I’m still fried, it’s been another long day, so just a brief update tonight. Once I get through this week, things should even out a bit. Basically, I’ve been both the gorilla and the bear in the video below for the past week.

Because it’s Friday.. 😂 pic.twitter.com/pb8xIQEoNx

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) March 15, 2024

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

This year we must and will reach the maximum level of Ukrainian defense production throughout the entire period of independence – address by the President of Ukraine

18 March 2024 – 19:54

I wish you health, fellow Ukrainians!

Briefly about this day.

I held a meeting of the Staff. There was a report by the Commander-in-Chief on the main areas of operations. Kupyansk direction, our directions in Donetsk region, southern directions. There was an analysis of the dynamics in terms of ammunition – logistics in the army has become significantly more efficient. There were reports from the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Strategic Industries on contracts for the supply of weapons and ammunition from both partner countries and domestic manufacturers. This year we must and will reach the maximum level of Ukrainian defense production throughout the entire period of independence. And every year we will consistently expand this potential, which is an obvious strategic perspective for Ukraine. I am grateful to everyone who contributes to this, giving all their energy, and to everyone who truly helps – every leader, every state, every company in the world that stands with Ukraine. The Staff also listened to the government’s report on the construction of fortifications – all resources are provided.

A few things today about our communication with partners. I spoke with the President-elect of Indonesia. We appreciate the relations that have already been achieved between our countries. It was in Indonesia that the Ukrainian Peace Formula was first presented. And since then, the Peace Formula has gradually become global, bringing together the world’s majority. States and leaders from all continents have already joined the work on the Formula, and we are now preparing the first inaugural Global Peace Summit. And today I invited Indonesia to participate in it. Senator Lindsey Graham, a representative of the Republican Party, visited Ukraine today. We talked, among other things, about the importance of freedom and democracy winning now, in this war, here in Ukraine, because otherwise Russian aggression and chaos will spread around the world. I informed the Senator about the situation on the battlefield and the key needs of our Defense Forces. The needs are quite obvious. Patriots, ATACMS, F-16s. And, of course, artillery. We discussed further cooperation and support for Ukraine. All our actions must be far-sighted, long-range, and as effective as possible to enable all free nations to live on in freedom and security. I am grateful to everyone in the United States who feels as we do that freedom must always prevail.

Today I would also like to thank the leadership of the European Union and all member states for establishing a new Fund to assist Ukraine within the European Peace Facility. The amount is 5 billion euros, which will be used to support our defense efforts this year. We also expect this Fund to become part of a general security agreement between Ukraine and the European Union.

I am grateful to all our people who fight and work for Ukraine and Ukrainians, who support each of our cities and communities. And especially to those who are currently having the hardest times: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv, Kherson, and our Odesa. We are doing our best to give Ukraine and each of our regions more protection and more strength. I thank everyone in the world who stands with Ukraine!

Glory to Ukraine!

This guy!

he voted against the supplemental with aid for Ukraine last month https://t.co/Infvp3AcVd

— Laura Rozen (@lrozen) March 18, 2024

This is a problem:

I can confirm that I've observed evidence of Russians having access to Western satellite imagery, including non-commercial images. It wasn't just one, but multiple providers of satellite imagery. https://t.co/VauuTRqXxG

— Tatarigami_UA (@Tatarigami_UA) March 18, 2024

From The Atlantic:

Earlier this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky got unusually testy over the failure of the United States to deliver anti-missile and anti-drone systems. On March 2, a strike in Odesa had killed 12 people, five of them children. “The world has enough missile-defense systems,” he said. Debates over funding have kept those systems from being delivered. “Delaying the supply of weapons to Ukraine, missile-defense systems to protect our people, leads, unfortunately, to such losses.”

Others in Ukraine’s government, however, have expressed an even deeper frustration. What if Americans, in addition to not sending defensive assistance to Ukraine, are sending offensive assistance to Russia? A Ukrainian military source told me he believes that Russia’s long-range strikes, by cruise missiles that are among the most costly weapons in its nonnuclear arsenal, are aimed using satellite imagery provided by U.S. companies. He says the sequence is clear: A satellite snaps pictures of a site, then some days or weeks later a missile lands. Sometimes another satellite is sent to capture additional images afterward, perhaps to check the extent of the damage. “The number of coincidences, where the images are followed by strikes, is too high to be random,” the source told me. (I agreed not to name him because he is not authorized to speak publicly.)

Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence. But the suspicious cases have added up, and because many satellite-imagery companies offer a backlist of archived images, marked with dates and coordinates, it’s possible to browse tens of thousands of images taken of Ukraine and notice suggestive patterns. In the week before April 2, 2022, about a month after Russia’s initial invasion, images of a remote airfield outside Myrhorod, Ukraine, were requested from American companies at least nine times. Myrhorod is not a particularly interesting place, apart from that airfield. On April 2, missiles landed there. In the week that followed, someone asked for images of the airfield again. Satellite imaging has preceded strikes in urban areas as well: In Lviv, just before March 26, 2022, someone tasked a satellite with looking at a factory used for military-armor production. It, too, was struck. In late January of this year, someone commissioned a commercial-satellite company to take fresh images of Kyiv, just before the city was hit by a missile barrage.

There are hundreds of such cases. The Ukrainians say they monitor flyovers by Russia’s own satellites. But until recently, they assumed that the satellites of allies would not be available for Russia’s advantage. “Before about six months ago, we couldn’t imagine that private companies would be selling satellite imagery in sensitive areas,” the Ukrainian military official told me. But “it has become hard to believe that [these coincidences] are random.” Russian satellite capabilities are limited, and Ukraine’s are too. Anyone who has seen the social-media footage of ragtag infantrymen huddled in trenches is aware that this war is being fought by two poor countries. But with subterfuge, even poor countries can try to rent the services of rich ones—or, more precisely, the services of the private companies that operate within the rich ones’ borders.

Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Kateryna Chernohorenko, sent me a statement noting that U.S. satellite companies have supported Ukraine. But she said that her ministry’s experts suspect that Russia “purchases satellite imagery through third-party companies” that do business with Western satellite-imagery companies, and that these images “could be used in armed aggression against Ukraine.”

Ordering imagery from these companies is simpler than you might think. Stale, blurry images are free on Google Maps. Fresh, crisp imagery of something you may or may not wish to blow to smithereens costs a little more. A site called spymesat.com tracks various companies’ satellites and will give a cost estimate for a brand-new image taken the next time one of them passes over the location you choose. In the business, ordering a satellite to take an image is called “tasking.” The companies offer astonishingly fast turnaround times, at costs in the low thousands of dollars. Faster turnaround and higher resolution raise the cost. I zoomed in on the apartment where I stayed in Odesa early in the war, and the site told me that a U.S. company would let me task its satellite for $1,200 when it passed in just a few hours. If I went there now and painted BOMB ME in huge letters on the roof, the paint would still be wet for its close-up.

For even less, one can order archival imagery from Ukraine—some of it very recent, and of militarily significant areas. The city of Zaporizhzhia is about an hour’s drive from the front line. An Atlantic staffer requested a recent satellite photo of that city from a reseller that works with Planet, a San Francisco-based commercial satellite company. The staffer gave the reseller a credit-card number and a name, and received a high-resolution image just minutes later.

Some targets are stationary: You can’t move an air base. But even those are worth monitoring persistently, sometimes weeks or even months before an intended attack. A cruise missile costs about $1 million, so a kopeck-pinching government would happily pay just a few thousand dollars for recent evidence of how a target is being used, what’s there, and what time of day is optimal for maximum damage. Watching a parking lot outside a factory or barracks can tell you when the building is full and when it is empty. A strike on a full building kills more than a strike on an empty one, so these images can theoretically multiply the Ukrainian body count, at minimal extra cost. Many of the images tasked in Ukraine—including many of sites of future strikes—show only cloud cover. These very expensive images of clouds are still much cheaper than another cruise missile.

Two of the largest commercial-satellite-imaging companies in the United States are Maxar and Planet. Both have produced imagery of Ukrainian sites later struck by Russian missiles. Both stressed that they vet their customers diligently, and that they have observed the U.S. regulation that has forbidden transactions with Russia since the beginning of the war. Maxar declined to comment on specific cases of suspicious imagery orders in Ukraine but said it “ceased all business with Russian entities, including resellers, in early March 2022.” Planet said it was dedicated to providing imagery to “responsible actors such as governments, aid and relief organizations, and media,” with “diligent operations to avoid the potential for misuse and abuse.” A spokesperson from Planet told me that after a review of more than a dozen cases of prestrike tasking, the company “did not find evidence of misuse or abuse.” The spokesperson declined to comment further or explain how Planet had exonerated itself in these cases.

Neither company was willing to say whether it had ever detected instances when it suspected that Russia had used its satellites, nor was either willing to describe how it ensured that its customers were not in fact Russian front companies. Maxar and Planet would not say how they would respond if they noticed a suspicious pattern—image tasking, missile strike on a Ukrainian airfield, follow-up tasking. “We regularly conduct thorough reviews” of security, a Maxar spokesperson told me, and have implemented “more stringent controls” for Ukraine imagery.

Sometimes the tasking is benign. If you deal in commodities, you might peek at Odesa’s port to see whether ships are loaded with grain, and whether the world’s grain supply is about to rise. You might also order an image of a wheat field 150 miles north, in Kropyvnytskyi, to see whether the crop is harvested early or late. Even sites of military significance can be of interest to neutral or friendly entities—including the Ukrainian government itself, media organizations, and humanitarian groups that need accurate pictures of the conflict to do their work.

An executive of a firm that analyzes satellite imagery told me that the firm noticed a pattern dating back to 2022, by cross-referencing tasked images against actual attacks. (The executive requested anonymity because the firm does business with the same satellite companies whose images it reviewed, and does not want its relationships to sour over bad publicity.) The executive identified more than 350 Russian missile strikes in the first year of the war, all deep within Ukrainian territory. I showed a selection of cases to Jack O’Connor, who teaches geospatial intelligence at Johns Hopkins University, and he wrote back, “The data suggests that the Russians are doing what the Ukrainians suspect.” He was, however, cautious about what one can infer with certainty, no matter what patterns one sees. “There is no direct causal relation that can be proven from this data.”

In any particular case, it’s impossible to be sure whether the tasking was done with malign intent. That is especially true when the imagery captures a large area. (Maxar, for example, produces very-high-resolution images of whole neighborhoods or even towns.) But the correlations are there. On February 27, 2022, days after the outbreak of war, Maxar was tasked with taking an image near the Belarusian border. On March 6, 2022, a Russian missile hit buildings in Ovruch—which happened to be dead in the middle of the previous week’s tasked image. (Maxar declined to say whether it had taken these images, but a source with access to the company’s catalog confirmed that the images were in it.) On May 18, 2022, with the war in full swing, someone asked Maxar to look at a large square in the town of Lubny. Two days later, a missile struck Lubny, and soon after, someone asked Maxar to take another look, in the area of the original image where the missile had just hit.

The Ukrainian military official acknowledged the possibility that the tasking was just a benevolent citizen or group with curiosity about obscure Ukrainian military assets and armor factories. And he said he had no reason to believe that the companies themselves favor Russia in the war. Planet and Maxar both do a great deal of business with the U.S. government, and intentionally helping Russia would jeopardize contracts and invite regulation.

But the executive I spoke with said that to keep the imagery out of Russian hands, the satellite companies would have to control not just which customers they accept tasking from but also the resale of those images. The executive said the U.S. companies’ process of vetting their customers was “detailed.” Industry experts stressed that the companies have contracts with the U.S. government, and would not gain from doing business with Russia under the table. Although Maxar insists that it no longer does business with Russian entities, including resellers, it did not reply when I asked whether its resellers’ customers also stopped doing business with Russian entities.

The U.S. companies’ desire to avoid doing business with Russia, directly or indirectly, is not in serious doubt. A former U.S. official who worked on commercial-satellite regulation told me that, early in the war, the companies regularly approached the government seeking help to determine whether their customers might be working for the Russians. “It was a confusing time,” he said, “and then companies got better at vetting their customers.” He said the companies had implemented stronger procedures since then. Skies over Ukraine have become crowded with image-capturing satellites. “There are many cooks in the kitchen,” he said—“sometimes five U.S. government agencies at once,” all seeking imagery from commercial and government satellites. And it is very hard to figure out who wants images, and for what purpose. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all that some of those images coincide in space and time with Russian military activities.”

The Ukrainian official told me he would just “like to see these images moderated,” possibly by giving the Ukrainian military a chance to see what images are tasked before they’re taken. He added that “the companies should look very carefully at the records of who has been buying these images,” and probably involve local spy agencies in tracking companies suspected of funneling the images to Moscow. Other Ukrainians I spoke with suggested that instead of blacklisting certain customers, the companies should develop a limited white list of approved taskers, and add to it only when someone is clearly not a Russian agent. (Planet and Maxar did not directly reply when I asked if they had a blacklist or white list, and if so, what one had to do to get on it.)

Much more at the link!

Novomykhailivka, Donestk Oblast:

The "Bermuda Triangle" for russian armored equipment in the Donetsk region. Many russian tanks and IFVs try to attack Ukrainian positions near Novomykhailivka village, but nobody returns.
This time, our defenders destroyed 3 tanks and 4 IFVs; also, 6 armored vehicles were… pic.twitter.com/03cdwFaPOv

— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) March 18, 2024

The “Bermuda Triangle” for russian armored equipment in the Donetsk region. Many russian tanks and IFVs try to attack Ukrainian positions near Novomykhailivka village, but nobody returns.
This time, our defenders destroyed 3 tanks and 4 IFVs; also, 6 armored vehicles were damaged.

📹: 79th Air Assault Brigade

The Avdiivka front:

Say hello to 🇺🇦 FPV drone.
Say goodbye to 🇺🇦 land.

📹: 109th @TDF_UA Brigade pic.twitter.com/OZw82bmDBt

— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) March 18, 2024

Stugna-P ATGM strike on Russian BMP. Avdiivka front, by the 47th Brigade. https://t.co/SNABJSPkkU pic.twitter.com/K6EScBjkR0

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) March 18, 2024

 

 

Moscow:

War without end:

Putin takes a brief victory lap. He says the record high turnout is because society is rallying around his war in Ukraine.

The main goals of his next six years in office are "achieving the goals of the special operation and strengthening our defense capacity and armed forces" pic.twitter.com/cCZnuACRqw

— max seddon (@maxseddon) March 17, 2024

Now that the "election" is done, expect acceleration & escalation from #Putin

Not just against #Ukraine, but against Western interests generally – globally@mkimmage & I recently took a deep dive into Russia's global anti-Western project @WarOnTheRocks:https://t.co/hUgTMzTicb

— Hanna Notte (@HannaNotte) March 18, 2024

From War on the Rocks:

“It is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union,” George Kennan wrote in 1947, “must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” When Kennan devised this famous sentence, he did not only have Europe in mind: Asia and the Middle East were catalysts of early Cold War contestation. Soviet expansive tendencies proceeded from the universal sway of communism and from the legacy of the Russian empire, which had been active in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. In 2024, with Russian expansive tendencies once again in evidence, the global thrust of Kennan’s thinking is as salient as his recommendation that U.S. policy cohere around the idea of containment.

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was meant to prove that the United States and its allies do not write the rules internationally. To prove this point in Europe, the heart of the liberal international order, is to hasten the advent of a post-Western order globally. Russia has recalibrated its entire foreign policy to fit the needs of a long struggle. Prior to 2022, Russia was already expanding its trade and political relations with non-Western countries and tangling with its Western counterparts in international fora. Since 2022, Russia has dramatically expanded these pre-existing trend lines, while improvising at every turn.

The four pillars of Russia’s global foreign policy are self-preservation, decompartmentalization, fragmentation, and integration. Russia has secured lifelines for its economy and defense enterprises, while navigating to retain its military influence outside of Europe — successfully in Syria and the Sahel and less successfully in the South Caucasus. On a host of policy issues, Russia has abandoned compartmentalization with Western states. Waging a war of narratives, gumming up legacy multilateral institutions, and pushing for the de-dollarization of international finance, a diplomatically hyperactive Russia has sought to fragment the existing international order. Russia has also been integrating partners into clubs that exclude Western states (like the BRICS alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and working with alliances that are openly anti-Western (like the new Alliance of the Sahel States).

Russia’s progress has been substantial enough in these four domains to give it the upper hand in the war and to place the Russian economy on a non-Western foundation. Russia’s successes have not just been a matter of savviness: the Kremlin has benefited from the West’s many mistakes in rallying global public opinion. At the same time, Russia’s redirected foreign policy generates costs and risks to the Kremlin. For Russia, much depends on the war. Victory in Ukraine would prove that Russia is an autonomous global actor capable of thwarting formidable adversaries. Should the war linger indefinitely or should Ukraine surge forward, Russia’s extreme anti-Westernism may start to look short-sighted, accident-prone, and self-defeating.

The United States and its European allies should respond to global Russia with a multi-part containment strategy. One task is analytical: to connect the dots in Russia’s global foreign policy. Another is to confront Russia selectively — where its activities are especially malign. A third is to define its own global outreach positively and not simply as a default strategy for opposing Russia (or China). Most importantly, the United States should help Ukraine to frustrate Russia’s European war aims. These aims are central to Russia’s global aspirations.

Self-Preservation

To deter Russia in 2022, the West had bet on markets. It had counted on its own centrality to the worlds of finance, technological innovation, and commerce, hoping that the threat of massive sanctions would restrain Russian President Vladimir Putin. Once the war began, the West wagered that Russia would be so damaged by sanctions that either its war machine would malfunction or a frustrated population would curtail Putin’s ambitions. An undeterred Russia preserved lifelines for its economy and military machine, leveraging an already robust relationship with China and many other bilateral ties in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Russia found markets for its energy products in Asia and reliable sources of weaponry in Iran and North Korea. Turkey, Central Asia, and the South Caucasus emerged as conduits for the “roundabout trade” of sanctioned goods into Russia.

For Putin, Russia’s economic break with the West may not have been an opportunity cost of the war. It may have been one of the war’s strategic objectives. In the 1990s, Russia’s deep dependence on the West hemmed in its foreign policy. Because Russia relied on the West for loans and for investment, then-President Boris Yeltsin could do nothing to halt NATO expansion. Having shown in 2014 and again in 2022 that Russia’s economy can ride out Western sanctions, Putin has reduced the efficacy of future Western sanctions, a virtuous circle for him. Russia’s growing reliance on Iran and North Korea, often dismissed as technological backwaters, has given it real-time advantages vis-á-vis Ukraine.

While pouring resources into Ukraine, Russia has not stood still elsewhere. In Syria, Russian troops relinquished several positions to groups affiliated with their partner Iran after February 2022. At the same time, Moscow pushed for Syria’s normalization with Arab states and Turkey, hoping to attract the reconstruction funding for Syria that Russia itself cannot provide. Both measures have been aimed at protecting Russia’s influence. In Africa, Russia has similarly ensured its staying power, most recently by restructuring and rebranding the Wagner private military company into the Africa Corps, which the Ministry of Defense holds on a tight leash. Only in the South Caucasus, where Russia’s nominal ally Armenia mourns the forced exodus of ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh, has the war in Ukraine visibly dented its military clout.

Decompartmentalization

Before 2022, compartmentalization in Russia’s relations with the West was already an endangered practice. Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the United States had suspended cooperation with Russia on a range of issues — to punish it and to elicit a change in Russian foreign policy. Yet Moscow and Western capitals managed to insulate areas of critical interest from their mutual grievances, continuing to talk about the future of nuclear arms control, the Arctic, or ways to bring much-needed humanitarian aid to Syria.

With the 2022 war, Russia has become much more categorical. Moscow suspended its participation in the New Strategic Arms Reduction (New START) Treaty and rejected multiple overtures from the Joseph Biden administration to resume discussions on nuclear arms control. With this, Russia is sending several signals: that something resembling a state of war obtains between Russia and the West; that for Russia to give an inch on any one issue might mean undermining itself on other issues; and that winning the war in Ukraine is a priority far above the value that cooperation on arms control, climate change, or the Arctic might provide for Russia.

Putin’s willingness to jettison any collaborative agenda with the West creates dangers for Russia itself. Arms control, not to mention setting global norms for climate change, is an effort that makes Russia safer and improves Russians’ quality of life. Having emboldened (near-nuclear) Iran and (nuclear) North Korea, the Kremlin cannot be certain that these countries will forever be ruled by regimes friendly to Moscow. A medium-sized economy, Russia does not have endless resources to compete in a multipolar nuclear arms race — one that its own policies may well be fueling. Just as compartmentalization had once contained conflicts between Russia and the West, a global escalation with the West could rebound against Russia. Should current tensions in the Middle East ignite an all-out war, for example, Russia would struggle to protect its presence in Syria.

Fragmentation

Ever since Foreign Minister Yevgeniy Primakov’s celebration of “multipolarity” in the mid-1990s, post–Cold War Russia has taken issue with the West’s global dominance. In the years leading up to the 2022 invasion, Russia had chipped away at support for existing multilateral institutions and regimes. It propagated a narrative about a dysfunctional “rules-based international order,” Russia’s derogatory reference to presumed Western hegemony. For years, Russian diplomats lamented that Western states were bending the rules in organizations like the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Since 2022, Russia has upped the ante. Moscow has intelligently exploited global discontent with the West. By arguing that the West has been invading sovereign countries and redrawing the map since time immemorial, Russia has deflected criticism of its war against Ukraine. Hamas’ attack against Israel on Oct. 7 and its aftereffects have given Moscow new tools of persuasion. While the West backs Israel’s assault on Gaza, Russia has been watching from the sidelines. It can amplify a global outrage that would be proliferating with or without Russia. Without a blueprint, Russia jumps on the West’s travails whenever and wherever they materialize.

Russia has also grown more obstructionist in multilateral institutions. Amid heightened acrimony at U.N. agencies, Russian diplomats have been creative in causing paralysis, tabling texts to compete with Western-backed resolutions and causing procedural hiccups. Russian diplomats have used the U.N. rulebook “as if they were sleeping with it under their pillow,” according to one official. At the U.N. Security Council, the fragile modus vivendi that had still held between Russia and Western states in 2022 also became more precariousover time. The paralysis cannot be blamed on Russia alone: Western diplomats took their grievances with Russia over Ukraine to each and every forum, alienating counterparts from the Global South. Post-invasion demands by Western states that the Global South fall in line with their position on Ukraine have backfired spectacularly.

Finally, Russia’s intent to fragment Western-led international systems includes international finance. Hit with unprecedented Western sanctions and cut off from the financial messaging infrastructure of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, Russia has embraced the idea of de-dollarization, although Russia’s reliance on the yuan and rupee has come with problems. While the Kremlin dreams about the BRICS moving toward a single currency, practical obstacles remain, and Russia has failed to induce other countries to bypass the U.S. dollar. Here, Russia’s push for fragmentation has made little headway thus far.

Integration

The most confounding of Russia’s global projects is the integration of non-Western structures of partnership and allegiance. Moscow has labored to expand both the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, cheering growing integration among what Russian diplomats term the “global majority.” As chair of the recently enlarged BRICS, Russia is planning to host over 200 events this year, including a ministerial in Nizhny Novgorod and a summit in Kazan.

Moscow is also exploring less institutionalized forms of integration. At Russia’s behest, synergies are emergingamong constellations of states that are hostile to the West. Russia’s ally Belarus and Iran are strengthening their defense cooperation. This spring, Russia will conduct routine joint naval drills with China and Iran, having also proposed similar three-way exercises with China and North Korea. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are attempting to tie down the American Gulliver in intersecting crises and war zones. Synchronization is not necessarily gamed out in advance, but it is already having a cumulative effect. The United States faces the prospect of simultaneous security crises in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

In the Sahel, a region that continues to tip toward military dictatorships, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger signed a tripartite mutual defense pact in the fall. Amid their joint departure from the Economic Community of West African States, Moscow signaled its interest in enhancing cooperation with the Alliance of Sahel States. After recent successes in fighting in Mali, the Africa Corps has been invited into Burkina Faso and may well emerge in Niger. Successfully branding itself as the only external force serious about fighting terrorism, Russia is creating a new axis of partners.

Closer to home, Russia’s integration projects have foundered. For decades, Russia has been the leading force in the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a military alliance made up of post-Soviet states that was established in 1992. In January 2022, the treaty had its moment in the spotlight when it successfully performed a regime maintenance operation amid protests in Kazakhstan, but since the invasion of Ukraine, it has failed to impress. When its members Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan rekindled their longstanding border dispute in September 2022, the Collective Security Treaty Organization was unable to mediate. In the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, it also played a muted role. An irritated Armenian government eventually turned to France and India for arms and held joint military exercises with the United States. In the economic sphere, Russia’s regional integration efforts have performed somewhat better. Amid the flourishing of Russia’s roundabout trade, the Eurasian Economic Union — designed to pursue a common market among Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia — witnessed a re-entanglement of business elites after February 2022.

A Balance Sheet

When Russia failed to take Kyiv and was pushed back in eastern and southern Ukraine in late 2022, low expectations crystallized for Russian foreign policy. The U.S. government identified Russia’s “strategic defeat” as the end state of its Ukraine policy. This optimism was premature — not just for the military configurations on Ukrainian territory, which have gradually begun to favor Russia, but also for Russia’s redesigned statecraft. Russia has been adept at the political economy of war, at styling itself as a David taking on the American Goliath, while thus far avoiding entanglement in costly blunders outside of Europe.

The open question for Russia’s foreign policy is whether its global ambitions are coherent. They are sustainable for Russia, though dangers for the Russian economy loom on the horizon. But if Russia’s improvisatory opportunism gives it agility, it also bespeaks a certain nihilism, as if Russian foreign policy exists for the war and not the war for some larger set of policy aims. This nihilism is most pronounced in Russia’s almost obsessive anti-Westernism, which globally is always in vogue but is too abstract and too empty a position on which to build anything really solid. It also makes for a lot of strange, disparate bedfellows.

Contending with a Global Russia

To recognize the scale of the challenge Russia represents is, first and foremost, to connect the dots of its global foreign policy. To diminish Russia’s sources of self-preservation, the United States should continue to close the loopholes on sanctions. Disrupting weapons transfers from Iran and North Korea will be a tall order, but other efforts to starve Russia’s war machine are having an effect — as shown by the growing number of foreign banks that are restricting their business with Russian clients. Although Russia’s military presence outside of Europe remains modest, the United States should counter Russia’s support for malign actors in the Middle East, where possible, while buttressing partner governments in Africa to limit the further expansion of Africa Corps. Since Washington cannot (and need not) take on Moscow everywhere, it should focus on those theaters where Russian military activities risk producing the greatest negative spillover effects.

The United States should not expect Russia to return to compartmentalization any time soon. Efforts at restraining a nuclear North Korea and preventing Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold will have to be done not just without, but also in opposition to, Russia. Washington should call on Russia to return to nuclear arms control talks before New START expires in 2026, while seriously planning for the eventuality that Putin will not cooperate.

Contending with Russia’s efforts to upend the international order and to advance its own integration projects will be very difficult. Washington’s support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s irresponsible government has further degraded trust in the West, elucidating a simple lesson: The more the United States and its allies have to offer the Global South in its terms, whatever those may be, and the more respect they show to the foreign policy autonomy of those countries, the more they will expose the many points of hollowness that inform Russian foreign policy. The power of example will in every case outshine the power of argument. The same is true for the power of negative example.

Most urgent is continued support for Ukraine. If Moscow wins the war, its efforts to remake international order will accelerate. A Russia in control of Ukraine would feel more self-confident, and it would suffer from fewer resource constraints. Its appeal as a partner to non-Western states would grow, while Western credibility in Europe and elsewhere would be in ruins. Russia’s global game runs through Ukraine. That is where it must be stopped.

That’s enough for tonight.

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