014. More innovatively, the AFU also became a community-based military. The financially strapped government appealed to civil society, the large Ukrainian diaspora around the world, and ordinary people to help fund the AFU and to join its ranks. New organizations cropped up “to equip, uniform, protect, and improve the Ukrainian Army as soon as possible” and to supply much-needed military equipment—their donations made up 4 percent of the Ukrainian defense budget in 2015. Another significant change that partly relieved the AFU’s manpower shortage was the creation of volunteer battalions that already by 2014 comprised more than ten-thousand fighters. While raising some disciplinary concerns, they proved effective in the conflict against separatists in eastern Ukraine and are likely to play a consequential defense role for years to come. Finally, Western countries led by the United States and Britain but also including (remarkably) Germany have sent lethal military aid that makes Kyiv’s forces measurably more effective on the battlefield. As of mid-October 2022, Washington had offered about $66 billion—a sum more than eleven times larger than Ukraine’s entire 2021 defense budget. The help has been high in both quantity and quality, including as it has sophisticated items such as U.S.-made M142 HIMARS mobile precision multiple-rocket launchers, British- and U.S.-made M777 155-millimeter howitzers, various types of UAVs, and more. Between 2015 and February 2022, active-duty British soldiers trained more than 22,000 Ukrainian recruits in western Ukraine through a program called Operation Orbital. As of September 2022, instructors from Canada, Denmark, Finland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Sweden were joining U.K. soldiers to give accelerated training to thousands more Ukrainians at camps in Britain. The programs teach junior officers, NCOs, and soldiers to think critically and make independent frontline decisions without waiting for permission from commanders sitting at distant headquarters. Ukraine’s military has been everything that Putin’s army has not. The smaller country has managed to convert its own recent reforms and massive Western aid into combat advantages. Defending their own soil, Ukrainian volunteer and professional soldiers alike have excelled in drive, courage, and resourcefulness. President Volodymyr Zelensky has been a revelation: Ukrainians are fortunate to have been led by a clear-thinking and uncompromising figure who knows that this is a contest between democracy and tyranny. The war has made Ukrainian nationhood (long denied by Russian nationalists of Putin’s type) undeniable and has underscored the larger but too-easily-forgotten truth that freedom is not free. Opposition to the invasion has also brought Western democracies closer together as members of NATO, which is adding Finland and Sweden to its ranks. If NATO continues to stand united behind Ukraine, David will have very good chances against Goliath.

In 2023, Russia faces three crucial issues—President Vladimir Putin’s plans for his future, the battle between the hawks and pragmatists in the elite, and looming government personnel changes—that could reshape the country.  More than ten months on from the invasion of Ukraine, the contrast between the scale of the external shocks faced by Russia and the relative inertia inside the country is striking. Despite military failings and punishing sanctions, most Russians have gone on with their lives as though nothing is happening, while the elites have tried not to think about what tomorrow may bring, instead putting their full trust in Putin. However, 2023 could prove a dramatic year for Russia and be make-or-break for its leadership’s resistance to change, with three internal questions in particular promising to shape the country’s development for decades to come.  First, Putin will have to decide whether to run for re-election in 2024. Russia’s constitution was amended in 2020 to allow him to remain president until 2036. He may alternatively name a successor, though to leave enough time for campaigning, he would have to do so by the end of December 2023. For now, no one is sure what his plans are. This is by design, as Putin prefers to keep his elites in the dark. Indeed, in the summer of 2020, he justified the constitutional changes that made it possible to extend his rule as a guard against unrest among the elites, who he said “need to work, not look around for successors.” Following the revision of the constitution, both the presidential administration and elites operated on the assumption that Putin would hold on to power indefinitely. Today, the key question is how his calculations have been changed by the war and, in particular, the fact that it has not gone according to plan. Some believe that in unleashing grave problems and threats, the war has strengthened Putin’s resolve to stay in power beyond 2024. Given his contempt for “political deserters”—those who quit their posts in tough times—he is unlikely to become one of them. Others feel that not only is Putin open to giving up power, he may see doing so as part of a solution to the conflict with Ukraine. Even if that appears to be wishful thinking, part of the elite clearly hopes that such a reset will suffice to end Russia’s recent string of setbacks. However, both sides lack certainty about his designs. In any case, Putin is famously fond of making decisions at the eleventh hour, often based on situational factors and in defiance of popular expectations. The 2024 problem, then, has become a major source of anxiety for the elites. It will do more than any other issue to influence the events of 2023, as the political class tries to work out Putin’s intentions and plan around them with an eye to minimizing risk. A second, related issue is the growing schism between those in the elites who favor escalating the war, and those who warn against doing so. This divide emerged after Russia’s withdrawal from the Kharkiv region and relinquishing of the key city of Kherson, and was fueled by Ukraine’s strike on the bridge to Crimea, the referendums held on annexing occupied parts of Ukraine, and the authorities’ subsequent ambiguity on what Russia’s official borders are.  The pragmatists, who consist of technocrats as well as mid-ranking officials in the military and the security services, are united in their conviction that the war should be paused and rethought, and that the country should opt for a more realistic policy in keeping with its rather limited capacities. The hawks call for Russia to not only unleash its full military might against Ukraine, but also to radically restructure its own political and economic system. The latter plank makes theirs a revolutionary faction (albeit pro-Putin, for now at least) whose aim is to supplant a government they see as stalled. Their struggle for supremacy is set to be one of 2023’s key political fights, and one that hinges largely on events on the battlefield: the worse Russia performs militarily, the more vicious the pragmatists’ battle with the hawks. The Kremlin will find its preferred mechanism for suppressing dissent—repression—ill-fitting if used against the regime’s loyalists. The hawks will take the offensive, targeting the military brass and politicians, as Yevgeny Prigozhin, the notorious head of the Wagner private military company, already has. The pragmatists, meanwhile, will express doom and gloom about the direction of the conflict, seeking to scale back Moscow’s war goals and force recognition that victory is impossible. Their message will be well received by non-military elites, who were taken by surprise by the invasion and fear its medium-term consequences. All this leaves Russia stuck between military madness and careful consideration of a possible de-escalation, and Putin faced with a choice: between doubling down on his quixotic pursuit of Kyiv’s decisive defeat and returning to the negotiating table, with the West if not Ukraine. The third key issue Russia faces in 2023 revolves around government personnel changes, which are highly likely, even if it is hard to predict who will replace whom. One reason a reshuffle is near-certain is the increasing demand at the top for dynamism and effectiveness. Putin’s inclination to invite technocrats into the government may grow further, with senior figures in the cabinet, the presidential administration, and the power structures all aged and exhausted by the war and military failings forcing Putin to look for new ideas. Another is the coming presidential contest, given the historical record: reshuffles have preceded all but one of Russia’s presidential elections. A long buildup of tension within the government offers another reason to expect personnel changes. Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov are being blamed for corruption within the armed forces, while the FSB has been slammed for intelligence failures. Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev is seen as having lost the plot altogether, and Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin as too apolitical, while central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina is suspected of secretly opposing the war. The government’s senior figures are all dissatisfied with each other: a mutual dislike that gives Putin cause to switch things up. Still, his conservatism and apprehensiveness when it comes to firing underlings will likely lead him to try to strike a balance between stability and renewal.  These fateful developments will be profoundly influenced by events on the battlefield. If, as Kyiv has predicted, Russia attempts a large-scale offensive in February or March, it will likely be met with significant Ukrainian resistance. Otherwise, Moscow will continue slowly strangling Ukraine with attacks on its infrastructure, to which Kyiv will respond with diversionary attacks on Russian soil. Russian political life will remain in the grip of the war’s grim and oppressive atmosphere, leaving elites even more anxious and fearful of the future. Putin’s hypersecrecy and refusal to explain himself to anyone will do nothing to help the situation. Repression will undoubtedly grow, with all dissent criminalized, elements of a state ideology introduced, and new pretexts found for even longer prison sentences. In 2023, Russia’s already historic war with Ukraine will show its full transformational potential, finally changing Russia from within and straining its leaders’ ability to keep the situation under control and plan the decisions they make.

In 1948, the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance was signed between the Soviet Union and Finland, providing a key basis for relations between the two states that was to last throughout the cold war. With memories of the 1939 “winter war” between the two still acute, the agreement embodied the Paasikivi–Kekkonen doctrine, named for two of Finland’s post-war presidents who developed the idea between 1946 and 1982 of a neutral Finland close to the USSR. It also set the context for the term “Finlandisation” used by international relations scholars to describe external interference by a powerful country in the foreign policy of a smaller neighbouring state. A year later, on April 4 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty was signed by the 12 founding members of Nato. Throughout the cold war, Finland remained a neutral state – although more due to circumstance than by choice. And despite its 1,340km (832 mile) border with Russia, it chose not to join Nato in the late 1990s, even as many of its eastern European neighbours did. It officially abandon its policy of neutrality in 1994, joining Nato’s Partnership for Peace and then the European Union in 1995. But aspirations to become a full Nato member state had not quite matured. That all ended with Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Finland (and Sweden) submitted their formal applications to join the alliance on May 18 2022 and this was endorsed by Nato members at the most recent summit in Madrid in June. Although accession to Nato membership was relatively quick, there were objections from some members, most notably Turkey and, to a lesser extent, Hungary. Turkey held up membership for Finland – and is still doing so for Sweden – due to its concerns over what it called support for terrorist groups, namely the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK). Hungary also raised objections due to what it regarded as criticism by the Nordic states with regard to the strength of Hungarian democracy. But Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg said recently he is confident that Sweden could become a member by summer.View from MoscowIf Putin was hoping to achieve the Finlandisation of Nato as one of his strategic aims of the war, what he has actually achieved was the “Natoisation” of Finland since it has now become the alliance’s 31st member state. With this comes Article 5 guarantees – the an attack on one member is an attack on the alliance as a whole and must be responded to as such. This fundamentally changes the defence and security posture of Finland, and European security architecture as a whole. Implications include the size and geographical focus of the alliance (even more so if Sweden joins in the not-too-distant future) as well as inter-organisational relations between Nato and the EU, the other key pillar of the European security architecture. And Finland is not playing catch up in order to meet its Nato commitments. In fact, Finland will be a net contributor to the alliance’s overall collective defence. Over recent years, it has been modernising its armed forces, purchasing robust military capabilities and, unlike the majority of member states, it meets the Nato target of 2% of GDP spent on its own defence. Putin has, of course, issued warnings to Finland (and Sweden) about joining the alliance. In 2016, Putin stated that “When we look across the border now, we see a Finn on the other side. If Finland joins Nato, we will see an enemy.” Although there have been mixed signals with regard to Russia’s views on the sovereign right of Finland to join a collective defence organisation if it so chooses (although Russia does not extend this position to Ukraine itelf), it is gravely concerned that Nato will position military capabilities in Finland, on its border – and close to Russia’s own strategically important bases and geography. Although Russia is very much focused on correcting its strategic blunders in Ukraine, it will at some stage begin to recover and, therefore, reconstitute its armed forces and military posture. Of particular concern could be Russia’s increased dependency on its tactical nuclear posture to offset its (temporarily) decreased capacity with regard to conventional capabilities. Although we do not know what the future holds, given both the duration and eventual outcome of the war, Russia will continue to have security concerns. And now it has a border with Nato that will run from the High North down to the Black Sea and beyond. This is guaranteed to lock in continued tensions between the alliance and Russia for years to come. Nato fundamentally thinks of itself as a collective defence organisation, with (nuclear) deterrence as its core strength. Russia will continue to see the alliance as a key stalwart undermining its threat perceptions and ability to affect its own near abroad. So as the Finnish flag is raised at Nato HQ in Brussels, It would be naive to think that Russia will not respond – even if its power to do so is currently somewhat diminished.

Monday, March 27 was supposed to be a red-letter day for the new far-right Israeli coalition government, when it planned to slide through the Knesset the central provision of its “judicial overhaul” bill, comfortably ahead of the Passover recess beginning on April 2. Instead, it ended up being one of the most extraordinary days in Israeli history. Spurred by the “firing” of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant by Prime Minister Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu the evening before, the demonstrations against the overhaul, which had been building in intensity for over two months, became overwhelming. Universities, businesses, Ben-Gurion Airport, and Israel’s embassies and consulates abroad were all closed down in protest, and a general strike was scheduled for the following day. Air Force reserve pilots and other security personnel on whom the military heavily relies were threatening to not report for training or duty. In the face of this completely unprecedented protest, Netanyahu announced he would suspend the bill’s progress “to try to reach a broad agreement during the next Knesset session,” which begins on May 1. The announcement was delayed while Bibi worked out a deal with one of his coalition partners, Itamar Ben-Gvir, minister of national security and head of the neo-Kahanist Jewish Power Party, to organize a new “National Guard,” which, its opponents charge, would constitute “a paramilitary organization that would operate inside Israel in times of crisis, mainly to deal with rioting and nationalist incidents involving Israeli Arabs.” They view it as a new reason not to compromise. Nevertheless, dialogue has already begun with the Knesset opposition under the auspices of President Isaac Herzog. Netanyahu was unquestionably forced to make the postponement concession by the massive outpouring of protest; one poll showed that two-thirds of the Israeli public was against the legislation in its current form. Nevertheless, his entire coalition supports the reform in its current form. Even Minister of Defense Gallant, who is apparently remaining in office since he was not given the requisite legal notice, stressed that his call for delay stemmed solely from fear of damage to Israel’s military preparedness after thousands of Israel Defense Forces reservists threatened not to show up for duty. The handful of coalition MKs, all from Likud, who had indicated reservations about proceeding immediately, were likewise aboard in principle. This may make the negotiations difficult, if not impossible. Dialogue, of course, is the civilized way to proceed, but finding a solution even remotely palatable to all is made significantly more difficult by the disparate composition of the coalition, in which Netanyahu holds less power and influence than in any of the previous five governments he headed. His four coalition partners are ideologically driven and all have very different visions of Israel’s society and priorities than do most Israelis or, in fact, than did Netanyahu himself during most of his political career. Moreover, with the increasing polarization of Israeli society during the last decade, the non-Arab Israeli parties have now formed into two solid blocs, usually called right and left, but they are more accurately described as “never-Bibi” and “pro-Bibi if he does what we want.” However, neither his partners nor his opponents retain any trust in Bibi’s word, and there is considerable suspicion he may push the reforms through unaltered. Thus, despite his promise to delay the bill and negotiate with the opposition, the regular Saturday night demonstration attracted as many — or more — Israelis as the previous ones.Concurrence on neutering the Supreme CourtWhile the genesis of the current crisis is complex, its way was paved by Netanyahu’s desperate attempts to end his ongoing corruption trial and Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s deep ideological commitment to shattering the existing judicial system by making it “more democratic,” i.e., rendering the Supreme Court powerless to invalidate laws passed by the Knesset majority. But the overhaul has received crucial support from a coalition of three distinct minority groups in Israeli society with their own political goals or grievances, all in the pro-Bibi bloc: 1. The two Haredi (“ultra-Orthodox”) parties, which want to block the Supreme Court’s repeated rejection of their blanket exemption from military service, exempt their schools from minimum education requirements, increase state support for yeshiva students, as well as remove the Court’s ban on Shas party Chair Aryeh Deri from serving as a minister because of two convictions for corruption. 2. Extremist settlers and supporters in the Jewish Power and Religious Zionism parties, who want to remove any legal obstacles to increased settlement, permit the annexation of part or all of the West Bank, and prevent punishment for atrocities like the recent settler pogrom in the West Bank village of Hawara, as well as make Israel “more Jewish.” While there has been an extreme anti-Arab right wing in Israel since at least the 1980s, this is the first time they have been part of a government, with their leaders in significant positions of power. They view the Supreme Court as their main obstacle, though it has only occasionally blocked settler activities in the West Bank. 3. The Kohelet Forum, a well-financed think tank that has gained significant influence in Israeli right-wing circles in recent years, which is pushing for the removal of legal norms preventing the adoption of American libertarian principles foreign to Israel. Their influence is primarily in the Likud.Deep cultural/political rootsThe broader impetus for these reforms has both a larger cultural context as well as a more political one. They emerge from a cultural polarization that has been building since the 1950s and a political tension evident since at least the time of Israel’s First Lebanon War in 1982. They can also be understood in the context of the decade-old worldwide movement toward populism and away from liberal democracy, with distinctive Israeli characteristics. The cultural context harkens back to the immigration to Israel in the 1950s of “Eastern Jews” (Mizrahim) from Arab and Muslim countries, over a million of whom arrived in Israel during the 1950s and 1960s, trebling Israel’s population. It is now generally recognized that they were demeaned and disparaged by officials from the then-hegemonic Labor movement, and Mizrahim are still, on average, less educated and wealthy compared to Ashkenazim (Jews of Central and Eastern European ancestry). Overwhelming Mizrahi support for the right-wing Likud party was a principal factor in its victory of 1977 and control of the premiership for 33 of the subsequent 45 years. All these governments were coalitions — no Israeli party has ever won an outright majority — generally with the participation of the two ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) parties, the National Religious (settler-dominated) party, and one or another centrist party that enabled Netanyahu to play one side against the other. Despite this fairly consistent political control, the single most important theme of Likud messaging has been opposition to the alleged (and partially real) “Ashkenazi”- and “leftist”-dominated Israeli establishment. This theme has been especially pronounced during the 22 years of Netanyahu’s leadership of the party (though all Likud chairmen have been Ashkenazim who rose to power within the country’s traditional power structures). The claims of elite domination have reached a crescendo in recent months and are now being put forward as the principal justification for the judicial reforms. Likud/Mizrahi complaints of being shut out of the Israeli power structure are not entirely unfounded, despite Likud’s control of the government, today and over the past four decades. There is no doubt that secular, moderately liberal Ashkenazim dominate the academic, legal, military, cultural, and business elites — obviously some more than others. However, the particular bête noir of the Haredim, the settler religious right, and the personal concern of Netanyahu and Deri is the courts, especially the Supreme Court, because that is the sole institution capable of blocking their disparate objectives. Protesters — and most of the Israeli establishment — see it as the critical — and sole — body exercising any check on the government and Knesset majority, given the absence of a written constitution, a second legislative chamber, a federal system, or any other such institution, one or more of which is present in virtually every other democratic country. The protesters are similarly, or perhaps even more, disparate than the “reformists.” Their core is indeed the educated Ashkenazi middle class, but also contains wide swathes of virtually all other social groups in the country with the exception of Israeli Palestinians, who would indeed be hard hit by the overhaul but who largely regard this as an intra-Jewish dispute. The protest organizers have been at pains to emphasize the non-ideological and non-left-wing nature of the protests, hence the ubiquitous Israeli flags and the absence of Palestinian ones. Of course the left is intimately involved and hopes these protests against the right will help to revive its depleted fortunes. The left sees the occupation as the root cause of the right’s insistence on the overhaul, and expects that Arab parties will be among the first victims of an empowered right if the reforms are enacted.Difficulties in reaching a compromiseTechnically, a compromise agreement including some of the “reforms” but leaving a viable system of checks and balances in place could easily be reached. However, this is unlikely, primarily because the two religious Zionist parties, Jewish Power and Religious Zionism, are ideologically committed to fundamental changes that the Supreme Court would certainly block. In addition, Justice Minister Levin and a few others in the Likud seem unalterably committed to the full overhaul, undercutting Netanyahu’s announced willingness to negotiate. The two Haredi parties may, however, be more flexible, as they have no commitment to the secular Israeli state and usually are able to obtain what they need through the political process. The only person in a position to transform the political debate and completely change its terms is Prime Minister Netanyahu himself. There has long been speculation that he could be offered a “get out of jail free card” by the prosecution in his ongoing trial on corruption charges, specifying that the charges would be dropped if he foreswore political activity. The opposition has no doubt that his main reason for staying in power is to change the Court and legal system sufficiently as to avoid any chance of conviction, which he indignantly denies. Some have recently speculated that the humiliation of being forced to change his mind and accept the postponement may drive him to accept the plea bargain. While chances still seem against that happening, if he did accept it, that would immediately transform the political map of Israel. A number of right-wing politicians have left Likud and the rightist bloc over the years because of their treatment by him — and they were part of the recently deposed, unwieldy 18-month “Government of Change,” which contained left, right, and centrist elements (all of the rightists and many of the centrists were ex-Netanyahu partners and supporters). Were Netanyahu to be out of the picture, a center-right coalition could be formed, perhaps even without new elections, that could pass an amended judicial reform package, presumably limiting the damage to checks and balances. The far right would be left out in the cold, the Haredim would join, and the tattered Israeli left would possibly be strengthened but would still be small. However, no one currently believes that is likely to happen. Claims have been made that Netanyahu has promised the hard-liners in his coalition that he won’t compromise, in which case there is little doubt that the demonstrations will be renewed, although whether they will be strengthened or weakened by the delay can’t be predicted. Minister Levin has promised large counter-demonstrations as well, heightening the likelihood of violence, some of which has already started. In fact, the most controversial provisions have already passed their preliminary “readings,” and could be approved on 24-hour notice once the Knesset returns. Besides the opposition in the street, the new provisions would immediately be brought before the Supreme Court, which would almost certainly declare them invalid, leading inevitably to a full-bore constitutional crisis based on the Court declaring invalid the legislation that purported to strip it of that power. Commanders of many of Israel’s security branches have already intimated that in such a contest of legitimacy, they would go with the Supreme Court rather than the government. Of course, this crisis is not taking place in a vacuum. The day after Bibi backed down, President Joe Biden warned that he “cannot continue down this road,” leading to charges of interference in Israel’s internal affairs. Closer to home, Bibi’s grandiose hopes of widespread Israeli-Arab peace based on the 2020 Abraham Accords are crumbling or, at the least, have entered a deep freeze. The United Arab Emirates cancelled a scheduled visit by Netanyahu in January, just after his government was formed, while Jordan was deeply upset by remarks that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich made denying the existence of a Palestinian people (something the Israeli government formally recognized in 1993), while standing on a stage festooned with a banner showing Israel’s borders as including not only the West Bank but Jordan as well. Moreover, the big prize Netanyahu hoped to bring into the Abraham Accords, namely Saudi Arabia, has closed the door on them, at least for the foreseeable future. Moreover, the kingdom’s recent China-brokered resumption of ties with Iran is a poke in Israel’s eye (as well as that of the U.S.), besides attenuating one of the main reasons for Saudi-Israeli rapprochement, namely, fear of Iran. Despite the gravity of the situation, some Israelis, at least on the protesters’ side, found reasons for optimism, apart from whether or not the overhaul would go through. Unlike many other countries in which populist regimes have enfeebled political and civil liberties — Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Russia, and India are only a partial list — Israelis chanting “De-mo-kra-tia” poured out onto the streets for months, while senior retired military, business, and civic leaders, as well as all manner of civil society institutions, declared their opposition to the overhaul, with some, such as high-tech venture capitalists, able to convincingly warn of serious consequences. This will presumably serve as a warning and check on any future governments, left or right, showing authoritarian tendencies. Even those hoping Israel will change its stance on the conflict with the Palestinians drew some comfort from the massive demonstrations, hoping that they could portend a new vision of democracy, despite the left’s dismal showing in recent elections. That, however, remains to be seen.

The significant rise in defence and security ties between India and Australia has led to an ease in dealing with their responsibilities in multilateral regional forums. The institutionalisation of cooperation has also become more strategic.  The geostrategic positioning of India and Australia on the Indian and Pacific Oceans has helped with the convergence of interests, enabling relations to expand and steadily deepen. Unlike in earlier times when New Delhi and Canberra were searching for equal grounds for cooperation, the concept of the Indo-Pacific has made this easier, enhancing the conviction that greater engagement was an inevitability of their geographic circumstances. It made them partners to jointly take responsibility for maintaining a free, open, inclusive and peaceful Indo-Pacific, which demands a noticeable tilt towards defence and security cooperation. India has long aspired to be the key protagonist in the Indian Ocean; Australia has wanted to more naturally belong to the region. Moreover, Australia’s foreign policy over the years has emphasised playing a constructive role in the region with enhanced regional engagement. Though China looms large in each nation’s strategic calculation, the issues that unite both countries go beyond China and include the multifaceted challenges of maritime security, piracy, armed robbery, smuggling of small arms, protracted internal conflict, illegal, unprotected, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, cyber security, climate change, and ocean-born trade security. The India-Australia Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (2020), upgraded from the bilateral strategic partnership of 2009, is an effort to broaden the scope of their defence and security relationship by finding new initiatives, methods, and mechanisms to sustain mutual security interests. These have been bolstered to-date through cooperation in the AUSINDEX, Kakadu, Pitch Black, Milan, and Malabar military exercises, and with further collaboration in the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium, 2+2 ministerial dialogues, Joint Working Group for research on enhancing defence industry, mutual logistics, and intelligence support and sharing agreements. These have included, for example, the Mutual Logistics Support Agreement and officer exchange programs. In addition, Australia’s invitation to India to join Exercise Talisman Sabre, the most important military exercise between Australia and the United States, will set another milestone for cooperation. Both countries further engage in humanitarian matters, energy security, and marine and space research. Their commitment to Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief in Afghanistan and within the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue in vaccine distribution, for example, highly has been successful. In energy security, both have agreed to focus on UN Sustainable Development Goals and work on new and renewable technology in solar and wind energy. One potential area for cooperation – being maritime powers – will be wave energy for sustainable and resilient energy sources. The Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative, in which India and Australia are deeply involved, will work on a whole array of issues involving marine ecology; security of maritime borders; pollutants, like marine plastics; IUU fishing; and marine research for conservation purposes. In addition, India and Australia have updated the Memorandum of Understanding in space programs, technology advancement, and joint space programs. Australia will also be supporting India in tracking the Gaganyaan mission – India’s first space-manned mission – at Cocos Keeling Island. Currently, India and Australia are at a crucial juncture. The election of the new government in Australia in 2022 is likely to aid the strong relationship between the two nations. But the turn for India to head the G20 is also expected to facilitate greater cooperation, particularly in economic and trade liberalisation and potential reform of economic regimes such as the World Trade Organization. In April 2022, India and Australia signed their first Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the India-Australia Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement. The fast pace at which their trade took off – from US$13.6 billion in 2007 to US$24.3 billion in 2020 – shows the many benefits of diversifying their trade. In addition, the elimination of tariffs for nearly 90 percent of Indian exports will further boost the Indian economy. The question is whether India will continue to engage its economy regionally in multilateral economic bodies. While it declined to join the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, India has begun a process of seeking bilateral FTAs with most member countries. What Australia and India can achieve bilaterally to make the comprehensive strategic partnership effective is to engage in dialogue with regional littoral countries on defence and security. This engagement will help with confidence-building and familiarity among partners. However, the advantage of this type of institutionalisation of the Indo-Pacific depends upon the degree to which states seek interaction. The littoral states, in this sense, should be included within the Indo-Pacific complex as much as possible. The emerging paradigm of inclusivity and pluralism within a free, open, and peaceful Indo-Pacific will bring together the littoral and less powerful countries of the region and empower them to join and engage with others; that is, those who otherwise do not have a voice or clout in international political platforms. Along these lines, the Indian Security and Growth for all (SAGAR) initiative seeks to enhance cooperation through information sharing, capacity building, coastline surveillance, and infrastructure building. The India-Australia-Indonesia trilateral dialogue is another attempt to enhance cooperation in the same direction. Although it was presumed in India that the Labor government in Australia might be more inclined toward China, it was understood that this did not mean a policy and behavioral turnaround. Instead, Canberra’s focus will include a mix of continuity and change. Australia has come a long way in its institutionalisation of the Indo-Pacific, and its ability to diversify its interests by engaging with the littoral countries deserves special attention. To be sure, China’s increased aggression in the South China Sea and it’s diplomatic handling of Australia’s COVID-19 inquiry have been influential here. But the process has also been captive to such institutionalisation as mentioned above. Australia’s involvement with Quad and its participation in the military exercises with India and other Quad countries in the Indian Ocean will continue to strain its relations with China. In addition, the Russia-Ukraine war will likely continue to drive foreign policy activism and cooperation among like-minded countries, of which Australia figures prominently. The takeaway here is that regular interaction between the two countries on various defence-related activities has worked to enhance mutual respect and understanding of shared values. This interaction has broader implications. Both nations can support each other in addressing issues of mutual concern internationally. Their engagement in trilateral groupings like the India-Australia-Indonesia and India-Japan-Australia dialogues, as well as joint engagement in the Supply Chains Resilience Initiative and the Quad with the United States and Japan, represent successful examples of bilateral and multilateral trust and relationship-building. One significant outcome of these growing partnerships will be to revive and strengthen the Indian Ocean Rim Association in awareness generation, capacity-building, and consensus-building. Lastly, all the above initiatives are government efforts to enhance partnerships. The involvement and regular interaction of academia, think tanks, civil society, and the media have been equally important and will continue to play an important role in boosting these relationships.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, today, at the Prime Minister's Knesset office, met with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo. Prime Minister Netanyahu showed them sections of the horrific footage from the IDF Spokesperson's Office and told them afterwards: "We face a peculiar kind of enemy, a particularly cruel and inhuman foe. They're genocidal. They're not fighting for this or that territory; they're fighting to eliminate the Jewish state in whatever boundary. They say so. Their charter says if you find a bush and a Jew is hiding behind it, kill the Jew. Kill all the Jews. Their goal goes beyond the destruction of Israel. They're part of an axis of terror: Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis. They say death to America—that's the Great Satan. Israel is the Small Satan. I hope I don't find any offense with any of you. You're a middle-sized Satan. They hate our free civilization. They want to bury it. They have an ideology that is mad. In the 21st century, after the Enlightenment, after the Scientific Revolution, after the advance of human rights and democracy, this is sheer madness. I don't give it relative moralism that says, moral relativism that says, well, they have this society. They can do these horrible things to women. They can do these horrible things to human beings. That's their value system. That's not a value system. That's something that has to be fought. And one thing that we discovered in the 21st century is that our assumption that we can live our civilized lives in our advanced countries, seeking peace, prosperity and progress, and we can just sit back and the barbarians will not come back, they come back. They come back in many places, and if we are unwilling to fight the barbarians, they will win. There's a great historian that I admire, an American Christian Humanist by the name of Will Durant, who wrote, in the last century he wrote "The History of Civilization." And he said history does not favor Jesus Christ over Genghis Khan. History favors the strong. Your moral values do not stand up if you're not willing to fight for them. Here is a classic case of savagery and barbarism against civilization. Now, this savagery has two techniques. One is to deliberately target civilians. The whole laws of war, humanitarian law, which we're committed to completely, makes a simple distinction. On one line, they draw, they draw a line in the middle of the world and they say on one line are combatants, and the other line are non-combatants. You can target the combatants. You should target the combatants. But don't deliberately target the non-combatants. They can be hurt, unintentionally. That accompanies every legitimate war. What the terrorists do is erase the sense of sin. They say everyone is a target. These girls in a music festival, these women. They're targets. Babies. They're targets. Old people. They're targets. Holocaust survivors. They're targets. Everyone is a combatant. Everyone! They not only target everyone, every citizen, no one is a civilian, no one is exempt from their murder, from their harm. They also hide behind their civilians. They deliberately implant themselves in hospitals, in schools, in residential areas, in UN facilities. They fire their rockets from there. Thousands of them. We might have an alert as we speak. There is no symmetry here! These people target directly our cities all the time. Thousands and thousands and thousands of rockets. Falling on Barcelona, falling on Madrid, falling on Brussels, falling on Antwerp. Or any one of the European cities. Thousands! Israel is a small country. They deliberately target civilians and they deliberately hide behind civilians and use them as a human shield. That's a war crime. So what is a democracy, committed to the human, to the laws of war, supposed to do? Do the laws of war give exemption to such criminals? And the answer is: They don't. They say do your best to target the terrorists. Do your best to minimize civilian casualties. But if we, the democracies, accept, say that under no circumstances should we go in because civilians tragically get killed, then we lost. We lost before we begin. You lost and you lost. Spain lost. Belgium lost. Because this will spread. You will see it. Very soon. Because the Axis of Terror is not going to stop. If they can emerge victorious here, they intend to bring down the Middle East, and next they'll go to Europe. After that they'll go elsewhere. If you think I'm exaggerating, I am not. This is where the pivot of history now is going to be decided. Do we stop them there? Or do they come to you? Now, how do you stop them? What do you do? What did the Western countries, what did the democracy do when terrorists embed themselves amidst civilians? Let me say from the start that any civilian death is a tragedy. Any one. And to avoid them, what you do is first, you try to get the civilians out of harm's way. And that's exactly what we did. We asked, called, sent leaflets, phoned the civilians in the areas where we were going to hit the terrorists, the Hamas terrorists, and we said please leave. When they tried to leave, Hamas kept them at gunpoint. Stay, because Hamas doesn't care that their civilians are killed. This is a messianic death cult that hides in the bunkers. As one of their spokesmen said: the underground belongs to Hamas; aboveground, so civilians, that's Israel's problem and the UN problem. Not their problem. On the contrary. It's their shield. So, what do you do? We ask them to leave. Hamas tries to stop them from leaving. Thankfully, many left. We set up a safe corridor, from the north of Gaza, where we were concentrating our effort against the terrorists, to the south. A safe zone in the south, safe corridor to the south. Hamas shot the safe corridor. They fired on the safe corridor, so the people would be trapped in. But they kept on leaving. I'm happy to say that there is a decline in civilian casualties, which is our goal. Our goal is to have none. And primarily that's because of the ground action. The ground action has resulted in the fact that the warnings that we give are addressed by the population, the civilian population that goes south. When they go south, we give them humanitarian support. There are about 150 trucks now going in. Probably go up to 200 and beyond: food, medicine, water. I have not seen yet the effort that I'd like to see from the UN and the international agencies to build there shelters. Winter is coming and there is no reason not to build tens of thousands of tents in the safe zone, next to the safe zone. Because they don't enter the safe zone, the UN, which I think is shocking. I said, okay, we'll give you a lot of little zones. And they're building little safe zones to get the population out of harm's way. Israel is doing everything in its power to get the population out of harm's way. Hamas is doing everything in its power to keep that population in harm's way. That's the facts. I'll give you an example – Hitler, the original Nazis, they invade Europe, they do these horrors on a mass scale. And by the way, these killers would do exactly what Hitler did if they could away with it. The difference is only in capability, not in intent and not in savagery. Hitler invades Europe, perpetrates these horrible savageries, the Holocaust and so on. And so on. And the Allies invade. They invade Normandy. The German army is in the cities. You've seen the footage. The Allies say, "No, we can't do anything. We can't fire," because they're amid civilians? Of course not. They try to do exactly what we are doing: try to minimize the cost. And then they go through the cities of France and they go through the cities of Germany. And unfortunately, many, many, many civilian casualties occur. I don't know what history would have been like if we had demonstrations and protests in the West against the Allies for incurring civilian, German civilian casualties. I know history would have been very different. But we are the Allies, along with the moderate Arabs, with the United States, with Europe. We're the Allies. And they're the new Nazis. Israel cannot be held to a standard that no one is being held to. We have to fight the terrorists. We're in complete compliance with international law. I think in many ways, we're setting a different standard. We seek to minimize civilian casualties, and Hamas seeks to maximize it. And I would strongly urge you to make that distinction, not merely because it's right and just, but because your very societies are on the line. You're next. This is a battle for civilization. It has to be won. We will win it, because we have no other choice. We don't have a future if we don't. Hamas has already said, 'We'll do it again and again and again.' So we'll have to eradicate them. Just as you couldn't leave a reduced Nazi presence, you know, in Germany. You couldn't do that. And we are not going to leave a reduced Hamas presence in Gaza. But the consequences are much bigger. And I think that we should all unite in making sure that this kind of savagery never shows its face again. I thank you." The views and opinions expressed in this article solely belong to the author and do not represent the perspectives or stance of World and New World Journal, nor do they reflect the opinions of any of our employees. World and New World Journal does not endorse or take responsibility for the content, opinions, or information presented in this article. Readers are encouraged to consider multiple sources and viewpoints for a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter. Thank you for your understanding.

For seven weeks, Iran has been gripped by widespread protests — the first of their kind driven by women — following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of the regime’s so-called morality police. These demonstrations represent perhaps the most sustained domestic challenge to the clerical leadership since 1979, despite efforts by authorities to quell the unrest through mass arrests, beatings and killings, and internet and social media cuts. The head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) even warned protesters that Oct. 29 would be their “last day of riots,” in a sign that security forces will intensify their crackdown on the unrest, which Iranian leaders have blamed on Israel and the United States. The charge against Israel is nothing new; but as with previous rounds of accusations, Tehran has yet to produce tangible evidence to substantiate its claim that the Israeli intelligence service is, together with the U.S., the real mastermind behind the protests. Ironically, while the official narrative from Iran has long been that Israel is a decaying power unable to stand up to Tehran, it is Israeli assessments on the state of the protests that appear to be of most interest to the senior leadership in Tehran. Kayhan, the newspaper closest to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who appoints the paper’s chief editor, wrote in an editorial in mid-October that even Israel has accepted that the protests will ultimately fail to topple the regime. By quoting a couple of Israeli television commentators, the paper wishfully concluded that Israeli experts have determined that “the number of protesters in Iran is small and they lack [a shared] ideology” and that “Unrests in Iran require maturity, leadership, planning and political vision, and currently we do not have any of these.” The stock Khamenei’s top men put in Israeli assessments of the prospects for popular unrest would seem bizarre if it were not so clearly intentional. Pointing the finger at Israel is self-serving for officials in Tehran. Trying to pin a nationwide uprising on a detested regional rival, one whose existence the Islamic Republic has refused to accept since 1979, is obviously more convenient than acknowledging the genuine grievances pushing Iranian protesters to the streets. In reality, Iran’s leaders know very well that while the U.S. and Israel both might have an interest in shaping and aiding the protest movement once it began, this large-scale mobilization of the Iranian public is a result of the regime’s own policies. No foreign intelligence service would be able to orchestrate such a large-scale popular revolt on its own; the population of the country would not have risen up like this had it not been so chronically beaten down by the regime’s policies since 1979. But yet the very same anger that the Islamists have created among the Iranian public has become an opportunity for the Israelis in their multi-front campaign against Tehran. The ongoing threat of nuclear brinkmanship has long loomed over Israel’s decades-old shadow war with Iran. While cyberattacks and assassinations might be effective tools deployed by Israel to destabilize Iran’s internal apparatus, the protests have revealed another powerfully simple yet possibly destabilizing strategy at its disposal: speaking directly to the Iranian people. Iran’s leaders would likely contend that this isn’t the first time foreign powers have intervened in Iran’s domestic politics, pointing to the role the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British secret services played in overthrowing Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. For their part, Israel and the U.S., while denying involvement in the protests’ inception, would say that that, today, they are merely expressing support for a population that’s looking to break free from the tight grip of Tehran’s militant clerical political class. Israel’s political landscape is famously divided, which is why, yesterday, Nov. 1, the country held its fifth national election in less than four years. But there is virtual unanimity across the political spectrum when it comes to supporting the protesters in Iran. And since the protests began in mid-September, Israel’s public diplomacy efforts have been ramping up across all levels of society in more direct ways not seen for decades. Israel is currently home to tens of thousands of Jewish people born in Iran or born to Iranian parents, including major public figures like Rita, one of Israel’s most famous singers, former President Moshe Katsav, or former heads of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Shaul Mofaz and Dan Halutz. From early October, dozens of Israelis have gathered in Jerusalem in support of the women of Iran. Protests have also spread across the Middle East and to Europe and North America, as well. This past weekend, in Tel Aviv, hundreds of Israelis gathered, waving Israeli and pre-1979 Iran flags while chanting, “From Tel Aviv to Tehran, we are standing together.” It’s not uncommon to see Israelis protesting against the theocratic regime in Iran. In fact, stoking fear in Israelis about Iran’s nefarious nuclear program is typically a cornerstone of any Israeli prime minister’s tenure, especially under Benjamin Netanyahu, who repeatedly said that the Islamic Republic was the single greatest existential threat to Israel. Still, an overzealous Israeli response to the protests in Iran could backfire and lend credibility to the narrative from Tehran that Israel is behind them, according to David Menashri, an Iran expert and professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University. “With the regime claiming that the protests are initiated by the U.S. and Israel, Israeli public support may be a double-edged sword for them,” Menashri explained. Relations between Iran and Israel haven’t always been so acrimonious. Prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the two countries enjoyed 30 years of cooperation. In 1950, Iran even became the second Muslim-majority nation (after Turkey) to recognize the State of Israel. Iran fit neatly into the “Periphery Doctrine” espoused by Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, which referred to his ambition to forge an alliance with non-Arab enemies of its enemies, including Iran and Turkey. But those days are over. Officials in Tehran are now very likely anticipating more Israeli efforts as part of what Iran considers to be a broader Israeli information war — a campaign that will seek to target the Iranian population and to keep them mobilized against the regime in Tehran to the extent possible. This campaign aims to stress two simple points of view to the Iranian population: First, that the common enemy of Israel and the Iranian people is the militant Islamist ideology of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And second, that a bright future awaits Iranian-Israeli relations as soon as the policy preferences of the Iranian people are reflected in Iran’s foreign policy. As Israel ratchets up its public diplomacy, the leadership in Tehran will be forced to respond. But it is hard to see what effective counter-arguments the Islamic Republic has left at its disposal that might put the brakes on this latest Israeli initiative and momentum.

The relationship between Myanmar and Russia has become increasingly close. This is fueled by practical considerations as well as geopolitics. Myanmar junta chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing and Russian President Vladimir Putin lauded the 75th anniversary of Russia-Myanmar relations when they met for the first time at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok in early September. However, Moscow and Naypyidaw interactions only started getting cosier about two decades ago. Min Aung Hlaing observed to Putin, “During this period [of 75 years of bilateral ties], there have been ups and downs. But, starting from the past two decades, the relations between Myanmar and Russia have noticeably improved.” Burmese generals are widely thought to be close to Beijing. Why then did the Myanmar military, also known as the Tatmadaw, attempt to forge closer relations with the Kremlin? The state of affairs can be summed up in two words: pragmatism and geopolitics. A key motivation lies in the Tatmadaw’s continuous quest for arms, which it justifies as necessary for counter-insurgency operations and to defend the country from outside threats. After the 1988 coup, the Tatmadaw turned to China when the West imposed arms embargoes and broad-based sanctions. Though necessity dictated this turn, Myanmar generals have for years been dissatisfied with China-made weapons, especially combat aircraft. “We felt China downgraded the quality of its arms exports, including fighter jets, to Myanmar,” shared a former major-general speaking on condition of anonymity. This eventually compelled the generals to look further afield for new arms suppliers. Myanmar approached Russia, other East European countries and even North Korea. Myanmar generals purchased Russian MiG-29s after a border clash with Thailand in February 2001 showed up the inadequacy of Myanmar’s China-made aircraft, such as the F-7 IIK, against Thailand’s US-made F-16 fighters. Shortly after the border clash, the Tatmadaw purchased 12 MiG-29s in 2001. In 2009 it negotiated a further purchase of 20 MiG-29s. Then, the acquisition was reportedly Russia’s biggest fighter deal since Algeria scrapped an agreement to buy 34 MiG-29s. The Tatmadaw also turned to Russia for military modernisation and training. This started before Min Aung Hlaing became Commander-in-Chief in 2011. Vice Senior-General Maung Aye, the second-in-command of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), made the overture with the consent of SPDC supremo Senior General Than Shwe, according to military and related sources. The same retired major-general who divulged the Tatmadaw’s dissatisfaction with China also shared that both Tatmadaw generals — Than Shwe and Maung Aye — fought against the China-backed Communist Party of Burma. He added that they both understood “where the real external threat lay”. There has also been an awkwardness in the junta’s relations with China after the 2021 coup, underscored by China’s concerns to safeguard its economic interests in Myanmar. This may have persuaded the current crop of generals to recall their mentor Maung Aye’s idea of seeking a new partner and arms supplier in Russia. Unlike other generals who had visited China since taking power, Min Aung Hlaing has not been to China since the coup. The junta has also rebuffed a Chinese request for Sun Guoxiang, its special envoy for Asian Affairs, to meet Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Russia and the Burmese generals both seem pleased with their two-decade-old supplier-buyer relationship. In June 2020 Russia’s state-owned RT (Russia Today) TV interviewed Min Aung Hlaing who was in Moscow for Russia’s 75th Victory Day parade. When asked whether he was “satisfied with the Russian-made planes and helicopters” he replied in the affirmative, stating that “they are really good, and of high quality.” The Tatmadaw also sought Russia’s assistance in modernising Myanmar’s air defence system. The Tatmadaw established the Office of the Chief of Air Defence in 1997, which became fully operational in 1999.  A key business crony of the Burmese generals takes credit for this. He shared with the author that he had recommended to Than Shwe and Maung Aye that Myanmar acquire Russian air defense systems to modernise the Tatmadaw’s air defense capabilities. There is also a capacity-building dimension. Since the early 2000s, thousands of Myanmar military officers have received training in Russia. Min Aung Hlaing reportedly developed this training programme. Topics included military studies, information technology as well as missile and nuclear technology. Some of the returned trainees are now serving in the Office of Strategic Studies, a think-tank advising top generals at the War Office in Naypyidaw. In this capacity, they have some influence over Myanmar’s current Russia policy, including support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  Russia’s continued supply of arms to Myanmar, and its recognition and support for the junta since the 2021 coup seems to confirm to the generals that Russia is indeed among the “few friends” remaining amid mounting international pressure from Western democracies and perceived friends such as China and ASEAN. Facing calls to free Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and requests for dialogue with her, the generals view Russia, which wields veto power at the United Nations Security Council, as an important part of the junta’s power-balancing strategy. Russia, which has weathered global opprobrium for its February invasion of Ukraine, is also keen to find friends. Cautious about making firm statements on Myanmar shortly after the coup, the Kremlin is now more willing to discuss closer ties with Naypyidaw. “After the Ukraine war, Russia and Myanmar became closer as the world treats both countries similarly,” said a senior officer familiar with the junta’s current Russia policy. He observed that Myanmar’s policy on Russia is now driven by geopolitics. With the Tatmadaw continuing to embrace the Kremlin, Myanmar may become Russia’s strategic foothold to expand its geopolitical reach in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, and could spark regional tensions. Whether the Tatmadaw’s turn to Russia may prove to be a wrong strategy seems to be contingent on diplomatic compromises on many fronts, which key actors are currently unwilling to cede.