The Morning Dispatch: A Chance for Temporary Peace in One of the World’s Deadliest Conflicts

Happy Wednesday! On this day 105 years ago, the House of Representatives voted 373-50 in favor of declaring war against Germany, formally entering the United States into what was then called the Great War. It’s also the anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh, the start of the Black Hawk War, and Germany’s World War II invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. Not a very peaceful day.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• In response to the atrocities in Bucha, Ukraine, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Tuesday outlined a fifth package of sanctions targeting Russia. If approved by the 27-member bloc, the European Union will ban imports of Russian coal (but not gas), levy additional sanctions on four large Russian banks, block Russian and Russian-operated vessels from accessing European ports (exempting ships carrying food and energy), implement controls on quantum computing exports to Russia, and more. Separately, the EU is reportedly also weighing sanctions on two of Vladimir Putin’s daughters.

• The U.S. Treasury Department announced Tuesday that, as of this week, it will no longer allow the Russian government to make any dollar debt payments at U.S. financial institutions. “Russia must choose between draining remaining valuable dollar reserves or new revenue coming in, or default,” a Treasury official said. The Biden administration is expected to announce an additional round of Russian sanctions in response to the Bucha revelations later today.

• Czech defense officials told the Wall Street Journal the Czech Republic has sent more than a dozen modernized T-72M tanks to Ukraine in recent weeks, and, along with Slovakia, is considering opening its military industrial installations to repair damaged Ukrainian equipment. No other country has sent tanks to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion began in late February.

• Citing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as rationale, Finland’s government announced plans on Tuesday to boost defense spending by more than 2 billion euros in total over the next four years—a significant jump given the country’s 2022 military budget was about 4.3 billion euros.

• The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and U.S. Air Force announced Tuesday they recently completed the United States’ second successful in-flight hypersonic missile test, with the weapon reaching altitudes above 65,000 feet and reaching Mach 5 for an “extended period of time.” President Joe Biden, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson also announced yesterday new “trilateral cooperation” on hypersonics and electronic warfare capabilities.

• The Justice Department announced Tuesday it had, in coordination with Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt, shut down the Hydra Market—the world’s largest darknet marketplace for illicit goods and services like drugs, identity forgeries, money laundering, hacking, ransomware, etc.—and seized $25 million worth of bitcoin. In connection with his operation of Hydra’s servers, the DOJ charged a 30-year-old Russian resident, Dmitry Olegovich Pavlov, with conspiracy to distribute narcotics and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

• In a new court filing on Monday, Special Counsel John Durham provided additional evidence supporting the indictment of lawyer Michael Sussmann on charges he lied to the FBI about his ties to the Clinton campaign when presenting information intended to establish Trump-Russia links. “Do you have availibilty [sic] for a short meeting tomorrow?” Sussmann allegedly texted FBI General Counsel James Baker in September 2016. “I’m coming on my own—not on behalf of a client or company—want to help the Bureau.”

• The Census Bureau reported yesterday the United States’ international trade deficit in goods and services remained near record highs in February, decreasing 0.1 percent month-over-month to $89.2 billion.

• Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan announced Tuesday he will retire at the end of his current term, becoming the fourth of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump not to seek reelection in 2022. Due to redistricting, Upton would have had to face off against Rep. Bill Huizenga in a primary challenge.

A Chance for Peace in Yemen 

A two-month truce that took effect in Yemen Saturday will provide a break in the yearslong conflict and allow much-needed fuel into the country—if it lasts.

Situated just south of Saudi Arabia on the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen’s government was overthrown by Houthi rebels in 2014. Wary of Iran’s support for the insurgents and hoping to restore the deposed government, Saudi Arabia led a coalition including the United Arab Emirates into the war one year later. The two sides are still fighting—or were until last weekend—with separatist factions and Islamists joining the conflict.

A staggering 377,000 Yemenis have died due to the war since 2015, the United Nations estimates, much more often from disease and famine than from airstrikes. The country’s economy has collapsed, with its Gross Domestic Product dropping 40 percent since 2015. External aid dropped off during COVID-19, forcing the U.N. to reduce rations for 8 million of the 13 million Yemenis receiving food aid. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has driven up food prices in Yemen, which received 31 percent of its wheat from Ukraine in recent months.

The war more or less ground to a stalemate over the past eight years, but bloodshed has continued into 2022. The Yemen Data Project reported 139 civilian deaths and 287 civilian injuries from Saudi coalition airstrikes in January, the highest rates since October 2016. The conflict escalated in mid-January when Houthi drone strikes on fuel tankers near an Abu Dhabi airport in the United Arab Emirates killed three people, prompting counterstrikes on Yemen’s capital. Days later, a Saudi-led airstrike on a Houthi-run prison in Yemen killed or wounded more than 100 detainees.

The U.S. has historically supported the Saudi coalition—primarily through weapons sales—generally preferring a Yemeni government inclined to help with counterterrorism efforts. But days after being inaugurated, President Joe Biden promised to end those sales and wind down the country’s involvement in the conflict. But that hasn’t happened yet: Over progressive objections, the U.S. has continued providing logistical support and weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. In March, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced almost $585 million in new humanitarian aid for Yemen for 2022.

The Saudi coalition announced a unilateral ceasefire last Wednesday during talks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, between several parties involved in Yemen—though not the Houthis, who say negotiations must happen on neutral ground. The Houthis had declared their own dayslong ceasefire before the United Nations announced the separate two-month agreement. 

The U.N.-proposed truce offers longer relief and a few economic terms, including allowing 18 fuel tankers through the Saudi blockade (the first arrived Sunday) and two commercial flights a week in and out of Yemen’s capital. “The aim of this truce is to give Yemenis a necessary break from violence, relief from the humanitarian suffering, and most importantly hope that an end to this conflict is possible,” U.N. Special Envoy to Yemen Hans Grundberg said in a statement. Houthi spokesman Mohammad Abdul-Salam tweeted that the group welcomed the truce. 

“This is really giving me some hope that Yemenis now can have a fresh breath in and look forward to see the end of this really catastrophic war,” former Yemen foreign minister Khaled Alyemany told The Dispatch.

That hope depends on whether the truce sticks. The two parties have attempted ceasefires a handful of times in the past eight years—most recently in 2020 to slow the spread of COVID-19—but most were temporary, one-sided, or dissolved into attacks or land grabs. “Both sides have previously used the cessation in fighting not to pursue peace but to prepare for more war,” American Enterprise Institute fellow Katherine Zimmerman wrote to The Dispatch, cautioning it could happen again. “Reports are surfacing that the Houthis are moving military equipment around, in addition to complaints of ceasefire violations on both sides.”

But despite scattered reports of violations, the ceasefire is broadly holding so far. Stalled fighting, specific economic terms, and some evidence of compromise suggest it could last. “There are other elements to this deal that we didn’t have in the past, particularly the agreement to allow fuel shipments,” former U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Gerald Feierstein told The Dispatch. For the moment, the Saudis and Houthis also seem more willing to compromise. The Houthis have previously demanded an end to the Saudi naval blockade and prisoner release before they’ll stop fighting, demands they seem to have relaxed for this truce. The Saudi coalition, meanwhile, has previously demanded nationwide ceasefires and Houthi pullback before partial blockade relief. “The ceasefire involved certain compromises from Saudi Arabia and the Houthis for the first time, which lends hope to the prospect for additional space to negotiate further,” Zimmerman said.

Grundberg, the U.N. envoy, promised more negotiation. “All Yemeni women, men and children that have suffered immensely through over seven years of war expect nothing less than an end to this war,” he said, adding that the sides had agreed to discuss opening roads to Taiz, a city in southwestern Yemen effectively under siege since 2015. “The parties must deliver nothing less.” Feierstein suggested U.N. negotiators push quickly for other economic cooperation—including continued oil shipments and improving Yemen’s central bank to prepare it for outside investment—and try to involve the Houthis in the talks between other parties in Riyadh. Alyemany agreed. “You can’t wait for two months to see if this truce will hold,” he said. “You need to bring initiatives to the table, keeping the parties interested.”

“Up until now, [ceasefires] have never really held, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed that it’s different this time,” Feierstein said. “We can hope that this is actually the beginning of the end.”

Worth Your Time

• J.D. Vance—U.S. Senate candidate from Ohio—staked out quite the position in February when he said he didn’t “care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” He may have thought that’s what GOP primary voters wanted to hear, but that may have been a miscalculation. “For all of Vance’s populist complaints about the elite foreign-policy consensus, it has been obvious since the first days of Russia’s war in Ukraine that his real problem is not donors but the overwhelming majority of Republican voters,” John McCormack writes in National Review. “If he loses, Vance won’t be able to blame a lack of support from elites. He started out the campaign with a $10 million check from billionaire Peter Thiel to his super PAC, and he now has been endorsed by [Rep. Marjorie Taylor] Greene and boosted by Donald Trump Jr. and Tucker Carlson, the host of America’s most-watched cable-news program. No, if Vance loses despite all that—Greene’s and Trump Jr.’s backing, Thiel’s cash, and Carlson’s airtime—it will be a sign that his brand of populism simply isn’t as popular as he and many others imagined.”

• In the Washington Post, Jessica Contrera tells the remarkable story of Vaughn Smith, a D.C.-area carpet cleaner who can, to varying degrees, speak nearly 40 different languages. “For Vaughn, every language is really a story about the people it connected him to,” she writes. “He learned American Sign Language from Gallaudet University students at a club called Tracks, which had a dance floor known for its vibrations. He picked up some Japanese from the staff at a restaurant where he volunteered to clean the fish tank once a week. When his niece liked the way the word chicken sounded in Salish, they started studying it together, befriended leaders of the language school on the Flathead Indian Reservation and road-tripped to Arlee, Mont., twice. … Vaughn makes an effort to get to know people in the language that shaped their lives. In return, they shape his. Welcoming him. Accepting him. Appreciating him.”

• Leon Aron—a Russia expert at the American Enterprise Institute—argues “neutrality,” one of the provisions being bandied about in Russia-Ukraine peace talks, would lead Ukraine down a “dangerous” path. “Without an international security guarantee for Ukraine, is there any doubt that Russia will interpret a peace agreement as the right to meddle aggressively in Ukraine’s politics and seek to reorient the Ukrainian economy toward Russia?” he writes in The Atlantic. “A truce stopping Russia’s barbaric onslaught might seem worth almost any concessions forced on Kyiv by Moscow. But the West should stop indulging the false hope of ‘Finlandization’ and see the potential armistice for what it is: not a lasting peace that would preserve much of Ukraine’s independence, but rather only a temporary cease-fire in Putin’s long war to end a sovereign Ukraine. Acknowledging this reality is essential to thwarting this plan.”

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Toeing the Company Line

• On the site today, Christian Schneider offers a warning about how difficult archiving online content for the benefit of future historians is and is likely to remain, Charlotte takes a deep dive on the topic of secondary sanctions and whether we’re likely to see America deploy them against Russia, and David Adesnik discusses the United Arab Emirates’ growing entanglement with the Assad regime in Syria.

• Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have begun leveling accusations of genocide against Russia and Vladimir Putin, and Tuesday’s Uphill (🔒) focuses on what they want to do about it. Members of Congress, Haley writes, are also “renewing calls for allied countries to ban Russian oil and gas imports, urging the White House to increase its military assistance to Ukraine, and emphasizing the need for the Senate to act quickly on a long-delayed bill to end Russia’s permanent normal trade relations with the United States.”

• In this week’s Sweep (🔒), Sarah assesses the likelihood of a GOP wave this November, cautions against taking too-early polling as gospel, and argues The West Wing is the most realistic political TV show. Plus: Audrey on the NRCC attempting to boost female and minority candidate recruiting, and Andrew on continued sniping between Brian Kemp and David Perdue in Georgia.

• David’s Tuesday French Press (🔒) pushes back against the “groomer” smear right-wing commentators and lawmakers are leveling against their political opponents. “Throwing around accusations simply to score talking points in public debate is vile,” he argues. “It’s dangerous. And it illustrates the destructive reality that for some of America’s most prominent right-wing voices, there is no smear too gross, no claim too extreme, to destroy the reputations or risk the lives of the people they love to hate.”

Let Us Know

Should the U.S. continue providing logistical support and weapons to the Saudi-led coalition? What do you think the role of the U.S. should be in Yemen’s civil war?