Today's D Brief: Russia's 'fake video'; Putin, Xi knock AUKUS, NATO; N. Korea's white horse messaging; And a bit more.
Americans, Brits escalate their counterintelligence game. U.S. and British officials said Thursday that Russian intelligence operatives had decided to produce a fake video as a pretext for another invasion of Ukraine. “We do have information that it is, that the Russians are likely to want to fabricate a pretext for an invasion, which, again, is right out of their playbook,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Thursday.
“One option is the Russian government, we think, is planning to stage a fake attack by Ukrainian military or intelligence forces against Russian sovereign territory, or against Russian-speaking people, to therefore justify their action” to launch further military operations inside Ukraine, Kirby said.
In a statement to Defense One’s Tara Copp, a senior administration official said, “We believe that Russia has already recruited those who will be involved in the fabricated attack and that Russian intelligence is intimately involved in this effort.” According to Copp, “The level of detail the U.S. was able to provide on what they thought the video would contain was striking.” The White House official said that attack could involve Turkish-made Bayraktar drones “as a means to implicate NATO in the attack.”
However, neither the U.S. nor the Brits have released supporting evidence to back up their claims, which Kirby said could compromise intelligence-gathering sources and methods.
Big picture consideration: “It appears that we're looking at a real-time U.S. counterintelligence operation here,” tweeted Thomas Rid of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “The act of publicising such specific information about planned Russian disinformation operations, in real time, is designed to blunt and obstruct these operations.”
Inflation watch: Russia just curbed its ammonium nitrate exports until April. Ammonium nitrate helps crops grow, and Russia provides 35% of the global supply of the stuff.
Why now? “This is a temporary measure,” according to Russian state-run media, TASS. “The remaining volume can be exported from April 2, when Russian companies will receive the ammonium nitrate in required volume and the demand for it on the domestic market will pass peak values.”
Another possibility includes “counter-sanctions planning,” according to Dmitri Alperovitch. “Food price inflation = leverage,” he tweeted Thursday.
NATO member Norway dispatched its F-35s to intercept Russian aircraft over the Barents Sea on Thursday, the Royal Norwegian Air Force tweeted, with supporting imagery. See those three images here.
The U.S. donated two UH-60M Black Hawk helicopters to Croatia on Thursday. “Croatia has earned a reputation as a committed and capable NATO ally, and the introduction of Black Hawks will further boost the capacities of the Croatian Armed Forces,” U.S. Chargé d’Affaires Mark Fleming said in a statement.
Background: “Croatia last month reached an agreement with the U.S. to buy 89 Bradley fighting vehicles as part of cooperation with Washington and plans as a member of NATO to form an infantry brigade,” the Associated Press reported Thursday from Zagreb. (Croatia joined NATO in 2009.) More here.
By the way: NATO’s chief has a posh gig lined up after his term ends in early October. Sometime before the end of the year, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is expected to take over as the head of Norway’s new central bank, Reuters reports from Stoltenberg’s hometown of Oslo.
Today we learned: Norway has the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, “with assets of $1.4 trillion,” according to Reuters. Stoltenberg will soon be in charge of that, as well as “setting interest rates and manag[ing Norway’s] financial stability.”
Why this matters: NATO must now line up a successor to Stoltenberg, and the alliance likely needs to do so “ahead of a meeting of member nation leaders in June this year,” Reuters reports. Read more, here.
Alleged Russian cyberspies targeted an unnamed “Western government entity” in a hacking operation on Jan. 19, according to a report published Thursday by the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks. The accused hackers, known as “Gamaredon,” have “been targeting Ukrainian victims for almost a decade,” Palo Alto writes in its report. According to Reuters, the firm “said it was able to track the Russian hacking mission by analyzing a maze of different malicious web domains designed to infect Ukrainian computers with malware.” But analysts stopped short of specifying the believed target.
Why this matters: “We have mapped out three large clusters of currently active Gamaredon infrastructure, [but] we believe there is more that remains undiscovered,” PAN wrote in the report, and added, “As international tensions surrounding Ukraine remain unresolved, Gamaredon’s operations are likely to continue to focus on Russian interests in the region.” Much more, here.
From Defense One
Russia Considering Fake Video With ‘Corpses’ As Pretext For Ukrainian Invasion, Pentagon Says // Tara Copp: Propaganda video would show fake attack and blame the west for supplying weapons.
Navy Puts AI, Unmanned Systems to the Test in Five-Sea, 60-Nation Exercise // Caitlin M. Kenney: Multiple scenarios will allow participants to explore the naval potential of remote sensing and more.
Can I Watch the Olympics or Does That Make Me a Communist? // Kevin Baron: New polls show there’s still time to shape how Americans feel about China, while still rooting for Team USA.
ISIS Leader Dead After US Raid in Syria, Biden Says // Jacqueline Feldscher: A U.S. helicopter malfunctioned and was intentionally destroyed during the mission, officials say.
What China Is Actually Saying About Russia and Ukraine // Peter W. Singer and Daniel Shats: Bits of pro-Russian rhetoric are a far cry from substantive support—or preparations for an invasion of Taiwan.
As Clouds Gather in Eastern Europe, Nuclear Diplomacy is More Important Than Ever // Eric Gomez: More must be done to keep tensions over Ukraine from deepening nuclear instability.
The Army Brief: // Caitlin M. Kenney: European deployment; Equipment stockpiles; Vaccine refusers booted; and more.
The Naval Brief: // Caitlin M. Kenney: Unmanned exercise; Finding cancer links; Underwater robotics; and more.
Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson, with Jennifer Hlad. If you’re not already subscribed to The D Brief, you can do that here. On this day in 2004, Facebook was founded.
The autocratic leaders of Russia and China are meeting today in Beijing for the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic games. The two released a very lengthy joint statement cheering each other on, though Russia seemed much more eager to get that out publicly than China, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Especially notable: China joined Russia’s call to halt the expansion of NATO. “The sides oppose further enlargement of NATO and call on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ideologized cold war approaches, to respect the sovereignty, security, and interests of other countries, the diversity of their civilizational, cultural, and historical backgrounds, and to exercise a fair and objective attitude towards the peaceful development of other States,” the joint statement reads about halfway through.
The two also dinged the U.S. for trying to elbow its way into the Pacific. “The sides stand against the formation of closed bloc structures and opposing camps in the Asia-Pacific region and remain highly vigilant about the negative impact of the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy on peace and stability in the region,” the statement reads.
Russia and China also flagged their “serious concern” about AUKUS, “the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom…in particular their decision to initiate cooperation in the field of nuclear-powered submarines. Russia and China believe that such actions are contrary to the objectives of security and sustainable development of the Asia-Pacific region, [and] increase the danger of an arms race in the region.” Read the rest of that document—including more about chemical weapons and intermediate-range missiles—in text hosted at the Kremlin’s website, here.
Alleged Chinese hackers attacked Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp on Jan. 20, and the breach seems to have allowed the hackers access to emails and employee documents, the Wall Street Journal reported separately on Friday. Cybersecurity firm Mandiant was called in to review the situation, which seems to have been resolved, and said the activity was “likely meant to gather intelligence to benefit China’s interests,” according to the Journal.
Worth noting: “The method of the hack and the number of staffers whose email accounts and documents were accessed couldn’t be learned,” the Journal writes. But subscriber information, as well as financial and customer data, is not believed to have been affected—though it’s unclear how that determination was made. Continue reading, here.
There could be an update later today on that U.S. operation inside Syria. CENTCOM’s commander, Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, is expected to brief Pentagon reporters this afternoon at 12:30 p.m. ET.
For at least the third time in about two years, North Korea’s dictator hopped on white horse and filmed himself galloping through the countryside for the apparent benefit of his starving countrymen.
Similar scenes were released by Pyongyang in late 2019, including a visit with his wife and generals to an alleged old North Korean guerilla camp. You may remember that by that time, North Korea had endured months of Twitter abuse and threats of war from then-U.S. President Donald Trump, who said in August 2017, “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” The North responded by threatening to hit the island of Guam, a U.S. territory in the Pacific, the very next day. But by the time Kim rode his horses for the cameras in 2019, he’d already shaken Trump’s hand in Vietnam during an unprecedented summit that accomplished nothing in terms of Pyongyang’s rogue nuclear weapons program. (For a more detailed history of U.S.-North Korean relations and key events, view an annotated timeline from Congressional Research Service.)
This time around, Kim’s on-camera equestrianism was for a propaganda film called “The Great Year of Victory, 2021.” Agence France-Presse tweeted parts of the film, along with its soundtrack—which sounds to your D Brief-er like it was lifted from the works of Leonid Kharitonov and the Soviet Red Army Choir.
And lastly this week: Hats off to science historian Alex Wellerstein. We’re one day late with this, but this week marked the 10th anniversary of Wellerstein’s online nuclear attack simulation known as “Nuke Map.”
What it is: An online resource that allows you to plan a nuclear attack anywhere in the world and assess the devastation, using metrics like megaton yield and height of detonation.
According to his site’s users and their choices, “there have been about 220 million detonations,” with almost 40% of users coming from the U.S., followed by the U.K, Canada, Germany, and Russia, Wellerstein wrote in a blog post Thursday. And in terms of bombs considered, “the Tsar Bomba’s maximum design yield (100 Mt) is by far the most popular yield, with over 81 million simulations by itself (37% of the total detonations).”
He’s still looking to improve the project. For example, “the prompt radiation curve gets out of whack at some yields, it’d be nice to have something related to underground or underwater detonations.” He has much more to say about all of this, here.
Have a safe weekend, everyone. And we’ll see you again on Monday!