Russia’s Twilight War

For those of you who have read my second book, The Absent Superpower, recent events in Ukraine should not come as a surprise. Chapter 6, The Twilight War, lays out how Russian geography and demographic realities would dictate Russian aggression in its immediate periphery. This is not a justification of Moscow’s aggression against its neighbor, but international watchers should not be feigning surprise. Nor should the current invasion of Ukraine be seen as a result of madness or a personal vendetta of Russian president Vladimir Putin; Russian leaders have viewed control of Ukraine, the Crimean Peninsula and access to the Black Sea as vital to the security of Russia and Russian interests for centuries. 

I would not argue that geopolitics is determinative. But geography tells a story. Russia’s wide-open, flat geography has provided little in the way of resistance to would-be invaders as varied as the Mongols and Napoleon, and the horrors of both World Wars still weighs heavily on the minds of Russians and their leaders. Does Putin wish for a return of the “glory” of the Soviet Union? Maybe. I can’t (and don’t want to!) claim any particular insights into the inner workings of his mind. But Putin’s flexing of his military might – in Chechnya and Georgia, and most recently in Ukraine – would not only have been understandable to Catherine the Great and the tsars (not to mention Soviet premiers), but seen as necessary for Russian security. 

But unlike his predecessors, Putin’s working with a terminal demography. Russia’s geography certainly hasn’t improved, but in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 a collapsing healthcare sector, skyrocketing alcohol and substance abuse, falling birthrates, declining life expectancies, and the ravages of disease – including tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS – has left Moscow to secure vast territories with a shrunken, and shrinking, military. If Russian geography can help explain the why of recent aggression, Russian demography can help us understand the timing. It’s now or never, and for Russian leaders the latter isn’t an option.

Consider the above map from The Absent Superpower. Pushing into and securing the Caucuses gives Russia a hard, mountainous border to the south of its critical access zones to the Black Sea (and through the Turkish Straits, the Mediterranean). After a couple of largely successful military campaigns in the mid-aughts, plus a friendly Armenia, there is precious little to impede Russia from imposing its will in the region. Russia’s western flank and its broad swathes of flat geography isn’t so easily secured. 

The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and the Russian-backed breakaway region of Transnistria aren’t Russian by accident. They bookend the narrowest part of the European peninsula. Securing them is vital for Russian national security interests, and in Moscow’s view the land bridge between them – better known as the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine – exists to either link and secure Russia interests, or to threaten them. 

Securing Ukraine is in no way the final step, but rather the necessary launching pad (along with Belarus) to securing the Baltic states and eastern Poland. I might have apologized for seeming alarmist before today’s events, but I think the last several weeks have shown the lack the lack of empathetic understanding on the West’s behalf of Russia and how it perceives its neighborhood and its future. The Russians do not see the Ukraine War as a war of aggression, or Putin’s egoistical quest for Soviet glory. Expect the Russians to fight as if their lives depend on the victory. In their minds, that’s precisely what’s on the line.

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The Invasion of Ukraine and Russian Product Exports

Russia’s months-long build up of troops along the Ukrainian border is starting Russia has followed through with its months-long threats of invasion of Now that the question of a Russian invasion of Ukraine has proven itself not to be a hypothetical, Western governments will be pushed to respond. The United States and its European allies are likely to pursue a sanctions campaign, but this is easier said than done. While it has been popular to deride Russia and its economy as a “gas station” masquerading as a country, the reality is that Russia is a significant–often the largest–exporter of several critical commodities. Russian exports directly feed and fuel (or enable the processes to do so) vast swathes of the world from South America to the Middle East and East Asia–in addition to lighting and heating European homes and supplying crude oil to US Gulf Coast refineries. For the latter scenario, Russian crude exports to the world’s largest oil producer picked up significantly in 2021 as a result of US sanctions against Venezuela, illustrating the double-edged nature of sanctions in the globalized economy.

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Ukraine, and Russian Invasion Paths

Russia’s months-long build up of troops along the Ukrainian border is starting Russia has followed through with its months-long threats of invasion of Ukraine. The Russian military has not focused on securing the separatist republics of eastern Ukraine; rather, the Russian military under the direction of President Vladimir Putin have launched missile and air strikes across the country with an aim of crushing not only the Ukrainian military but dismantling the independent government in Kyiv in total. 

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Ukraine: The War After the War

In a public broadcast late February 21 (local time), Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a lengthy, moody speech about the status of relations between Russia and its neighbor, Ukraine. Putin in essence declared a formal cold war with the West, while also making clear his belief that an independent Ukraine should not exist – going so far as to erroneously claim the nation a creation of Lenin, and that he will do something about it.
 
Effective immediately, Putin formally recognized the two secessionist bits of Ukraine (Donetsk and Luhansk) that he has been supporting with special forces troops, weapons, intelligence, and air support for the past seven years. In his mind, they are now “independent countries” and “allies.”
 
This is the identical playbook to what Putin did in a couple of provinces of another former Soviet state – Georgia – back in the 2000s. The idea being that these Russian-created, Russian-funded, and Russian-armed statelets are “allies”; allies deserve Russian troops to “protect” them; and under Russian law such Russian deployments are empowered to attack territories adjacent to the new allies to secure allied interests. In 2008 similar Russian deployments led to a brief war which smashed the military of Georgia. Russian troops remain in Georgian territory today.
 
In case you’ve been living under a rock, the Russians have been steadily amassing multiple invasion forces on Ukraine’s borders for a couple of months now, with the most recent guesstimate of the force total approaching 200,000, the greatest concentration of focused military power the world has seen since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. On a number of occasions, the Russians have claimed to be withdrawing forces, but civilian satellite monitoring has vividly illustrated that such “removed” troops have redeployed closer to the border. In the aftermath of today’s speech, multiple unconfirmed reports already indicate that Russian troops have moved into Donetsk and Luhansk.

Russia propaganda isn’t what it once was. In Soviet times it was often subtle, working through multiple intermediaries to provide rhetorical buffers, while also trickling into the conventional wisdom. It would seem to seep in from…everywhere. Now it’s just literally making up easily-disprovable stuff up on live television, and then moving on to the next blatant lie. About the only people who give it any credence are folks who have no choice (think: Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko) or folks who have consciously blended the Russian lies into their own domestic ideological narratives (think: Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, US Senator Bernie Sanders, or Fox News Host Tucker Carlson). Even Chinese state media is giving the Russians a look that communicates “Really? That’s what you’re going with?”
 
Russian leadership isn’t what it once was. Once it became clear in 1975 that Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev was little more than an occasionally shuffling corpse, real power shifted to the Soviet intelligence directorate, specifically KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov. This shouldn’t shock. The Soviet system existed in an information vacuum, so the people with the most power were those who actually knew what was real and what was propaganda. In time Andropov became Soviet premier, as did two of his acolytes: Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev. And then the Soviet Union ended.
 
About the same time the KGBers took over, the Soviet Union went broke. The late-1970s and 1980s were a time of immense economic upheaval and near collapse (which preceded worse upheaval and actual collapse). One of the many ways the late-Soviet leadership attempted to square their failing circles was to reduce government spending. On everything. But most notably on education. Mass science and technical and manufacturing education in the Soviet Union in effect ended in the early 1980s. Russia is a pale shadow of the Soviet Union, and Russia never restarted mass educational efforts. Which means the last crop of Soviet KGB agents and leaders are the sole remaining pool of talent from which today’s Russian leadership can draw. Putin is 69. The youngest people who had completed their Soviet education before the bottom fell out are now 59. The average life expectancy for Russian males is 64.
 
The Russian strategic position is not what it was. The Russian heartlands are great wide opens. Defending great wide opens takes more troops than any country could supply. So, as Russian czar Catherine the Great famously put it, “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.” Extend them until they reach a physical feature that blocks invasion. Doing such would enable Russian troops to hunker down and plug the gaps between mountain and desert and sea.
 
At the height of Soviet power, the Russians controlled all nine of those geographic gaps that allow entry to the Russian heartlands. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia commanded but one. Courtesy of Putin’s wars of expansion and “peacekeeping” efforts in the former Soviet space, the Russians now have forces in six. Of the remaining gateways, two lie on Ukraine’s western border: the Polish and Bessarabian Gaps.
 
In my mind, the question was never “will” Russia invade Ukraine and attempt to absorb it in totality, but instead “when”. The Kremlin has been threatening Kiev for a decade now. My caution to today’s Russia watchers has been that there was little occurring which suggested this season’s round of Russian angst and anger was in any way unique.
 
Until today. Putin’s speech does more than merely suggest that Russia is ready to go.
 
Sanctions – real or imagined, in-place or threatened – will not shift Putin’s stance. For Russia, control of Ukraine isn’t simply seen as a birthright, but as an issue of national survival. The Russian population suffers so completely from drug abuse, alcoholism, malnutrition, and disease that it is the world’s fastest collapsing demography (although recent statistical updates suggest China is challenging Russia for the top spot). Patrolling Russia’s current borders is laughably beyond the capacity of Russia’s current population. But forward-positioning what troops remain in those gateways? That just might work. So, the Russians will try.
 
About the only would-be sanction which might – might – earn a blink from the Kremlin would be if the Europeans all swore off Russian oil and natural gas. That export line-item is far and away the Russian government’s largest money-maker, accounting for a hefty majority of income. But in doing so the Europeans would be cutting off their primary energy provider, condemning themselves to the dark and cold. And so that specific threat hasn’t happened. I’d be impressed – and shocked – if it did.
 
I’d be equally shocked if the fall of Ukraine were the end of the story. Ukraine is not a NATO ally. The West will not send regular troops to support Ukraine. That makes Ukraine – with its 45-million-strong population – the easy target. What assistance arrives will be designed to snarl the Russians in as painful and bloody of an occupation as possible. The real show – the real war – comes after. The two most important gateways to the Russian heartland remain: the Baltic Sea coast and the portion of the Polish gap that lies in, well, Poland. Unlike Ukraine, the countries in question here – Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – are members of the NATO alliance. And of the European Union as well.
 
The Baltic beaches and the plains of Poland are where the future of Russia and the West, of the European Union and NATO, will ultimately be decided. It is there that Russia will succeed or die. This is far worse than it sounds. Russia’s population is in free-fall. A Russian occupation of Ukraine completed to Russia’s satisfaction will still absorb most of what’s left of Russia’s conventional military capabilities, leaving only the decidedly unconventional available for the next conflict.
 
Russia won’t fight its Twilight War with soldiers.

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The Federal Reserve Plans its Next Move

The United States Federal Reserve is preparing to raise interest rates in 2022. The question is not longer one of “if” or “when,” but how frequently and by how much. The implications will reverberate throughout American society and the economy.  

It won’t just be new homebuyers scrambling to lock in low interest rates before the hike, or investors–jumping from tech stocks to crypto to GameStop to NFTs–who are likely to feel the pinch. Federal spending (and by extension, policy), investments in the manufacturing space, and global trade will all be impacted. And in the backdrop of a major global demographic shift, and countless opportunities and pitfalls abound. 

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Russia’s Ukraine Gambit

Russia’s months-long build up of troops along the Ukrainian border is starting to yield tangible results… though perhaps not in the way that Moscow originally intended. Rather than successfully convincing NATO and the United States that any milque-toast defense of Kyiv would not be worth their while, Russia has instead watched as political and materiel support for its former Soviet satellite steadily increase. 

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Natural Gas and Ukraine

Russia has maintained a threatening posture against Ukraine, including maintaining approximately 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border. The United States and the United Kingdom have taken the lead in crafting a set of financial sanctions they are threatening to levy against Russia in the case of any aggression. Moscow has said that such a move would result in a cessation of energy supplies to the Europeans–who happen to get about 30% of their oil and natural gas from Russia. 

Russia’s energy leverage over the EU (and as many other states as it can connect itself to via pipelines) is significant, particularly in terms of natural gas. Global liquefied natural gas production–including the burgeoning US LNG industry–might help alleviate some of these pressures, but not all.

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The Ins and Outs of Omicron

I’m sure a lot of you have noticed that I haven’t mentioned much at all about the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. It really boils down to one factor: reinfection.
 
Coronavirus is fast. With the original strain out of Wuhan, as well as the Alpha variant, you would be exposed, then 2-5 days later you’d develop symptoms, then you’d be ill for another 2-20 days, then you would recover. Your exposure would grant you a degree of resistance that could last anywhere from four months to over a year. After that period of time, you could be reinfected.
 
The same general process followed with Delta variant which was the world’s dominant strain for most of 2021, but with Delta the reinfection window shrank down to as little as two months. One of the leading reasons I am so pro-vaccine is not simply that the vaccines are safe and prevent death and most hospitalizations, but the resistance they grant you lasts longer than if you suffered through the virus itself. With the original strain, vaccine-granted resistance was so strong that in most cases would the virus would be killed as soon as it entered your body. Against Delta, vaccine-granted resistance typically lasted over six months.
 
The United States has one of the world’s healthiest demographic structures, but COVID has killed a million of us. If there is a way to prevent the virus from damaging America’s demographic strengths, it has been the vaccines. Cheap. Effective. Available.
 
Or you could choose to be unvaccinated, and in doing so get sick over and over and over and over again. That’s why I started harping on the vaccines in June of 2021. Delta had been around for over six months and we had a strong idea of just how easy it was for the unvaccinated to suffer repeat infections. But things have changed.
 
Now we have Omicron. It has only had a name for two months. It hasn’t been around long enough for a meaningful number of people to catch Omicron, recover from Omicron, and potentially get Omicron again. Its reinfection profile is a critical unknown.
 
Every time we get a new variant, we get a new reinfection profile, and so the goalposts move. At present, with Omicron, it is simply too soon to know where those goalposts have moved to. And so for now, I don’t have much to forecast about Omicron’s mid-to-long-term impact.
 
That’s the first big point. The second has to do with the vaccines themselves.
 
All the vaccines in use today were designed for the original Wuhan strain. But that strain is now extinct. The Delta variant emerged in India in late 2020, and in about six months spread so aggressively that it wiped out both the original strain and the Alpha variant. Globally.
 
Now, evolved from Delta, we have Omicron, a variant even more communicable. It will probably wipe out Delta in the United States sometime in March (which is also when we will probably have some of our first answers about Omicron’s re-infection profile).
 
Original strain to Delta to Omicron – we are now two viral generations removed from the original strain we based the vaccines on. The vaccines – especially with boosters – are still highly effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths, but the days of completely preventing symptoms, much less sterilizing immunity, are long in the past.
 
In that I am perhaps Exhibit A. I’m vaxxed. I’m boosted. I probably recovering from Omicron right now. I say “perhaps” and “probably” because it took four days to get tested and I have been warned that processing the test could take eight more. I’m hardly the only American who has noticed a problem here.
 
Omicron is the most communicable pathogen currently in circulation and it has overwhelmed…everything. The week of January 17 something like 15 million Americans missed work either due to suffering Omicron directly, or because they were caring for someone who had Omicron. That’s the second-biggest impact to the workforce from a health-related issue ever – topped only by the national lockdown of March and April 2020 itself.
 
Our systems are overwhelmed. Not because of lockdowns – very few places are trying that again – but because of sickness. Omicron’s high rate of transmissibility means that it is probably infecting over a million people a day, and last week it killed nearly as many Americans as Delta did at its peak. Is Omicron less lethal? Definitely, but it is so much more communicable the death tallies rival.
 
Bottom line? We need to update our vaccine formulas. Yes, getting vaxxed and boosted with what is on hand is still by far the best way to prevent deaths and hospitalizations. But we can do better. One of the beautiful things about the new mRNA technology is that techs can update the formula in a matter of days, and alter production runs within a couple of months. The firms that manufacture the mRNA formulas – Pfizer and Moderna – suggest that by April we can be churning out updated formulas that use Omicron as the baseline (as opposed to the original Wuhan version). If past proves prologue, we could get back to the heady days of May 2021 when we had a platinum-standard vaccine formula that provided something very close to sterilizing immunity. That’d be awesome.
 
It won’t last of course. America’s anti-vax community will remain millions strong, ensuring an ample supply of walking petri dishes Omicron can use to breed the next generation of coronavirus. But armed with a vaccine based on Omicron rather than Wuhan, we’d only be a single generation behind rather than three. That’s still a win. And a big one at that.
 
For the rest of the world, the news is less great. We are now a full year after the release of the original mRNA vaccines. At this point roughly half of the human population has been fully inoculated. Shifting gears to a new formula can put shots in most American arms before summer’s end, but retooling vaccine manufacturing around the world will take longer. Best case scenario? Global inoculation with the new formula will not complete before mid-2023.

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Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

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Kazakhs Protest, and Russia Reacts

Russian-led forces entered Kazakhstan today, under the guise of a Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) peacekeeping mission. The former Soviet state and significant oil producer has seen several days of sustained public protests turned violent after raising the price of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cannisters, a key local transportation fuel. Although the government reversed its decision to halt fuel subsidies, the move triggered widening protests outside the initial cluster in the resource-rich Mangystau region eventually reaching the largest city, Almaty. Several cabinet officials resigned as protests grew in scope and intensity; many Kazakhs are frustrated by the economic challenges of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, entrenched social inequality, and endemic corruption of the Kazakh state. After protestors stormed the Almaty airport January 5 and set fire to city administration building, Kazakh president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev allowed CSTO forces into the country to help quell unrest. Details are increasingly difficult to come by amidst an internet and media blackout, but security forces have already claimed to have killed dozens of protestors. 

The challenges facing Tokayev are legion, and easily discerned. What is a little less obvious are the opportunities now present for Moscow. Instability in former Soviet areas is always a delicate balancing act for Russia; protestor grievances in Kazakhstan likely mirror many of those not only in Russia, but throughout states on its periphery. Unrest is typically met with cracked skulls. But Kazakhstan’s oil and gas wealth has afforded it more economic independence from Moscow than many of the other Central Asian states. Having Kazakhstan on the ropes and in need of aid–including an open invitation for Russian soldiers that are unlikely to leave after protestors go home–is right where Russia likes its neighbors to be.

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Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

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Germany’s Uncertain Future

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel was wildly successful at maintaining a German–and European–status quo nearly two decades. While her tenure will almost assuredly be remembered as the Golden Age of a unified, post-war Germany, the deeper structural issues Merkel failed to address risk undermining the stability and success she sought to preserve. 

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The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

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