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Today marks one year since Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Russia on what American officials say are false charges of espionage. He has been held in jail ever since.

Members of Russia’s Federal Security Service—the country’s intelligence agency, also known as the FSB—detained Gershkovich while he was on a reporting assignment in the city of Yekaterinburg, according to the Journal. Gershkovich had deep familiarity the country: his parents fled the Soviet Union in the 1970s. He had full press credentials from Russia’s foreign ministry and had reported from Moscow for Agence France Press and the Moscow Times before joining the Journal in January 2022. Russia has not publicly presented evidence of its espionage claims against Gershkovich, the Journal reports. 

Since his arrest—which marks the first time an American journalist has been held on such charges in Russia since the end of the Cold War—Gershkovich has been in Russia’s notorious Lefortovo prison, where he spends 90 percent of his day in a small cell, according to the paper. Earlier this week, a Russian court extended Gershkovich’s pre-trial detention by three months, until June 30. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the extension, calling it “another cynical affront to press freedom by the Russian authorities.” 

In a letter published today, Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker called Gershkovich’s detention “a blatant attack on the rights of the free press,” adding that “given the lessons of history and the arbitrary power of the Russian state, if there is a trial, we would expect a guilty verdict—something we would view as a travesty of justice.” A conviction could carry a sentence of 10 to 20 years, the Journal reports.

Roger Carstens, the Biden administration’s special envoy for hostage affairs, told the New York Times that the US government is involved in “intensive efforts” to secure the releases of Gershkovich and ex-Marine Paul Whelan, who has been in Russian custody since 2018 and was sentenced to 16 years in prison on espionage charges, which American officials also deny.

The Journal dedicated its front page to Gershkovich today, leaving much of it blank under the headline, “His story should be here,” alongside other stories on his detention and the threats authoritarians pose to journalists around the world. (More than 520 journalists are imprisoned worldwide, according to the group Reporters Without Borders.)

Here is an early look at the front page of a special section wrapping today’s Wall Street Journal https://t.co/kTxN0a0m6N pic.twitter.com/X8C54alCiH

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) March 29, 2024

The Journal also hosted a public, 24-hour read-a-thon, which streamed live on social media, of Gershkovich’s work, with participants such as NBC’s Lester Holt and Andrea Mitchell, ABC’s David Muir, and CNN’s Jake Tapper and Kaitlan Collins.

In a statement released today, President Joe Biden said he will “never give up hope” of freeing Gershkovich.

“We will continue working every day to secure his release,” Biden said. “We will continue to denounce and impose costs for Russia’s appalling attempts to use Americans as bargaining chips. And we will continue to stand strong against all those who seek to attack the press or target journalists—the pillars of free society.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken also acknowledged the anniversary of Gershkovich’s arrest, noting that “Russia has provided no evidence of wrongdoing for a simple reason: Evan did nothing wrong. Journalism is not a crime.” 

Gershkovich’s parents have said “he’s doing the best he can under the circumstances, and the circumstances are very hard.” The reporter sends his parents letters weekly, his mother, Ella Milman, added in an interview with Tucker in January. They told the Times he also plays chess with his father over email and reads books recommended by friends.

In the meantime, we’ll echo something you’ll probably hear a lot of today: Journalism is not a crime. 

Nuclear war is a topic few care to think about. We sometimes call it unthinkable. But we need to think carefully, and to talk—particularly with high-ranking foreign officials whose motives we may have reason to distrust, just as they distrust ours—about how we can collectively avoid launching a weapon that would end our civilization. 

Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen’s timely new book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, is a lightning-fast read intended to put the nuclear threat squarely back on everyone’s radar. Her narrative thread, as the title suggests, is a fact-based (though thankfully fictional) scenario that shows how a nuclear launch can escalate into World War III at dizzying speed.

Jacobsen tees up her cinematic approach with chapters describing how we got here, including a discussion of America’s Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) for General Nuclear War—which was devised in the 1960s and, as Jacobsen details in this Mother Jones book excerpt, was more or less a recipe for the end of the world.

Because that’s nuclear war: One bad assumption, one shot, one retaliation, and it’s unstoppable.

Your book is frightful. What made you want to write in such detail how a nuclear war could unfold?

As a national security reporter, I have written six previous books on military and intelligence programs—CIA, Pentagon, DARPA—all designed to prevent nuclear World War III. During the Trump administration, amid the “fire and fury” rhetoric, I was watching STRATCOM commanders and deputy commanders speak freely on C-SPAN about the dangers therein. I began to wonder, My god, what would happen if deterrence failed? I began to interview people during Covid, when people had more time on their hands for someone like me—and that began the terrifying process of learning that nuclear war is, in essence, a sequence of events, and that once it starts it almost certainly will not stop.

The US public hasn’t thought a whole lot about nuclear weapons since the Cold War. We have more nuclear nations today, but far fewer weapons in the global arsenal. Are we safer now?

Well, as I show in the book, it doesn’t take but one weapon to set off a chain reaction to unleash the current arsenal, which is forward deployed in launch-on-warning positions and could be fired in as little as a minute—15 minutes for the submarines. There are enough weapons in those positions right now to bring on a nuclear winter that would kill an estimated 5 billion people.

Are there too many? Absolutely. Have we made progress? The all-time high in 1986 was 70,481 nuclear weapons. Now, there are approximately 12,500. But to your point, there are nine nuclear-armed nations, not just two or three superpowers. And that presents a lot of unknowns that create serious unease and room for catastrophe.

So we may be less safe because we don’t really know how certain nations might behave—notably North Korea.

Absolutely. Reporting and writing this book was one surprise after another. For example, I did not know until I had it confirmed with US nuclear experts that North Korea does not announce any of its missile tests, whereas the other countries do. North Korea has launched 100 missiles since January 2022. After you read my book, you realize what happens to the US nuclear command and control apparatus in the seconds and minutes after a launch is seen by the advanced super satellite system we have. You can now imagine what goes on in those command centers.

A total frenzy.

Imagine!

One thing that really struck me is the unbelievable speed at which nuclear war is waged.

Gen. Robert Kehler, the former commander of STRATCOM, said to me that the world could end in the next couple of hours. It took me a minute to ask my next question, because coming from someone in that position of authority—the most significant role in the entire nuclear apparatus—that really blew my mind.

Ditto goes for an interview I did with President Barack Obama’s FEMA chief, Craig Fugate. Of course, FEMA is the agency in charge of what’s called population protection planning for American citizens in the event of hurricanes, floods, earthquakes. Fugate told me that after a nuclear war, there wouldn’t be any population protection planning because everyone would be dead.

Help is not coming.

I said, “Well, what should people do?” He more or less said, “Self-survive, and don’t forget your morals, and I hope you stocked Pedialyte”—because radiation poisoning makes you vomit and have diarrhea and away go all of your electrolytes, which leads to secondary problems.

I learned from your book that FEMA plays a unique role in the event of a nuclear attack, and it’s not what one might expect.

That’s right. In the ’50s and ’60s, the US position was that a nuclear war could be fought and won. That is no longer the official position. But plans were put in place for the continuity of government programs—the idea that the government must continue functioning no matter what. That is also a fantasy.

To hear from former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry about the madness and mayhem and anarchy that would follow, in his mind, in the event of a nuclear war, you really get the sense that civilization will fail. I believe one of the reasons so many of these sources went on the record for me is because they know that this is the truth. And they know it is up to the people to change the trajectory of where we’re headed. I mean, my god, look at the saber-rattling going on as we do this interview.

Potential nuclear nightmares range from an accidental detonation to a massive “decapitation” strike to someone using a small nuke on the battlefield. You picked the madman scenario: North Korea inexplicably launches a long-range missile at Washington, DC. Why that one?

I did a series of interviews with [physicist] Richard Garwin, who is now 95. He is arguably the most knowledgeable person about nuclear weapons on the planet, and he probably knows more about policy over the long lens of history because he was 23 or 24 years old when he designed the first thermonuclear bomb.

In the “Ivy Mike” test, it exploded with 10.4 megatons of power—about 1,000 Hiroshimas. Garwin said to me that his biggest fear was now, and always had been, the madman theory you referred to. He used the French phrase Après moi, le déluge—after me, the flood—referring to this idea that a maniacal, egotistical, narcissistic madman leader could launch a nuclear weapon for reasons no one would ever know.

And to counterattack North Korea, as in your scenario, the US would need to send missiles over Russia, which has a very unreliable early warning system.

That’s right. Learning about the technological limitations of some of the Russian systems was just as terrifying as any part of reporting this book.

It’s almost like you’d want to reach out to the Russians and say, look, just take our technology so you won’t launch on a false alarm—but the US would never do that.

There have been many opportunities to have a dialogue with the Russians—Putin inquired about joining NATO back during the Clinton administration. One really has to lean upon one’s leaders to think about communicating rather than saber-rattling, because I hope that my book demonstrates in appalling detail how horrific nuclear war would be. And we know from the Proud Prophet war games that no matter how it begins, it ends in nuclear apocalypse.

For context, Proud Prophet was a classified series of war games President Ronald Reagan ordered in 1983. Civilian and military planners convened for two weeks to run through scenarios that could spark a nuclear war and see how they played out.

That Proud Prophet was declassified is interesting. Nuclear war games are among the government’s most jealously guarded secrets. I printed a copy of what a couple pages of the declassified war game look like—95 percent is redacted. It’s literally a couple of headers and a few numbers.

But when something like that gets declassified, it becomes very valuable to the people. An individual like Paul Bracken—a civilian professor at Yale who participated in Proud Prophet—can now speak about it in general terms. He wrote in his own book that everyone left very depressed, because no matter how the nuclear scenario begins—if NATO is involved or not involved, China is involved or not—it always ends the same way, the most terrible way, because America has a “launch on warning” policy.

We do not wait to absorb a nuclear blow. Once a missile is on the way and there is secondary confirmation from ground radar, the president is asked to launch a counterstrike. In the book—I have the president asking this because it came up in my discussions with sources—he says, “How do we know it’s a nuclear weapon?”

And we don’t.

That is a fact. The answer is, Well, it could be a biological weapon. Another answer I was told is that no one launches a ballistic missile at the United States unless they’re expecting a counterattack. So now you are looping into the Orwellian world of: This is deterrence. Deterrence will hold. Don’t you dare launch at us or else! Which becomes part and parcel for why the counterattack is required, per the deterrence doctrine. There is no room for saying, well, maybe we’ll wait and see.

Once you break deterrence, everything else goes out the window.

Correct. One of the most haunting quotes in the book is from the deputy commander of STRATCOM, Lt. Gen. Tom Bussiere. I located an unclassified discussion he had with insiders, and the quote is along the lines of, When deterrence fails, it all unravels. In seconds and minutes and hours—not days and weeks and months.

Twelve thousand years of civilization extinguished in a few hours.

General Kehler was not speaking hyperbolically when he said that.

Say more about “launch on warning.” You cite Paul Nitze, a former defense secretary and later presidential adviser, calling the policy “inexcusably dangerous.” Presidents Bush, Obama, and Biden wanted it scrapped. So why is it still in place?

I’d like to shout out William Burr, who runs the Nuclear Documentation Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, because many of those quotes and documents come from that organization, which made them accessible to journalists like me. Nitze was one of the biggest hawks across the Cold War. To have a guy like that go on the record and say this is inexcusably dangerous says a lot.

Multiple presidents have campaigned on the promise that they will change this dangerous policy, but then they become president and you never hear of it again. That speaks to the kind of secret-keeping that is dangerous and can be changed. I wrote Nuclear War: A Scenario for the layperson to be able to rip through it in a night, no matter how terrifying. I do not bog the reader down with polemics or jargon, because this is an issue everybody should know about. Because only in knowing about it is change possible. We can look to The Day After battle, what’s known in inner circles as the Reagan Reversal policy of 1983.

Wait, what’s that?

So in 1983—I’m dating myself here—I was a high school student. And I watched the ABC movie The Day After.

I was the same age, and watching it too.

It’s a fictional account of a nuclear war between America and Soviet Russia, and half the country watched it. Interestingly, behind the scenes, ABC got a lot of pressure not to air it. Well, one very important American watched it: Reagan had a private screening at Camp David. His chief of staff tried to suggest that he shouldn’t watch it, but he did. And he wrote in his diary that he became “greatly depressed,” and he picked up the phone and called [then–Soviet President Mikhail] Gorbachev, and the two leaders communicated—which is really the only solution for any of this.

Because of those communications and because of their conference and because of the treaty, the insane nuclear arsenal has been reduced to the approximately 12,500 we have now, which is a considerable reduction. The president’s position prior to seeing The Day After was a much harder, more saber-rattling approach. He changed his position and became much more dovish.

“Launch on warning” puts extraordinary pressure on a president. The one in your scenario is pretty clueless. He hasn’t ever rehearsed. Nobody told him he’d have just six minutes to choose from a Denny’s breakfast menu of existential options in response to what may or may not be an incoming nuke. It’s hard to believe the Pentagon doesn’t put every new president through a series of war games.

I was just as surprised as you are. But that’s coming from multiple secretaries of defense and national security advisers—people in a position to advise the president on a nuclear counterattack. The best summation came from Leon Panetta, who explained that as White House chief of staff he was witness to the fact that the president is primarily concerned with domestic issues—like his popularity. I asked Panetta how clued in he was when he was the CIA director, and he said almost not at all, because the CIA is about intelligence, not nuclear operations.

Only when he became secretary of defense did it really hit home, the weight of all of this. He spoke about visiting missile silos, submarine bases, and nuclear command bunkers—once you go to places like that, your entire perspective changes. And that is why I believe he was willing to go on the record. You really get the sense that things are precarious once they begin, and decisions follow that are out of everyone’s control.

Right. And our continued existence depends not only on our internal communications and processes, but those of our adversaries, about which we know little. 

Absolutely.

Your book busts some common myths, for instance the belief that the US could shoot down an incoming nuclear missile. We really can’t defend against nuclear weapons, can we?

We can’t. That is pure fantasy. During the final fact-checking incantations, I had the book read by a lieutenant general who ran these scenarios for NORAD. I was almost hoping someone would say, Annie, you should take this part out of the book, because we have a secret Iron Dome that you can’t report on. No. The truth is that the United States relies upon 44 interceptor missiles to stop any incoming missiles. Russia alone has 1,674 nuclear warheads in “ready to launch” position. Adding to that, according to congressional reports, the interceptors are only approximately 50 percent effective.

Under the best of circumstances.

Absolutely, like when you’re doing a test and you know precisely where the missile is going to be. It’s a curated test. So people have this idea that we have an Iron Dome–type shield. And we don’t.

The Reagan Reversal bit reminds me of a moment from your scenario. Your secretary of defense is sworn in as president because the president and others in the line of succession are dead or AWOL, and he has this moment of humanity. Russia has launched all its ICBMs at us, so we know we’re goners. And the new guy asks: Why respond now if all it will do is kill millions more people? The STRATCOM commander is like, Nope, we’re doing this. Humanity is already doomed, yet Russia and the United States keep launching their weapons until practically none are left. It’s nonsensical. But is it realistic?

It is if you talk to the sources I spoke to. A lot of the decision-tree situations involving the defense secretary came from my multiple discussions with former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, who has thought a lot about this—and what an individual’s thought process would be. The point of including that question was to demonstrate how the madness of MAD—mutual assured destruction—takes over.

I asked [retired weapons engineer] Glen McDuff—the curator of the classified museum at the Los Alamos National Laboratory—the question you’re kind of asking me: What did he think, as an insider, about the notion that people would not follow orders? He basically said: Annie, I would suggest betting on Powerball, because you’d have a better chance of winning than betting on a high-ranking individual in the nuclear command and control system not following orders.

Right. It seems like folks in the nuclear command and control structure have rehearsed these scenarios over and over. They’re on autopilot to a degree. Which gets at the notion of “apes on a treadmill” that you write about late in the book: We’ve made this plan, and we’re going to follow it—even if it’s completely bonkers.

Apes on the treadmill was just such a brilliant concept. It goes back to the Cold War when it was used as a metaphor for people slavishly following away in this nuclear arms race.

But even more interesting was the present-day anecdote I found. It was a scientific experiment having nothing to do with the original metaphor but was literally apes on a treadmill. The researchers were studying bipedalism: They put humans on the treadmill and they put apes on the treadmill. Anecdotally, one of the scientists said, and I’m paraphrasing, that some of the apes got fed up with walking to nowhere and got off the treadmill.

I thought, my god, the apes are smarter than the humans when it comes to mutual assured destruction.

Little known to those outside of Finland, Finnish Karelia is a land of lakes and deep forests and the home of a culture that founded elements of today’s Finnish identity and politics. It is also a zone contested through history: a contact line between Eastern and Western forms of Christianity, between the Swedish and Russian empires from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, and between Finnish and Soviet armies in the 20th. In the twenty-first century, Finnish Karelia has become a line of contact between a liberal, integrationist governance model and an increasingly authoritarian one in Russia.

Since Finland’s independence in 1917, Karelia has been split between it and Russia but it was once a Finnic space: the shores of the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland were home to a variety of peoples speaking languages and following life patterns similar to those of the Finns, Estonians and Sami, and these extended to the White Sea, the Barents Sea, east towards the Ural Mountains and well into modern Sweden and Norway.

In the nineteenth century, its forest-bound isolation preserved a culture of poet-singers, men and women who recited from memory verses passed down for generations. These verses contained traces of an ancient Finnic mythology, layered with tales of creation, heroes and tragedy, and the arrival of Christianity. These cultural materials formed the substance of the country’s national epic poem, the Kalevala, and the work of its greatest musical composer, Jean Sibelius. The cultural movement of Karelianism shaped Finnish architecture, painting and literary imagination, lending itself to characters, metaphors and an artistic mood that persist in cultural life in the country to this day.

The establishment of St. Petersburg had a radical consequence for that Finnic space. The “wretched Finns”, as the Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin put it in the “Bronze Horseman”, living as fishers, hunters, foresters and agrarians at the head of the River Neva, were displaced by a much more grandiose project, that of Russian Tsar Peter I, the “Great,” and his opening a “window on the West” for his empire. The decision to found an imperial capital on the Gulf of Finland reverberated across the region, portending a future of altered contact between Finnic speaking peoples and their Russian-speaking neighbours, relations that are known to have existed from the earliest medieval records.

 

Two corners of Karelia remain in today’s Finland, the North and South Karelias. Today, by train you emerge from the forests into North Karelia’s capital, the small city of Joensuu. It is the regional hub for many small and exotically named towns and hamlets. The town names often are based on words from Karelian, a Finnic language tinged with Russian diction, phonetics and metaphors. The spoken language there today, the modern Finnish dialect of Karelian, with its distinctive phonetics and vocabulary, is a cultural signifier in the country. In North Karelia, you see the marks of its past: a rich engagement with Russian Orthodox Christianity and a relationship to the other side of a border severed by time and repeated spats of high and violent politics.

Even today in Finland’s capital of Helsinki some few hundred kilometres southwest of Joensuu, you get the feeling that you’re on an edge, a liminal space in which a society perched itself on the first line of contact between competing systems. This mood existed profoundly during the Cold War, when Finland was not as much an edge as an interstice, weaving a distinctive geopolitics of neutrality between Soviet and American power, engendering an almost solipsistic domestic perception that Finland was in it alone when it came to survival.

On 24 February 2022, Russia’s attack on Ukraine again perched Finland on the edge, but in the very different conditions of the twenty-first century it has opted for defence integration, turning to NATO to produce greater security for itself. Living on the edge of an interstice, as Finnish Karelians have done for centuries, has had a profound effect not just on government, foreign policy and academic elites, but on the general populace.

Geopolitics is full of wagers, bets on uncertain outcomes, attempts to shift the current towards an actor’s set of preferences. Among the most famous of these wagers in recent times has been the liberal one – that exchange through a trade liberated of national barriers would foster democratic society and politics. Often our thoughts turn to the big bets, like those placed on China and Russia: the USA’s bet that trade and investment would integrate China into democracy, Germany’s staking its competitiveness on inexpensive Russian natural gas, betting economic interdependence would foster stability.

When thinking of such wagers, our thoughts rarely travel to liminal places like Karelia but that misses something about the lived experience of geopolitics, at the day-to-day level, for people who are not diplomats, intelligence agents, uniformed military or elected leaders. In places set along geopolitical fault lines, individuals experience these wagers, and keenly. It is an interesting feature of geopolitics that the experience of them is often more immediate for individuals in small societies than for those in larger societies or cities. The potential to specialize in the labour force amid more abundant economic and diverse cultural opportunity carve foreign policy, defence and national security off into esoteric activities for a sect of specialists and often secretive officials and national politicians. What is theory and strategy in Washington, London, or Ottawa is lived and felt by people in Ukraine, Taiwan, Gaza and Israel – or Karelia.

In small places on the edge, the experience of security extends from daily matters of economic security — finding a job, affordable housing, quality schooling for the next generation — to roles in the geopolitics of the day, as both subjects and objects. Subjects, in that they are more likely to fill the roles of soldier, border guard, cross-border trader. Objects, in that their “located life plans,” to use the terminology of philosopher Anna Stilz, are more likely to be undermined by events over which they have no control.

Finnish Karelians are living that experience. Russia’s aggression and its manifold consequences resonate at an individual level. In conversation in Joensuu in October, local experts conveyed to me some of the sentiments being expressed by Karelian residents. Some were asking questions like: has joining NATO made us part of the enemy camp? Were all of our efforts to cooperate with our neighbours in Russia — the front line the liberal bet — in vain? Others think, why should these grand politics affect our everyday lives? For some local inhabitants, the people of Russian Karelia seem unlikely agents of Putinist designs to rework the European map in Muscovy’s favour.

An understandable but curious thought. Finland once held much more Karelia, around Lake Ladoga. Finnic peoples had inhabited these lands since the Middle Ages. That land was shorn away by the peace settlement of World War II. Some 420,000 — basically the region’s whole Finnish citizenry and 11% of the country’s total population —  were resettled in the rest of Finland. Few places have felt Russian power more acutely.

But the 1990s infused a sense that neighbouring Russia presented an opportunity. Closed lands were now open. In Helsinki and Brussels, Finland in general and the border areas in particular were seen as gateways to Russia. St. Petersburg’s proximity no longer cast a dark shadow, but emitted a bright beacon.

Academics Dr. Joni Virkkunen and Dr. Minna Piipponen, who I heard speak in Joensuu at a conference of specialists on border dynamics, have periodized Russian-Finnish Karelia cross-border evolution since January 1992, in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s dissolution mere weeks before. An era of expectation unfolded between 1992 and 1995 as the border opened, Finland sought EU membership and Russia wobbled into democracy. This then evolved into advocacy for cross-border ties from 1995 to 2000, led by the European Union and welcomed on the Russian side, and the consolidation of those ties from 2001-2013. Virkkunen and Piipponen pointed out this was not all about trade deals and diplomatic negotiations, but about people-to-people contacts being forged across the border in the forestry sector, in academia, in tourism. A perspicuous reminder of the lived experience of geopolitics.

Rumblings of trouble existed throughout the consolidation period as Russia strengthened, Virkkunen and Piipponen noted. Geopolitics in earnest intervened in 2014, when Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and started a war in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. From 2014 to 2021, a nervous pragmatism reigned, as local actors tried to navigate between sanctions and cooperation; the events in Ukraine were mostly “sauna talk.” That era ended in early 2022, as Russia backed up its revisionist rhetoric with revisionist action.

The sentiments of the inhabitants of North and South Karelia reflect a local expression of the disorientation and frustration geopolitics are visiting on many in Europe, North America and beyond. Finland’s Karelians now can no longer look 360º for opportunities – a microcosm of Finnish experience more broadly, but felt more acutely, more personally and more directly there, due to tight economic opportunities. They now look west and south, and increasingly north, as part of Arctic-oriented supply and value chains, for an elusive prosperity.

Echoes of previous cross-border movement — and current displacement — could be heard in Joensuu’s city square, where young Russian-speaking people gathered. PhD candidate Virpi Kaisto described how the population centres amid this “borderscape” bear the marks of the rupture, as well as the remaining effects of the COVID crisis.

Kaisto has documented and analyzed how a once thriving commerce in cross-border shopping ground to a halt, leaving parking lots empty and many Cyrillic signs taken down in the South Karelian centres of Lappeenranta and Imatra. Abundant Russian tourists, sometimes conspicuously consuming, are now conspicuously absent. In the brief time between COVID restrictions loosening and visa restrictions tightening in 2022. Russians coming to South Karelia saw Russian-language signs protesting the war and pointing to their agency in Russia’s agency: “Putin is not Russia. You are Russia,” they read. These Russians were exposed to the open debate of a liberal political culture. That window of contact closed in fall 2022.

Regionally, Russian engagement with the markets and institutions of the European Union did, at times, shape Russian participation, even if it failed to change the mentality of Russian leadership. In a case study, researcher Maria Tyshiachniouk explored the cross-border timber trade. Her work draws attention to efforts to preserve old-growth forests from the White Sea to Norway, to how Finnish and Russian civil society actors and programs of environmental certification in European markets influenced industry practices in Russian Karelia — the slow but steady and often overlooked march of the liberal bet, progress that ultimately proved to be at odds with the geopolitical instincts of the governing elite in Moscow. Now turning east to sell these products, such sustainable practices are less likely to survive, although a sort of positive inertia in the Russian industry is perpetuating them, in part because a market of Russian consumers have come to demand those standards, Tyshiachniouk discovered. Losing Finnish Karelia is certainly a loss for the political and economic development of Russia and its northwest, but the legacy of over two decades of interaction has left a strong institutional mark.

 

These marks are almost certainly what Russia’s political elite fears. This summer, Nikolay Patrushev, a long-time senior security figure in the Putin government, was reviving anti-Finnish tropes during a visit to the Russian Karelian capital of Petrozavodsk, tropes that had mostly lain quite since the 1930s. The Putinist narrative alleges that Finns are, with Western colleagues, fomenting separatism and unrest in Russian Karelia. These are preposterous claims: Finnish authorities long ago abandoned seeking the return of territories lost in World War II. But these allegations are all too credible, if one sees, as the Russian leadership does, the forces of democratization and integration with European and Western institutions and markets as existential threats to their power. As the Finnish diplomat and commentator Max Jakobson noted in the 1960s, it is perceptions that count in dealing with Russia, and the Russian leadership perceives a threat in Russia’s contact with European modernity.

In all likelihood, the next few years will see North and South Karelia mutate from a locally-influenced space of border negotiation to one shaped by distantly adumbrated high strategy. Dr. Pasi Tuunainen, a historian at the University of Eastern Finland and major in the military reserves, told me about some of the dynamics. He sensed that Finns, while in general supportive of the county’s NATO membership, were keen to solidify the bilateral defence relationship with the USA, the two countries are in the final stages of agreeing upon a Defence Cooperation Agreement (DCA) — and were “enthusiastic” about extra-regional UK-led initiatives like the Joint Expeditionary Force, a ten-country grouping of Nordic and Baltic countries along with the Netherlands. A lingering reluctance held, he thought, among Finns about NATO bases or housing nuclear weapons. Norwegian approaches, which had seen a lighter military presence and no NATO basing in the country’s northern-most regions, might appeal most to Finns, he thought, although a rotating NATO presence would be welcomed. It is notable, however, that in Norway these acts of geopolitical balancing are under question in the face of Russian aggression.

Some of the transformation is visible. Finland is building a fence along parts of the border, a measure officials see as dealing with Russia’s callous manipulation of migrants, directing them to an often-unwelcoming Europe Union. According to Dr. Jussi Laine, a professor at the University of Eastern Finland’s Karelia Institute, however, they are more performative, a way to offer visible signs of reassurance to Finns, rather than producing real security. In November, the number of asylum seekers arriving at Finland’s land borders with Russia spiked precipitously to over 500, an acceleration that can only be explained by the conscious work of Russian state agencies. Finland’s decision on 30 November to close the land border entirely with Russia perhaps recognizes that reality: a larger rupture with Russia has occurred, one that even the metaphor of a fence only partially captures.

Finnish Karelia is again a frontier. New wagers are being laid in distant capitals, bets that Western alliances will produce real security. NATO membership means that Finland is integrating into the world’s largest, most powerful defensive alliance. It is transforming Finnish Karelia from an interstice to an edge in the encounter between authoritarian and liberal-democratic geopolitics. It is likely to be a sharp one.

Alexander Dalziel is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa. He has over 20 years of experience in Canada’s national security community. Previously, he held positions with the Privy Council Office, Canada School of Public Service, Department of National Defence and Canada Border Services Agency. In the 1990s, he spent an academic year at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths will travel to the Jordanian capital Amman on Wednesday for talks on the possibility of opening the Kerem Shalom crossing to allow for humanitarian aid to enter Gaza from Israel.

Located at the intersection of Israel, the Gaza Strip and Egypt, the Kerem Shalom crossing was used to carry more than 60% of the truckloads going into Gaza before the current conflict.

Aid currently being allowed into Gaza comes through the Rafah crossing on the Egyptian border, which was designed for pedestrian crossings and not trucks.

“We have said from start we need more than one crossing,” Griffiths told a briefing of member states at the United Nations in Geneva on Tuesday.

“The opportunity to use Kerem Shalom should be explored, and that will be topic in Amman. It would hugely add scope (to the response).”

A Western diplomat said there was no prospect of opening the Kerem Shalom crossing for the moment. The diplomat said that Israel does not want to open the crossing because their troops are located in the area.

There was no immediate comment from Israel.

Since a fragile truce came into force last week, some 200 trucks have carried aid into Gaza on a daily basis, but the amount of aid is nowhere near enough to meet the needs of its population.

“We know that more humanitarian aid should be delivered in Gaza. We know how we could increase it, but there are constraints beyond our control,” Griffiths said.

“We know that the people of Gaza need much more from us.”

Since the truce, the United Nations has scaled up the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza and sent aid to some northern areas that had been largely cut off for weeks due to Israeli bombing.

“We need to have reliable and scalable aid delivery mechanisms, that include all humanitarian partners – including NGOs,” Griffiths said.

“We are refining prioritisation, advocating for more entry points and the resumption of (the) private sector.”

The wife of Ukraine’s military spy chief has been poisoned with heavy metals and is undergoing treatment in a hospital, a spokesperson for the agency said on Tuesday.

Marianna Budanova is the wife of Kyrylo Budanov, who heads Ukrainian military intelligence agency GUR, which has been prominently involved in clandestine operations against Russian forces since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

“Yes, I can confirm the information, unfortunately, it is true,” GUR spokesperson Andriy Yusov told Reuters, without clarifying when the poisoning took place.

The BBC’s Ukrainian service cited Yusov as saying that several GUR officials had also experienced milder symptoms of poisoning.

Budanov’s public profile has risen in Ukraine and the West, where he is portrayed as a behind-the-scenes mastermind of operations to strike back at Russia. In Russian media he is a hate figure.

The 37-year-old has himself been the target of several attempts on his life, including a botched car bombing.

If confirmed as deliberate, the purported poisoning of his wife would represent the most serious targeting of a high-profile Ukrainian leadership figure’s family member during the 21-month-long war.

The poisoning was first reported by Ukrainian media outlets.

One publication, Babel, cited an unidentified source who said Budanova had been in hospital, and was finishing a course of treatment for the effects of the poisoning.

Another outlet, Ukrainska Pravda, cited an unidentified source who said the poison was likely administered through food.

Moscow has previously blamed Ukrainian secret services for the murders of a pro-war Russian blogger and a pro-war journalist on Russian soil. Ukraine denies involvement in those deaths.

Separately, Russian media has reported that a court in Moscow had arrested Budanov in absentia in April on terrorism charges.

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U.S. President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden on Tuesday offered to testify publicly in the House Republican impeachment inquiry of his father’s Democratic administration, while a leading lawmaker stuck to his demand of testimony behind closed doors.

Escalating a months-long investigation across three congressional committees, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives launched an impeachment inquiry into Biden in September, which focuses on Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

House Republicans allege Biden and his family improperly traded access to Biden’s office as vice president in President Barack Obama’s administration. The White House denies wrongdoing.

As part of the inquiry, the House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed Hunter Biden, 53, to appear before the panel in a closed-door interview on Dec. 13. The panel also subpoenaed the president’s brother, his late son’s widow and Hunter Biden’s business associates, among others.

The House Oversight Committee has held one public hearing as part of the probe, instead conducting most of their interviews in private.

Hunter Biden’s lawyer on Tuesday blasted the panel’s probe as “a fishing expedition” and an “empty investigation,” telling the panel chairman a public hearing was the only way to prevent “your cloaked, one-sided process.”

“We have seen you use closed-door sessions to manipulate, even distort the facts and misinform the public. We therefore propose opening the door,” attorney Abbe Lowell wrote committee chairman James Comer.

Hunter Biden would appear for a public hearing on Dec. 13 or any other date in December that they could arrange, his lawyer said.

Comer said in a statement that the subpoena required Hunter Biden to appear for a deposition on Dec. 13, but added that he should also have a chance to testify publicly at another time.

“Hunter Biden is trying to play by his own rules instead of following the rules required of everyone else. That won’t stand with House Republicans,” Comer said.

The White House has called the investigation a “smear campaign” that “has turned up zero evidence.”

Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has cheered on the impeachment probe. During his four years in the Oval Office, he became the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice. He was acquitted both times by the Senate.

Hunter Biden in October pleaded not guilty to charges that he lied about his drug use while buying a handgun, in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a sitting U.S. president’s child.

Special Counsel David Weiss brought those charges against Hunter Biden after an earlier proposed plea deal unraveled under questioning from a judge. Weiss is still investigating whether the younger Biden can be charged for tax law violations.

The younger Biden earlier this month sought a federal court’s permission to subpoena documents from Trump and top Justice Department officials in his administration as part of his defense against federal gun charges.

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The conservative U.S. political network led by billionaire Charles Koch on Tuesday endorsed Nikki Haley for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, giving the former South Carolina governor a boost among party rivals struggling to make a dent against frontrunner Donald Trump.

The influential group, which pushes for tax cuts and less government regulation, has made clear that beating former president Trump in the primaries is a top priority, as they think he would lose the November 2024 election to President Joe Biden. Biden beat incumbent Trump in the 2020 White House race.

“We would support a candidate capable of turning the page on Washington’s toxic culture – and a candidate who can win. And last night, we concluded that analysis,” the Koch group, Americans for Prosperity Action, said in a statement.

“That candidate is Nikki Haley.”

The group said its internal polling confirms anecdotal reports from activists on the ground on what they are hearing from voters in states with early presidential nominating contests.

They show Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations, is in the best position to defeat Trump in the Republican primary, it said. Internal polling also “consistently shows” that Haley is the strongest candidate by far to beat Biden in a general election, it said.

Public opinion polls show Haley battling with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for a distant second place behind Trump.

The super-PAC has raised over $70 million to spend on political races, an official with the group said in July.

“In sharp contrast to recent elections that were dominated by the negative baggage of Donald Trump and in which good candidates lost races that should have been won, Nikki Haley, at the top of the ticket, would boost candidates up and down the ballot, winning the key independent and moderate voters that Trump has no chance to win,” it said.

The group promised Haley “the full weight and scope of AFP Action’s unmatched grassroots army and resources” in her bid to become the next U.S. president.

Indian rescuers on Tuesday pulled out the first of 41 construction workers trapped inside a collapsed tunnel in the Himalayas for 17 days, hours after drilling through the debris of rock, concrete and earth to reach them, officials said.

The evacuation of the men to safety began more than six hours after rescuers broke through to end an ordeal that began early on Nov. 12 when the tunnel caved in.

“The first one is out,” a rescue official told reporters outside the 4.5 km (3 mile) tunnel in the northern state of Uttarakhand.

Ambulances with their lights flashing lined up at the mouth of the tunnel to transport the workers to a hospital about 30 km away.

The men have been getting food, water, light, oxygen and medicines through a pipe but efforts to dig a tunnel to rescue them with high-powered drilling machines were frustrated by a series of snags.

The tunnel is part of the $1.5 billion Char Dham highway, one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s most ambitious projects, aimed at connecting four Hindu pilgrimage sites through an 890- km network of roads.

Authorities have not said what caused the cave-in but the region is prone to landslides, earthquakes and floods.

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Before 24 February 2022, it was a common view amongst Russia experts in the West that Putin’s autocratic regime was some kind of curiously ‘postmodernist’ phenomenon, exercising state power less through direct coercion and more through propaganda and deployment of behind-the-scenes political technology. But by now, this narrative’s credibility has been dented. Russian elites have taken to using rhetoric of open genocidal incitement, and Russia’s criminal war of aggression against Ukraine has revealed its essential brutality in a way that harks back to the worst excesses of the USSR. There is not much space left for postmodernism after all.

Estonia … should not be surprised at the recent mass bomb threats against its schools and kindergartens, and the sabotage of its underwater infrastructure.

The ‘hybridity’ of Russian military doctrine, another much talked-about topic, also rings largely hollow today. The idea that Russia would rather use non-kinetic capabilities – from cyber-attacks to weaponisation of migrants – and prefers low-intensity grey zone conflicts to all-out war, might be true, but it is not the whole truth. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has by now lasted for more than 600 days, is for the most part a conventional land war with attrition battles: precisely what various theorists of “future war” had already consigned to the dustbin of history.

However, this does not mean that the propaganda theatre in Russian politics no longer merits scholars’ attention, or that the Russia’s hybrid war has gone away. The full-scale war against Ukraine was difficult for many to foresee and is taking up much of the bandwidth of both the Russian leadership and international observers. Yet Russia also continues its sub-Article 5 aggression against its other neighbouring countries, and the West in general. In fact, it is now even more dangerous than before, because Ukraine’s prospects for success are directly linked to the support it receives from its partners, and this is something that Russia hopes to undermine with its hybrid measures.

Estonia, which has experienced some level of Russian aggression near-constantly since the early 1990s and is now one of the staunchest supporters of Ukraine, should not be surprised at the recent mass bomb threats against its schools and kindergartens, and the sabotage of its underwater infrastructure. But what we are seeing now serves as a yet another reminder that Ukraine is fighting not only for its own freedom, but also that of ours, and that of other countries bordering Russia. Supporting Ukraine is not just a moral necessity, it is also essential for regional security as a whole.

As far as other countermeasures are concerned, they must not only be carefully considered; they must also be bold. The purpose of Russia’s probing is to find out how far it is possible to go, and what the likely reaction is going to be. If the reaction remains lukewarm, then escalation will follow: for example, a drone or missile that “accidentally” falls on Estonian territory. The Russian side will naturally deny having any knowledge about where it came from, but Estonia is once again presented with a fait accompli to which it must somehow respond. If the reaction is lukewarm again, the next experiment will soon be ready in the pipeline. In fact, this is currently the only possible way to communicate with Russia: in a caveman-like fashion through reciprocal demonstrations of force and resolve.

It is up to the Estonian state to make sure that, together with our allies, we will have the last word in this exchange.

The post Russia’s War against Ukraine and Its Hybrid War Against Estonia appeared first on The Northern European :: UpNorth.

• The Swedish government has decided to commission the Swedish Armed Forces to investigate the conditions for sending Gripen fighter jets to Ukraine.
• The government is particularly interested in learning how a handover would affect Sweden’s own defense capabilities, and how quickly Sweden could get new Gripen jets as compensation.
• Another important issue is the training of Ukrainian pilots and other ground personnel. The Swedish Armed Forces would need to provide this training, which would take time and resources.

The Swedish government is considering sending Gripen fighter jets to Ukraine, according to a report by Ekot, the Swedish public radio news program. The decision is likely to be made as early as Thursday, after a meeting of the defense committee.

Ukraine has requested a division of Gripen jets, or 16-18 aircraft. The Swedish Armed Forces will now be tasked with analyzing how this would affect Sweden’s own defense capabilities. There are currently around 90 usable Gripen jets in the Swedish inventory.

The government is also interested in learning how quickly a new Gripen jet could be ready to replace any aircraft that is sent to Ukraine. There are a number of finished hulls at Saab in Linköping, some of which are reportedly empty and others with equipment in them. The government wants to know how quickly these could be made ready for use and how much it would cost.

Another issue is the training of Ukrainian pilots, mechanics, and other ground personnel. The Swedish Armed Forces would need to provide this training, which would take time and resources.

Finally, Sweden would need to obtain permission from the United States, as a large part of the equipment in the Gripen comes from the US.

The Swedish Armed Forces is expected to submit its report on the feasibility of sending Gripen jets to Ukraine at the beginning of November. The government will then make a decision on whether to send the jets, and if so, how many.

It is important to note that there are a number of political factors that could affect the decision. For example, Turkey has blocked Sweden’s accession to NATO, and it is unlikely that Sweden would send Gripen jets to Ukraine without Turkey’s approval.

Overall, the decision of whether or not to send Gripen jets to Ukraine is a complex one with a number of factors to consider. The Swedish government will need to weigh the potential benefits of sending the jets against the potential risks and costs.

Source: https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/regeringen-vill-utreda-gripen-till-ukraina

 

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