#David Patrikarakos

[nicklloydnow]

“President Biden has authorized the first use of U.S.-supplied long-range missiles by Ukraine for strikes inside Russia, U.S. officials said.

The weapons are likely to be initially employed against Russian and North Korean troops in defense of Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region of western Russia, the officials said.

Mr. Biden’s decision is a major change in U.S. policy. The choice has divided his advisers, and his shift comes two months before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office, having vowed to limit further support for Ukraine.

Allowing the Ukrainians to use the long-range missiles, known as the Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, came in response to Russia’s surprise decision to bring North Korean troops into the fight, officials said.

(…)

Mr. Biden began to ease restrictions on the use of U.S.-supplied weapons on Russian soil after Russia launched a cross-border assault in May in the direction of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.

To help the Ukrainians defend Kharkiv, Mr. Biden allowed them to use the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, which have a range of about 50 miles, against Russian forces directly across the border. But Mr. Biden did not allow the Ukrainians to use longer-range ATACMS, which have a range of about 190 miles, in defense of Kharkiv.

While the officials said they do not expect the shift to fundamentally alter the course of the war, one of the goals of the policy change, they said, is to send a message to the North Koreans that their forces are vulnerable and that they should not send more of them.

The officials said that while the Ukrainians were likely to use the missiles first against Russian and North Korean troops that threaten Ukrainian forces in Kursk, Mr. Biden could authorize them to use the weapons elsewhere.

Some U.S. officials said they feared that Ukraine’s use of the missiles across the border could prompt President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to retaliate with force against the United States and its coalition partners.

But other U.S. officials said they thought those fears were overblown.

The Russian military is launching a major assault by an estimated 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean troops, on dug-in Ukrainian positions in Kursk with the goal of retaking all of the Russian territory that the Ukrainians seized in August.

(…)

Some Pentagon officials opposed giving them to the Ukrainians because they said the U.S. Army had limited supplies. Some White House officials feared that Mr. Putin would widen the war if they gave the missiles to the Ukrainians.

Supporters of a more aggressive posture toward Moscow say Mr. Biden and his advisers have been too easily intimidated by Mr. Putin’s hostile rhetoric, and they say that the administration’s incremental approach to arming the Ukrainians has disadvantaged them on the battlefield.

Proponents of Mr. Biden’s approach say that it had largely been successful at averting a violent Russian response.

Allowing long-range strikes on Russian territory using American missiles could change that equation.

In August, the Ukrainians launched their own cross-border assault into the Kursk region, where they seized a swath of Russian territory.

Since then, U.S. officials have become increasingly concerned about the state of the Ukrainian army, which has been stretched thin by simultaneous Russian assaults in the east, Kharkiv and now Kursk.

The introduction of more than 10,000 North Korean troops and Mr. Biden’s response come as Mr. Trump prepares to re-enter office with a stated goal of quickly ending the war.

Mr. Trump has said little about how he would settle the conflict. But Vice President-elect JD Vance has outlined a plan that would allow the Russians to keep the Ukrainian territory that their forces have seized.

The Ukrainians hope that they would be able to trade any Russian territory they hold in Kursk for Ukrainian territory held by Russia in any future negotiations.

If the Russian assault on Ukrainian forces in Kursk succeeds, Kyiv could end up having little to no Russian territory to offer Moscow in a trade.

Mr. Zelensky has long sought permission from the United States and its coalition partners to use long-range missiles to strike Russian soil.

The British and French militaries have given the Ukrainians a limited number of Storm Shadow and SCALP missiles, which have a range of about 155 miles, less than the American missile system.

While British and French leaders voiced support for Mr. Zelensky’s request, they were reluctant to allow the Ukrainians to start using their missiles on Russian soil unless Mr. Biden agreed to allow the Ukrainians to do the same with ATACMS.

Mr. Biden was more risk-averse than his British and French counterparts, and his top advisers were divided on how to proceed. On Sunday, some Republican lawmakers praised the move but said it had come too late.”

“President Vladimir V. Putin on Tuesday lowered Russia’s threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, a long-planned move whose timing appeared designed to show the Kremlin could respond aggressively to Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory with American long-range missiles.

The decree signed by Mr. Putin implemented a revised version of Russia’s nuclear doctrine that Mr. Putin described in televised remarks in September. But the timing was clearly meant to send a message, coming just two days after the news that President Biden had authorized the use of U.S.-supplied long-range missiles by Ukraine for strikes inside Russia.

Asked whether Russia could respond with nuclear weapons to such strikes, Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, repeated the new doctrine’s language that Russia “reserves the right” to use such weapons to respond to a conventional-weapons attack that creates a “critical threat” to its “sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

(…)

The new doctrine, published Tuesday on the Kremlin website, differs from the previous iteration in at least two important ways that show how Mr. Putin is trying to use the threat of his nuclear arsenal to deter the United States from further supporting Ukraine.

First, it raises the possibility that nuclear weapons could be used against a nuclear-armed country that doesn’t directly launch an attack on Russia but supports one by a nonnuclear country. That is a clear reference to Ukraine and its nuclear-armed backers led by the United States. Russia’s previous nuclear doctrine focused on responding to attacks by nuclear-armed countries and alliances.

Second, it lowers the threshold at which Russia could consider nuclear use in response to an attack with conventional weapons. The previous doctrine, published in 2020, said such an attack must threaten “the very existence of the state,” while the new one puts that threshold at a “critical threat” to Russia’s sovereignty.

The doctrine’s publication on Tuesday appeared to be the latest suggestion from the Kremlin that Russia could use nuclear weapons to respond to attacks by Ukraine carried out with American support, and that the response could be directed against American facilities as well as Ukraine itself.

“Aggression against the Russian Federation and (or) its allies by any nonnuclear state with the participation or support of a nuclear state is considered as their joint attack,” the document says.

Mr. Peskov, speaking at his daily conference call with reporters, pointed to this section of the revised doctrine, saying, “this is also a very important paragraph.”

“Nuclear deterrence is aimed at ensuring that a potential adversary understands the inevitability of retaliation in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation and/or its allies,” Mr. Peskov said.

(…)

On the battlefield, Russian forces are advancing in eastern Ukraine, while Kyiv struggles with recruitment and morale. And in geopolitics, Mr. Putin has also been making gains: his phone call last week with Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany broke two years of diplomatic isolation by the biggest Western countries, while the election of Donald J. Trump as incoming president of the United States has raised hopes in Russia of an Ukraine peace deal on the Kremlin’s terms.

(…)

In September, Mr. Putin warned that if the United States and its allies permitted Ukraine to fire missiles deeper into Russia, they would put his country “at war” with NATO.

(…)

On Tuesday, Andrei Kartapolov, the head of the defense committee in Russia’s lower house of Parliament, said that Mr. Biden “will slam the lid of his own coffin and drag many, many more people with him.”

Dmitri A. Medvedev, the outspoken former Russian president and vice chairman of Mr. Putin’s security council, said in a social media post that under the new nuclear doctrine, the use of missiles provided by NATO countries in attacks by Ukraine against Russia “can now be qualified as an attack on Russia” by NATO nations.

Mr. Medvedev, whose threats often go beyond the Kremlin’s official pronouncements, added: “In this case, the right arises to launch a retaliatory strike with weapons of mass destruction against Kyiv and the main NATO facilities, wherever they are.””

“It seems extraordinary, but I have seen and heard the same things at every front line I have visited across south and eastern Ukraine: The Russians are happy sending their soldiers to the ‘meat grinder’ to be slaughtered. They have endless supplies and a political system that renders them entirely expendable.

(…)

This doesn’t surprise me. Everything on the ground in the Russia-Ukraine War is now playing out with Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on January 20 in the background. Trump says he wants to end the war: This appears to mean a Versailles-style carve-up of the territories Moscow stole through invasion, torture and murder.

But I’ve always believed it will be almost impossible for Putin to negotiate while Ukraine holds a part of Russia. It makes him look unforgivably weak.

This is the man who wanted to bring back his nation’s glory days as a global power, but ended up with a foreign army on Russian soil for the first time since the 1940s. He has little choice but to go all-out to take it back before the inauguration, no matter how many will die.

Ukraine seized around 420 square miles of Russian territory in the Kursk Oblast following its August incursion, but the Russians have counter-attacked ferociously and reclaimed around half of what they lost.

(…)

US officials have said that Biden may authorise them to be used to strike targets deeper into Russia in the future. In the meantime, a bonus is that Biden’s authorisation means the UK and France will now almost certainly grant Kyiv authorisation to use their Storm Shadow long-range cruise missiles inside Russia, too.

Anticipating such a move, Russia has reportedly pulled most of its warplanes and other assets deeper into Russia. In September, a Pentagon spokeswoman said 90 per cent of Russian aircraft launching guide bombs into Ukraine were doing so from airfields out of ATACMS range.

(…)

The Ukrainians will need all the help they get. They are always outnumbered when they face their far more brutal and larger neighbour. And now things are even worse as Russian numbers in Kursk have swelled with the arrival of 10,000 North Koreans. The troops, whom Moscow has supposedly trained in artillery fire, basic infantry tactics and trench clearing, are likely to get involved in the continuing assaults against Ukraine’s positions. They wear Russian uniforms and are equipped by Moscow. But US officials assess that they will likely fight in their own distinct units.

(…)

Either way, the arrival of the North Koreans is an ominous development. This marks a major broadening out of the war as another nation state joins the fight. Alongside its troops, Pyongyang has also reportedly supplied Russia with long-range rocket and artillery systems, some of which have been deployed to Kursk.

(…)

The arrival of the North Koreans also drags China further into this war. We already know how deep China and Russia’s ties run. In February 2022 the two powers announced their own ‘no limits’ partnership. Russia is integral to creating the alternate world order Beijing wants to build and lead.

The ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy’ doctrine that underpins Chinese foreign policy stipulates that countries should work together on a ‘common destiny’. Make no mistake, the North Korea-Russia partnership, especially if successful in Kursk, brings the ‘common destiny’ of dismantling American and Western hegemony one step closer.

(…)

In the end, though, it is perhaps a different harbinger of World War III that we need to beware of – and confront. Almost every week in 90 Seconds To Midnight, the Daily Mail’s weekly global news podcast, I discuss how the prospect of mass war is closer than ever. The podcast has travelled from Ukraine to Iraq to Israel, and the lesson from those I speak to is always the same: Appeasement emboldens our enemies.

(…)

‘Trump reminds me of Neville Chamberlain. He said he would bring peace, but instead brought us World War II. Now, Trump could bring us World War III.’”

[eretzyisrael]

IDF Spokesman: “why did they strap GoPros to themselves? Why do they call the family of who they murdered? Bc they are proud of what they did? Rape - where is Islam? Burn - where is Islam? Behead - where is Islam?

Read More: Here

H/T @scartale-an-undertale-au

[buttercupkg66]

Ukrainians used to spit at deserters... now they sympathize with them. With 6,000 soldiers absconding every month, brutal press gangs roam the streets seizing new 'recruits'. DAVID PATRIKARAKOS on how battle-weariness is taking its toll

[ferrolano-blog]

Israel y el surgimiento de un nuevo orden mundial... Irán y Rusia ven en Gaza un desafío a Occidente... se está curvando el arco de la historia: hacia el nacimiento de un nuevo orden mundial en el que tres civilizaciones -una civilización ruso-eslava liderada por Rusia, una civilización islámica liderada por los islamistas chiíes de Irán y la civilización Han china- están todas en conflicto con un Occidente en declive... Para Teherán y Moscú, Ucrania e Israel se han convertido en dos frentes de un enfrentamiento más amplio entre Oriente y Occidente. Estados Unidos ha gastado tanto dinero y capital político en ayudar a defender al Estado judío en el último medio siglo que cualquier derrota que sufra Jerusalén proyecta no sólo su propia debilidad sino la de su principal aliado. Cada cohete de Hamás que impacta en casa no es simplemente otro acto de terror, sino un agujero más en el orden occidental (David Patrikarakos)

[the100th-monkey]

Today's News 13th July 2023

The Death Games Of Ukraine The Death Games Of Ukraine Authored by David Patrikarakos via UnHerd, Down in a bunker a little way back from the Ukraine frontline, I am watching a staple of modern warfare: a drone attack in real time. The command centre is a small room with three TV monitors, two of which are divided into four screens. All are showing drone footage from different parts of the…

[thenewviewerdaily]

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: The setback in the battle for Bakhmut

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-12108773/DAVID-PATRIKARAKOS-setback-battle-Bakhmut.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=1490&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

[gnatswatting]

• History shows us that with each new major evolution in information technology comes a period of great instability, often leading to conflict. —David Patrikarakos

War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century

[andrewtheprophet]

The Iran Horn is spinning out of control: Daniel 8

Iran is spinning out of control, just like the last days of the Shah Not content with infighting and battling thousands of enraged Iranians on the streets, Tehran is determined to fight on many fronts David Patrikarakos 18 January 2023 • 12:40pm The last days of the Shah of Iran have become a cautionary tale. The absolute ruler of Iran, who had the best equipped army in the Islamic Middle…

[zmkccommonplace]

The character of war changes with time, but it always brings the same things: disease, death, atrocities and elites.

David Patrikarakos, the Spectator, https://spectator.us/book-and-art/travels-robert-d-kaplan-good-american-robert-gersony/

[mariacallous]

Do what JFK did. By David Patrikarakos: Here’s how we can end nightmare—by taking a leaf out of JFK’s book: US President’s dealings with Nikita Khrushchev before the 1962 missile crisis could show us the way out of Ukraine crisis.

Do what Truman did. By Robert Zubrin. What would Harry Truman do? Truman was not willing to go to nuclear war to save South Korea, but he was not willing to allow it to be defeated either. So he found a third alternative: limited war.

Don’t do what George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump did. By Nicolas Tenzer:

George W. Bush, after his administration apparently pledged his support for the legal government of Georgia, has only ever verbally condemned the 2008 aggression against Tbilisi. This did not prevent Barack Obama from launching his reset in March 2009. The same Barack Obama refused to enforce the red lines he had defined in Syria, thus letting Assad and Iran, and then Putin from 2015, massacre hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians. He also made it clear to Putin that he had a free hand—and less than a year later Putin attacked Ukraine. The master of the Kremlin was not mistaken: the reactions of the West were, as he had foreseen, inconsistent and poor. Then, with impunity, Putin’s Russia was to spread terror and death in Syria from 2015 onwards—and this continues today. Russia also aids the bloody regime of Maduro, uses its militias in Africa and, together with China, supports the Burmese junta in its policy of all-out repression. …

[newstfionline]

For Whom the Cell Trolls

A new book argues that modern wars will be won with phones and laptops rather than tanks.

By Sasha Polakow-Suransky, Foreign Policy, February 28, 2018

War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. David Patrikarakos, Basic Books, 320 pages, $30, November 2017

It’s popular these days to proclaim that Clausewitz is passé and war is now waged via smartphones and Facebook feeds. Few writers have actually explored what this means in practice. The journalist David Patrikarakos’s new book, War in 140 Characters, chronicles in granular detail how social media has transformed the way that modern wars are fought. From the battlefields of eastern Ukraine to the bot factories of St. Petersburg, Patrikarakos takes us into the lives of ordinary citizens with no military training who have changed the course of conflicts with nothing more than a laptop or iPhone.

At the core of Patrikarakos’s book is the idea that narrative war has become far more important than physical war due to new technologies that shape public perceptions of conflicts in real time, regardless of what is actually happening on the battlefield. The spread of social media, he argues, has brought about a situation of “virtual mass enlistment” that gives civilians as much power as state propaganda machines--and sometimes more. Although some techno-utopians have celebrated the breakdown of centralized state control of information and the empowerment of the individual to challenge authoritarian regimes, he is not starry-eyed about the leveling of the playing field. “[B]ecause these new social media forums are structurally more egalitarian,” he writes, “many delight in holding up the Internet as the ultimate tool against tyrants.” It is not. As Patrikarakos notes, “the state will always fight back”--and it has.

The greatest strength of War in 140 Characters is the author’s preference for in-depth reporting over soundbite-ready platitudes. This is not a book of Lexuses and olive trees. Patrikarakos also goes to great lengths to show both sides of each conflict he covers. His chapter on Israel’s 2014 war against Hamas in Gaza, known as Operation Protective Edge, first brings us into the home of Farah Baker, a 16-year-old Twitter activist who became the voice of Gaza during the Israeli bombing campaign. Patrikarakos shows convincingly how Baker “could morph from a mere child into the most potent of weapons.” She helped drive the narrative of the war by producing heart-rending eyewitness accounts of a city under attack and disseminating information that mainstream news organizations, lacking access to the battlefield, picked up and repeated in their own coverage. Mainstream journalists had “become, in effect, her PR agents.” While Palestinians’ “rockets could never stop Israel,” he observes, “their narrative might.” Some books, content with celebrating a heroic underdog, would stop here. Patrikarakos’s does not.

Instead, he takes us into the inner sanctum of the Israel Defense Forces and examines how the Israeli defense establishment adjusted, slowly, to fighting a new enemy and a narrative war. He profiles a young soldier who, during a previous war in Gaza, pushed her superiors to stop fighting “analog war” and started a YouTube channel and Twitter account to disseminate the IDF’s narrative. The soldier even paid for a blog and domain name on her own credit card to bypass the grindingly slow bureaucracy. By 2014, the top brass had joined the modern era, and the IDF’s Facebook page was using visual propaganda, primarily videos, to bolster its message. The problem for Israel, as Patrikarakos observes, is that it is in a lose-lose situation even when it defends its narrative using the latest technology. “If it struck Hamas targets embedded in civilian areas, it received international condemnation, but if Hamas succeeded in kidnapping or killing any of its soldiers, Hamas won again.” The state struck back effectively, but the narrative of the underdog still dominated the news cycle.

The book’s focus then shifts from Gaza to Ukraine, where we meet Anna Sandalova, a middle-aged mother and former PR executive who is appalled by the state of the corrupt Ukrainian military establishment, hollowed out by years of kleptocracy and unable to provide the basic necessities for its soldiers. She takes it upon herself to “fill the governmental void.” She starts by organizing her friends on Facebook to supply Ukrainian soldiers battling separatists and Russian troops in the country’s east. Soon, she is sourcing boots and body armor and driving to the front lines in subzero temperatures, where Patrikarakos joins her under the threat of artillery fire, to deliver the supplies. Her efforts are not entirely new; as the author observes, the Jewish Agency illicitly obtained and shipped weapons to the Haganah--Israel’s pre-independence militia. The difference between 1948 and 2016, Patrikarakos argues, is that “What it may have taken the Jewish Agency months to do, Anna can do in days” with the help of diaspora networks that can be instantly activated on Facebook.

Just like the Gazan teenager tweeting under fire, the Ukrainian citizens fighting via Facebook also faced a response from the state. In this case, it was Russian troll farms that countered grassroots activists like Sandalova. Patrikarakos tells the story of Russia’s state-sponsored trolls by profiling one of them, who worked at the center of the counterpropaganda effort during the early stages of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Rather than simply justifying its actions, the Kremlin’s goal was to flood the zone with conflicting information and “sow as much confusion as possible.” The troll and his colleagues created fake blogs and sites masquerading as Ukrainian and cited each other as genuine sources in a self-referential circle of lies, producing a narrative completely at odds with the reality on the ground that was enthusiastically consumed and shared by pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk. The troll rationalized his work as “finding idiots and giving them what they wanted.” The mark of victory in Russia’s new narrative war was not to convince the enemy of its position, but to heighten the level of doubt about all news among the target population so as to “weaken their propensity to recognize the truth when they see or hear it.”

Patrikarakos argues that social media exerts both a centripetal force--uniting people and creating new virtual communities such as the Ukrainian patriots who donated to Sandalova’s Facebook page--but also a centrifugal force driving people apart, such as the Ukrainian neighbors (or for that matter American Democrats and Republicans) who live side by side but inhabit parallel universes because their news comes from diametrically opposed sources. It is a textbook illustration of Hannah Arendt’s classic description of the fertile soil in which totalitarianism grows: “The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them,” she wrote in 1951. “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thoughts) no longer exist.”

[usanewsgoogle]

Refugees can achieve so much if they’re not caged in isolated camps | David Patrikarakos | Opinion

Rooms were lying empty at the City Plaza hotel in Athens. Now it’s an autonomous hive where refugees are empowered

‘One third of the population at City Plaza are children and they are able to access schools.’ Photograph: Nasim/Nasim.

In May 2016, after the EU-Turkey agreement designed to close off mass immigration to Europe, a group of…

[reportwire]

Energy and existence | Eurozine

Energy and existence | Eurozine

2022-09-05 02:13:18 PEN Ukraine’s #DialoguesOnWar continues with a conversation between journalists Angelina Kariakina and David Patrikarakos. This is a transcription of key moments from their conversation. You can check out the recorded conversation here. David Patrikarakos: It is always a pleasure to speak to Angelina, one of Ukraine’s prominent journalists, who has been in Ukraine throughout…

[kragnir]

A military is the reflection of its society. Thus, it cannot be said enough what despicable, evil creatures that the Russians are. It’s usually a regime and its many organs that embody evilness in a country, but, in this case, the demons residing in the Kremlin have managed to brainwash the majority of the country’s population into drooling freaks who even prefer a handful of toilet paper money over the lives of their sons and husbands … or a TV set. Some have no problem wearing panties stolen in Ukraine with the blood of the victim still clinging to the fabric.

[ceevee5]

“I just don't really think you can see Ukraine as a victory for Russia, really. Their entire reputation as a super military superpower has been just destroyed. Their army is an army of serfs [that] doesn't have adequate rations … Seems to me that if you're Georgia or Moldova, you've got to look at this and be happy to see the Russian Army get absolutely chewed up, right. If Ukraine had fallen in three days, like Putin's ass-lickers told him it would, he'd be halfway to Georgia and Moldova, because why wouldn't he?”