Foreign Policy Update – USA Gov Policy

U.S. State Dept. Statements on Ukraine

The United States, along with its allies and partners, works to ensure the Russian Federation and the Lukashenka regime in Belarus pay a severe economic and diplomatic price for their unprovoked aggression against Ukraine.

With our allies and partners, we have taken these actions:

Applied powerful sanctions on Russia’s largest financial institutions and its sovereign wealth fund.
Made it difficult for Russia to find funding for its war beyond its borders.
Choked off Russian imports of key technologies.
Targeted the financial networks and assets of Russian and Belarusian elites, including President Putin and members of his security council.

There is nowhere for individuals or entities who support the unprovoked war to hide. We already see the effects of these actions, as the Russian and Belarusian economies stumble. With our allies and partners, we will continue to take strong economic and diplomatic actions.

We are also working with partners, including the Ukrainian authorities and international institutions, to pursue justice and accountability for war crimes and other atrocities committed in Ukraine. We will use every tool available to promote accountability for these acts, including criminal prosecutions.

Analyzing a fake Kremlin video used to justify war with Ukraine

The Kremlin is claiming the atrocities committed by Russian forces in Bucha, Ukraine — documented by satellite imagery — were a provocation staged by the West. Here’s what a staged provocation really looks like.

Evidence suggests Russia used a staged incident to justify its full-scale further invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

The Kremlin has ramped up its disinformation campaign since Russia began its unprovoked war with Ukraine, but there were plenty of false claims leading up to it.

One video was so suspicious — and so gruesome — that it drew scrutiny from Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based investigative journalism group that specializes in fact-checking and open-source intelligence.

The incident in question allegedly took place on a highway between Donetsk and Horlivka on February 22 at approximately 5 a.m. local time. An improvised explosive device (IED) was reported to have detonated on the highway, destroying a van and a car.

The video showed three charred bodies from two vehicles, apparently from a roadside bomb, in the Donbas region, which Russia-backed forces have controlled since 2014, when Russia first invaded Ukraine.

Using state media to spread the falsehoods

Vladimir Putin loyalists and pro-Kremlin media reported that Ukrainian armed forces were behind the alleged IED and targeted a military commander affiliated with the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) in eastern Ukraine.

Among those posting the images on social media and the claim: the state-controlled daily newspaper Izvestiya and the pro-Kremlin DNR People’s Militia.

Bellingcat relied on an explosive weapons expert and a forensic pathologist during its investigation, and what they saw didn’t add up.

Neither vehicle had number plates.
Neither vehicle appeared to have moved from the point of detonation, suggesting they were both static when the IED detonated.
The damage seen on both vehicles was inconsistent with an IED blast.

“In my opinion the images do not represent credible scenario,” Chris Cobb-Smith, an explosive weapons expert and director of Chiron Resources, told Bellingcat. “I believe the incident has been manufactured to give the appearance of an IED blast in which three individuals died.”

Relying on experts

The injuries to the skulls also appeared inconsistent with an IED blast. The skull of one of the bodies appeared to have clear cuts on both sides of the head, cleanly separating the skull cap from the rest of the skull.

Bellingcat looked at open sources and discovered these cuts are more consistent with a procedure carried out during an autopsy. The organization asked Lawrence Owens with the University of Winchester in England to analyze the images. He concluded the people were already deceased before their bodies were placed in the vehicles.

Bellingcat’s final report concludes that the incident involved “the staged use of cadavers and likely faked IED damage.”

The bottom line: the Kremlin used a fake story about a fake IED that didn’t kill anyone to drum up support back in Russia for a war it provoked. The war has killed more than 1,600 civilians and injured more than 2,000 since it was launched more than a month ago.

Quick Analysis

Putin’s Saber Rattling

Earlier this week, President Biden reversed his 2022 decision, authorizing the provision of antipersonnel land mines to the Ukrainian government. It follows an earlier Administration authorization to allow the use of an advanced American missile system capable of striking as deep as 100 miles inside Russian territory. The US election season may be ending, but both Russia and the West show no indication of stepping down the conflict. Russian propaganda continues to swell as the Kremlin increases its threats to use nuclear weapons against the West. Last week Andrey Sushentsov, program director of the pro-Kremlin think tank Valdai Discussion Club (VDC), published an article on growing nuclear tensions in the region. Official Russian language in the last few years has been threatening. Since the US election, rhetoric like that in the Sushentsov article, has approached the level of nuclear blackmail. The VDC article’s main theme centers on Russia’s intent to directly confront the West militarily if the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) becomes involved in Russia’s conflict with Ukraine. “On the one hand, these threats are intended to frighten the West, but on the other, Russian propagandists themselves are starting to believe in the inevitability of escalation,” according to Ksenia Kirillova of the Jamestown Foundation. On November 11, Sushentsov wrote that “The conflict will reach a completely new level, with unpredictable consequences for Europe and the entire world.” Kirillova points out that Putin’s distorted image of the world is divorced from reality and is causing the Kremlin to issue demands that are impossible to fulfill. Financial and other Russian resources needed to support Putin’s war are growing scarcer at the same time. This week the Kremlin announced a reduction of payments to its soldiers. Recently North Korea acknowledged it was sending soldiers to fight in Ukraine as Putin is running out of bodies to use as cannon fire. The war is not going well for Russia. One question floating around the Washington intelligence community is whether Putin will act out of desperation before President-elect Trump assumes office. In recent months the Russian propaganda machine is spewing out materials from fairly reputable analytical platforms inside the country. Kirillova says that “Kremlin ‘experts’ do not conceal that such threats are only intended to break the West psychologically, as they themselves are not prepared for full-scale nuclear war.” Despite Russia’s lack of preparation for an all-out war with the West, the expanding nuclear rhetoric carries with it an increase in the threat of a full-scale war in multiple theaters of operation. In June 2023 a founder of the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, Sergey Karaganov, called for “delivering a pre-emptive strike of retaliation” on Poland to force the West to surrender. In the previous month, Dmitry Suslov, a direct of research programs at the policy center proposed organizing “a demonstration nuclear explosion” aimed at intimidating the West. In September, President Putin announced a reappraisal of Russian nuclear doctrine after speaking earlier in the year at the plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum and jokingly calling Suslov a “scary person.” Pavel Baev, writing in the European Daily Monitor, says “Putin intends his announcement to mark an escalation of nuclear brinkmanship and influence the proceedings of future Ukrainian peace efforts.” Putin is expanding the list of environmental conditions that are acceptable for using a nuclear weapon and incorporating it into Russian military doctrine. Baev adds that “The ups and downs of Russian brinkmanship are disconnected from the kinetic battles of the war, correlating instead with Ukrainian peace offensives, such as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s first peace summit in Bürgenstock, Switzerland.” Despite the increase in vitriolic language, in a You Tube video published a week before the US presidential election, Karaganov openly assured the West the primary goal of the escalation is to break the American spirit and that of the West, not outright nuclear war. By Election Day in the US, with political prognosticators predicting a win for former president Trump, Karaganov changed his tune and called for an increased role in nuclear deterrence. Kirillova points out that Western concessions to Russia are unlikely to reduce the risk of nuclear escalation. The distorted reality inside the Kremlin continues to push that President-elect Trump is an adherent of “world government,” that Ukraine will create a nuclear weapon, and Russia must prepare for a nuclear conflagration to achieve its ambitions for a new world order. President-elect Trump has indicated he will not agree to concessions that destabilize Europe, the Middle East or other regions. Going forward a strong US foreign policy may be the most stabilizing course the West can count on to restrain Putin and his intent to rebuild the Russian empire. Daria Novak served in the U.S. State Dept. Illustration: Pixabay

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