Friday News Roundup — March 18, 2022
Russia, Ukraine & WMDs; Wartime Messaging from Moscow & Kyiv; Early Lessons for the Future of Electronic Warfare
Earlier in the week, we witnessed an amazing scene of unity, as Congress sat jointly and listened to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s video address. While calls for a no fly zone or more direct intervention remain remote, the U.S. and its allies are stepping up the military supplies, including more advanced weaponry. As the Russian advances stalls, the humanitarian crisis grows. Hopes for off-ramps towards a ceasefire are tempered by the prospects of further escalation — or Russia’s slow, grinding destruction of the Ukrainian state.
At home, even as Russia’s assault has prompted unity in support for Ukraine, the details are always trickier — questions remain about the prospects for trade sanctions on Russia and how/when energy sanctions might be implemented. Looking ahead, it also appears that the lines are being drawn for the confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, with some disagreement in the GOP on how to address her past work as a defense attorney.
This week Joshua C. Huminski, the Director of the Mike Rogers Center for Intelligence & Global Affairs reviewed Jeevan Vasagar’s “Lion City” an exploration of the past and future of Singapore for the Diplomatic Courier. An interesting book, it struggles, much like Singapore, to find its soul, but it is a welcome distraction from the doom-scrolling.
For The Hill, Huminski also penned an op-ed warning about the risks of over-correction in punitive measures against Russia, calling for policymakers to be aware of escalation — unintended or otherwise. Also in The Hill, Wes wrote how support for Russia’s neighbors in Central Asia needs to be part of any economic strategy to isolate Moscow.
In this week’s roundup, Joshua looks at the rumors and warnings of WMD use in the war in Ukraine, while Wes breaks down how Kyiv and Moscow are approaching wartime messaging. Ethan is joined by Stanton Hubbard, providing analysis of how this conflict is yielding early lessons about electronic warfare and information operations. As always, we wrap with news you may have missed.
Russia, Ukraine, and the Prospect of WMDs
Joshua C. Huminski
At the end of last week, intelligence officials began warning that Russia may consider using chemical weapons against Ukraine to reinvigorate the stalling advance in that country. Officials suggested that Moscow may launch a “false flag” attack, placing the blame on Kyiv or a Western government to justify an expanded operation.
Concern about the possibility prompted President Joe Biden to warn that Russia would pay a “severe price” if Moscow decided to use chemical weapons in Ukraine, an act that would violate the Chemical Weapons Convention. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, for his part, said “we must remain vigilant because it is possible that Russia itself could plan chemical weapons operations under this fabrication of lies.”
The use of chemical or indeed biological weapons in Ukraine would certainly be a “game changer” in the words of Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda. “Of course, everybody hopes that he would not dare do that but … if he uses any weapons of mass destruction then this will be a game changer in the whole thing,” Duda said. He added that NATO would have to “think seriously what to do because then it starts to be dangerous not only for Europe … but the whole world.”
That the possible use of chemical or biological weapons is being considered or discussed within Moscow is both concerning and, yet, unsurprising. In the former, it is reflective of Moscow’s stalled campaign that has met with greater than expected Ukrainian resistance and worse than expected Russian performance. While the full battlefield performance of Russia will be dissected for years to come, it is clear that the underlying assumptions of a hollowed out Ukrainian state, one that would roll over in the face of Russian aggression without much of a fight, has proven demonstrably false. That assumptions about military performance or the resistance of adversaries proved false is not without precedence.
That Ukraine did not roll over and capitulate is likely part of the reason why Russia has shifted to more aggressive and indiscriminate attacks. The Russian military’s adoption of punitive, destructive operations aimed increasingly at civilian populations is likely aimed at driving Kyiv to the negotiating table by raising the costs of resistance to such a high degree. The longer Ukraine resists, the worse the punishment and damage becomes. Similar destructive tactics were used in Chechnya and, more recently, in Syria.
In the case of the latter, it is almost certain that somewhere within Russian military intelligence, the GU, or the Ministry of Defence itself that some officers are discussing the possibility of using such weapons. Given the fact that these intelligence disclosures are, in practice, selective leaks, and lack context, it is impossible to tell at what level these talks are occurring. Moreover, discussing their use does not mean their use is imminent.
Nonetheless, as others have noted, Russia has used chemical and radiological weapons before. Ukraine’s then pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned and disfigured with dioxin in 2004. In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with Polonium 210, and subsequently died. Twelve years later, two Russian military intelligence officers attempted to murder Sergei Skripal, a former intelligence officer himself who defected to the UK, with the nerve agent Novichok. That same agent was used by Federal Security Service (FSB) officers to poison Alexey Navalny, an opposition figure on a flight to Moscow in 2020. Russia is also accused of helping Syria cover up Damascus’ use of Sarin nerve agent and chlorine gas attacks against opposition fighters.
There is, however, an order of magnitude difference between individual poisonings and widespread battlefield use, false-flag or otherwise. Such a dramatic escalation would indeed be a “game changer” as would any use of tactical nuclear weapons. Indeed, the risk of the use of nuclear weapons is not zero anymore. António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general said “The prospect of nuclear war is now back within the realm of possibility.” The nuclear dimension is, however, an issue unto itself and worth lengthy exploration, perhaps in later CSPC piece.
It is nonetheless important to consider the implications of the simple fact that these conversations are even taking place, and what it means for preparedness both locally and internationally.
As Ned Price, a Department of State spokesperson said, “It is Russia that has active chemical and biological weapons programs and is in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention and Biological Weapons Convention.” These programs are not small and while the full scope of their existence is not known, extrapolating what we do know from the end of the Cold War is nothing short of alarming. David Hoffman’s book “The Dead Hand” goes into frightening detail about Russia’s WMD program and is well worth a read on the subject.
Andrew Weber, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration suggested that a battlefield use of Anthrax was a possibility: “Biological weapons would be different. They might use something like anthrax, for example, which is not contagious and wouldn’t spread back to Russia. But the Russian illegal biological weapons program includes things like plague, tularemia [a rare infectious disease] and even smallpox.”
While nearly all of the world’s attention was, rightly, on Covid, the possibility of purposeful WMD use escaped much notice. Indeed, many had hoped that such a prospect was exceedingly slim, wishing it away, almost. With the crisis in Ukraine, it should, hopefully, spark a renewed conversation on the need for preparedness, strategic stockpiling, surveillance and tracking, and other dual-purpose efforts — such measures would undoubtedly help prevent the next pandemic, but would also be useful in the event of a wartime crisis, such as Ukraine.
At a macro-level picture, while it is important to consider any possibility, the use of WMD would likely be self-defeating for Moscow. Putin claims that Ukraine is part of Russia and rendering it inhospitable for a period of time via nuclear weapons, or ensuring a complete hardening of international opinion against Moscow (with the use of chemical or biological weapons) would seem to fly in the face of taking back something that was, in his view, wrongly lost in history. It would prompt considerable international backlash and condemnation, even beyond that which is presently seen, and may force China, one Moscow’s few remaining allies, into an awkward position. Putin is not irrational and not suicidal, and setting the stage for a nuclear exchange would certainly be both of those things, and the downsides of a chemical or biological release would seem to grossly outweigh any battlefield advantage or gain. This is not to say that it is definitively not possible (a sure-fire way to be wrong in any analysis), but that the balance of probabilities is against it at the moment. In the end we can only identify possible paths of escalation and weigh the odds of each path.
Russian and Ukrainian Leaderships Settle into Wartime Mindset
Wesley Culp
After more than three weeks of massive fighting across Ukraine, the quick victory over Ukraine’s armed forces which the Kremlin had assumed was inevitable has not materialized. Both Ukraine and Russia’s leadership have continued to project confidence of future battlefield successes despite negotiation teams from the two sides regularly speaking with one another at the negotiating table. Regardless of recent progress made at the negotiating table, it is apparent that both Kyiv and Moscow are settling into the idea of a much longer war.
With its war in its third week, Kremlin messaging is signaling through domestic messaging that it is digging in for a long war and long period of confrontation with the West. In a March 16 address to Russian government ministers, Putin claimed that the so-called “special military operation” was proceeding according to plan, even as Russian troops remained bogged down around significant strategic objectives such as Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Mykolaiv. Putin further claimed, with no basis in fact, that Russia was forced to invade by the threat of Kyiv acquiring nuclear weapons and the need to “denazify” and “demilitarize” the country. Putin further doubled down by saying that those who prioritize their connections and comforts in the Western world are not “mentally with” Russia, and therefore would be considered enemies. In decrying assumed Western designs to support a pro-Western “fifth column” within Russia, Putin declared that Russians with supposed foreign sympathies would be identified and rejected by the Russian people in a “natural and necessary self-purification of society.” This hardline position leaves little room for reconciliation with the West over Ukraine and implies that the Kremlin seeks to achieve society-wide buy-in for a sustained campaign against Ukraine.
Ukrainian messaging has remained defiant of Russian pressure so far, even going as far to reject the notion that Ukraine would accept compromise terms from Russia on its future status. While noting over the weekend that Ukraine remained interested in negotiating with Russia, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba insisted that Ukraine would not capitulate or accept any Russian ultimatums. Zelensky’s messages to the Ukrainian people this week have centered around themes of resiliency and confidence in the ability of the Ukrainian people to eventually defeat Russia’s invasion. On March 14, Zelensky declared that Ukrainians would fight for their independence and ultimately emerge triumphant, an undeniable message of faith in the future performance of the Ukrainian armed forces. Addresses to the people of Ukraine on March 15, March 16, and March 17 took similar tones and emphasized that Russia’s invasion would be defeated through the resilience of the Ukrainian people. He also described a set of optimistic demands that Ukrainian negotiators asked of Russia: security guarantees for Ukraine and a restoration of Ukraine’s long-violated territorial integrity.
While Russia and Ukraine have continued to prepare their populations for longer-term war, both Ukrainian President Zelensky and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov conveyed optimism at progress made by negotiators, with Zelensky saying that talks had become “more realistic” and Lavrov saying that the two parties were “close to agreeing” on mutually agreeable terms. However, both Ukrainian and Russian negotiators have hinted that a large gulf exist between the two parties in their principal demands. Russian Press Secretary accused Ukrainian negotiators of lacking “zeal” to complete negotiations quickly, while Ukrainian policymakers have said that Ukraine will not accept Russian ultimatums and that Kyiv maintains certain “inviolable” conditions which Russia has not agreed to. Significant daylight also appears to exist between Moscow and Kyiv’s public messaging, which raises questions about the ultimate viability of negotiations.
The past week has also seen Zelensky take Ukraine’s cause abroad with several virtual addresses to Western legislatures. A Wednesday virtual speech to Congress implored the United States to impose a no-fly zone above Ukraine or to provide aircraft and anti-aircraft systems to Ukraine in the absence of a Western no-fly zone. Several hours later, the Biden administration announced that the United States would give an additional $800 million in military aid to Ukraine, including Stinger anti-aircraft missile systems requested by Kyiv. This security aid had been planned prior to Zelensky’s address to Congress. President Zelensky’s speech to Congress occurred between similar appeals to the Canadian Parliament and German Bundestag. Such appeals appear to imply that Kyiv is buckling up for a longer-term war with Russia, regardless of its public optimism about a ceasefire.
While negotiations between Ukraine and Russia continue to take place and have given some cause for optimism, public messaging from Ukrainian and Russian national leadership indicates that both countries have begun to settle in for a longer war. President Zelensky’s requests for further international aid and addresses to the Ukrainian people by President Zelensky show that Kyiv is conscious of the reality that Russia will not back down any time soon, even if Kiev is ready to reach a mutually agreeable negotiated settlement with Moscow. These publicly expressed attitudes in Kyiv and Moscow indicate that Ukraine and Russia both expect the war to drag on longer than recent progress in negotiations would suggest.
Ukraine portends the future requirements for Electronic Warfare
Ethan Brown & Stanton Hubbard
Stanton Hubbard is a SETA contractor for the U.S. Army and has served in Iraq and Afghanistan in different Intelligence/Security roles. Previously, Mr. Hubbard served in the U.S. Army as an Infantryman, Cavalry Scout, and Signals Intelligence analyst.
Ukraine may very well be the lynchpin for a broader, strategic shift in how warfare is waged in the future. While Russian conventional forces have taken a slow, deliberate slog through a tremendous Ukrainian resistance, the reality remains that in the west, we do not fully understand the strategy behind the Russian advance. This space has covered some of the more baffling tactical steps taken by Russian Federation military units and decision makers, but one thing should remain fundamentally understood: even though the performance of these units was seemingly well below-par, Russian military leaders and intelligence watched the activities and is already compiling lessons learned from the 21st century’s first true state-on-state war. For the United States and liberal-order partners to do anything less is foolhardy.
Electronic Warfare (EW) and Information Operations (IO) will be the main thrust of this analysis. Specifically, what the Ukraine conflict and Russian use of both domains can tell us about how to generate requirements for and create systems to defeat and contest adversaries attempts to influence the modern battlefield with these non-kinetic, yet highly influential mediums.
While the US is working on building its Electronic Warfare and IO dominance, it currently lacks substantive numbers regarding capable systems that can counter a contested environment and aid allies to countermine adversaries EW/IO operations. Less expensive and asymmetric capabilities to conduct EW/IO operations can fill a void in the interim, but the reality is that fundamental requirements must be established first and foremost, and no better proving ground exists for this baseline than the activities that were seen (and not seen) in recent weeks across Eastern Europe. To date, a great deal of the counter EW operations are being undertaken by commercial enterprises, exemplified by SpaceX’s starlink internet deliveries to Ukraine during the invasion crisis. Inevitably, jamming ensued as Russian forces reacted to this development, which further demonstrates the criticality for establishing EW mitigation protocols.
What have we learned from Ukraine? For one thing, either EW capabilities have been largely over-estimated on the part of the Russian security enterprise (both our domestic assumptions and their own competence), or those capabilities have been held in reserve by the Russian aggressor who see an end state which the West is not considering. This indicates two key points — the first that the ability to control, defend, and influence the electromagnetic spectrum is tantamount to freedom of maneuver in future conflicts. The second is that this remains a capability which has not received the attention it deserves, owing to western tendencies to double-down on conventional hard power and foregoing the competitive arenas where adversaries have sought and gained capability advantages.
What is Electromagnetic Warfare?
EW by doctrine is organized into three tenets under the Electro-Magnetic Spectrum Operations (EMSO) paradigm: Electronic Support, Electronic Attack, and Electronic Protection. The first tenet involves detecting, recording, and disseminating information on EMSO; the second is the applied used of directed energy or anti-radiation weapons to attack personnel, structures, or equipment with the intent to degrade, neutralize or destroy enemy combat capabilities; the final tenet consists of hardening the architecture to resist and defend against adversarial employment of the second tenet. Under threat from the EMSO construct is not limited to military systems, but includes the civilian spectrum of wireless and telecommunications architecture, making the influence of EW particularly critical in modern warfare.
So now let’s consider what we have seen in Ukraine
Electronic Protection: We know that those Russian forces have been grossly under-equipped, with a myriad of reports indicating that much of the command and control architecture has been unencrypted, even though there have been reports of 6th-gen radios like the R-187P1 Azart and R-168–5UN-2 digital radios which are capable of Citadel-format encryption software. These packages can be used as network repeaters (the digital aspect of the transceiver) and provide situational awareness reporting through GPS and GLONASS (the Russian alternative satellite positioning network) pings as well.
Our lesson to learn from Russian mistakes: In contested environments radio and GPS signal may be unreliable but the need to develop the situation calls for a simple Information Surveillance and Resonance platform (not to be confused with an Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance platform…too many acronyms these days) that can operate with our GPS and radio communications. While this may lack Realtime reporting capability, UAS require continuous and reliable estimates for the attitude, velocity, and position. Traditionally, these states are estimated by applying Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Barometer, Magnetometer, and GPS measurements. When the GPS signal is lost, these systems can collect Full Motion Video (FMV) or passive Electronic Warfare sensing capabilities leaving a very low signature. Not only is the goal to defeat the adversary in the EW spectrum but protect your own systems from the same kind of activities.
Having communications in a contested environment is key for leaders to command and control their elements. A potential low-cost solution is to use cognitive radio for multiple-input multiple-output (CR-MIMO) networks. This system is designed to mitigate interference through a time-division-duplexing (TDD) system but would require inference cancellation built into the radio infrastructure. These are stop gap measures until the DoD can begin to field actual EW Support, Attack, and Protection systems, but it serves as one vector to insulate our systems for these kinds of battlefields.
Counter-UAS: The role of remote systems has become a pivotal component to this new era of war, something that has scarcely manifested elsewhere, save for the case study in loitering weapons during 2020’s Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In Ukraine, defense forces have employed direction finding, comms jamming, and weapons-interference EMSO manipulation via the Bukovel-AD. In short, the Bukovel-AD uses EW energy to sever the link between airborne UAV’s and their ground control stations, jams the GPS/GLONASS signal, and spoofs communications channels across detected frequencies — including GSM/CDMA/LTE [mobile network bandwidth] emanating from the identified adversary UAV. This is accomplished by detecting radio emissions, triangulating that source energy and redistributing the energy in such a way that renders the connection unusable. It can even interfere with frequency hopping, an Electronic Counter-Counter Measure (ECCM) meant to overcome such efforts as jamming and spoofing.
Our lesson to learn from this experience: These systems are already in place in Ukraine, developed by domestic tech companies like Tritel and Proximus; these Ukrainian outfits built these systems out of simple necessity and survival — they know better than anyone the kinds of interference and threats emanating from Russian capabilities in the EMSO paradigm. What the United States, chiefly policy, and defense leaders, must take away from this is the value in pushing the capabilities gap in EMSO. It will serve as a deterrent function when adversaries and competitors know that their freedom of maneuver in the electromagnetic spectrum is no longer assured because of the Wests inaction.
Parting Shots
Russia has learned that it can still operate and pursue its political objectives while relying on hard power alone, albeit poorly constituted and led, but make no mistake that every one of these actions are being studied and captured for future reference. Perhaps that is the underlying thrust of the Ukraine invasion, a litmus test for what old capabilities can achieve in this new era of confrontation, and Ukrainian civilians are the ones suffering and paying so that Russian military forces can ascertain their current capabilities.
But the main takeaway is that, whether these EMSO capabilities are over-estimated, or we simply aren’t seeing them fielded so as to give away what they can really do, we can still assess our own limitations in EMSO operations. Indeed, this isn’t something that can be resolved overnight, nor can the public sector do it alone. It will require integration of the industry and commercial partners to compete at the speed of innovation (a compelling sub-thread which Maj.Gen. Mick Ryan talks about in his new book “War Transformed”). Ukraine has given key performance indicators for what the EMSO domain is capable of, and what failure to exploit those gaps means for even highly professionalized modern militaries.
Exploiting those gaps means building requirements into public-partner integration that shows “X is the problem, and A-B-C are capabilities that are needed to overcome and exploit it”. The systems aren’t going to be built until the requirements are generated, and the battlefields in Ukraine show what requirements the electromagnetic spectrum demands.
News You May Have Missed
Chechen Leader Ramzan Kadyrov and Elon Musk Publicly Feud on Social Media
Following Elon Musk’s tweeted challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin to fight in “single combat” over the fate of Ukraine, Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of Russia’s Chechen Republic federal subject, mocked Musk’s challenge and his fitness to fight Putin. Kadyrov, who rules his federal subject as an autonomous personal fiefdom, said that Musk would flounder in personal combat with President Putin based on Putin’s judo skills and intellectual prowess, which in the Chechen President’s mind towered over Musk’s qualifications as a “twitter blogger and businessman.” Kadyrov also suggested that Musk train at boxing clubs and special forces academies associated with his Chechen government. In response to Kadyrov saying that feminine “Elona” must become a more masculine “Elon” to fight Putin, Musk claimed that such training would give him an excessive advantage over Putin and temporarily changed his twitter name to reflect Kadyrov’s play on his name.
Outrage as Brazil’s Bolsonaro is Given Indigenous Rights Award
Environmental activists and indiginious leaders expressed their outrage as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was awarded the “Medal of Indiginous Merit” by his Justice Minister, Anderson Torres. Given Bolsonaro’s policies, which have reversed protections for indiginous Brazilians and their land claims, while also opening protected Amazon lands to further development. One former recipient of the award returned theirs in protest, while opposition lawmakers are moving to see if the award can be annulled.
The views of authors are their own and not that of CSPC.
