Click the link for a transcript of “Ukraine, Russia and the Fight for Democracy.”

The Complicated History Between Russia and Ukraine
 

Ukraine played a key role in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it came out as the biggest independent country of the former Soviet states. Ukraine decided to be a democracy, thankfully, and this has been our path for the last thirty years.

This is a great achievement for our nation, because if you look around our country, even among hundreds of other successful European countries, there are not many other good examples of democracy. They have problems: Turkey has problems; Belarus has problems; Kazakhstan as well. We have some problems with corruption, but we are still an electoral democracy with fair elections.

Now, unfortunately, Russia understands itself as the successor, or empire, coming after the Soviet Union, and Putin has said many times that this collapse was the biggest catastrophe in the last twenty years of the last century. For him, Ukraine’s success is a tragedy.

Putin has invaded Ukraine before during the annexation of Crimea. He tried to divide Ukraine into a Russian, authoritarian Ukraine and a European, democratic Ukraine. But he failed. Our civil society worked hard to create voluntary military and paramilitary organizations and units, and Ukrainians pushed back as a nation.

And that was a moment when Putin understood, finally, that he lost Ukraine not only as an economic partner, but ideologically. Ukrainians chose freedom. We chose democracy. And for Putin, it's very dangerous to have examples of successful democratic countries – especially Slavic Orthodox Christian countries with close ties to Russia – like Ukraine. Putin needs the Russian people to believe that democracy is a weak, failing idea that doesn’t work.

A Struggle Broader Than One Country
 

This buildup of Russian troops along the Ukrainian border is not juist a regional conflict, and it's not just about NATO. It’s a battle between two conceptually different systems: the authoritarian system and the democratic system. It’s an attack towards democracy and the Western world. Our values in the Western world are a threat for Mr. Putin himself.

Putin is trying to shape the situation and to undermine the trust among countries and among people. He's trying to create destabilizing situations like an immigration crises, organize sabotages among the military, have political murders, and so on and so forth.

This buildup is only one element of this game to create one more additional crisis to attract attention, and to create a situation where Western leaders have to decide and make very hard decisions. Putin is trying to show that, “If I do attack, nobody will protect you. All of these values you have are just fairy tales. The West is weak, the West is insincere. When they tell you that values matter, it’s a lie because the only real value is money. There is no democracy.”

The Role of the West in Supporting Democracies
 

For Putin, the weak reaction from the West to the aggression towards Ukraine was a signal that it was acceptable to act like this. That's why Putin is raising the stakes and why he will continue to raise the stakes every year. Right now, the sanctions policy and general Western policy is creating a situation where time is playing against the victim, not against the aggressor.

Putin’s strategy is to wait, to use all his resources to undermine his democratic opponents, and to make sure that the next politicians in the western world will be more flexible. And maybe in 10 years or 15 years when the annexation of Crimea has become deep history, he will find some new trade-off with the next generation of democratic leaders.

This is why there needs to be a new model of smart or cascading sanctions where the EU adopts a package of sanctions for some period of time, maybe five, seven or ten years, and every next wave, every next package of sanctions will automatically come into power if the problem is not solved. So every single day, it automatically raises the price for the aggressor.

Supporting fragile democracies is not just about making a morally right choice; these countries on the frontlines that have paid an additional price – an additional tax, if you will, for democracy, and have taken on additional burdens, because they choose the democratic path. Whether it’s Ukraine or other countries, we need Western support now in a much bigger way than we have it now.

For more from Oleksiy Honcharuk, listen to his his remarks on "Ukraine vs Russia: The War for Democracy," given as a Liautaud Lecture at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL).

Click the link for a transcript of "Why Right Matters to Democracy Here and Abroad."

Upholding Democracy At Home
 

It's really kind of quizzical how an immigrant refugee kid from Kyiv ends up in the White House working on Russia and Ukraine policy. And that’s what my book is really about; it talks about some of the key moments from my background and my family's background that I drew on in making those fateful decisions that I did on January 25, and how they carried me through my congressional testimony.

I made that report without any hesitation, because I thought there was an opportunity to right the course of events. I didn't really think that these things were going to enter the public view. I just did what I thought was right, and then when I was called to testify about making these reports, I followed through. Even there, it was not a hard decision about what the right thing to do was. I was not going to put my interests ahead of U.S. interests.

Supporting Democracy Abroad
 

When we see everything that’s happening in the world right now, I can understand why people look at someplace like Ukraine and think, “Why should we care about what happens there?”

But Ukraine makes a really compelling normative case for where Russia could end up, which I think everyone would agree is important. I think about the example of West Germany making East Germany unviable in the Cold War. Both countries started at the same place: decimated. But West Germany, being democratic and prosperous and enjoying basic human rights, thriving economy, made East Germany unviable and demonstrated Germany as a failure.

In much the same way, Ukraine could do the same thing for Russia. As we both know, Putin believes that Ukraine and Russia are the same people separated by an artificial boundary; the share roots and have a shared identity. Now, that's a vast oversimplification. That's not entirely true. But that's what he believes. And that's what he's convinced this population of. So, how would he explain 20 years from now, or in 2036, when he's done with his latest term in office, and there's somebody else that's looking to step in: How can another authoritarian leader step in and say, “We’re going to continue the course with managed democracy,” when Ukraine is prosperous?

It makes a really compelling case for a path that Russia could take on a path that would take it towards democracy. That would be a difficult road, but it's a viable path, because Ukraine is the example. And that's important not just because of our strategic aspirations for Russia, but also because it has an impact on China also. You've heard me talk about this notion that all of Russia's national security threats are from a belligerent rising, coercive China; they're not from the West.

The West is held out as a boogeyman at the moment, because it's useful to the regime. It's important to the regime to fight against the West as the aggressor and to couch the West as a failure and decadent for regime stability purposes. But from a national security perspective, I think any reasonable assessment would indicate that those threats are really not emanating from the West, but from the East. So supporting Ukraine also empowers our competition with China. That's why I think that the Biden administration should be unconstrained in its support of Ukraine.

More from Alexander Vindman
 

Watch the book talk FSI hosted with Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman (Ret.) for Here, Right Matters.

Click here for a transcript of “We Need To Rethink Our Assumptions about China’s Strategic Goals”

Where China Was in the 1990s

Twenty years ago, the Chinese-Taiwan invasion plan was to take a couple of fishing vessels and paddle their way across the strait. In the 1990s, China had very limited, and often no ability to fly over water, or at night, or in weather, and their ships had no defenses.

For many, many years we knew that China was willing to fight if Taiwan declared independence. Fighting a war in any country that is big and resolved is problematic. But it was never the case that the United States was going to lose that war; it was always a matter of, “How many days?” How many days is it going to take us to win?

Where China Is Now

In the intervening years, China's military has changed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Now they have the largest navy in the world, and those ships are some of the most advanced surface ships that can be comparable to those of the United States. Same with their fighters; they have fifth generation airplanes and the largest airforce in the region. They’ve put all these capabilities online, and at the same time, they [have also] started developing capabilities to reach out and touch the United States with.

They developed the capability to hit moving ships at sea, which is something the United States doesn’t have the capability to do. They have a huge cruise and ballistic missile program that basically can take out a U.S. base like Kadena  in the region in a matter of hours, should they ever be willing to make a direct hit on the U.S.

This doesn't mean that China is more powerful than the United States; China still can’t project power outside the Indo-Pacific region, and even there it’s mostly through space, cyber, and nuclear weapons. But most of the contingencies we're talking about are really close to China, so it doesn’t really matter that they can’t project power. So, on the conventional side, I’m very concerned.

Why Taiwan Matters

The whole goal of the Communist Party, since its founding in 1949, has been to resolve this Taiwan issue.

Now they have the ships, the aircraft, and they’ve reorganized their whole military so that they can do joint operations, so that the navy and the air force can do an invasion of Taiwan. And a lot of those efforts came to a successful conclusion at the end of 2020. And that's why people like myself, not because of  the capabilities, but because when I was in Beijing and talked to the Chinese military and government officials, they said, “We could do this now, and maybe we should think about it.”

We know from behavioral economics that countries and people are much more willing to take risks to not lose something that they think is theirs, versus when they are trying to get something which they don't think is theirs. In the Chinese mindset, Taiwan, the South China Sea, East China Sea, etc. is already theirs, and the United States is trying to take it from them. That makes the situation even more problematic. 

What the United States Should Do

The Biden administration is doing a lot of political maneuvering to show that the United States is willing to defend Taiwan. And I think it’s just upsetting Beijing, because they think we’re changing the political status quo. It also does nothing to enhance our deterrence, because it doesn't signal anything about our capability to defend Taiwan.

The Chinese basically assume the United States will intervene. Their big question is, can they still win? We need to show China that they cannot win, and that’s about showing out capabilities in the region. It’s about aggressively negotiating new host arrangements, more access for the U.S. military, and new international institutions and treaties that constrain the ways China leverages power.

I'm a military person, but I'm totally on board with leading with diplomacy. But I don't see those types of efforts coming out of the Biden administration. They seem to want to double down and do the same things, just with more allies and partners.  I'm supportive of it, but I just don't think it's enough.

In a multipolar international system during the era of technology disruption, international security continues to be fragile. Whether overtly or covertly, ambitious states have been competing to obtain a comparative advantage over the one-another, such as China and the United States. While governments rely on national technical means (NTM) on tracking other states’ actions, the implications of this competition would ultimately fall on the general population. The ubiquitous nature of international security has inspired many academic experts, private organizations, and corporations to develop open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysis with the purpose of improving transparency and expanding NTM capacities. Of the most prominent OSINT fields is geospatial intelligence and imagery analysis, which has come a long way through increased cooperation with commercial data providers, particularly satellite companies.

Over the last decade, the quality of imagery collection has increased in both spatial and temporal resolution. While the former allows for the discerning of smaller objects captured on the surface of Earth and positive identification of them, the latter allows for monitoring of sites on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Therefore, both are required for a comprehensive analysis of the site of interest and proper academic practice.

Over the summer, I worked with Allison Puccioni, a career imagery analyst and a consultant at BlackSky, who provided me an opportunity to cooperate with BlackSky and Planet, two of the leading commercial satellite companies on the salient issue of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). An article from The Drive released on July 14, 202, sparked interest in a remote facility in Xinjiang, China just south of Bosten Lake.The functionality of the facility is still disputed, but the structural features suggest that it may be a directed-energy weapons (DEW) development facility. As no previous research on this facility had been conducted, we decided to conduct a comprehensive analysis together with Allison and Katharine Leede, a senior majoring in Political Science and part of the CISAC Undergraduate Honors Program.

This analysis required the acquisition of extensive imagery of the site, which was available only at BlackSky through their global monitoring program. BlackSky was more than willing to share the imagery with us in an effort to establish academic-private sector cooperation. The data consisted of 400 images of the site spanning from mid-2019 to August 2021. To manage this large amount of data, we went through every single image, noting any key features and tracking them over time. The image below depicts an aerial view of the Bosten Lake Facility, which is characterized by the presence of large hangars with retractable roofs. The imagery is also of high temporal resolution, up to 10 images a day in some cases. This frequency allows us to create a pattern-of-life where we identified the times and days of the week the hangars would be open. Assuming that the current hypothesis is that this facility is a DEW testing site, we can infer that the tests were conducted when the hangars were open. However, further analysis is required to confirm this statement. After compiling the pattern-of-life analysis, we needed to identify the objects inside the hangars in order to confirm our hypothesis.

While BlackSky imagery has an unmatched temporal resolution, it comes at the cost of spatial resolution. Therefore, we identified key images in which activity at the site was at its highest and requested those images from Planet. Planet’s SkySat satellite constellation has a resolution of 0.5 meters, allowing one to identify small objects in the image. This technique we used is generally referred to in the intelligence community as Low-to-High Resolution Tipping and Cueing. This is the process of monitoring an area or an object of interest by a sensor and requesting “tipping” another complementary sensor platform to acquire “cueing” an image over the same area.

This project has also attracted interest from major defense-related media outlets, most notably Janes Intelligence Review (JIR). Upon completion, this project will result in a published article in JIR and is scheduled for the December 2021 edition. Additionally, the project received attention from the Defense Innovation Unit in the U.S. Department of Defense, whose representatives expressed interest in establishing cooperation for future projects.

This internship provided  me an opportunity to be one of the first people to analyze an emerging case study such as the Bosten Lake Facility in China and learn how to work with commercial satellite companies. As a military officer in the Kosovar Army, I will have to deal with public-private partnerships, and the connections I have made together with the communication and networking skills I acquired will contribute to a more successful career. Additionally, geospatial intelligence analysis will be included in my job description as an intelligence officer, thus having had the chance to practice the necessary skills in both an academic and corporate setting will greatly aid me in the future.

Finally, the UNDPPA internship also allowed me to be part of the pioneering team for an environmental security project in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The project was initiated as a result of negotiations between the UNDPPA and DPRK, and environmental security became the only area of mutual interest that will further facilitate cooperation from the DPRK government. As the framework for this project was only developed this summer, it is still an ongoing process requiring coordination between policymakers, diplomats, DPRK representatives, and the engineering team who realizes the requirements put forward into a platform similar to the Iraq Water Security Project. As I have had the opportunity to be present during the creation of this project, I will be looking forward to contributing to its development and seeing the result.

There are many reasons to fear an impending Chinese attack on Taiwan: Intensified Chinese aerial activity. High-profile Pentagon warnings. Rapid Chinese military modernization. President Xi Jinping’s escalating rhetoric. But despite what recent feverish discussion in foreign policy and military circles is suggesting, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan isn’t one of them.

Some critics of President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan argue the move will embolden Beijing because it telegraphs weakness — an unwillingness to stick it out and win wars that China will factor in when deciding whether to attack Taiwan, which it considers to be part of its territory.

The reality is, though, that the U.S. departure from Afghanistan will more likely give pause to Chinese war planners — not push them to use force against Taiwan.

The Chinese Communist Party’s stated goal is “national rejuvenation”: Regaining China’s standing as a great power. Chinese leaders and thinkers have studied the rise and fall of great powers past. They have long understood that containment by the United States could keep China from becoming a great power itself.

Luckily for Beijing, the Afghan war — along with Iraq and other American misadventures in the Middle East — distracted Washington for two decades. While China was building roads and ports from Beijing to Trieste, Italy, fueling its economy and expanding its geopolitical influence, the United States was pouring money into its war on terrorism. While Beijing was building thousands of acres of military bases in the South China Sea and enhancing its precision-strike capabilities, the U.S. military was fighting an insurgency and dismantling improvised explosive devices.

In many ways, it was just dumb luck that Mr. Xi and his predecessors, thanks in part to the war in Afghanistan, could build national power, undermine international norms, co-opt international organizations and extend their territorial control all without the United States thwarting their plans in any meaningful way.

But the end of the war in Afghanistan could bring these good times — which the Communist Party calls the “period of important strategic opportunities” — to an abrupt end. Sure, over the past 10 years American presidents tried to get back into the Asia game even as the war continued. Barack Obama asserted we would pivot to Asia back in 2011. Donald Trump’s national security team made great power competition with China its top priority.

But neither went much beyond paying lip service. The withdrawal shows Mr. Biden is truly refocusing his national security priorities — he even listed the need to “focus on shoring up America’s core strengths to meet the strategic competition with China” as one of the reasons for the drawdown.

Such a refocusing comes not a moment too soon. Chinese expansion and militarization in the South China Sea, deadly skirmishes with India, its crackdown in Hong Kong and repression in Xinjiang all point to an increasingly confident and aggressive China. In particular, Chinese military activity around Taiwan has spiked — 2020 witnessed a record number of incursions into Taiwan’s airspace. The sophistication and scale of military exercises has increased as well. These escalations come alongside recent warnings from Mr. Xi that any foreign forces daring to bully China “will have their heads bashed bloody” and efforts toward “Taiwan independence” will be met with “resolute action.”

The U.S. policy toward Taiwan is “strategic ambiguity” — there is no explicit promise to defend it from Chinese attack. In this tense environment, U.S. policymakers and experts are feverishly considering ways to make U.S. commitment to Taiwan more credible and enhance overall military deterrence against China. A recent $750 million arms sale proposal to Taiwan is part of these efforts, as is talk of inviting Taiwan to a democracy summit, which undoubtedly would provoke Beijing’s ire.

Some have argued that America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan undermines efforts to signal U.S. support for Taiwan. On the surface, it may seem as if the U.S. withdrawal would be a good thing for China’s prospects at what it calls “armed reunification.” Indeed, this is the message the nationalist Chinese newspaper The Global Times is peddling: The United States will cast Taiwan aside just as it has done with Vietnam, and now Afghanistan.

However, the American departure from Afghanistan creates security concerns in China’s own backyard that could distract it from its competition with the United States. Beijing’s strategy to protect its global interests is a combination of relying on host nation security forces and private security contractors and free-riding off other countries’ military presence. Analysts have concluded that China is less likely than the United States to rely on its military to protect its interests abroad. Beijing appears committed to avoiding making the same mistakes as Washington — namely, an overreliance on military intervention overseas to advance foreign policy objectives.

Now there will be no reliable security presence in Afghanistan and undoubtedly broader instability in a region with significant economic and commercial interests for China. Chinese leaders are also worried that conflict in Afghanistan could spill across the border into neighboring Xinjiang, where Beijing’s repressive tactics have already been the cause of much international opprobrium.

The reality is, the United States stayed much longer in Afghanistan than most expected. This upsets China’s calculus about what the United States would do in a Taiwan crisis, since conventional wisdom in Beijing had been that the painful legacy of Somalia would deter Washington from ever coming to Taipei’s aid.

But U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have called these assumptions into question. Taiwan, with its proportionately large economy and semiconductor industry, is strategically important to the United States. U.S. power and influence in East Asia are reliant on its allies and military bases in the region and America’s broader role as the security partner of choice. If Taiwan were to fall to Chinese aggression, many countries, U.S. allies included, would see it as a sign of the arrival of a Chinese world order. By comparison, Afghanistan is less strategically important, and yet the United States stayed there for 20 years.

This does not bode well for any designs Beijing might have for Taiwan.

It’s true that China would benefit from a home-field advantage given Taiwan’s proximity, and that Beijing’s arsenal is far greater than Taiwan’s. China, too, would likely enjoy more domestic public support for any conflict than the U.S. would for yet another intervention.

But if China has any hope of winning a war across the Strait, its military would have to move fast, before the United States has time to respond. Chinese planners know that the longer the war, the greater the U.S. advantage. Unlike Chinese production and manufacturing centers, which can all be targeted by the United States, the American homeland is relatively safe from Chinese conventional attack. China is far more reliant on outside sources for oil and natural gas, and thus vulnerable to U.S. attempts to cut off its supply.

And the Chinese economy would suffer more: Since the war would be happening in Asia, trade would be bound to be disrupted there. The United States would need to stick it out for only a short time — not 20 years — for these factors to come into play.

A call on Thursday between Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi hinted at the stakes — the two “discussed the responsibility of both countries to ensure competition does not veer into conflict,” according to the White House.

Chinese leaders already expected a tense relationship with the Biden administration. Now they are faced with the fact that the United States might have the will and resources to push back against Chinese aggression, even if it means war.

So, while there may be other reasons to oppose the end of the war in Afghanistan, the impact on China’s Taiwan calculus is not — and should not be — one of them.