The Morning Dispatch: War in Ukraine Creeps Closer

Happy Friday! We really hope World War III hasn’t started by the next time we’re in your inbox.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• One day after Democrats’ voting reform bills failed to advance in the Senate, a bipartisan group of senators confirmed they are in the early stages of crafting legislation that would shore up the Electoral Count Act. Senate and House Minority Leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy both seemed to endorse the effort on Thursday, as did White House press secretary Jen Psaki—though she maintained it’s “not a substitute” for larger reforms.

• The Biden administration on Thursday sanctioned two current Ukrainian officials and two former Ukrainian officials for acting as “pawns” of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and participating in a “global influence campaign to destabilize sovereign countries in support of the Kremlin’s political objectives.”

• The Department of Justice announced Thursday federal prosecutors had charged four Belarusian government officials with conspiracy to commit aircraft piracy for their role in fabricating a bomb threat last spring that forced a RyanAir plane to land in Minsk so local law enforcement could arrest a dissident journalist onboard. The four Belarus-based individuals remain at large and will likely not be tried, but Thursday’s charges will severely restrict where they can travel without facing extradition.

• Police in the United Kingdom arrested two men on Thursday in connection with Malik Faisal Akram’s hostage-taking at a Dallas-area synagogue last weekend. FBI Director Chris Wray said yesterday the law enforcement agency is treating the incident as an act of terrorism. “This was not some random occurrence,” Wray said. “It was intentional, it was symbolic, and we’re not going to tolerate antisemitism in this country.”

• A federal judge ruled on Thursday that the January 6 Select Committee does not have to return or destroy a Trump spokesman’s financial records obtained through a subpoena. District Court Judge James Boasberg said he did not have the authority to tell Congress what to do with documents already in its possession, and that, even if he did, the subpoena in question was not overly broad and the committee had a legitimate legislative purpose for issuing it.

• The January 6 Select Committee announced yesterday it is seeking voluntary cooperation from Ivanka Trump in an effort to learn more about her father’s attempts to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to participate in his plan to overturn the election and what the former president was doing the afternoon of January 6.

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday that union membership in the United States declined to near-record lows in 2021. About 14 million workers—10.3 percent of the labor force—belonged to unions last year, down 0.5 percentage points from 2020. Approximately 34 percent of public-sector workers were unionized, compared to about 6 percent of private-sector workers.

• The Labor Department reported Thursday that initial jobless claims increased by 55,000 week-over-week to 286,000 last week, the highest number since October.

• Maura Healey, Massachusetts’ Democratic attorney general, announced Thursday she is mounting a gubernatorial bid to succeed Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, who is not running for reelection this year.

The Fallout From Biden’s Ukraine Remarks

Making use of both carrots and sticks, the United States and its fellow NATO member countries have worked tirelessly over the past few months to patch together an amalgam of sanctions, concessions, and diplomatic promises that, in combination, could convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to back down from his threat to re-invade Ukraine. It’s proven difficult, with even the harshest warnings failing to deter the steady buildup of weaponry and troops—127,000, per the latest Ukrainian intelligence—along the countries’ shared border.

It didn’t get any easier on Wednesday. “We’ve had very frank discussions, Vladimir Putin and I,” President Joe Biden told reporters when asked about disagreements within the military alliance. “And the idea that NATO is not going to be united, I don’t buy. … I think what you’re going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades. And it depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do.”

The admission—which Biden expounded upon later in the press conference, publicly conceding there are “differences” in NATO countries’ willingness to stand up to Putin’s aggression—set off shockwaves in Washington, Kyiv, and, likely, Moscow. The White House scrambled to clarify Biden’s remarks—a Wednesday press release asserted any Russian military movement across the Ukrainian border would be met with “a swift, severe, and united response from the United States and [its] Allies” and Biden himself said Thursday morning there is “no doubt” Russia will pay a “heavy price” for any further aggression—but the damage was done. 

In those Thursday morning comments, Biden made clear that what he meant by “minor incursions” from Russia a day earlier were cyberattacks and paramilitary invasions—think the “little green men” of 2014’s Crimea annexation. But Ukraine is plenty worried about those “gray-zone” attacks as well. “We want to remind the great powers that there are no minor incursions and small nations,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted Thursday. “Just as there are no minor casualties and little grief from the loss of loved ones.”

Biden’s “minor incursions” remark generated the most news, but what came next may have been even more damaging. “It wasn’t only the comment that he made, but the fact that he qualified it by saying that there would be fighting within NATO. He openly acknowledged that NATO is not on the same page,” Peter Dickinson—the Ukraine-based editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert—told The Dispatch, describing Biden’s comments as “disastrously revealing.”

But whether the president openly copped to their existence or not, NATO’s divisions were bound to come to the fore—and they have this week. On Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron called on the European Union to “conduct [its] own dialogue” with Russia separate from NATO and the United States. And in a joint press conference with Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock dodged a question about her country’s willingness to halt the operations of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline in the event of an invasion, despite the Biden administration repeatedly pointing to the project as leverage with which to shape Russia’s behavior.

Dickinson explained why Baerbock may be waffling. “If the worst comes to the worst and the Russians do attack—if they destroy or seriously damage Ukraine’s gas transit system—the Germans will be faced with a choice,” he said. “Do they accept the Nord Stream 2 pipeline—do they certify, do they allow it to enter into service—or do they freeze? Do they do without gas? There’s no third option.”

Blinken has spent most of this week in Europe, meeting with the Ukrainians on Wednesday and Germans on Thursday. Today, he’ll sit down with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva, Switzerland, for what could be one last-ditch effort to find a “diplomatic off-ramp” before things start to get truly messy. But Biden admitted Wednesday his “guess” is that Putin will move on Ukraine at some point, and experts agreed there’s little Blinken can do today to budge him from that course.

Dmitri Alperovitch, the Russian-born co-founder of both CrowdStrike and the Silverado Policy Accelerator, told The Dispatch yesterday there is “very little hope for a breakthrough” at today’s talks. “I think they’ve decided in Moscow that, to accomplish all the objectives that they’re desiring—which is the end to NATO expansion in the former Soviet Union space, the end to Ukraine’s flirtation with NATO and support by NATO, and the resolution to the Donbass—the only way they can get them is through invasion,” he said.

The most pertinent questions, then, are starting to begin with a when and not an if. “[Putin’s] got these forces that he’s got to do something with,” said Jim Townsend, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy. “They can’t stay on high readiness forever. They will begin to deteriorate in terms of their capability.”

Russian officials announced Tuesday an unspecified number of troops would be deployed to Belarus for “major war games,” but the Biden administration isn’t buying it. “This is neither an exercise nor normal troop movement,” a senior State Department official told reporters this week. “It is a show of strength designed to cause or give false pretext for a crisis as Russia plans for a possible invasion. And let’s be clear: This is extremely dangerous. We are now at a stage where Russia could, at any point, launch an attack on Ukraine.”

Alperovitch was “very fearful” of a Belarus deployment—because he sees the strategy behind it. “They now have an option to surround Kyiv without having to cross the Dnieper [River],” he said. “Even if they don’t [go] after Kyiv, they can force the Ukrainians to defend across a 500 kilometer line of engagement; spreading their resources across the east, the west, the south, and the north and making resistance very, very difficult.”

The Kremlin continues to deny such plans, with Sergey Nechaev, its ambassador to Berlin, describing the move as “normal” preparation for joint military exercises. “We are reacting to the fact that our Western negotiating partners are flooding Ukraine with weapons,” he added. “These weapons are construed by the West as defensive, but they can be turned into offensive ones very quickly.”

British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace announced Monday the United Kingdom had begun supplying Ukraine with “light, anti-armor defensive weapons systems,” and Biden said Wednesday the United States has already shipped over $600 million worth of defensive equipment. It’ll be enough to make Russia’s increasingly likely invasion more costly, but not enough to stop it.

“The Ukrainians are going to encounter one of the most well-armed militaries on the planet, and one that has enormous capacity to deliver long-range fires,” Alperovitch said. “Russians are going to bring down absolute hell on Ukrainian defensive positions—with long-range artillery, with fixed-wing aircraft, with ballistic missiles—and there is nothing in the Ukrainian arsenal to stop any of that.”

Oleksiy Danilov—a senior Ukrainian defense official—told the Wall Street Journal yesterday he believes Russia will ultimately back down from a large-scale military incursion and opt instead to undermine Ukrainian leadership with cyberattacks, economic pressure, and disinformation campaigns. But Ukraine’s Defense Ministry announced on Tuesday it was mobilizing 130,000 reservists to bolster its 246,000-troop active duty military. James Heappey, British armed forces minister, said this week he believes tens of thousands of people could die in the conflict. 

“[The Ukrainians] can’t physically stop Russia from invading,” Dickinson said. “But what they can do—and what they plan to do openly—is fight a prolonged guerrilla campaign, which they are very well-equipped to do. … They’re very motivated because they’re fighting in their own country against an enemy who is openly seeking to destroy them, seeking to deny their right to exist as an independent country.”

Worth Your Time

• In his Wednesday press conference, President Biden repeatedly blamed Republican obstructionism for his administration’s lack of progress on a number of different issues. “Did any of you think that you’d get to a point where not a single Republican would diverge on a major issue? Not one?” he asked the press corps. But as Marc Thiessen points out in his latest column, that’s not exactly true. Senate Republicans offered to cooperate on a COVID-19 relief bill; Biden rejected their proposal after one meeting. Nearly 20 Senate Republicans—and about a dozen in the House—broke with Donald Trump’s wishes and gave Biden a win on infrastructure, which he almost frittered away by tethering the legislation to his much more ambitious Build Back Better Act. Republicans have signaled a willingness to work with Democrats to update the Electoral Count Act, but the White House has thus far dismissed those efforts as insufficient compared to Democrats’ more aggressive election reforms.

• In The Atlantic, science writer Ed Yong explains why an idea gaining traction online—denying medical care to unvaccinated people—is an unabashedly terrible one. “People whose actions endangered themselves, like smokers with lung cancer or drivers who crash while not wearing a seatbelt, still get treated. Those whose actions endangered others, like drunk drivers or terrorists, also get treated,” he writes. “‘We are all sinners,’ Carla Keirns, a professor of medical ethics and palliative medicine at the University of Kansas Medical Center, told me. ‘No one has made all the perfect decisions, and any of us could find ourselves in a situation where we are sick.’”

• Political and corporate participation in the 2022 Winter Olympics—already morally reprehensible—has grown even more indefensible in recent days, Josh Rogin notes in his latest Washington Post column. ​​”In a news conference this week, a top Beijing Organizing Committee official said, ‘Any behavior or speech that is against the Olympic spirit, especially against the Chinese laws and regulations, are also subject to certain punishment.’ On Tuesday, the nonprofit research organization Citizen Lab released a report revealing that the Chinese government has mandated that all Olympics athletes download a ‘health monitoring’ app that is riddled with security vulnerabilities that puts their data and conversations at risk,” Rogin writes. “Corporations don’t seem ashamed at all. … By both action and inaction, they are helping the Chinese government cover up its repression, mainly because it is in their financial interest.”

Presented Without Comment 

Also Presented Without Comment 

Toeing the Company Line

• Economist deputy editor Edward Carr joined Jonah on yesterday’s Remnant for a discussion of how the pandemic has affected nations outside the United States. Can we trust China’s COVID statistics? Are things as weird in Russia and the U.K. as they are in America? And are we in the early stages of a new Roaring ‘20s?

• Holy croakano, it’s another Stirewaltisms! In this week’s edition, Chris opens up the mailbag and touches on noncitizen voting in New York, Bernie Sanders’ overratedness, the brewing Trump-DeSantis feud, Idaho’s wacky lieutenant governor, Socrates, and his concern about NATO. “We are in the moment that many of us have been worried about for a decade,” he writes. “Putin wanted a weaker NATO and a politically dysfunctional United States, and we have obliged him.”

• On Thursday’s Advisory Opinions, David and Sarah talk about all the Neil Gorsuch masking gossip before turning to A flagpole in Boston and Ted Cruz’s very, very boring Supreme Court case.

• Audrey takes a dive into the coming GOP primary in Illinois’ 15th Congressional District, where—thanks to redistricting—two House incumbents will be running against one another.

• On the site today, Jonathan Schanzer grades Biden’s handling of Middle East policy, pointing to a series of unforced errors. Also, Danielle Pletka argues that the Afghanistan debacle has our geopolitical foes sensing weakness, leading to national security challenges from Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China.

Let Us Know

The NFL on Thursday released a trailer for this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, which will feature Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar, and Dr. Dre.

Do you have a favorite Super Bowl halftime show of all time? (And if it isn’t Prince’s in 2007, why not?) Is there a band or artist you’re hoping the NFL will select for the performance at some point?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@lawsonreports), Audrey Fahlberg (@AudreyFahlberg), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).