Syrians voted in 8,151 polling stations that opened across the country, with the exception of areas not controlled by the Assad regime. To cater to residents displaced from opposition-held areas, the government established special polling stations scattered throughout the country. For example, stations were set up for Raqqa residents in the Hama, Damascus, Hasakah, Homs, Latakia, and Tartous governorates. For Quneitra residents, more than 111 out of 175 stations were located outside the governorate.

In northeastern Syria, the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) prevented elections by establishing a security cordon around the Qamishli “government quarter,” in which the Assad regime provides administrative services to the residents of the area. SDF-affiliated social media and news outlets broadcasted warnings that the election sites might be subject to unspecified terrorist attacks. In Idlib and northern Aleppo, areas controlled by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Syrian National Army (SNA), there were no electoral activities.

Of all the areas under governmental control, the most disruptions were reported in the southern areas of Sweida. Before the polls, and continuing into Election Day, demonstrators protesting against the elections entered several polling centers, took away ballot boxes, and set election materials on fire. The anti-election protests were a continuation of the anti-regime protests that have been regularly occurring for the past year. On Election Day, demonstrators in Sweida’s al-Karama Square came under fire by security forces, and a civilian was injured. It’s worth noting that protests were not limited to Sweida—violence and demonstrations were reported across the governorate, as well as in the towns of Qarya and Mazraa and the villages of Melh, Slim, and Koraya. In Daraa governorate, protests and threats of violence forced the government to relocate twenty-five polling stations. For example, stations in the town of Mahja were moved to the city of Izraa, stations from al-Karak were moved to al-Musayfrah, and those in the city of Jasem were relocated to a safer part of the city.

Where the polls were conducted without disruption, the process unfolded identically to the 2020 election. Because the election authorities neither register voters nor compile the voters list in advance of elections, the first step at the polling station was to register a voter using the blank forms used to write in voters. This way, the voters list was compiled on Election Day rather than being available to the committees before the elections.

Voters would then be handed a ballot and needed to choose to either use ballots pre-filled with the Baath Party-sponsored candidates on the National Unity (NU) list or, if they dared, a blank ballot. Those who opted for a blank ballot had to write in the names of the candidates by hand, ranging from five names in al-Quentra to thirty-two names in rural Aleppo, which is a burdensome process. In some areas, the non-NU candidates would also distribute pre-printed ballots, such as the “Sham” list in Damascus, which features the incumbent Mohamed Hamsho (sanctioned by the European Union and the United States). The practice is fully permitted by law.

To ensure high turnout, public institutions, companies, committees, factories, banks, and unions were instructed by the government not to give employees a day off, which prevented them from ignoring the polls, and to compel them to vote en masse, likely under supervision. Many polling stations were set up in or near their workplaces—like factories and universities—to boost turnout. However, in contrast with the previous elections, there was no information on turnout either during the day or immediately after the close of the polls. According to our research, the Supreme Judicial Election Committee (SJEC), governors, and heads of polling committees used vague language to describe the turnout in the media, with statements like “turnout was good,” “nice,” “high,” “not bad,” and “it got better in the afternoon” being used throughout the day. During a live interview on state television with the polling station committee in rural Damascus, the reporter abruptly changed the subject and asked the polling station president not to share any information about the number of voters or the station’s results.

There is little to be said about the credibility of the polling process itself. As described in a previous article on electoral administration, the process did not meet fundamental standards for impartial management of elections nor the standards of transparency. There were no independent national or international observers, and there were no systematic, evidence-based reports of the polling process. For what it is worth, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of mass proxy voting, underage voting, voting without secrecy, and voting in military barracks without a chance for supervision.

The same lack of transparency shrouds the process for resolving election disputes. The president of the Supreme Constitutional Court, Jihad Lahham, announced on July 28 that all forty-seven appeals were rejected for “not meeting the conditions stipulated in the laws” and “not supported by any document or evidence.” Nothing is known about the nature of the appeals or those filing them.

The Syrian opposition was campaigning against the legitimacy of the elections. These efforts were led by the Syrian Negotiation Committee, several Syrian nongovernmental organizations, and the media. The key slogan of the campaign was “No to Assad and his elections” alongside “Resolution 2254,” which also appeared as hashtags on X (formerly Twitter). The campaign messages were of a general anti-elections character, pointing out that they were against the framework set by the United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSC) 2254. The campaign was launched late and was effectively active only on Election Day. It does not appear to have gained any significant traction.

The Baath Party endorsed NU lists that included 185 candidates across the country. As expected, the electoral system ensured that all of them were elected, making the partisan composition of the assembly identical to the previous one: 67 percent for the Baathists (a total of 74 percent for all the NU candidates) and 26 percent for those elected to seats not contested by the NU. The number of seats not contested by the NU candidates, a maximum of sixty-five, is not random; it is by design. It avoids the perception of single-party rule and allows for a semblance of diversity, but protects the regime by securing a two-thirds majority needed to fend off legislative challenges, enact constitutional amendments, or accuse the president of treason. This golden ratio has been the formula in place since the 2016 legislative elections held in the aftermath of the 2012 constitutional reforms.

Are there any other conclusions besides the predictable 100 percent victory for all of the NU candidates? Detailed analysis is difficult because of the lack of transparency; there is simply not enough data published for a granular view of the results. If elections were ever to be held under the framework of the UNSC Resolution 2254 and within international standards, the authorities would be obliged to publish the complete election results, including turnout with gender breakdown, numbers of invalid ballots, registered voters, and votes for all the candidates. Currently, the results published by the SJEC present only the votes of the winning candidates, not all the candidates. This makes election analysis impossible, as by how much the election losers lost will never be known.

Because the voting data are missing, and because the competition was, in practice, resolved before Election Day through internal elections and the primaries, the analysis is reduced to levels of participation. The SJEC only announced an overall number of voters in elections: 7,325,844 out of 19,200,325 claimed by the government to be eligible, which results in a turnout of 38.16 percent, about a 5 percent increase since the 2020 elections. This overall number says nothing about regional differences.

Voting patterns are even harder to analyze because of elections used a block vote system with multiple candidates. The workaround is to consider the top candidate on the list as representative of the support received by the list. Employing this method reveals a pattern of some voting shifts between the governorates and between the 2020 and 2024 elections. Countrywide, the NU lists received 5 percent fewer votes than in 2024. Some drops in the votes were dramatic, such as in Damascus, where NU lost 49 percent of the votes, followed by Hasaka with 43 percent. On the other hand, votes for NU in rural Aleppo, Deir ez-Zor, and Hama dramatically increased (42 percent, 51 percent, and 71 percent, respectively.)

It will take some time to understand the cause of these changes. They could be simply the result of the redeployment of the military and the return of internally displaced persons, especially to Damascus. The only solid conclusion at this point is that the actual increase in the total number of those who voted by 1.1 million has not resulted in increased support for the NU lists, as they lost two hundred thousand votes compared to the 2020 elections. And, when compared with the 2016 elections, the increase in 2.2 million voters led to a decrease in support for the NU by 1.2 million votes.

Shifts in support for the NU lists do not seem to be related to whether the candidates on the lists were incumbents. As in the previous elections, the rates of turnover were high. Out of the 250 elected to the new parliament, ninety-three are incumbents, which is only 37.2 percent of the total—and almost exactly the same as in the 2020 elections, when 37.6 percent of incumbents were re-elected.

However, turnover is not uniform across the country. The variations between the regions are significant. In Idlib, Tartous, Deir ez-Zor, Raqqa, and Damascus, more than 80 percent of representatives were replaced. On the other side of the spectrum is Sweida with only 33 percent, followed by Daraa at 40 percent, and Hassaka at 42 percent.

Besides analysis of the turnout and the turnover in the parliament, what are the election results saying about the structure and political dynamics of the newly elected assembly? On an individual level, it might be of interest that six of the eight members serving in the governmental delegation to the UN-sponsored Constitutional Committee were not re-elected, including Ahmed Kuzbari, the co-chair. In Damascus, the “Sham” list led by Hamsho, a sanctioned businessman closely affiliated with Maher al-Assad, the president’s brother, won twelve seats that were not contested by the National Unity list. One of the new independent members of parliament from Aleppo, Mohammed al-Ruslan, is a former leader of a militia faction reportedly affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Madoul al-Aziz, a former leader of a militia affiliated to al-Nusra, was re-elected as an independent candidate for Deir ez-Zor.

But, as explained in the previous article on candidates, if there was any political competition, it played out in advance to general elections, in the intra-Baath Party elections and primaries. The conclusion from observing those processes is that the new parliament might be rejuvenated with significant turnover, but will likely remain in the service of the top Baath leadership.

Vladimir Pran advises electoral authorities, governments, and political leaders on transitional, electoral, and political processes.

Maroun Sfeir advises international and local civil society organizations, political groups, and electoral authorities on electoral and political processes.

The post Syrian elections ended. What have we learned from the results? appeared first on Atlantic Council.

We still don’t know the military significance of Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk Oblast, which marks the first time that foreign troops have occupied Russian territory since World War II. But judging from the Kremlin’s whiny initial response—in which Russian President Vladimir Putin and other top officials decried and downplayed the offensive as a “terrorist attack” and an “armed provocation”—the political fallout promises to be enormous.

This is because the invasion and occupation of parts of Kursk Oblast marks the third major military humiliation the Kremlin leader has suffered since launching his full-scale assault on Ukraine in February 2022.

The first humiliation: February-September 2022

First, of course, there was the routing of Russian forces in the battle of Kyiv in the early phase of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The embarrassing withdrawal of Russian forces from near the Ukrainian capital in March 2022 was quickly followed by more military humiliations for the Kremlin, including Ukraine’s April 2022 sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

And if you thought it couldn’t get much worse for Russia than losing its flagship in a land war to a country without a navy, you would be wrong. In September and October 2022, Ukraine launched lightning counteroffensives to liberate large swaths of Russian-occupied territory in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions.

UkraineAlert Aug 11, 2024

Ukraine’s invasion of Russia is erasing Vladimir Putin’s last red lines

By Peter Dickinson

Ukraine’s invasion of Russia has erased the last of Vladimir Putin’s red lines and made a complete mockery of the West’s frequently voiced escalation fears, writes Peter Dickinson.

Conflict Defense Policy

UkraineAlert Aug 15, 2024

Ukraine’s invasion of Russia exposes the folly of the West’s escalation fears

By Oleksiy Goncharenko

Ukraine’s invasion of Russia has shown that Putin’s talk of red lines and his nuclear threats are just a bluff to intimidate the West, writes Oleksiy Goncharenko.

Conflict Defense Policy

New Atlanticist Aug 9, 2024

Is Ukraine’s raid into Russia a ‘crossing the Delaware’ moment?

By Daniel Fried

With echoes of earlier raids, Ukraine’s recent push into the Kursk region of Russia shows its tactical cunning, audacity, and tenacity against a superior foe.

Conflict Russia

The result of these first humiliations was, for lack of a better term, the shrinkage of Putin in the international arena. When Russia launched its invasion in the beginning of 2022, most analysts believed the war would be over in a matter of weeks. But by the end of 2022, Russia’s war machine no longer looked invincible—instead, it looked quite fallible and beatable. And Putin no longer looked like a ten-foot-tall master strategist—instead, he looked small.

The dismal performance of the Russian Armed Forces in 2022 weakened Putin domestically and divided the Russian elite into hawks, who wanted nothing short of the complete conquest of Kyiv, and kleptocrats, who wanted to go back to the prewar status quo. Ukrainian forces prevented Russia’s complete conquest, while Putin continued to isolate and impoverish his country, and therefore neither group was happy. Which set the stage for Putin’s next humiliation.

The second humiliation: June-August 2023

Putin’s second great military humiliation came not at the hands of Ukraine, but from within his own inner circle. The June 2023 mutiny of Yevgeniy Prigozhin and his Kremlin-connected mercenary army, the Wagner Group, exposed deep cracks in the Russian political elite as well as the hollowness and rot of the Russian Armed Forces.

The fact that Prigozhin, a Putin crony since the 1990s, would launch a rebellion against the Kremlin illustrated the perils of Putin’s “venture-capital foreign policy,” which outsources key military and security tasks to nominally private-sector actors. These informal patronage networks, in which Putin is the ultimate arbiter, only function well when the Russian leader is strong. When Putin is weak, it can lead to events like the Wagner Group mutiny.

And the fact that Prigozhin could effectively take control of the city of Rostov-on-Don—to a hero’s welcome, no less—and march his Wagner mercenaries north to the outskirts of Voronezh, roughly three hundred miles from Moscow, further punctured Putin’s aura of omnipotence.

Prigozhin, of course, paid a price for his mutiny. He died in a plane crash together with nine others, including Wagner co-founder Dmitry Utkin, on August 23, 2023. The crash, to state the obvious, was not an accident. It was, according to sources in Western intelligence agencies, an assassination organized by longtime Putin aide Nikolai Patrushev.

Putin’s second humiliation did not just deepen the divisions in Russia’s ruling elite exposed by the invasion of Ukraine. It also exposed the fundamental weakness of the armed forces in performing their core mission: protecting the homeland. And this, in turn, set the stage for Putin’s most recent humiliation.

The third humiliation: August 2024

The Ukrainian Armed Forces’ invasion of Kursk Oblast—conceived, planned, and executed in strict secrecy—came as a shock and instantaneously transformed the narrative of the war. Instead of the steady drumbeat of news about incremental Russian gains in the Donbas, a headline in the New York Times said it all: “Deception and a Gamble: How Ukrainian Troops Invaded Russia.”

From the mass surrenders of unprepared and outmanned Russian troops, to the chaotic evacuation of civilians, to the steady advances of Ukrainian forces deeper into Russian territory, the Kursk operation exposed the weakness not just of the Russian Armed Forces, but of the Russian state itself.

Over his more than two-decade rule, the Putin regime’s social contract with Russian society has been based on restoring lost greatness and reestablishing the empire. But today, it seems to have failed at achieving the most fundamental responsibility of a state: protecting its territory and citizens from foreign invasion. And the fact that Putin is rumored to have tasked one of his former bodyguards, Aleksei Dyumin (whom some Russian Telegram channels have dubbed Russia’s “shadow defense minister”), with ending Ukraine’s cross-border offensive, suggests that panic is in the air and that recently appointed Defense Minister Andrei Belousov may not be up to the task.

The military fallout of Ukraine’s bold invasion of Russia is still unclear. It may turn out to be, as former US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Daniel Fried suggested, a George Washington “crossing the Delaware moment.” In a smart post on Substack, retired Australian Army Major General Mick Ryan noted that as a result of the incursion, Ukraine has options: It can try to hold on to the territory it has seized, it can retreat to more defensible positions inside Russia, or it can withdraw to Ukraine after embarrassing the Kremlin. Putin, meanwhile, faces the difficult choice of whether to move troops from the front in eastern Ukraine to take back Russian territory in the Kursk region.

Regardless of how this plays out militarily, the political damage is done, and it is rooted in the nature of Russian politics. As I have written, under Putin, the Russian state has become, in essence, an organized crime syndicate. Its internal logic, processes, incentive structure, and behavior resemble those of a mafia family. And the most destabilizing moment for a crime syndicate is when the mafia boss looks weak.

Brian Whitmore is a nonresident senior fellow at the Eurasia Center, an assistant professor of practice at the University of Texas-Arlington, and host of the Power Vertical podcast.

The post Ukraine’s Kursk offensive marks Putin’s third major humiliation of the war appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Russians first began reporting significantly slower YouTube loading speeds in the weeks preceding the August shutdown. Officials in Moscow claimed this was the result of technical problems, but the Kremlin has also recently signaled its mounting dissatisfaction with YouTube. In July, Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor called on Google’s CEO to restore over 200 pro-Kremlin YouTube channels that had been blocked for violations. Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Ministry has accused the platform of carrying out “the political directives of Washington.”

As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.

The recent crackdown on YouTube is the latest milestone in a war against free speech in Russia that began when Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000. During the 1990s, the Russian media sector had briefly flourished amid unprecedented freedoms. One of Putin’s first major acts as president was to reverse this trend and reassert Kremlin control over Russia’s mainstream media.

The Russian authorities have continued to expand their campaign against the country’s shrinking independent media sector for much of the past two decades. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin moved to block or restrict major Western social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. These measures were imposed in parallel to Orwellian new restrictions banning any references to “war” and forcing Russian media outlets to refer to the invasion of Ukraine as a “special military operation.”

UkraineAlert Aug 15, 2024

Ukraine’s invasion of Russia exposes the folly of the West’s escalation fears

By Oleksiy Goncharenko

Ukraine’s invasion of Russia has shown that Putin’s talk of red lines and his nuclear threats are just a bluff to intimidate the West, writes Oleksiy Goncharenko.

Conflict Defense Policy

New Atlanticist Aug 15, 2024

Ukraine’s Kursk offensive marks Putin’s third major humiliation of the war

By Brian Whitmore

Ukrainian forces’ recent incursion into Kursk Oblast in Russia came as a shock and instantaneously transformed the narrative of the war.

Conflict Politics & Diplomacy

New Atlanticist Aug 9, 2024

Is Ukraine’s raid into Russia a ‘crossing the Delaware’ moment?

By Daniel Fried

With echoes of earlier raids, Ukraine’s recent push into the Kursk region of Russia shows its tactical cunning, audacity, and tenacity against a superior foe.

Conflict Russia

It is easy to see why Putin may now have decided to block YouTube. After all, reports of a widespread freeze came just days after Ukraine launched a surprise cross-border offensive into Kursk Oblast, marking the first invasion of Russia since World War II. While the Kremlin-controlled Russian state media has sought to downplay the invasion, ordinary Russians have used YouTube to post information about the Ukrainian advance and publish videos contradicting the official Moscow narrative.

As Ambassador Daniel Fried has emphasized, this ongoing Ukrainian offensive “upends the Kremlin narrative of inevitable Russian victory” in Ukraine, and threatens to lift the veil of propaganda that the Russian authorities have created since the start of the full-scale invasion. By slowing down or blocking access to YouTube, Moscow may be hoping to prevent any public panic over Ukraine’s Kursk offensive.

Eurasia Center events

Online Event Thu, August 15, 2024 • 9:00 am ET

Ukraine’s advance in Kursk: What’s next and implications

Conflict Russia Security & Defense Ukraine

Recent steps to limit access to YouTube are seen as somewhat risky due to the video sharing platform’s status as the most popular social media site in Russia. Indeed, it came as no surprise when the apparent shutdown of YouTube sparked significant alarm and anger on Russian social media. Notably, no genuine alternative currently exists in Russia. The Kremlin has promoted similar domestic platforms such as VK Video and RuTube, but these options have not been able to rival the popularity or audience reach of YouTube itself.

There are additional indications that the Kremlin may now be seeking to strengthen its control over the information space and further cut Russia off from the outside world. On August 9, Roskomnadzor blocked access to Signal, a messaging app that allows for end-to-end encrypted communications. Reports also continue to circulate that the Kremlin is preparing to take similar steps against messenger platform WhatsApp.

Recent measures to prevent Russians from accessing YouTube represent the latest escalation in the Kremlin’s campaign to dominate the domestic information space and eliminate all independent media in today’s Russia. Over the past twenty-four years, Vladimir Putin has created a powerful propaganda machine that has proved instrumental in legitimizing his own increasingly dictatorial rule and mobilizing public support for the invasion of Ukraine. Popular social media platforms like YouTube remain outside of Moscow’s control and therefore pose a significant threat to the Kremlin censors. With Ukrainian troops now advancing inside Russia itself, it would seem that this threat can no longer be tolerated.

Mercedes Sapuppo is a program assistant at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

Further reading

UkraineAlert Aug 13, 2024

Ukraine’s Kursk offensive proves surprise is still possible in modern war

By Mykola Bielieskov

Ukraine’s Kursk offensive has succeeded in demonstrating that surprise is still possible despite the increased transparency of the modern battlefield, writes Mykola Bielieskov.

Conflict Defense Policy

UkraineAlert Aug 11, 2024

Ukraine’s invasion of Russia is erasing Vladimir Putin’s last red lines

By Peter Dickinson

Ukraine’s invasion of Russia has erased the last of Vladimir Putin’s red lines and made a complete mockery of the West’s frequently voiced escalation fears, writes Peter Dickinson.

Conflict Defense Policy

UkraineAlert Aug 1, 2024

Ukraine’s new F-16 jets won’t defeat Russia but will enhance air defenses

By Mykola Bielieskov

Ukraine’s fledgling fleet of F-16 jets will not win the war but should strengthen the country’s air defenses and help protect the civilian population from Russian bombardment, writes Mykola Bielieskov.

Conflict Defense Technologies

The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

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The post The Kremlin is cutting Russia’s last information ties to the outside world appeared first on Atlantic Council.

However, two years on it is becoming increasingly clear that the legacy of the IRA is tethered to a renewed pact between government and the US economy, with key implications for trade, technological competition with China, and foreign policy writ large.

Since the early 1980s, the prevailing dogma on both sides of the aisle regarding US economic policy has largely been one of skepticism about direct government intervention in the economy. Trade and domestic market liberalization have been features of Republican and Democratic rhetoric since at least the Reagan administration. Of course, US government spending did increase over this period, and Washington did often step in with, for example, countercyclical spending during economic downturns. Nonetheless, most US politicians took as axiomatic that the government should not be “picking winners and losers” in the economy. The IRA has ushered in a new era in which this reflexive aversion to economic intervention may be vanishing.

Industrial policy has risen from the gutter

The IRA’s subsidies and grants for low-carbon electricity generation and technology manufacturing, along with its capitalization of the US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, represent a divergence from the once-dominant economic policy consensus. The IRA is among the most significant government investments in the US economy since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. In fact, it is rivaled only by primarily demand-side stimulus packages, such as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 and the CARES Act of 2020.

According to Goldman Sachs estimates, by 2032 the IRA will provide $1.2 trillion in incentives with the intention of fueling the deployment of energy technologies. This includes technologies that are currently profitable, such as solar and onshore wind, as well as new market entrants, such as electric vehicles, grid storage, new forms of bioenergy, offshore wind, clean hydrogen for hard-to-abate sectors, point-source carbon capture, and carbon removal. If the broad-scale deployment of these technologies is achieved at the scale envisioned by prevailing models—which is dependent on additional regulatory reform—these effects of the legislation will be uniformly positive for climate mitigation and economic growth alike.

These positive effects are being borne out in data. Of an estimated seventy-eight billion dollars in public investment since the IRA’s enactment, the bill has shepherded between five to six times that figure in private investment. In fact, investment in low-carbon technologies and manufacturing has comprised about half of private investment growth since the IRA’s passage. That is a success.

The implications of the IRA as a shift in economic policy are not uniformly positive, however. The global consequences of this shift have manifested in at least two ways.

First, the floodgates of government market interventions have been opened. In 2023 alone, governments around the world implemented more than 1,600 industrial policies. The IRA is both an example of this general trend and, given the size of the US economy and the IRA’s intervention, something other countries have reacted to with their own interventions. For example, the United States’ use of subsidies for its economy has prompted adverse reactions from the European Union, whose single market makes the use of subsidies difficult, and prompted concerns regarding the comparative advantage of its domestic industry. This year, the European Parliament and European Council passed the Net-Zero Industry Act, which provides financial support through grants, loans, and other funding mechanisms to promote research, development, and deployment of clean technologies and manufacturing capacity—a direct response to the IRA.

In a sense, the IRA has prompted global competition among governments to make public investments in emerging industries and technologies.

Second, trade measures have arisen as a method by which to protect, or “ring fence,” domestic industrial policy strategies from foreign competition. Notably, the May 2024 suite of tariffs announced by the White House represent a substantial signal of intent to isolate encroachment of Chinese imports on domestic industries that have not yet been established and that the IRA supports. In the IRA, certain softly punitive measures impact trade, stoking additional tension. For instance, eligibility for subsidies under the Clean Vehicle Tax Credit is limited, based on the country of origin of critical minerals and battery components and excluding several US allies and partners.

Economic competition among the United States, the European Union, and China is increasing, and the decades-long criticism of China’s subsidy-centric growth model by Washington and European capitals is being usurped by a new industrial policy with US and European characteristics. In some sense, although all three blocs are competing, two distinct visions have emerged: the bottom-up, private sector-led and government-enabled vision of the United States and European Union, and the top-down, state-directed vision of China.

Trade-offs, tariffs, and technological innovation

Will this trend continue? Industrial policymaking in democracies is necessarily impacted by political feasibility, what is favored by those with power, and what works within the parameters of a state’s administrative capacity, as an International Monetary Fund publication recently reflected. As such, the IRA is also a product of the political moment, dubbed by the Breakthrough Institute as a period of “post-COVID congressional profligacy.” It is difficult to predict what the next major industrial policy package in the United States will consist of, but it will likely be shaped as much by the political forces at play as by rigid economic analysis.

Careful reflection is needed going forward, as industrial policy, by definition, leads to concentrated benefits and carries diffuse costs. As such, it can also lead to unintended or counterproductive outcomes. The recent tariffs may prove this true, depending on one’s definition of the intended outcome.

Take the 25 percent tariff increase that was imposed on imports of Chinese solar cells. While this may protect domestic solar manufacturers, it may also slow the rate of solar deployment overall, given the higher resulting price for panels. Absent this tariff, solar panels would likely be cheaper, so it would be fair to say that the Biden administration’s implicit target of countering China’s industrial prowess is countering its explicit goal of achieving a carbon-free power grid by 2035.

The effects of trade policies such as this are unclear. What is clear is that acknowledgement of the trade-offs is necessary.

Public investments in infrastructure do have an important role. They are critical conduits of productivity growth and are necessary in areas where clear incentives for the private sector are not present. For instance, while nuclear energy is critical for bolstering the reliability of the electric grid, its business model has suffered significantly from the natural gas production boom that the United States has experienced from 2005 to the present. The affordability of gas, and increasingly of other resources, such as solar power, has made nuclear power’s high operating and capital costs less attractive to utilities, among other factors. Programs such as the Department of Energy’s Civil Nuclear Credit Program, which provides financial assistance to the United States’ nuclear reactor fleet, play an essential role.

Looking forward, however, it is also worthwhile to recall what is historically the engine of growth for the modern US economy, and the principal root of US competitive advantage in the global economy—technological innovation. It was not the tariffs of the McKinley administration or the safety net of the Roosevelt administration that led the way in supercharging US growth, although safety nets and infrastructure definitively do breed innovation.  

Attempting to reinvigorate domestic industry through grants, loans, or subsidies may be necessary to achieve goals such as “reshoring” manufacturing. At the same time, investments in research and development (R&D) are proven over decades to provide consistent macroeconomic returns and drive technological progress. An independent report commissioned by the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy found that investments of twelve billion dollars made by the office since the mid-1970s have yielded more than $388 billion in total undiscounted net economic benefits to the United States.

However, public R&D spending in the United States has been stagnant for decades as a percentage of gross domestic product. If government investment is looking for the best rate of return, as sound investors do, R&D may be an underappreciated “asset class” that should increasingly be targeted by the United States and its partners.

William Tobin is an assistant director at the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center, where he focuses on international energy and climate policy.

The post The IRA two years on: A signpost of the new economic policy consensus appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Below, experts from the Atlantic Council and its Venezuela Solutions Group answer five pressing questions about the country’s ongoing political crisis.

1. What is the situation in Venezuela since the election?

Venezuela is experiencing a deepening of its crisis. The lack of transparency in the electoral process and the failure of the CNE to present the electoral bulletins have led the country into a chaotic situation. Repression is increasing by the day, reaching levels that exceed anything previously seen in Venezuela. Respect for the right to demonstrate and for the popular will of the people are fundamental pillars of any government that calls itself democratic. The world cannot remain silent in the face of the systematic and violent repression of opponents and dissidents in Venezuela.

—María Ángela Holguín is a former foreign minister of Colombia and a senior advisor to the Atlantic Council’s Venezuela Solutions Group. 

The situation in Venezuela is deeply alarming, especially given the fact that the government has not presented detailed results for each polling station to back up its figures. Transparency in the process of counting votes is essential. A thorough verification of the election results must be carried out to ensure that they faithfully reflect the will of the Venezuelan people. This verification must include a complete count of all tally sheets, which the CNE must provide without further delay.

—Miguel Vargas is a former foreign minister of the Dominican Republic and a senior advisor to the Venezuela Solutions Group.

2. What exactly is the issue with the election results?

The voting, counting, and tallying system used in Venezuela includes a mechanism for verifying its operation and auditing its results through what is known as the “paper trail.” This paper trail consists of physical records and voting receipts that verify whether the results announced by the CNE reflect the valid will of the voters. The paper trail includes several components, such as the receipt given to each voter after casting their ballot. This receipt allows voters to confirm that it contains the candidate’s name and the organization they supported. This is the first step in the verification process. Voters then place this receipt into a secure box.

At the end of the voting process, the machine immediately prints out the voting record. For the presidential election on July 28, 30,026 voting machines were deployed for the CNE, each corresponding to a separate voting table. Consequently, 30,026 original voting records were printed and kept in the custody of the Plan República military personnel. Once the machine transmits the results, copies of the voting records are printed for all witnesses. These witnesses must verify that these copies are accurate reproductions of the original records printed by the system.

Additionally, each voting record features a QR code summarizing the data printed on the record. Following the transmission, up to 54 percent of the machines are audited by manually opening the boxes containing the printed voting receipts to ensure that the data on the records is accurate.

Starting on Monday, July 29, the opposition began publishing digitized images of the voting records collected by its witnesses. It is important to note that in many cases, Plan República agents prevented opposition witnesses from accessing this material. As of the time of this report, the opposition has managed to collect, validate, and digitize 83 percent of the election records.

However, the CNE has reported hacking of the 30,026 private transmission lines for the machines (one encrypted line per machine) and has refused to disclose the results broken down by center and table. This has made it impossible to compare the opposition’s copies with the results released by the CNE. Additionally, the telecommunications audit and phase II verification, scheduled for July 29 and August 2, respectively, were suspended. These reviews are crucial for assessing the consistency of the announced results.

Trust in an automated voting system is not a matter of faith. Trust is built through auditability, and to date, the Venezuelan government has obstructed the auditability of the results. After more than two weeks, there are also reasonable concerns about the custody of physical electoral materials and databases. The initial international request to present the voting records is proving to be inadequate.

—Eugenio Martínez is the director of Votoscopio, a Venezuela elections specialist, and a member of the Venezuela Solutions Group. 

3. What role can other countries in the region play? 

Latin American countries have a crucial responsibility at this moment. It is necessary to support efforts to promote credible negotiations that will lead to a peaceful and democratic solution in Venezuela. However, it is imperative that any negotiations incorporate the desire of both the Venezuelan people and all of Latin America to respect the rule of law and democratic order in Venezuela. Only through a firm commitment to these principles can we move toward a solution that reflects the will of the Venezuelan people.

—Miguel Vargas

Faced with this reality, it is imperative that Latin American countries continue to demand electoral transparency and condemn repression and the violation of human rights. It is essential to increase diplomatic coordination and demand transparency, independent auditing, and respect for the popular vote. Only with a firm and coordinated position in the region will we be able to engender a way out of the deep crisis in Venezuela, which must occur through a credible and realistic negotiation process with the accompaniment of guarantor countries. 

—María Ángela Holguín

4. Is there any hope the Maduro regime will negotiate a transfer of power?

We must start from the premise that Maduro’s government made a political decision in ignoring the results of the presidential election. This implies a radical break with popular sovereignty, which Chavismo proclaimed as the foundation of its legitimacy. The cost of this rupture is as high as the associated costs of international isolation and of reversing steps taken toward economic stabilization, because it enshrines the divorce between the ruling coalition and its popular bases. However, the dominant coalition perceives that it can stay in power if it manages to deflate the strong feeling of change and, above all, unity, through the weakening of the leadership of María Corina Machado and González, in a kind of repetition of the resistance-attrition strategy it used to address the 2019 crisis with the interim government of Juan Guaidó.  

The ruling coalition tries to do so through repression and self-isolation. It is attempting to prevent an internationally supported negotiation from forcing it to recognize the opposition’s victory. And it is doing so with a degree of open, articulate, and express support from the military that had not been necessary to exhibit in the past. The efforts of Colombian President Gustavo Petro and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are geared toward opening a crack to move Maduro from his position, which at this time is completely insensitive to the usual list of incentives. Thus, it is not foreseeable that in the short term an effective negotiating body can be built to ensure the verification of results. Perhaps it is necessary to start, as in serious armed conflicts, with more basic areas of agreement, such as advancing mutual guarantees and respect for human rights.

—Colette Capriles is an associate professor and researcher in philosophy, politics, and social sciences at Simón Bolívar University and a member of the Venezuela Solutions Group.

5. How is the US working to advance a democratic transition?

On August 11, the Wall Street Journal reported that Washington is engaged in secret talks with Maduro, and may be offering him and those around him an amnesty from US narcoterrorism charges in exchange for a democratic transition. This news may be a sign that the Biden administration is trying to preserve space for negotiations behind the scenes. However, Maduro is a serial abuser of dialogue and, should these efforts fail, it is likely that the White House’s patience will run out. The good news is that the United States still holds considerable leverage, which can be used to shape elite interests and maximize opportunities for a democratic solution. 

For the Biden administration, the challenge lies in finding a balance between applying targeted, effective pressure on elites and preventing Venezuela from drifting further into Russia’s and China’s spheres of influence. Some in Washington fear that a return to “maximum pressure” could drive Maduro closer to the United States’ geopolitical rivals. Individual sanctions may be a more appealing strategy, but it will be crucial to focus this pressure on fostering a democratic opening while avoiding actions that strengthen regime unity. More than 160 regime members have already been sanctioned—many of whom have been celebrated in public ceremonies and awarded replica swords of Venezuela’s liberator, Simón Bolívar. Bringing pressure to bear while avoiding anything that helps unify Maduro’s coalition at his weakest moment in years will be absolutely crucial.

—Geoff Ramsey is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.

The post Will Maduro negotiate a transfer of power? And four other questions about Venezuela’s political crisis. appeared first on Atlantic Council.

This article analyzes the evolving dynamics of Syria-Turkey relations, focusing on the key diplomatic milestones and the underlying factors influencing their interactions, and providing a comprehensive understanding of the path toward potential reconciliation. The objective is to identify the critical factors that could facilitate or hinder the normalization of relations between Damascus and Ankara.

Turkey’s intentions

The ongoing situation in Syria presents risks for Turkish security, prompting a search for viable solutions to its multifaceted challenges. Starting in 2019, developments in Syria have been shaped by shared Russian-US interests in preventing Turkish intervention in the country and, in particular, safeguarding the YPG-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The presence of the Russian military and the prospect of economic sanctions from the United States have repeatedly prevented Turkish efforts to launch military operations in Syria. At least three planned Turkish military operations appear to have been prevented because of these factors.

Turkey urgently needs to address the situation in northeastern Syria, mainly because it has lost hope in the United States resolving its security concerns related to the YPG-dominated SDF. Ankara views the US partnership with the YPG, the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)—a designated foreign terrorist organization—as a national security threat.

As mentioned earlier, Turkey has three main objectives in Syria: to eliminate the YPG threat, facilitate the return of refugees, and seek a political solution for long-term stability. There is growing anti-refugee sentiment in Turkey and the Turkish opposition is gaining strength, putting pressure on the government to address the refugee crisis. Domestic politics significantly influence Turkey’s involvement with Damascus as the government aims to ease public discontent and bolster its political position.

Furthermore, Russia has conducted a successful propaganda campaign targeting the Turkish public and decision-makers, shaping perceptions, and influencing policy decisions. This campaign has further emphasized the supposed benefits of talking with Damascus.

Turkey didn’t perceive a realistic policy option to cooperate with the United States in Syria and pursue talks with Damascus. Speculation about a possible US withdrawal from Syria due to the upcoming US elections in November and a new momentum in Turkish-US relations resulted in Ankara hoping for a joint approach with Washington. However, the United States’ refusal to abandon the YPG continues to be the main barrier to reaching any agreement.

As Turkey cannot achieve its objectives given opposition from Russia and the United States, and Washington has yet to provide Ankara with a viable alternative, Turkey is willing to consider the option proposed by Russia. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has acknowledged the need for an exit strategy from Syria, a reality recognized across the Turkish political spectrum. The main issues concern Syria’s conditions and the nature of governance there. Erdogan has emphasized the need for a new social contract in Syria that would ensure the safe return of refugees and address Turkey’s security concerns.

The Russian strategy

Russia’s efforts to pressure Turkey into a military retreat from Syria suffered a significant setback in 2020, when the Turkish Armed Forces effectively defeated regime forces after the unfortunate loss of thirty-four Turkish soldiers. This event exposed the limits of Russia’s power and necessitated a reassessment of its strategy toward Turkey and the broader Syrian crisis.

While Russia has been focused on the invasion of Ukraine, its strategy in Syria has been aimed at preventing a situation in which a fait accompli by another actor diminishes its influence. Russia is actively pursuing a plan to secure its ongoing presence and control in Syria, while also preventing Western powers or their regional allies from establishing a solid position in Damascus. This strategic maneuvering is essential for Moscow to maintain its geopolitical leverage in the Middle East.

Turkey remains the primary obstacle to a decisive Russian victory in Syria. Moscow recognizes that, to surmount this impediment, it must actively involve Ankara in a manner congruent with Turkey’s interests, which only sometimes coincide with those of Western countries. Russia believes that Turkey is pursuing an autonomous agenda in Syria, which might deviate from the objectives of Western countries. This autonomy presents both a challenge and an opportunity for Russian diplomacy.

Russia is greatly concerned about the possibility of a Turkish-US agreement regarding Syria, particularly considering the potential future withdrawal of US forces from the area. This agreement could weaken Russian interests, leading Moscow to influence Turkey’s position actively. In the worst-case scenario for Russia, negotiations between Ankara and Damascus could serve as a stalling tactic, buying time until the situation in Ukraine stabilizes or the United States withdraws from Syria.

Russia has skillfully capitalized on Turkey’s concerns about migration to benefit itself. At first, it used the tactic of threatening to attack internally displaced persons (IDPs) along the border between Turkey and Syria to put pressure on Ankara. Presently, Russia is implementing an all-encompassing propaganda strategy intended to persuade the Turkish population that engaging in negotiations with Damascus is the definitive resolution to Turkey’s refugee crisis. This psychological and media campaign aims to alter public opinion and enable diplomatic talks.

Moscow is invoking the 1998 Adana Protocol, which would officially legitimize the Turkish military’s existence in Syria, to promote a consensus between Ankara and Damascus. Nevertheless, this proposal would require a thorough examination and possible protocol enhancement to make it more attractive to Ankara. Russia’s proposal for a formal and globally acknowledged military presence is intended to give Turkey a feeling of safety and credibility in its actions, thus creating a favorable atmosphere for diplomatic talks.

Damascus’s position

Reconciliation with Turkey, the last-standing primary regional adversary, is crucial to completing Syria’s narrative of victory. The prevailing sentiment in Damascus is that mending ties with Ankara would deliver a significant blow to the opposition, further impeding the implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254 (UNSCR 2254). By reconciling with Turkey, Syria could strategically undermine the opposition’s position in the negotiations and strengthen its stance. This would help Syria consolidate its control over its future political landscape.

Syria would have preferred to negotiate with a Turkish government other than the one led by President Erdogan. Opposition parties in Turkey have demonstrated more eagerness to engage with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and are less bound to impose burdensome conditions for reconciliation on Damascus. Syria must confront the current reality of Erdogan’s government, which holds power despite its contentious position. The general sentiment in Damascus is that a potential reconciliation with Ankara should lead to only a limited amount of diplomatic interaction, allowing Syria to maintain some influence for possible future negotiations with a more favorable Turkish government. By adopting this pragmatic approach, Damascus can effectively navigate the intricate dynamics of Turkish politics while maintaining flexibility in its long-term strategic choices.

Moreover, re-establishing diplomatic relations with Turkey would significantly influence opposition armed factions in northern Syria. If Ankara changes its position, these groups—many of which depend on Turkish support—would experience a substantial decline in their influence. By ensuring that Turkey is held responsible for their actions, the opposition from these factions is anticipated to decrease significantly. Additionally, this normalization could resolve the stalemate in negotiations with the YPG-dominated SDF. The process of reconciliation with Turkey has the potential to either result in Kurdish communities making further concessions or lead to the formation of a united anti-YPG front by antagonistic Arab communities, with the support of Ankara. This transition has the potential to result in a more united and secure northern Syria, which aligns with Damascus’s broader strategic objectives.

Reconciliation with Ankara also carries substantial economic and financial incentives. Regaining partial or complete control over Turkey’s borders would provide Syria access to international trade routes, which would be crucial for economic recovery. The Syrian economy, severely damaged by prolonged conflict and financial restrictions, urgently needs opportunities for expansion and progress. Despite Turkey’s interest in other regional connectivity projects, Syria’s connectivity remains more feasible and cost-effective. The strategic advantage of re-establishing trade links with Turkey highlights the economic imperative for Syria to pursue normalization.

Nevertheless, Damascus has substantial apprehension about the validation of the Turkish military’s presence in Syria. Damascus might lose vital leverage in future discussions with Ankara by acknowledging or temporarily legitimizing this presence. As a result, Syria, with Tehran’s backing, is expected to consistently insist on the complete withdrawal of the Turkish Armed Forces from northern Syria as a prerequisite for reconciliation.

As Syria and Turkey navigate this new phase of diplomacy, the path to reconciliation remains fraught with uncertainty and complex technical negotiations. While recent developments hint at a thaw in relations, the demands and concessions required from both sides are more complicated. A photo-op between leaders might offer a symbolic victory, but it is the most accessible milestone in a future filled with arduous discussions and complex agreements. The real test lies ahead as both countries strive to address deep-seated issues, balance regional interests, and forge a sustainable path forward amid enduring skepticism.

Sinan Hatahet is a nonresident senior fellow for the Syria Project at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs and vice president for investment and social impact at the Syrian Forum.

Ömer Özkizilcik is a nonresident fellow for the Syria Project in the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs.

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The Reuters article also quoted European intelligence sources as stating that “dozens” of Russian military personnel were being trained in Iran on Fath-360 short-range ballistic missiles, which are said to have a maximum range of 120 kilometers (75 miles). These intelligence sources also stated that delivery of these Iranian Fath-360s is expected “soon.” According to one source, the Fath-360 is based on the Fateh-100 design but is considerably smaller, and its launcher can be camouflaged as a civilian truck.

In addition, former Russian Defense Minister and current Secretary of the Russian Security Council Sergei Shoigu was in Tehran on August 5, where he met with several officials, including Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian. During their meeting, Pezeshkian reportedly told Shoigu that Iran was “determined to expand relations” with its “strategic partner Russia.” Various media sources indicate that Tehran has renewed its requests for Russian deliveries of advanced air-defense systems and that Moscow might have delivered radars, Iskander missiles, and other items, but these have not been verified.

The reports come at a time when Moscow and Tehran have experienced embarrassing setbacks. Israeli forces killed Fuad Shukr, a top Hezbollah commander in Lebanon—something Israel has admitted. Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was then killed in Tehran, for which Israel has not claimed responsibility but which it is widely believed to have been behind. Additionally, Moscow was unable to prevent an armed incursion by Ukrainian forces into a sizeable segment of Russian territory in the vicinity of Kursk near the Russian-Ukrainian border.

While the expansion of Russian-Iranian military cooperation might have already been in the works, these setbacks that Moscow and Tehran have experienced at the hands of US-backed Ukraine and Israel may only serve to increase it. Still, the policies pursued by Russia and Iran are not completely in harmony.

While Tehran has vowed to retaliate against Israel for the killing of Haniyeh in particular, Moscow has called for “all parties”—which presumably includes Iran—to refrain from taking steps that could lead to a wider war in the region.

Further, Tehran cannot be pleased by recent news reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin dropped plans to provide missiles to the Iran-backed Houthis at the request of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. It is unclear how accurate these reports are, as different intelligence sources on which they are based were not in complete agreement with one another. It was a reminder that even while Moscow’s relations with Iran’s adversary, Israel, may have soured after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on the Jewish state, Russia’s ties to Iran’s Sunni Arab adversaries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have not.

According to other reports, the Su-35 fighter aircraft Russia reportedly agreed to send to Iran have still not been delivered. An agreement on a new twenty-year Russian-Iranian cooperation agreement has yet to be finalized—with Russian sources pointing to Tehran as the reason.

Despite their differences, Russian-Iranian military cooperation will likely continue—and increase. But with both now on the back foot, the question is just how useful their cooperation is. Moscow is urging Iranian restraint in responding to Israel over the death of Haniyeh in Tehran not because of any inherent peace-loving nature, but because the Kremlin understands that, with its forces tied down in Ukraine, it is not in a position to do much to protect Iran in a wider conflict with Israel—especially if the Jewish state receives US military support. And it might have occurred to the Islamic Republic’s leaders that Iranian drones and ballistic missiles sent to Russia are no longer available for use against Israel or US forces in the Middle East.

However, while military assistance that Moscow and Tehran receive from one another has not allowed either Russia to prevail against Ukraine or Iran to prevail against Israel and the United States in the Middle East, it allows each to continue prosecuting these conflicts—something which leaders in Russia and Iran are clearly determined to do. Absent being able to somehow bring about an end to either conflict, the United States and its partners in Europe and the Middle East do not appear to have a viable means of forcing or persuading either Moscow or Tehran to reduce their military cooperation. 

Mark N. Katz is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and professor emeritus of government and politics at the George Mason University Schar School of Policy and Government.

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How did this happen? Russia, long opposed to the Council of Europe’s 2001 Budapest Convention on cybercrime, began this process in 2017. Then, in 2019, Russia, along with China, North Korea, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Syria, Cambodia, Venezuela, and Belarus, presented a resolution to develop a global treaty. Despite strong opposition from the United States and European states, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution in December 2019, by a vote of seventy-nine in favor and sixty against (with thirty abstentions), that officially began the process. Already, it was clear that the member states did not share one vision. Indeed, they could not even agree on a name for the convention until last week. What they ended up with is a mouthful: “Draft United Nations convention against cybercrime: Strengthening international cooperation for combating certain crimes committed by means of information and communications technology systems and for the sharing of evidence in electronic form of serious crimes.”

This exceedingly long name reveals one of the biggest problems with this convention: its scope. At its heart, this convention is intended to allow law enforcement from different countries to cooperate to prevent, investigate, and prosecute cybercrime, which costs trillions of dollars globally each year. However, the convention covers much more than the typical cybercrimes that come to mind, such as ransomware, and includes crimes committed using technology, which reflects the different views as to what constitutes cybercrime. As if that were not broad enough, Russia, China, and other states succeeded in pushing for negotiations on an additional protocol that would expand the list of crimes even further. Additionally, under the convention, states parties are to cooperate on “collecting, obtaining, preserving, and sharing of evidence in electronic form of any serious crime”—which in the text is defined as a crime that is punishable by a maximum of four years or more in prison or a “more serious penalty,” such as the death penalty.

In Russia, for example, association with the “international LGBT movement” can lead to extremism charges, such as the crime of displaying “extremist group symbols,” like the rainbow flag. A first conviction carries a penalty of up to fifteen days in detention, but a repeat offense carries a penalty of up to four years. That means a repeat offense would qualify as a “serious crime” under the cybercrime convention and be eligible for assistance from law enforcement in other jurisdictions that may possess electronic evidence relevant to the investigation—including traffic, subscriber, and even content data. Considering how much of modern life is carried out digitally, there will be some kind of electronic evidence for almost every serious crime under any domestic legislation. Even the UN’s own human rights experts cautioned against this broad definition.

Further, under the convention, states parties are obligated to establish laws in their domestic system to “compel” service providers to “collect or record” real-time traffic or content data. Many of the states behind the original drive to establish this convention have long sought this power over private firms. At the same time, states parties are free to adopt laws that keep requests to compel traffic and content data confidential—cloaking these actions in secrecy. Meanwhile, grounds for a country to refuse a cooperation request are limited to instances such as where it would be against that country’s “sovereignty,” security, or other “essential” interest, or if it would be against that country’s own laws. The convention contains a vague caveat that nothing in it should be interpreted as an obligation to cooperate if a country “has substantial grounds” to believe the request is made to prosecute or punish someone for their “sex, race, language, religion, nationality, ethnic origin, or political opinions.”

Russia claimed that such basic safeguards, which do offer some protection in the example regarding LGBT activity as “extremist,” were merely an opportunity for some countries to “abuse” the opportunity to reject cooperation requests. Those safeguards, conversely, could also be abused by the very same states that opposed them. The Iranian delegation, for its part, proposed a vote to delete that provision, as well as all other human rights safeguards and references to gender, on the day the text was adopted. These provisions had already been weakened significantly throughout the negotiation process and only survived thanks to the firm stance taken by Australia, Canada, Colombia, Iceland, the European Union, Mexico, and others that drew a red line and refused to accept any more changes.

The possible negative consequences of this convention are not limited to human rights but can seriously threaten global cybersecurity and national security. The International Chamber of Commerce, a global business organization representing millions of companies, warned during negotiations that “people who have access to or otherwise possess the knowledge and skills necessary” could be forced “to break or circumvent security systems.” Worse, they could even be compelled to disclose “previously unknown vulnerabilities, private encryption keys, or proprietary information like source code.” Microsoft agreed. Its representative, Nemanja Malisevic, added that this treaty will allow “for unauthorized disclosure of sensitive data and classified information to third states” and for “malicious actors” to use a UN treaty to “force individuals with knowledge of how a system functions to reveal proprietary or sensitive information,” which could “expose the critical infrastructure of a state to cyberattacks or lead to the theft of state secrets. Malisevic concluded that this “should terrify us all.”

Similarly, independent media organizations called for states to reject the convention, which the International Press Institute has called a “surveillance treaty.” Civil society organizations including Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, Human Rights Watch, and many others have also long been ringing the alarm bell. They continue to do so as the final version of the convention adopted by the committee has failed to adequately address their concerns.

Given the extent and cross-border nature of cybercrime, it is evident that a global treaty is both necessary and urgent—on that, the international community is in complete agreement. Unfortunately, this treaty, perhaps a product of sunk-cost fallacy thinking or agreed to under duress for fear of an even worse version, does not solve the problems the international community faces. If the UN General Assembly adopts the text and the required forty member states ratify it so that it comes into force, experts are right to warn that governments intent on engaging in surveillance will have the veneer of UN legitimacy stamped on their actions. Rights-respecting states should not allow themselves to be co-opted into assisting abusive practices under the guise of cooperation. Nor should they willingly open the door to weakening their own national security or global cybersecurity.

Lisandra Novo is a staff lawyer for the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council specializing in law and technology.

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The last day I went to the office was August 15. On that day, I was dismissed from my job and told that the Taliban had entered the city. Out on the streets, the city was gripped with terror: people running everywhere, cars stuck in traffic, policemen removing their uniforms, and parents frantically trying to pick their children up from school and rush to their houses. When I finally got home, I found my daughters in despair and the neighbors hoisting a Taliban flag over their gates. Overnight our lives had changed.

It took me three days to venture outside after the Taliban’s military takeover. With a friend, I walked through the Shahr-e Naw neighborhood and posted on social media, encouraging other women to come out, so that the Taliban could not deny our existence. Nearly three weeks later, on September 3, I participated in the first protest at Fawara Aab, or “Water Fountain,” square in Kabul. As I published photos and videos on social networks, I began receiving messages from friends seeking to join. I created a WhatsApp chat group and, after adding those I trusted, we organized another protest the following day. This time, however, the Taliban were prepared and quickly suppressed our rally, beating people and firing tear gas into the air. Most protesters dispersed but some of us continued on to another location, growing along the way to include men and women from the public. We felt so energized we decided to organize more protests.

With no previous experience in organizing protests, I learned quickly that it was a lot of work. We began coordinating through the WhatsApp chat group I had started while also establishing media contacts and trying to get our voices heard inside and outside the country. At first, we were a loose coalition of many different protest groups, at least fifty, but soon we operated under one large umbrella group, united as a movement in our opposition against gender apartheid, tyranny, restrictions, and the exclusion of women.

Taliban members responded to our growing protests with ever more suppression and violence. They knocked us to the ground, punched and kicked us, and destroyed our phones and property. Many of us were detained for days and subjected to threats and insults. Some were imprisoned and tortured for longer. Until I was kidnapped and imprisoned by the Taliban, I participated in thirty-eight protests against its oppressive apartheid regime.

Over time, Taliban intelligence infiltrated our organization, and the regime knew about our protests before they even took place. On September 19, 2023, I received a call alerting me that the Taliban had kidnapped a fellow organizer along with her husband and child, and warning me that I could be next. I fled my home that day, leaving my daughters with my mother for their safety. But when I secretly returned a week later to attend a funeral, I was accosted on my street by a man who shouted, “It’s her.” Within minutes, twelve Taliban military vehicles arrived. The men put a black hood over my head, forced me into a car, and took me to a police station with my hands tightly and painfully bound for hours.

On arrival, they pointed a gun at me and demanded the password for my mobile phone. I resisted at first but relented when they threatened to torture and arrest my children. They threw me into a room where I sat, worried for my fellow female protesters who were unaware that my phone was now in Taliban hands. Half an hour later, the person who arrested me entered the room with my son’s and daughter’s phones. When I saw my nineteen-year-old son’s unlocked phone, I realized that he too had been arrested and I collapsed to the ground.

I was held in solitary confinement in a damp room for nearly two months and routinely interrogated and tortured for a confession. They would show me videos of my son, wearing a prison uniform and growing weaker by the day. I later learned that he was also being held in solitary confinement. Twice during my imprisonment I was hospitalized, once due to severe pain and swelling, the other because I broke down after witnessing the suicide of a young boy who took his life after being tortured.

Still, I was lucky compared to other prisoners, who were subjected to whipping, electric shocks, and forced starvation. They didn’t torture me in these ways. Instead, they inflicted psychological torture, placing my room across from the men’s torture chamber where I lay awake listening to their screams for days. During my interrogation sessions, I was forced to sit upside down with my hands tied to the arms of the chair. At one session, I overheard the Taliban interrogators say, “If she is released, she will talk about this. After all, she is the leader of these movements.” I realized then that they were afraid of my voice, just as all apartheid regimes fear the voices of their citizens.

On the forty-fifth day, I was allowed to see my family for five minutes. They told me they had been searching for me and submitted endless petitions to the Taliban before the regime finally confirmed my detention. This was the first time I was allowed to see my imprisoned son, though only for five minutes.

About eighteen days later, I was returned to the general cells, where other women prisoners recounted their stories and those of other friends, including one who repeatedly tried to escape and fought fiercely every time Taliban soldiers took her for interrogation. She was eventually released after nine months.  

I too was desperate for release and to see my family, but I never showed my despair to the prison guards. Even when they punched and kicked me—or worse, when they called my son “de caper zoi” (son of the infidel), I kept my composure. No one was willing to bail me out of prison because they feared becoming targets as well. Eventually, however, a former Taliban governor agreed to be my guarantor, and I was released into my family’s custody.

Although free, I was confined to my house, the streets of my city closed off to me. Taliban fighters kept a constant watch on me and my home. They also offered me a proposition: Spy for them, and I could live comfortably wherever I wanted in Afghanistan. Betraying my homeland and the freedom of its women was never an option for me.

Ultimately, I was forced to accept exile. Late one evening, I received an email notifying me of my transfer outside the country. I cried through the night, mourning the loss of my home and homeland. When I crossed the border out of Afghanistan, I screamed in anguish. I considered staying behind and secretly working under an assumed identity, but it was not a viable choice for my family.

I am now a stranger in a foreign land, without a home and without an identity. I count the minutes until I can return to Afghanistan and witness the fall of the Taliban. In exile, my greatest hope is that our protests, our sacrifices, our rebellions were not in vain.

Zholia Parsi is a member of the leadership of the “Spontaneous Women’s Protest Movement of Afghanistan” and was imprisoned and tortured by the Taliban for protesting against gender apartheid. This article was edited from an interview with Parsi by Nayera Kohistani and Mursal Sayas.

This article is part of the Inside the Taliban’s Gender Apartheid series, a joint project of the Civic Engagement Project and the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center.

The post I was imprisoned and tortured by the Taliban for protesting gender apartheid in Afghanistan appeared first on Atlantic Council.

What’s next for the parliament?

The second round of legislative elections on July 7 left France with three different blocs of competing agendas. With the Olympic “political truce” over, appointing a new prime minister has become the priority. Macron is under no legal pressure to name Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s successor, which gives the president time to strategize how to form a stable government. Negotiations are already underway, but some speculate that Macron might seek to extend the political truce through the Paralympic Games, which run through September 8.

Typically, the president chooses a prime minister from the party with the most seats in the National Assembly—currently, the New Popular Front (NFP) coalition. However, the NFP, composed of five different political parties, faces internal challenges, particularly with the far-left France Unbowed party at the helm. The coalition has proposed Lucie Castets as their preferred candidate, yet Macron’s allies have labeled France Unbowed as too “extreme” to govern. This situation has increased the likelihood that Macron might attempt to lure some moderate Socialists and Greens from the NFP to his more centrist bloc.

Whoever is named prime minister is in for a rocky road ahead, starting on October 1, when the National Assembly reconvenes. France’s budget is under tight scrutiny after the European Council launched formal action against its high deficit-to-gross domestic product ratio. The Council has requested that France submit medium-term plans by September to get its deficit levels back on track. Managing these budget concerns while operating in an unprecedented hung parliament will be a daunting task for Macron’s choice.

What’s next for Macron?

Despite embracing gold medal–winning French swimmer Léon Marchand and capitalizing on the feel-good spirit evoked by the Olympics, Macron will soon find that sporting euphoria doesn’t last. Shortly after the French men’s soccer team won the World Cup in 2018, the “yellow vest” movement gripped the nation for fifty-two consecutive weeks. It’s too soon to tell whether 2024 will resemble 2018, but Macron will undoubtedly attempt to keep the spirit of the Olympics and Paralympics alive for as long as he can.

The division of labor in French politics grants Macron a near monopoly over foreign policy, but his agenda could be complicated by the French Parliament. Many of Macron’s plans—reducing the budget deficit through spending cuts or tax increases, transitioning to renewable energy, and maintaining a hard stance on Russia—could be upended by bureaucratic hurdles raised by the NFP or the National Rally (RN) party. Marine Le Pen of the RN, for example, already made it clear that Macron’s defense and foreign policy agenda will not go his way.

What does this mean for the EU?

As the next few weeks unfold in France, no one will be watching the French political scene more anxiously than policymakers in Brussels who rely on French support. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has outlined a strategic agenda for the EU with ambitious goals surrounding competitiveness, defense, and clean energy. Realizing these initiatives will require strong support from France.

Perhaps the most significant implication of the French political saga for the EU is its impact on support for Ukraine. Macron has been a staunch advocate for aiding Ukraine, saying in May that “if Russia wins in Ukraine, there will be no security in Europe.” Going forward, however, maintaining a high level of support hinges on his ability to navigate a hung parliament.

Another factor in the equation is Jordan Bardella, president of the RN party, who now leads the far-right Patriots for Europe (PfE) group in the European Parliament. The PfE has emerged as the third-largest bloc in the European Parliament and has the backing of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The far right may have faltered in the second round of the French snap elections, but with the PfE’s increasing momentum in the European Parliament and Orbán as a powerful ally in the European Council, the RN still has the potential to complicate the pro-EU agenda.

Macron is basking in the success of a spectacular Olympics, but it’s unlikely that that success will translate into political gains for the president or lead to compromises in the French Parliament. The two biggest tests will be naming a prime minister and addressing the budget proposal for the European Council. French politics will certainly stay in the headlines for the foreseeable future, leading to profound implications for both Paris and Brussels.

Joely Virzi is a young global professional at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center.

The post The Olympic truce in French politics is ending. What happens next? appeared first on Atlantic Council.

That risk is due to a number of factors, but one glaring reason is the limited availability or mining of these minerals in the United States. That is increasingly problematic as demand for these minerals rises, considering the role they play in building a green economy globally.

In contrast, across the Atlantic, Africa is home to over 30 percent of the world’s known reserves of critical minerals. While international interest and investment in the African critical-minerals industry have been lagging, it is rapidly picking up; this is welcome news for resource-rich African nations.

But history shows that mining interest and investment—even if welcome—can have inadvertent negative effects. In recent years, mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Zambia, and South Africa have been found to be polluting waterways, contributing to acid rain, and poisoning residents. Thus, the US public and private sectors should develop strategies surrounding mining projects that ensure African workers’ health is protected, the environment is not damaged, and the opinions of local communities are sought out, heard, and respected.

Acknowledge the checkered history of mining in Africa

It is important for mining companies and foreign governments to be cognizant of the historical context that surrounds the African mining industry.

For example, in South Africa in the nineteenth century, the discovery of diamonds and gold brought Africans and Europeans alike to mining areas such as the Witwatersrand and mining towns such as Kimberley. After the initial boom, the South African government passed the Natives Land Act in 1913, which restricted Black Africans from buying or occupying land outside of specified areas, except as employees. This policy restricted many Africans from benefiting from the proceeds of mining minerals, and for these people, their main access to any financial gain from the mines came only from working as miners.

While the legislation was repealed in 1991—and others like it are firmly in Africa’s past—it created the conditions for a variety of socioeconomic challenges, including poverty, inequality, and landlessness. Thus, as the US public and private sectors look to get more involved on the continent with mining projects, they should integrate into their strategies a plan for increasing economic opportunity for local communities.

The US government seems to be headed in this direction already with its support for and investment in the Lobito Corridor project, which aims to update the infrastructure along an economic route stretching from the DRC and Zambia to an Angolan port in order to improve the flow of mining-related trade and also to create jobs for local communities. Concerns still remain, but this form of holistic engagement is essential to ensuring mutual prosperity in mining projects.

Don’t exacerbate the “resource curse”

Many African countries have been associated with a “resource curse,” a term that refers to the failure of many resource-rich countries to fully benefit from their natural resources.

For example, Cabo Delgado, a small province in Mozambique’s north, is one of the country’s poorest regions, despite the region’s many natural resources. This has led many in Cabo Delgado to feel marginalized and angry at the central government. A 2011 discovery of a massive natural gas field off the northeastern coast of Mozambique further exacerbated this dissatisfaction. Specifically, youth in the region felt sidelined as foreigners and Mozambicans from elsewhere in the country benefited from the jobs and wealth associated with the discovery.

As the government formalized the mining sector and centralized control of it, artisanal miners were displaced. A widely held sense of injustice gave rise to an Islamist militant group, Mozambique’s al-Shabaab, which took advantage of these grievances to gain popularity among youth in the region. The activities of various armed groups in Cabo Delgado have resulted in around five thousand deaths and the displacement of 582,000 people since 2017.  

In conducting mining projects on the continent, the US public and private sector should add to their strategies specific plans to ensure that the benefits of natural-resource endowment reach local communities.

Botswana provides a positive example. In recent years, the country—one of the world’s leading producers of diamonds and also among the least corrupt on the African continent—has developed a “pro-equity based extractive sector strategy,” taking revenues from extractive sectors and investing them in health and education infrastructure and also into long-term savings through an asset fund. There are also various mechanisms and institutions set up to prevent or catch corruption, such as a constitutionally independent body in charge of cases of corruption. Botswana shows that strong business and the fight against corruption are perfectly compatible.

As part of any strategy, US stakeholders should support African countries in their anti-corruption endeavors and empower human-rights organizations that risk much to protect the resources of these countries and ensure benefits from mining reach local communities. Doing so would encourage African countries to take corruption issues seriously and, in the long run, would create a more attractive environment for sustainable investments. That contradicts the naive belief of some people—such as Israeli businessman Dan Gertler, who was sanctioned by the Trump administration for what it called “corrupt mining and oil deals” in the DRC (he has denied wrongdoing)—that lifting sanctions would be a way to bring back foreign investors.

Strategize for stability

Over time, mismanaged mining projects have contributed to instability, violence, and conflict across Africa.

That dynamic can be seen not only in the Mozambique case but also in Kivu, a region in the DRC’s east. The DRC is central to the production of several critical minerals. For example, as much as 70 percent of global cobalt comes from the DRC. A conflict has gripped the region for almost three decades, and armed groups have wrestled control of mining areas to finance their operations. The DRC, Rwanda, Uganda, and China have often put their interests ahead of those of the residents, who are hoping to see their quality of life improve. Currently, six million people are internally displaced within the DRC, and since the start of the conflict in 1996, six million people have been killed.

With this history in mind, US mining companies with projects on the continent must strategize on how to limit the role mining plays in exacerbating conflicts and tensions. They can do that by bringing more of the supply chain—specifically, value-adding stages of critical-mineral processing—to the continent.

Industrializing the mineral sector in Africa

Historically, mining in Africa has been exploited by foreign partners. China, for example, controls 80 percent of the world’s raw mineral refining and owns fifteen of the seventeen cobalt mining operations in the DRC.

But the US public and private sector can change this status quo by bringing more of the value-adding stages of critical-mineral processing to the African continent, rather than extracting the minerals and bringing them immediately overseas for processing. Not only would this appeal to local populations—as it would encourage industrialization—but employing this different strategy would offer the United States a comparative advantage over China.

A strategy that brings value-adding steps of the value chain to the continent should promote local job creation, prioritize environmental protection in areas with high floral and animal biodiversity, and protect workers’ health. It should also prioritize the deployment of cleaner mining techniques (including those mobilizing artificial intelligence) and encourage countries to adopt a tax that allows for a more fair and just distribution of revenues from mining.

Economic communities—such as the Southern African Development Community—should also play a role in promoting regional value chains. Through such groupings, countries should take advantage of opportunities to share information and data, build capacities, and harmonize legal frameworks.

Stakeholders from the United States must remember that this is about more than curbing Chinese and Russian influence on the continent; rather, it is about avoiding past wrongdoings on the continent, by supporting local communities and preventing mining operations from contributing to various forms of instability and conflict.  

But there’s also a bigger picture to keep in mind: By getting mining investment right, the United States can set a new precedent for its collaboration with African countries in other areas, such as in health, security, and technology.

Rama Yade is senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center and senior fellow for the Europe Center. She is also a professor of African affairs at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco and at Sciences Po Paris.

Sibi Nyaoga is a program assistant for the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center where he supports the center’s work on critical minerals and migration. 

The post Critical minerals investment must avoid the mistakes of the past in African mining appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Perhaps none have been as active, nor shown a greater commitment to bipartisanship, than Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who made their sixth trip to Kyiv on August 12. This was no recess joyride down Kyiv’s Khreshchatyk Street. Most notably, the two senators met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and then quickly announced what could be a blueprint for US policy toward Ukraine in the waning months of the current Congress.

In a joint press release, Blumenthal and Graham outlined four pillars for a strong US policy on Ukraine through 2024 and 2025. First, they called on NATO to “issue an invitation this year to Ukraine for membership,” an obvious but crucial next step to more formally bind the country into the Alliance.

Second, the two announced that Blumenthal would introduce the Stand with Ukraine Act when Congress returns to Capitol Hill in September to “codify the bilateral security agreement” that the Biden and Zelenskyy administrations reached in June. This, too, is a sensible and necessary move. While Ukraine has signed security pacts with a host of Western partners, nearly all of them have been non-binding, including the US-Ukraine agreement. An act of Congress would seal its implementation over the length of its ten-year lifespan.

The senators joined a growing chorus of US lawmakers and experts calling on the Biden administration to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of US weapons against military targets in Russia. After months of pressure, the administration assented in May to allow limited strikes inside Russia, but only under specific conditions. Blumenthal and Graham see the folly in limiting when and how Ukraine can use US weapons and vowed to “urge the Biden administration to lift restrictions on weapons provided by the United States so they can strike the Russian invaders more effectively.”

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, the senators offered the prospect of a strategic economic partnership between the United States and Ukraine centered on metals and rare earth elements development. Their press release hinted that their suggestion was a welcome surprise for Zelenskyy, whose government has expressed hopes of leveraging Ukraine’s vast mineral wealth to become a major exporter of lithium and rare earths, raw materials key to new technologies and the energy transition. In a veiled reference to China’s dominant position in the rare earths market, the senators noted that “an agreement with Ukraine in this area would make the US less dependent on foreign adversaries for rare earth minerals.”

As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.

After the House of Representatives belatedly passed the national security supplemental package that unlocked further US aid to Ukraine in April, experts and lawmakers alike began to wonder how Washington might continue to support Ukraine throughout the rest of 2024. The Blumenthal-Graham priorities outline what could be an ambitious, re-energized US policy on Ukraine through the end of the current year.

US President Joe Biden has been skittish at the last two NATO summits about pushing for Ukraine’s membership in the Alliance, largely for fear of escalating tensions with Russia. But with Biden now out of the 2024 presidential race, he may be thinking more about his foreign policy legacy. Having already helped usher Finland and Sweden into the Alliance, opening Ukraine’s accession bid in earnest would be the third in a hat-trick of transatlantic security wins for Biden. Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s underwhelming response to Ukraine’s offensive into Russia’s Kursk Oblast should certainly tamp down any misplaced fears of escalation.

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Ukraine’s advance in Kursk: What’s next and implications

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Blumenthal’s Stand With Ukraine Act will likely run up against latent partisanship and electoral jitters when he introduces it in September. Much of Congress will be campaigning this fall, avoiding difficult votes while trying to score political points against the other party. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer could very well bring the bill to a floor vote, both to support Ukraine and to force a vote from anti-Ukraine Republicans, but Speaker of the House Mike Johnson may be loath to spend political capital to do the same. Even so, the bill may get the ball rolling on further Ukraine legislation, especially as some pro-Ukraine Republicans indicate they want funding to continue uninterrupted, even under the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency.

As for dropping restrictions on the use of US weapons, only the Biden administration can reverse this policy, something it has repeatedly declined to do. It may take further public and private calls from Democrats such as Blumenthal before the White House agrees to a change. In the meantime, Russian rockets will continue to kill Ukrainian civilians using launch systems that could have been taken out by US-provided Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and other Western-supplied weapons.

The senators’ proposal for a US-Ukraine economic partnership has all the ingredients for bipartisan consensus in Washington: Support for Ukraine without US taxpayer dollars, reduced dependence on China, and the potential for economic gain by importing one of the few materials the United States can’t make itself. A formal agreement would likely be highly technical and take many months to negotiate, but all the incentives are there for a new element in US-Ukraine relations.

Congressional delegations can sometimes be high on style and discussion but low on action and deliverables. This time, Blumenthal and Graham delivered on all counts and laid out a road map outlining US support for Ukraine through the end of 2024. Their list is as ambitious as it is sounds, both in its support for US interests and in helping Ukraine move toward victory on the battlefield. That combination of vision and vigor is exactly why their initiatives deserve bipartisan support.

Andrew D’Anieri is a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

Further reading

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The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

Read more from UkraineAlert

UkraineAlert is a comprehensive online publication that provides regular news and analysis on developments in Ukraine’s politics, economy, civil society, and culture.

The Eurasia Center’s mission is to enhance transatlantic cooperation in promoting stability, democratic values and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe and Turkey in the West to the Caucasus, Russia and Central Asia in the East.

Learn more

The post New US-Ukraine partnership proposal from influential senators is a recipe for bipartisan success appeared first on Atlantic Council.

These steps are encouraging and indicate welcome Western awareness of the repression that continues to define the political climate in today’s Belarus. Nevertheless, there is still a sense that not nearly enough is being done by the international community to challenge the impunity enjoyed by Lukashenka and members of his regime.

These concerns were amplified recently when the largest prisoner swap between the Kremlin and the West since the Cold War went ahead without featuring any Belarusian political prisoners. Lukashenka himself was closely involved in the complex negotiations behind the exchange. The Belarusian dictator agreed to free German national Rico Krieger, who was being held in Minsk on terrorism charges, as part of efforts to convince the German government to release Russian secret service assassin Vadim Krasikov.

Many have questioned why prominent Belarusian pro-democracy leader Maria Kalesnikava, who had previously lived for many years in Germany, was not also freed as part of the trade. Kalesnikava was jailed amid nationwide protests following Lukashenka’s rigged 2020 election. One of the figureheads of the anti-Lukashenka protest movement, she has reportedly been suffering from deteriorating health for the past year and a half. Similar questions were also asked regarding fellow political prisoners Ales Bialiatski, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, and Ihar Losik, a prominent blogger and journalist for RFE/RL’s Belarus Service.

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Four years since the sham ballot that sparked the biggest protests of Lukashenka’s three-decade reign, he appears more comfortable than ever with the idea of holding large numbers of political prisoners as hostages. This must change. With no regime-linked Belarusians in Western custody who are anything like as valuable as Krasikov was to Putin, other approaches are clearly needed to increase the pressure on Lukashenka and convince him to release political prisoners.

Economic measures can be used to target the largely state-controlled Belarusian economy, but this is more likely to have an impact as part of a long-term strategy. One alternative approach would be to engage third parties such as China, which has considerable influence in Minsk. Earlier diplomatic efforts succeeded in securing the release of US citizen Vital Shkliarau, indicating that negotiations of this nature can yield results.

Finding the right formula to keep up the pressure on individual members of the Lukashenka regime is crucial. At present, comparatively few of those involved in repressive measures are subject to international sanctions. For example, I was recently sentenced in absentia by a Belarusian court to ten years in prison alongside nineteen other independent Belarusian analysts and journalists. The judge in our case has a history of handing down lengthy sentences to prominent opposition figures, but has yet to be sanctioned.

During the past four years, only 261 Belarusians have been placed on the EU sanctions list. While the work of sanctions teams is commendable, their capacity is limited. Past experience has also demonstrated how sanctions can be sabotaged, as was the case in 2020 when Cyprus was accused of blocking the introduction of new restrictions against Belarus. There is also room to improve cooperation between Western partners, with a view to developing a more unified approach to sanctions.

Eurasia Center events

Online Event Thu, August 15, 2024 • 9:00 am ET

Ukraine’s advance in Kursk: What’s next and implications

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Strikingly, the quantity of Belarusians currently facing Western sanctions is far less the almost 1,400 political prisoners in the country’s prisons. According to human rights groups, tens of thousands of Belarusians in total have been detained in recent years for political reasons. Behind these arrests and prosecutions stands an army of enablers including government officials, security personnel, and judges. The vast majority of these people have yet to be held accountable by the international community for their role in the repressive policies of the Belarusian authorities.

There are some indications that Western policymakers are looking to broaden the scope of sanctions and increase individual accountability. However, while the recent round of sanctions included new measures targeting officials responsible for regime propaganda, other representatives of the Belarusian state media received international accreditation to cover the Olympics in Paris.

The West already has powerful tools at its disposal that can realistically make Belarusian officials consider the consequences of their actions. Standard personal sanctions such as travel bans and asset freezes go far beyond mere symbolism and are capable of creating problems that can have far-reaching practical implications in everyday life. However, more leverage is required in order to maintain the pressure on the regime and on the individuals responsible for specific abuses.

Looking ahead, the West needs to make the issue of political prisoners far more uncomfortable for the entire Lukashenka regime. There is no single solution to this problem; instead, a range of options should be explored including broad economic restrictions, personal sanctions, and diplomatic pressure. Crucially, sanctions should be applied to thousands of officials rather than just a few hundred. The end goal must be to significantly raise the costs of the repressive policies pursued by Lukashenka and all those who enable his regime.

Hanna Liubakova is a journalist from Belarus and nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Further reading

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The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

Read more from UkraineAlert

UkraineAlert is a comprehensive online publication that provides regular news and analysis on developments in Ukraine’s politics, economy, civil society, and culture.

The Eurasia Center’s mission is to enhance transatlantic cooperation in promoting stability, democratic values and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe and Turkey in the West to the Caucasus, Russia and Central Asia in the East.

Learn more

The post Belarus’s political prisoners must not be forgotten appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The Ukrainian military’s ability to maintain a veil of secrecy around preparations for the current operation is all the more remarkable given the evidence from the first two-and-a-half years of Russia’s invasion. The war in Ukraine has been marked by the growing importance of drone and electromagnetic surveillance, creating what most analysts agree is a remarkably transparent battlefield. This is making it more and more difficult for either army to benefit from the element of surprise.

Given the increased visibility on both sides of the front lines, how did Ukraine manage to spring such a surprise? At this stage there is very little detailed information available about Ukraine’s preparations, but initial reports indicate that unprecedented levels of operational silence and the innovative deployment of Ukraine’s electronic warfare capabilities played important roles.

As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.

Ukraine’s political leaders have been unusually tight-lipped about the entire offensive, providing no hint in advance and saying very little during the first week of the campaign. This is in stark contrast to the approach adopted last year, when the country’s coming summer offensive was widely referenced by officials and previewed in the media. Ukraine’s efforts to enforce operational silence appear to have also extended to the military. According to The New York Times, even senior Ukrainian commanders only learned of the plan to invade Russia at the last moment.

Ukraine’s Kursk offensive appears to have been a major surprise for Ukraine’s Western partners. The Financial Times has reported that neither the US nor Germany were informed in advance of the planned Ukrainian operation. Given the West’s record of seeking to avoid any actions that might provoke Putin, it is certainly not difficult to understand why Kyiv might have chosen not to signal its intentions.

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This approach seems to have worked. In recent days, the US, Germany, and the EU have all indicated their support for the Ukrainian operation. If Ukraine did indeed proceed without receiving a prior green light from the country’s partners, planners in Kyiv were likely counting on the reluctance of Western leaders to scupper Ukrainian offensive actions at a time when Russia is destroying entire towns and villages as it continues to slowly but steadily advance in eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine’s expanding electronic warfare capabilities are believed to have been instrumental in safeguarding the element of surprise during preparations for the current campaign. The Ukrainian military appears to have succeeded in suppressing Russian surveillance and communications systems across the initial invasion zone via the targeted application of electronic warfare tools. This made it possible to prevent Russian forces from correctly identifying Ukraine’s military build-up or anticipating the coming attack until it was too late.

Eurasia Center events

Online Event Thu, August 15, 2024 • 9:00 am ET

Ukraine’s advance in Kursk: What’s next and implications

Conflict Russia Security & Defense Ukraine

It is also likely that Ukraine benefited from Russia’s own complacency and overconfidence. Despite suffering a series of defeats in Ukraine since 2022, the Kremlin remains almost pathologically dismissive of Ukrainian capabilities and does not appear to have seriously entertained the possibility of a large-scale Ukrainian invasion of the Russian Federation. The modest defenses established throughout the border zone confirm that Moscow anticipated minor border raids but had no plans to repel a major Ukrainian incursion.

Russia’s sense of confidence doubtless owed much to Western restrictions imposed on Ukraine since the start of the war that have prohibited the use of Western weapons inside Russia. These restrictions were partially relaxed in May 2024 following Russia’s own cross-border offensive into Ukraine’s Kharkiv Oblast, but the Kremlin clearly did not believe Kyiv would be bold enough to use this as the basis for offensive operations inside Russia. Vladimir Putin is now paying a steep price for underestimating his opponent.

It remains far too early to assess the impact of Ukraine’s surprise summer offensive. One of the most interesting questions will be whether Ukraine can force the Kremlin to divert military units from the fighting in eastern Ukraine in order to defend Russia itself. Much will depend on the amount of Russian land Ukraine is able to seize and hold. Putin must also decide whether his military should focus on merely stopping Ukraine’s advance or liberating occupied Russian territory.

Ukraine’s Kursk offensive has succeeded in demonstrating that surprise is still possible on the modern battlefield. This is a significant achievement that underlines the skill and competence of the Ukrainian military. The Ukrainian invasion has also confirmed once again that Putin’s talk of Russian red lines and his frequent threats of nuclear escalation are a bluff designed to intimidate the West. Taken together, these factors should be enough to convince Kyiv’s partners that now is the time to increase military support and provide Ukraine with the tools for victory.

Mykola Bielieskov is a research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies and a senior analyst at Ukrainian NGO “Come Back Alive.” The views expressed in this article are the author’s personal position and do not reflect the opinions or views of NISS or Come Back Alive.

Further reading

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The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

Read more from UkraineAlert

UkraineAlert is a comprehensive online publication that provides regular news and analysis on developments in Ukraine’s politics, economy, civil society, and culture.

The Eurasia Center’s mission is to enhance transatlantic cooperation in promoting stability, democratic values and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe and Turkey in the West to the Caucasus, Russia and Central Asia in the East.

Learn more

The post Ukraine’s Kursk offensive proves surprise is still possible in modern war appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The post Linderman in American Foreign Policy Council: A political inflection point in Georgia appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Ukraine’s summer offensive is a watershed moment in the current war and an historic milestone in its own right. For the first time since World War II, Russia has been invaded by a foreign army. Initial reports indicate that this ambitious operation was prepared amid great secrecy over a period of months. Ukraine managed to catch the Russians completely off-guard, with Ukrainian forces advancing tens of kilometers into Kursk Oblast during the first days of the campaign.

Ukraine’s political and military leaders have so far remained remarkably tight-lipped about the invasion, saying very little publicly and providing few details. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify a number of likely objectives.

Ukraine’s most obvious intention is probably to ease the military pressure in the south and east of the country, where Russia has been slowly but steadily advancing in recent months. By attacking across the lightly defended border and seizing Russian territory, Ukrainian commanders believe they can force the Kremlin to withdraw troops from the front lines of the war in Ukraine in order to redeploy them for the defense of Russia itself.

The offensive also creates opportunities for Ukraine to regain the military initiative after a year of costly and demoralizing defensive operations. It has long been obvious that Ukraine cannot realistically hope to win a war of attrition against the far larger and wealthier Russian Federation. Kyiv’s best chance of military success lies in returning to a war of mobility and maneuver that allows Ukrainian commanders to take advantage of their relative agility while exploiting the Russian army’s far more cumbersome decision-making processes. This is exactly what the invasion of Kursk Oblast has achieved.

In psychological terms, bringing the war home to Russia has allowed Ukraine to strike a powerful blow against enemy morale. The Ukrainian army’s advances in Kursk Oblast are spreading panic throughout the surrounding region and undermining Putin’s efforts to prevent the invasion of Ukraine from disrupting the daily lives of ordinary Russians. On the home front, Ukraine’s surprise summer offensive has provided Ukrainian society with a desperately needed morale boost, reviving hopes that the war-weary nation can still achieve meaningful military success.

The Kursk offensive may ultimately be part of Ukraine’s preparations for a future peace process, with Kyiv looking to occupy as much Russian territory as possible to use as a bargaining chip in any negotiations with the Kremlin. Indeed, during the initial days of the invasion, there was widespread speculation that Ukraine’s primary target may be the Kursk nuclear power plant, with a view to trading it for the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine. An eventual land swap on a far larger scale may be part of Kyiv’s calculations.

As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.

The Ukrainian army’s advance into Russia has profound implications for perceptions of the war. It directly challenges the widespread belief that Russia’s invasion has reached a stalemate and can no longer be decided on the battlefield. Crucially, it also exposes the emptiness of Vladimir Putin’s red lines and the folly of the West’s emphasis on escalation management.

Ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, the international response has been hindered by fear of escalation. Western leaders have allowed themselves to be intimidated by Putin, who has used thinly veiled nuclear threats and frequent talk of Russian red lines to restrict the flow of military aid and convince Ukraine’s partners to impose absurd restrictions on the use of Western weapons inside Russia. As a result, Ukraine has effectively been forced to wage war with one hand tied behind its back.

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Ukraine’s Kursk offensive has succeeded in demonstrating that surprise is still possible despite the increased transparency of the modern battlefield, writes Mykola Bielieskov.

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Ukrainian forces launched a surprise raid into Russia’s Kursk region on Tuesday. Our experts explain how this could affect the course of the war.

Conflict Defense Policy

Ukraine’s offensive is now posing serious questions about the credibility of Russia’s saber-rattling and the rationality behind the West’s abundance of caution. After all, the Ukrainian army’s current invasion of Russia is surely the reddest of all red lines. If Russia was at all serious about a possible nuclear escalation, this would be the moment to make good on its many threats. In fact, Putin has responded by seeking to downplay the invasion while pretending that everything is still going according to plan.

In his first public statement following the start of Ukraine’s invasion, Putin euphemistically referred to it as a “large-scale provocation,” a phrase that seemed specially tailored to disguise the gravity of the situation. The Kremlin then declared a “state of emergency” in Kursk Oblast, which was subsequently upgraded to a “counter-terrorism operation.” The difference between this restrained law-and-order language and the usual soundbites trumpeting existential war with NATO could hardly have been starker.

Russian propagandists have adopted an equally low-key approach. There have been no appeals to the Russian people or attempts to rally the country against the invader. On the contrary, the Kremlin media has reportedly received instructions to avoid “stirring up the situation,” while Russian officials have been told to refrain from commenting on developments in the Kursk region altogether. These are most definitely not the actions of a self-confident military superpower on the verge of a major escalation.

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Ukraine’s advance in Kursk: What’s next and implications

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What we are currently witnessing is entirely in line with a well-established pattern of Russian threats being exposed as bluffs by Ukrainian boldness. During the first year of the war as Putin prepared to announce the annexation of occupied Ukrainian city Kherson, he warned that any attempt to reclaim this “Russian land” would result in a nuclear reply. “I’m not bluffing,” he famously declared. But when Ukraine liberated Kherson just weeks later, Putin did not reach for the nuclear button. Instead, he ordered his beaten troops to quietly retreat.

Russia’s reaction to wartime setbacks in Crimea has been similarly underwhelming. The 2014 seizure of the Ukrainian peninsula remains Putin’s crowning glory and serves as the basis for his claim to a place in Russian history alongside the country’s greatest rulers. Nevertheless, when Ukraine deployed missiles and marine drones to sink or disable around one-third of the entire Russian Black Sea Fleet, there was no apocalyptic response from the Kremlin. On the contrary, Putin instructed his remaining warships to withdraw from Crimea and seek safety in Russian ports.

This record of inglorious Russian retreats makes the West’s frequently voiced fear of escalation all the more difficult to justify. Ukrainians will now be hoping Putin’s characteristically weak response to the Kursk offensive can persuade Western leaders to belatedly abandon their failed policies of escalation management and acknowledge that the quickest way to end the war is by arming Ukraine for victory.

There are some indications that attitudes among Ukraine’s Western allies may finally be changing. The EU has led the way, with European Commission spokesperson Peter Thano responding to the Ukrainian cross-border push into Kursk Oblast by saying Ukraine has the “legitimate right” to defend itself, including inside Russia. Berlin has reacted in the same manner, with the German Foreign Ministry issuing a statement confirming that Ukraine’s right to self defense “is not limited to its own territory.” Meanwhile, US officials have also signaled their approval. “Ukraine is doing what it needs to do to be successful on the battlefield,” commented a Pentagon official.

This broadly supportive international reaction is welcome news for Ukraine, but officials in Kyiv are also well aware that further steps are required in order to set the stage for Putin’s eventual defeat. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy underlined this point in his August 11 evening address, when he once again called for the lifting of all Western restrictions on long-range strikes against military targets in Russia. Until that happens, Moscow will retain the ability to pummel Ukrainian cities at will and Putin will have little reason to end his invasion.

The West has spent more than two years slow-walking military aid to Ukraine for fear of provoking Putin. And yet time after time, Ukraine has proved that whenever the Russian dictator is confronted with the prospect of defeat, he is far more likely to retreat than escalate. Now that the Ukrainian military has crossed the last of Putin’s red lines and invaded Russia without sparking World War III, there are no more excuses for restricting Kyiv’s ability to defend itself or denying Ukraine the weapons it needs to win the war.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

Further reading

UkraineAlert Jul 30, 2024

Paris Olympics: Ukrainian dedicates medal to athletes killed by Russia

By Mark Temnycky

Ukrainian fencing star Olga Kharlan has won the country’s first medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics and dedicated her medal to the Ukrainian athletes “who couldn’t be here because they were killed by Russia,” writes Mark Temnycky .

Conflict France

UkraineAlert Aug 1, 2024

Ukraine’s new F-16 jets won’t defeat Russia but will enhance air defenses

By Mykola Bielieskov

Ukraine’s fledgling fleet of F-16 jets will not win the war but should strengthen the country’s air defenses and help protect the civilian population from Russian bombardment, writes Mykola Bielieskov.

Conflict Defense Technologies

UkraineAlert Aug 6, 2024

Russia’s Black Sea defeats get flushed down Vladimir Putin’s memory hole

By Peter Dickinson

Vladimir Putin’s readiness to flush Russia’s Black Sea naval defeats down the memory hole is a reminder that the Kremlin propaganda machine controls Russian reality and can easily rebrand any retreat from Ukraine, writes Peter Dickinson.

Conflict Disinformation

The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

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UkraineAlert is a comprehensive online publication that provides regular news and analysis on developments in Ukraine’s politics, economy, civil society, and culture.

The Eurasia Center’s mission is to enhance transatlantic cooperation in promoting stability, democratic values and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe and Turkey in the West to the Caucasus, Russia and Central Asia in the East.

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The post Ukraine’s invasion of Russia is erasing Vladimir Putin’s last red lines appeared first on Atlantic Council.

An initiative led by the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center in partnership with the US Department of State continues to focus on facilitating greater constructive exchange among multisectoral thought leaders and government leaders as they work to implement commitments made at the ninth Summit of the Americas. This readout was informed by a private, information-gathering roundtable and several one-on-one conversations with leading experts in the digital space.

Executive summary

At the ninth Summit of the Americas, regional leaders agreed on the adoption of a Regional Agenda for Digital Transformation that reaffirmed the need for a dynamic and resilient digital ecosystem that promotes digital inclusion for all peoples. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the digital divide globally, but these gaps were shown to be deeper in developing countries, disproportionately affecting women, children, persons with disabilities, and other vulnerable and/or marginalized individuals. Through this agenda, inclusive workforce development remains a key theme as an avenue to help bridge the digital divide and skills gap across the Americas.

As part of the Atlantic Council’s consultative process, thought leaders and practitioners evaluated progress made in the implementation of the Regional Agenda for Digital Transformation agreed on at the Summit of Americas, resulting in three concrete recommendations: (1) leverage regional alliances and intraregional cooperation mechanisms to accelerate implementation of the agenda; (2) strengthen public-private partnerships and multisectoral coordination to ensure adequate financing for tailored capacity-building programs, the expansion of digital infrastructure, and internet access; and (3) prioritize the involvement of local youth groups and civil society organizations, given their on-the-ground knowledge and role as critical indicators of implementation.

Recommendations for advancing digitalization and workforce development in the Americas:

Report

May 31, 2024

PACC 2030 objectives: The road to implementation

By Wazim Mowla, Charlene Aguilera

The Atlantic Council organized a PACC 2030 Working Group and worked closely with governments, the business community, and civil society organizations to support the implementation of PACC 2030’s objectives.

Caribbean Climate Change & Climate Action

Report

Apr 16, 2024

Advancing health and resilience policies in Latin America and the Caribbean

By Isabel Chiriboga, Martin Cassinelli, Diego Area

During an off-the-record private roundtable, thought leaders and practitioners from across the Americas discussed how to further enhance access to and finance for health services and products in the region.

Coronavirus Latin America

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Amid global uncertainties and new challenges, the ninth Summit of the Americas is a renewed opportunity to bring about hemispheric cooperation and consensus to reach regional prosperity and security.

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Program Assistant

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Diego Area

Deputy Director, Strategic Development

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The Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center broadens understanding of regional transformations and delivers constructive, results-oriented solutions to inform how the public and private sectors can advance hemispheric prosperity.

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The post The future of digital transformation and workforce development in Latin America and the Caribbean appeared first on Atlantic Council.

What do the 2024 Paris Olympic Games mean for France? What is the overall impression of the Paris Olympics so far? What sort of values and principles does France want to showcase to the world by hosting? And how will France pass the torch to the United States for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics?

On this episode of #AtlanticDebrief, Visiting Fellow Léonie Allard sits down with the French Ambassador for Sport Samuel Ducroquet to discuss his impressions of the Paris Olympics and the role of the Olympics in international diplomacy. 

You can watch #AtlanticDebrief on YouTube and as a podcast.

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The post #AtlanticDebrief – What do the 2024 Paris Olympic Games mean for France? | A debrief from Amb. Samuel Ducroquet appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Such dramatic developments have put the country in uncharted territory. Three aspects of the developing situation warrant attention.

What will the interim government look like?

On August 6, a day after Hasina fled Bangladesh, the country’s only Nobel Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus, was selected to lead the interim government. His name was proposed by the student protesters, who have spearheaded the movement. The choice of Yunus is a clear testimony that unlike on previous occasions, when political parties, in consultation with the military and bureaucracy, decided who would head the government, a new political force is making the decision this time around. The students have emerged as the center of power, and will seek to exercise that power in the selection of the interim government’s cabinet.

It is notable that the appointment of Yunus is beyond the purview of the existing constitution. While the political actors and army leaders appear to be operating with the understanding that Bangladeshi President Mohammed Shahabuddin is the chief executive, they seem to recognize that under the circumstances, all actions draw their legitimacy from the student-led movement.

How the remainder of the interim government will be formulated is unclear. While the cabinet is expected to reflect the country’s broad political spectrum and its civil society, it must represent the aspirations of the mass upsurge as articulated by the students, who have made it clear that this is not only about deposing an autocrat but also about creating a system that will prevent the rise of a future autocrat. In its language, this movement seeks to change the existing political settlement.

Can the interim government tackle the immediate challenge?

That the interim government will face enormous challenges is an understatement. Indeed, over the medium term, the country’s economic challenges will be the most formidable. But those pale in comparison to what the new government will face in the coming days. The most immediate challenge is to restore confidence in the administrative structure, including law enforcement agencies, while ensuring that those who committed transgressions are held accountable.

In the fifteen years that Hasina was in power, the state’s administrative apparatuses were too often filled with party loyalists who served the party first and acted beyond the remit of the law. Officials persecuted the opposition, siphoned off money from the country, and participated in a kleptocratic system. In a similar vein, many in law enforcement agencies have been involved in gross violations of human rights, including extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances.

The same goes with leaders and officials in previous regimes. Holding them accountable for their alleged crimes is necessary for the sake of justice, but so too is the need to assure the public that this is something more than just one government replacing the old one with no other changes. Many Bangladeshis, including those from the business community, have either fled or are trying to flee. The government will have to act swiftly but avoid any impression of seeking revenge. It is a delicate balance to maintain, but imperative for going forward.

As an immediate aftermath of Hasina’s downfall, there were reports of looting, arson, and attacks on religious minorities from around the country. Roving mobs ransacked houses and offices. The situation is improving now, but a worrying development was reports of attacks by weapon-wielding individuals in various places. The death toll mounted. The identity of these attackers remains unknown, but the indiscriminate nature of these attacks gives the impression that they were intended to create an apparently lawless situation and destabilize the country. While some of these incidents can be described as settling personal scores, the scale makes it suspicious.

In the weeks leading to the demise of the regime, especially since the middle of July, when then ruling Awami League Secretary General Obaidul Quader threatened that the party activists were enough to confront the demonstrators, party loyalists had used lethal weapons in broad daylight. Individuals loyal to Hasina and her party might now see it as in their interest to create the impression of widespread chaos.

How will India react?

While the sudden change in Bangladesh has implications for the wider international community, its impacts are most immediately pertinent in neighboring India. Hasina’s decision to take refuge in India was not only predicated by its geographical proximity but also was due to her close connection to the Indian establishment. Since 2009, India has supported the Hasina regime and helped it to survive adverse situations. India’s business interests and desire to keep the country within its sphere of influence shaped India’s policy toward Bangladesh. Indian policymakers, analysts, and media have for years insisted that a change in the government in Bangladesh will create a security threat. They have tacitly suggested that stage-managed elections delivering victory to Hasina were preferable to free and fair elections that would have reflected Bangladesh’s popular will.

At the same time, Indian media has portrayed Bangladesh’s legitimate political opposition parties, including the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, as conspiring with Pakistan’s main intelligence agency. Even though anonymously sourced and devoid of any real evidence, such allegations are quickly becoming a mainstay of Indian media discourse. In the final days of her rule, Hasina insisted that the movement against her government was orchestrated by “militants” and “terrorists”—a message that several Indian news outlets have amplified in recent days.

This approach has now become a central element of Indian media discourse and policy making. Since Hasina landed in India, the mass movement that toppled her has been portrayed as an Islamist upsurge, and some in the Indian establishment are highlighting the violence in Bangladesh since her departure more than the autocratic nature of her governance. The statement of External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar to the Indian parliament on August 6 is a case in point. The meeting between Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Hasina at Hindon Airbase near Delhi upon her arrival also sends the message that India is most concerned with the security aspect.

As the situation in Bangladesh is unfolding, the Indian establishment will be better served if it revisits its Bangladesh policy and acknowledges the underlying causes that led to Hasina’s downfall. In recent months, an “India Out” movement, akin to a campaign that emerged in the Maldives several years ago, has gained attention in Bangladesh. A large segment of Bangladeshis seem to feel that Indian policy since 2009 had deprived them of their right to freely choose their leaders and that an unequal relationship was forged with Hasina. The sooner that Indian policymakers acknowledge the necessity to recalibrate their country’s policy, the sooner a better relationship with the interim government can emerge.

Ali Riaz is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council South Asia Center and a distinguished professor at Illinois State University.

The post Hasina is out. Yunus is in. Here are the three biggest factors to watch in Bangladesh. appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Shukr’s killing has put Hezbollah in a bind. The group has been hesitant to provoke Israel since Lebanon’s economy collapsed almost five years ago—recognizing that every altercation could spiral into an undesired conflagration and not wanting to be blamed by the Lebanese for compounding their economic miseries with a war from which the country may not recover. After Hamas spearheaded the October 7, 2023 attack against Israel, however, Hezbollah joined in the next day to support its Gaza-based allies—both expecting a short conflict and feeling secure that their intervention would not spark a war since the Israelis were too preoccupied with operations in the Gaza Strip and restrained by American opposition to the conflict’s expansion into Lebanon. The group split the difference with a war of attrition, as Nasrallah noted in his latest speech that “we have been balancing between the support front [for Gaza] and the conditions in our country.” But as that conflict dragged on, a fatal mistake was inevitable.

That came on July 27, when an errant Hezbollah missile struck a soccer field in Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, killing twelve Israeli children. Notwithstanding the group’s ongoing and desperate denials of responsibility, Israel had to exact a painful price on the group by killing Shukr in Hezbollah’s stronghold in the capital, Beirut. This wasn’t the first time the Israelis had assassinated such a high-ranking Hezbollah commander. In 2008, in a joint operation with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Israel assassinated Imad Mughniyeh, then Hezbollah’s commander-in-chief and most storied military commander in Damascus, Syria. Eight years later, in 2016, the Israelis eliminated his successor Mustafa Badreddine in Syria.

Either of those assassinations should have also warranted serious responses from Hezbollah. However, both occurred outside of Lebanon, during periods of quiet with Israel and during sensitive periods for the group. Mughniyeh was assassinated amidst a political crisis in Lebanon that began in December 2006—mere months after Hezbollah’s war with Israel that summer—and only ended in May 2008. Meanwhile, Badreddine was killed while Hezbollah was fully engaged in Syria’s civil war, perhaps the most existential battle in the group’s history, and could ill afford to open a second front with a foe as powerful as Israel. Yet Israeli silence in both instances allowed Hezbollah to quietly absorb the blows—even blaming Sunni Islamist militants in the case of Badreddine—and focus on more pressing matters.  

Shukr’s assassination is fundamentally different. The location alone—Beirut—violated a serious red line for the group. Coupled with his stature and the fact that the Israelis claimed the attack amidst an ongoing confrontation, the strike denied Hezbollah an off-ramp. The group must now respond, but a routine retaliation, akin to the ones it has been conducting for killings of lower-level commanders in south Lebanon, will not suffice given Shukr’s stature and the location of his killing. To avoid looking weak and permitting Israel to set the redlines of the conflict, Hezbollah must mount a more severe response—but this risks an escalation the group would prefer to avoid right now. Hence the group’s dilemma.

Enter Nasrallah. True to form over the past five years, the talkative secretary-general sought to cover his group’s exposed vulnerability with propaganda. Highlighting Hezbollah’s very real destructive power—the group has amassed 200,000 projectiles of different levels of sophistication, after all—he inevitably veered into exaggeration by claiming it could wipe out most of northern Israel’s vital infrastructure “in one hour, half an hour.” He also stressed just how much Hezbollah had established an equilibrium of pain with the Israelis. “Airlines stop arriving in Beirut and Tel Aviv, foreigners flee Lebanon and the entity alike, the villagers of the south and the colonizers of northern Palestine are both displaced, their homes are destroyed like our homes, their factories burn like ours, and their people fear just like ours,” Nasrallah said.

He also stressed the need for Hezbollah to have entered the conflict to prevent an Israeli victory over Gaza. If that occurred, Nasrallah claimed, the Israelis would be so emboldened that “there will be no Palestine, there will be no Palestinian people, there will be no Palestinian refugees—meaning they will be naturalized—and there will be no holy sites [in Jerusalem],” he claimed, stressing that both “Al-Aqsa Mosque will be in grave danger” of being brought down “by one bomb”—as would the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Then he vacillated between talking points from this conflict. Nasrallah’s oft-repeated claim is that the Israeli army, which defeated several Arab armies in mere days, had become too weak to defeat Hamas over months, overlooking the differences in Israeli objectives and the added complexity of defeating a guerilla organization embedded in civilian areas. Namely, that Israel was “standing on a leg and a half” in anticipation of Hezbollah’s retaliation—and that “this Israeli anticipation for a week is part of the punishment, response, and battle, because the battle is psychological, one of morale and nerves and brains, [not just] weapons and blood.”

Here, Nasrallah was harking back to the last time the Israelis had flagrantly violated a Hezbollah redline by killing one of their fighters, Ali Kamel Mohsen, in Damascus in July 2020. “If you kill our fighters in Syria, we will kill you from Lebanon,” Nasrallah had thundered in August 2019. But when Mohsen was killed, with the COVID-19 pandemic further burdening Lebanon’s battered economy—which had practically imploded in October 2019—Hezbollah failed to act on its threats, quickly covering up their inaction by claiming that Israel’s fear of a response was, in and of itself, the punishment for Mohsen’s death.

But propaganda alone will not suffice now. Hezbollah will have to respond, and their responsibility must be obvious. Nasrallah promised—in his August 1 speech as with his last—that “our response is coming, God willing…precious blood [has been shed], and the resistance cannot, no matter the consequences, remain idle….our response will be strong, impactful, and effective,” without elaborating more.

It is quite possible the Israelis have crossed one of Hezbollah’s irreversible redlines, and the group, either alongside the rest of the Iran-backed Resistance Axis or separately, has decided to go to war or to undertake a retaliatory response that bears a high chance of leading to war—“no matter the consequences” for Lebanon. Nasrallah certainly hinted at that in his speech, both by detailing the alleged threat posed to the region by an Israeli victory in Gaza and by stressing, “No one can ask, in Lebanon or outside, that we deal with the aggression that happened last Tuesday [i.e., Shukr’s assassination] as if it was an ordinary aggression as part of the battle ongoing for ten months.”

But it’s likelier that Hezbollah is planning a more limited response. It’s not that the group does not desire a full war with Israel, one it hopes will bring about the Jewish state’s destruction, but it seeks to wage that war under optimal conditions that maximize its chances of success: when its arsenal is stronger and larger, Lebanon’s domestic conditions have improved, its regional partners are similarly positioned, and—preferably—when Iran can provide them with a nuclear umbrella. Indeed, Nasrallah indicated these conditions had not ripened by noting, “the objective of the current battle is not destroying Israel, but denying it victory and the ability to destroy the Palestinian resistance.” This was echoed the same day by Ibrahim al-Amine, Nasrallah insider and editor-in-chief of the secular left-leaning pro-Hezbollah daily Al-Akhbar. Al-Amine wrote that, whatever the nature of the retaliation against Israel, its effect on the central goal of the ongoing battle—“stopping the aggression against Gaza”—will remain the core consideration.

Therefore, Hezbollah and the Resistance Axis will not likely undertake any action that would complicate achieving a ceasefire in Gaza, the surest and quickest way to halt the Israeli campaign there.

Hezbollah could be planning a one-time, intense, individual retaliation. This would be the riskiest option for the group. It would carefully have to thread the needle between a retaliatory attack sufficiently painful to settle the score for Shukr while remaining below the threshold, which could lead to a spiral of escalation. Alternatively, the group could plan to participate in a one-time retaliatory strike alongside Iran and the remainder of the Resistance Axis. This would be more advantageous for Hezbollah, allowing the group to strike Israel with more intensity in that one instance but leaving it less exposed to individual consequences by blending its attack into the rest of the Resistance Axis retaliation.

Hezbollah could also be planning to overall permanently escalate the intensity, frequency, and depth of its attacks against Israel—but keep them limited below the threshold that would justify war. This could occur only on the Lebanon front or across all “support fronts” opened by the Resistance Axis.

David Daoud is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Follow him on X: @DavidADaoud.

The post Understanding Nasrallah’s speech: How will Hezbollah avenge Shukr? appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Introduction

I. Addressing the Soviet legacy

II. Pre-war policies

III. The ethnic variable

IV. Wartime policies undermine population growth

V. Conclusion

About the author

Russia’s future will be characterized by a smaller population. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war has virtually guaranteed that for generations to come, Russia’s population will be not only smaller, but also older, more fragile, and less well-educated. It will almost certainly be ethnically less Russian and more religiously diverse. While some might view diversity as a strength, many Russians do not see it this way. In a world with hordes of people on the move to escape war, persecution, poverty, and the increasing impact of climate change, xenophobic political rhetoric sells well.

Putin has spoken frequently about Russia’s demographic problems, beginning in his first months as president. Despite spending trillions of rubles on high-profile “national projects” to remedy the situation, population decline continued. Putin’s choice of timing for military aggression in Ukraine might have reflected an understanding that Russia’s demographic (and economic) situation would not improve in the next two decades. However, the war is turning a growing crisis into a catastrophe.

The demographic consequences from the Russian war against Ukraine, like those from World War II and the health, birth rate and life expectancy impact from Russia’s protracted transition in the 1990s, will echo for generations. Russia’s population will decline for the rest of the twenty-first century, and ethnic Russians will be a smaller proportion of that population. The ethnic and religious groups that embrace the “traditional family values” Putin favors are predominantly non-Russian.

United Nations scenarios project Russia’s population in 2100 to be between 74 million and 112 million compared with the current 146 million. The most recent UN projections are for the world’s population to decline by about 20 percent by 2100. The estimate for Russia is a decline of 25 to 50 percent.

While Russia is hardly unique in facing declining birth rates and an aging population, high adult mortality, and infertility among both men and women, increasingly limited immigration and continuing brain drain make Russia’s situation particularly challenging. Population size is determined by a combination of natural factors—birth rates and life expectancy, along with the emigration-immigration balance. Putin’s war on Ukraine has undermined all the potential sources of population growth.

There have been four important inflection points in demography policy since Putin became president. The first came in 2006, when Putin’s rhetoric about demography finally resulted in specific policies: demography was one of the first four national projects he launched at that time. The second significant change came following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. The reaction to that aggression in Ukraine, Moldova, and other former Soviet republics narrowed the number of countries providing labor to Russia.

A third key moment was the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack near Moscow in March 2024. Tajiks made up half of the immigrants to Russia in 2023, but that has become politically problematic in the aftermath of the Crocus attack. The most recent policy shifts accompanied the formation of a new government in May 2024. Initial reports promise a long-term approach that perhaps begins to recognize Russia’s new demographic reality. It comes too late, and the measures proposed fail to offer new solutions.

The paper begins with a summary of the demographic problems the Russian Federation inherited from the Soviet Union and its ineffective initial response. The second section reviews the deteriorating situation after 2013. The third section focuses on ways Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine is exacerbating all of these challenges. The conclusion suggests what impact population decline will have on Russia’s future.

Addressing the Soviet legacy

The Soviet Union experienced multiple demographic shocks in the twentieth century. Following Joseph Stalin’s death, recovery appeared possible. Yet by the 1960s, Russia’s high infant mortality and low adult life expectancy were outliers compared with most highly industrialized countries.

The population shock from World War II echoed for decades. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign in 1986–1987 generated a brief improvement in life expectancy, but this was hardly enough to change the dynamic.

Economic disruptions, beginning with Gorbachev’s perestroika and continuing into the 1990s, resulted in fewer births, higher mortality, and significant emigration. The dissolution of the Soviet Union spurred massive population relocation, as millions of Russians and non-Russians returned to their titular homelands. Every former Soviet republic became more ethnically homogeneous. This trend has continued within the Russian Federation, as some non-Russian republics continue to become less Russian. Russians relocating within the Russian Federation have reduced the population in the Far East.

Russia’s immigration-emigration balance involves several population flows. Russians have moved back to Russia from newly independent former Soviet republics. As Russia’s economy improved, labor migrants, primarily from former Soviet republics, have found formal and informal work in Russia. Prior to the war, the immigrants compensated for the multiple waves of (mostly Russian) people emigrating from Russia.

The breakdown of the Warsaw Pact —and then the Soviet Union itself—disrupted economic linkages and supply chains that had existed for decades. Economic insecurity reduced already-declining birth rates across much of the post-Soviet space. Russia’s total fertility rate (TFR)—the number of births per woman—dropped from just below replacement level in 1988 to 1.3 in 2004. Maintaining a population level requires a TFR of at least 2.1 without positive net immigration; Russia’s high adult mortality rate requires one even higher.

In his initial inaugural address in August 2000, Putin warned that Russia could become “an enfeebled nation” due to population decline. Despite the warnings, little was done. Russia’s TFR increased from 1.25 in 2000 to 1.39 in 2007. This slight improvement reflected better economic conditions due to rising oil prices, and a (temporarily) larger number of women in the 18–35 age cohort.

One reason for persistent difficulty in achieving higher birth rates or TFR numbers has been the legacy of Soviet polices. Lack of access to effective birth control and male resistance to condom use resulted in abortion being the widely used solution for unwanted pregnancies. Murray Feshbach calculated that the Soviet-era abortion rate averaged seven per woman. Far less attention has been devoted to male infertility. Alcohol and substance abuse have resulted in unusually high infertility rates among Russian men.

Low birth rates are only one part of the population problem. Unhealthy diet and lifestyle, binge alcohol consumption, and accidents contribute to the high adult mortality numbers. When Putin was first elected president in 2000, Russian men aged 18–64 were dying at four times the rate of European men. Russian women were perishing at about the same rate as European men.
Until early 2005, Putin’s public position was that Russia could offset its population decline by attracting more Russians living in former Soviet republics to return to Russia, bringing with them needed skills while augmenting the ethnic Russian population. This immigration offset much of the population loss in the 1990s but has increasingly declined since Putin became president. Significantly, non-Russians became the dominant labor migrants.

Data from the Russian state statistics service Goskomstat indicate legal immigration peaked at 1.147 million in 1994 and declined each year thereafter, shrinking to 350,900 in 2000 and 70,000 in 2004.

Despite the declining numbers, the Russian government adopted a highly restrictive law in 2002 limiting legal immigration. When the Security Council discussed immigration again in 2005, Putin called for a more “humane approach,” dropping the racial and religious criteria. Yet he followed this with a “clarification” prioritizing Russian speakers. It is possible that Putin understood the situation but adjusted his rhetoric in accord with public opinion.

Russian media reports of a massive influx of Chinese immigrants in the 1990s were wildly exaggerated. By 2000, as oil prices rose, workers from Central Asia, Ukraine, and Moldova found formal or informal work in Russia. Russia incorporated the populations of Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, and additional territories since 2022, which accounts for official claims of a larger “Russian” population.

Immigrants to Russia have come overwhelmingly from former Soviet republics, which account for 95–96 percent of the total. Just five countries that were part of the Soviet Union (Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) had population growth between 1989 and 2004. Migrants from two former Soviet republics with declining populations, Ukraine and Moldova, continued to provide labor until 2014. Putin reiterated the importance of demography in his inaugural addresses in 2012, 2018, and 2024, and in many of his annual call-in programs. Several times he has acknowledged the failure to achieve promised increases in births. Yet there appears to be no learning curve regarding policies. Putin’s 2024 address promised more of the same: paying Russians to have larger families, accompanied by invoking the need for more soldiers to defend the motherland.

Pre-war policies

As the price of oil increased in the 2000s, Putin’s government debated how to use the windfall to address persistent demographic challenges. As in many countries, immigration remains politically fraught. Russian nationalist groups adopted “Russia for the Russians” as a campaign slogan. Improving life expectancy is an ideal solution, but it is slow and expensive, depending on adults taking care of their health. Putin’s government opted for pro-natal policies. In his presidential address in 2006, Putin cited demography as “the most serious problem in Russia today.” Rather than listening to advisers familiar with the basket of diverse policies that improved birth rates in France and Sweden—prenatal and postnatal care, parental leave, daycare, preschool programs, housing support, and other incentives—Russia’s government emphasized “maternity capital.”

The initial maternity capital program offered incentives to women for the birth or adoption of a second or additional child. The funds, paid when a child turned three, could be used for housing, the child’s education at an accredited institution, the mother’s pension, or assistance for children with disabilities. Over time, changes have included payment for a first child and improved housing. The annually indexed funding was enough to encourage additional births in rural areas and smaller towns but had little impact in higher-priced urban areas that are home to 70 percent of the population. Moreover, many women who experienced giving birth in a Russian maternity hospital decided once was sufficient.

The pro-natal policy coincided with slightly higher Russian birth rates, raising the TFR from 1.3 when the maternity-capital program was launched in 2007 to nearly 1.8 in 2015. Most demographers, however, attribute the higher numbers to a (temporarily) larger cohort of women in prime child-bearing years, economic growth due to higher oil prices during Putin’s first two terms, and hopes that nationwide protests over the 2011–2012 elections augured real change. After 2012, the reduced number of returning compatriots offset the gains in births.

Despite the augmented maternity-capital program, Russia’s TFR dropped back to 1.5 by 2019, prior to COVID-19 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian official sources continued to report the rate as 1.8. Without immigration, even a TFR of 1.8 would result in Russia’s population decreasing by about 20–25 percent in each generation.

The other endogenous factor in natural population change is life expectancy. Russia is hardly an outlier in experiencing lower birth rates. Most countries outside of Africa are projected to have smaller populations in the coming decades. Yet Russia continues to be exceptional among developed countries in the rate of mortality among adults aged 18–64. Russia’s economic recovery during Putin’s first two terms as President did lead to some improvement. While Russian men died at four times the rate of European men in 1990, by 2022 the rate was merely double the European rate.

The modest improvements during Putin’s first two terms were due to the economic recovery, greater stability, and efforts to improve healthcare. Yet the major focus of the healthcare program was not the badly needed primary and preventive care. Instead, most of the funds were used to purchase expensive new equipment, creating opportunities for graft.

The improvements in life expectancy began to reverse by 2019. Russia’s COVID-19 response was deeply flawed, resulting in the highest per-capita death rate among industrialized countries, though official statistics have consistently concealed the impact.

Economic benefits from people living longer are double edged. The impact depends on individuals’ capacity to work and the related dependency ratio for the population. Societies need enough able-bodied workers to support the young, the old, and the disabled.

Russia’s demographic issues involve quality as well as quantity. Even before Putin opted to invade Ukraine, Russia was experiencing another significant brain drain. Just before the war, Valerii Fal’kov, Russia’s Minister of Science and Higher Education, told Putin that the number of scientists in Russia was declining. Outside of atomic energy and the defense industry, Russia’s best specialists preferred to work in the US, Europe, and “even China.” Nikolai Dolgushkin, Academy of Sciences Chief Scientific Secretary, reported that emigration by scientists had increased from 14,000 in 2012 to 70,000 in 2021. Russia was the only developed nation where the number of scientific personnel was shrinking.

The challenges have become more serious, as the war on Ukraine has resulted in as many as half a million young men killed or wounded, women choosing to forego having children, women being sent to fight in Ukraine, and more than one million mostly young and highly educated people choosing to leave Russia.

Replacing them has been increasingly undermined by shortsighted government policies. In a country with a history of claiming to be multinational while viewing Russians as the system-forming ethnicity, recent government policies are creating additional difficulties. One of the great ironies of the situation Putin has created is that, in addition to poor rural villagers, the demographic groups best matching his August 2022 decree advocating “preservation and strengthening traditional Russian spiritual-moral values” are Russia’s non-Russian and non-Russian Orthodox populations.

The ethnic variable

Russia’s birth rates vary across regions and ethnic and religious populations. The rates in major urban centers resemble those of Central Europe, with later marriages, widespread use of birth control, and a large number of single-child families. Rural regions and small towns tend to retain more traditional values around child-rearing. People in these venues marry and begin having children earlier and are far more likely to have two or more children. Yet 70 percent of Russians live in the urban centers. The citizens most likely to have large families live in villages, small towns, and Russia’s non-Russian regions and Republics. In 2023, the non-Russian share of the population was about 30%.

Putin-era policies have persistently undermined the principles of federalism enshrined in Russia’s 1993 constitution. Some non-Russians believe the assault on their special status stems, in part, from Russians fearing their higher birth rates.

Significant differences in birth rates among ethnic and religious groups within Russia pose serious policy challenges. Some groups have been more resistant to the “demographic transition” than others. The predominantly non-Russian and Muslim republics of the North Caucasus are experiencing the “demographic transition” more slowly than most Russian regions. The Chechens in particular have responded to their deportation to Central Asia during World War II with a strong pro-natal ethos.

Comparative studies find relationships between high birth rates and traditional religious beliefs in multiple places. Some accounts emphasize higher birth rates among Muslims, despite wide variation across communities. Religious conservatives in many faiths record higher birth rates: evangelical Christians, Mormons, Hindus, Orthodox Jews, and others. Some groups have historically been known for large families. In Russia, some non-Russian ethnic groups have higher birth rates than Russians. The birth rates in the largely Muslim North Caucasus have been a particular concern for Moscow. Despite birth rates among many ethnic populations declining, births in many non-Russian communities continue to remain higher than those of ethnic Russians.

Several analysts call attention to a phenomenon of ethnic groups that feel threatened responding with high fertility rates. Russia’s “punished peoples”—those accused of sympathizing with the Germans during World War II and deported from their homelands—have received particular attention. Marat Ilyasov, a scholar from Chechnya who now teaches in the US, makes a strong case for the Chechens, one of the groups that managed to return to their ancestral territory, striving for high birth rates to guarantee the nation’s survival. They have the highest birth rates in the country.

Chechens are hardly the only ethnic group in the North Caucasus with birth rates higher than the Russian average. Some official sources intentionally downplay the numbers of Chechens and other non-Russian groups in an attempt to emphasize “Russianness” and downplay the significance of non-Russian populations.

Some Russian demographers suggest that non-Russians are increasingly experiencing the “demographic revolution,” but at a slower pace. While this is plausible, complaints about changing definitions and undercounting in recent Russian censuses provide ample grounds for skepticism regarding the official numbers.

Even the official data show that birth rates continue to be higher among many of the non-Russian groups in Russia. Many leaders of non-Russian peoples claim that these populations are being sent to fight in Ukraine in far larger numbers than ethnic Russians. Russian officials try to emphasize that it is the rural population that provides most of the soldiers, due to the high wages the military offers.

Data show that individuals from ethnic republics in Russia’s far east and south have a far higher chance of being mobilized for combat. While proving intent is complicated, the numbers are shocking. Men living in Buryatia have a 50- to 100-percent greater chance of being sent to fight in Ukraine than a resident of Moscow or St. Petersburg.

It is too early to gauge whether the high numbers of deaths and injuries will stimulate a response by some groups to try increasing birth rates. It does appear that the war is resulting in a more serious decline in births among ethnic Russians in urban centers than in both Russian and non-Russian rural communities. Russia’s non-ethnic-Russian citizens increasingly perceive their populations as being singled out as cannon fodder in Ukraine.

Immigrants have also been pressed into military service, causing a precipitous drop in immigration.

Wartime policies undermine population growth

Russia’s natural population growth has been curtailed by mobilization, casualties, emigration, and widespread reluctance to have children. Illegally annexing Crimea added 2.4 million people to Russia’s population, but significantly reduced immigration from Ukraine and Moldova. After 2014, labor migration to Russia was limited to five countries in Central Asia. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine stalled, the Kremlin has consistently needed more troops, forcing increasing numbers of these workers into military service.

Offering high salaries has attracted mercenaries from Cuba, Syria and elsewhere, but devious tactics have discouraged many labor migrants. In 2023, half of Russia’s labor migrants came from Tajikistan. The Crocus City Hall terror attack in March 2024, which Russian law enforcement alleges was carried out by Tajiks, is curtailing this pipeline. Tajiks have been rounded up for deportation and subjected to physical violence. Efforts to develop new sources of labor migration from Southeast Asia have been undermined by Russia continuing to send labor migrants to Ukraine.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine also provoked another large exodus of Russians from Russia. Some families had their bags packed and were ready to leave when Russian troops crossed the border in February 2022. Mobilization in September 2022 caused an additional exodus, primarily by young men. Many information technology (IT) specialists left, believing they could continue to work while abroad.

Emigration by hundreds of thousands of young men, and an unknown number of young women, is reducing the already small cohort of Russians in prime reproductive years. Hundreds of thousands of men being sent to serve in Ukraine further limits reproductive potential. Russian women have increasingly opted to avoid pregnancy in the face of economic difficulties and growing uncertainty. In the first half of 2023, a record number of Russians applied for passports for travel abroad “just in case” (na vsyaki sluchi).

The regime has responded with efforts to prevent abortion and limit birth control. This comes at a time when abortions are less frequent. Some Russian women are choosing sterilization instead. This represents an ironic shift from the Soviet-era legacy of many women being unable to have children due to multiple abortions. Births in 2023 reflected the lowest fertility rate in the past two or three centuries.

The declining value of the ruble and raids on immigrant communities to conscript workers to fight in Ukraine have reduced the number of Central Asians seeking work in Russia. The number willing to become paid mercenaries is limited.

Russia’s leadership apparently did not anticipate the need to recruit additional soldiers for a protracted war in 2022. Doing so now represents a serious challenge. Data in 2015 indicated that Russians were pleased that Crimea was under Russian control. However, fewer than 20 percent of Russians surveyed thought their government should spend large sums to rebuild occupied areas of Ukraine, especially the Donbas region. Fewer than 10 percent said it was worth risking Russian lives to keep these territories.

The Russian government’s polling consistently reports approval for the war as high as 70–80 percent. Some Western analysts accept these numbers, and some have commissioned their own polling that confirms strong support for the war. Others are dubious, reporting data similar to those of 2015, when respondents were asked about financing reconstruction or the need to suffer casualties.

One indication that Russia’s leadership understands the problem of sending Russians to fight in Ukraine is an increasingly desperate and shortsighted attempt to find alternatives to mobilizing more Russians. After the February 2022 invasion provoked a large exodus of Russians of all ages, the “partial” mobilization conducted in September 2022 resulted in tens of thousands more, primarily young men, leaving the country. No one has precise data, and many of these Russian citizens have moved on from their initial refuge. If seven hundred thousand Russians now registered as living in Dubai is any indication, the émigrés may number far more than one million.

The people mobilized are overwhelmingly from low-income rural and non-Russian regions. Stories have emerged about recruits needing to provide their own equipment, including bandages in case of injury. Some received less than a week of training before being sent into combat. These conditions confirm the belief that the authorities view them as expendable cannon fodder. The result is widespread efforts to evade serving.

In an attempt to reduce the need for mobilization, other tactics were developed. Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the paramilitary Wagner Group, toured Russian prisons to offer convicts the opportunity to serve six months in Ukraine in return for presidential pardons. Tens of thousands took him up on the offer and died at the front. Survivors have returned to Russia, with some resuming their criminal activity, including rape and murder.

Prigozhin perished when his plane was shot down a few months after he staged an aborted march to Moscow to convince Putin to fire military commanders the Wagner leader deemed incompetent. But his program lives on, and recent reports indicate it is being expanded to include female prisoners.

Ironically, while the convicts who survive their six-month contracts have been allowed to return home, Russians who have been fighting for two years or more are still on active duty. Their families are furious. One of the few significant protest groups left in Russia, “the Council of Wives and Mothers,” that has protested the length of time their husbands and sons have been forced to serve, was declared a foreign agent in July 2023 in an effort by Putin to stifle public awareness of the treatment of soldiers and overall casualties in the war.

Despite major recruitment efforts, Russia is not experiencing a major influx of new immigrants or returning compatriots. The full-scale war has further limited the already diminishing prospects of inducing a large share of the 30 million Russians living outside of Russia to return home. In 2006, Putin signed a decree establishing a program to encourage Russians to return, and some eight hundred thousand did so between 2006 and 2018. The number of both applications and returns declined in 2020 due to COVID-19. The numbers recovered slightly in 2021 but declined after the start of the full-scale war in 2022. In 2023 the number applying to return was the lowest in a decade. The number who did return dropped below the 2020 COVID-19 level:

Legislation designed to prohibit Russians—especially mobile IT workers—from working while abroad has provoked sharp battles between security services and Russian companies that depend on these employees in a tight labor market.

Treatment of Central Asian and other foreign labor migrants has increasingly shifted to forced labor and sometimes outright slavery. Central Asians working in Russia have been rounded up and sent to join the war on Ukraine. A study of the Uzbek community reports that many Uzbeks have been arrested for minor or contrived offenses and sentenced to terms of fifteen, twenty, or even twenty-five years. Once in prison, they are offered the Wagner option of “volunteering” to fight in Ukraine.

Predatory practices have extended beyond Russia’s usual sources of migrant workers. Individuals from Nepal, Syria, and India have been recruited to work in factories or as guards at various venues in Russia. After they arrive, their passports are confiscated and they are sent to fight in Ukraine. As during World War II, punishment squads are deployed to prevent soldiers from retreating. These predatory tactics differ from the treatment of Cuban and African mercenaries who are attracted by the money.

In addition to money, another inducement to attract foreign fighters is the offer of Russian citizenship. If these commitments are honored, the result will be to add more non-Russians to the country’s population. The disastrous long-term impact of the predatory recruitment policies is clear. As information (and bodies) reach families, word spreads. Russian programs to increase labor recruitment in Southeast Asia are being undermined as word of these tactics spreads.

Conclusion

Why would a leader who has proclaimed demography to be one of the most serious threats to a nation’s future launch an unprovoked war against a neighboring country that was a significant source of labor before 2014? We may never be able to answer this. We can conclude that Putin has turned a daunting crisis into a cataclysm.

Putin’s policies cannot solve these demographic problems. He has been reiterating the importance of Russia’s dire demographic situation for a quarter-century. Manipulating demographic data, adding people in occupied Ukrainian regions to Russia’s population, and omitting war casualties from the census do not generate sustainable population growth. These tactics cannot meet the needs of employers who report serious labor shortages in nearly every sector of the economy. Russia’s defense industry is operating “three shifts” by requiring workers to work sixty to seventy hours per week. The sustainability of these measures and the impact on quality raise significant questions. Financial incentives are undermined when workers are compelled to make “voluntary” contributions to fund the war effort.

In 2022–2023, the most serious labor shortages were reported in agriculture and construction, sectors that rely heavily on Central Asian migrants. Now Russia’s government is endeavoring to attract labor from India, Pakistan, and North Korea to replace the war casualties and émigrés. Firms involved in production, retail, logistics, and e-commerce face labor shortages. While manufacturers continue to prefer Russian workers, one company told journalists that bringing workers from India required paying salaries at the same level as those for Russian staff, plus the cost of transporting and registering the workers. Yet the company was looking for a contractor to arrange providing five hundred workers from India. The reasoning was that workers who lack Russian language are less likely to be recruited by competitors, while foreign workers who know Russian are more mobile.

A Russian entrepreneur noted that labor brokers in Kazakhstan smuggle thousands of workers from Bangladesh into that country in containers each year. They are now offering their services to Russian employers, suggesting that the same tactics can be used to bring workers from India. Others point out that labor from India remains crucial in several Middle Eastern countries where wages are higher, making Russia the option for the least skilled and least desirable migrants.

Sources of labor globally are increasing due to population growth in developing countries that face serious impacts from climate change. Demographers project that the major growth in global population during the rest of the twenty-first century will be in Africa. Yet the six African countries with the largest populations also appear on most lists of the places likely to face the greatest threats from climate change. As in Latin America, this will result in “green migration.” These are not traditional sources of labor for Russia, and the regime may choose to rely on these countries for mercenaries.

Putin’s government has not evinced visible concern that Russia’s population might be cut in half by century’s end. Unless Russia’s leaders can develop and finance a more effective set of policies, the only solutions to population decline will be a combination of incorporating non-Russian territory and/or immigration from Asia and Africa.

If Putin truly believed that demography is an existential problem for Russia, he might have calculated how many Ukrainians lived or worked in Russia before annexing Crimea and launching an invasion.

Putin’s regime is both seeking and discouraging repatriation by compatriots. On February 1, 2024, Russian media reported new legislation allowing the government to seize property belonging to Russians outside the country who criticize the war on Ukraine. Multiple instances have been reported of Russian diplomats and security personnel demanding that other countries detain and repatriate Russians who speak freely. Threats to seize their property in Russia are a logical extension of policies threatening family members still living in Russia.

At the same time, Russia’s policy does encourage compatriots to return, even as other citizens continue to depart.

One possible solution to the problems compounding Russia’s labor shortage would be to decentralize policy, allowing Russian regions to make their own decisions about attracting foreign labor. The resulting competition could go a long way toward improving conditions for foreign workers. Regional development was the prime mover in China’s massive urbanization and industrialization after 1978. While this involved horizontal mobility within the country, the model would resemble the significant influx of immigrants that, at least thus far, has kept the US population at well above replacement level. As Russia’s population continues to decline, immigrants will be increasingly vital to economic recovery.

Invading Ukraine while facing a catastrophic demographic challenge appears to have been a massive folly for the Kremlin. Hubris based on an astonishing intelligence failure might account for the miscalculation. Another possible explanation is that Putin understood that Russia’s economic and demographic challenges mean the country would not be in a more favorable condition any time in the coming decades.

Every corner of Russia’s economy is experiencing personnel shortages, while war casualties continue to shrink the able-bodied population. Russians and their leaders must learn to value diversity, or Russia will have an increasingly smaller and older population. Either way, there will be fewer ethnic Russians.

Harley Balzer retired in July 2016 after 33 years in the Department of Government, School of Foreign Service, and associated faculty member of the History Department at Georgetown University. He was founding director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies from 1987-2001. Prior to Georgetown he taught at Grinnell College and Boston University, and held post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard’s Russian Research Center and the MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society. In 1982-83 he was a congressional fellow in the office of Congressman Lee Hamilton, where he helped secure passage of the Soviet-East-European Research and Training Act (Title VIII).

In 1992-93 Balzer served as executive director and chairman of the board of the International Science Foundation, George Soros’s largest program to aid the former Soviet Union. From 1998 to 2009, he was a member of the Governing Council of the Basic Research and Higher Education (BRHE) Program, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, and Russian Ministry of Education. BRHE established 20 Research and Education Centers at Russian Universities, and was significantly expanded by the Russian government using their own resources.

His publications have focused on Russian and Soviet history, Russian politics, Russian education, science and technology, and comparative work on Russia and China.

The Eurasia Center’s mission is to promote policies that strengthen stability, democratic values, and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe in the West to the Caucasus, Russia, and Central Asia in the East.

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The modern history of a single park in east Ukrainian city Luhansk offers insights into the memory war currently being waged by the Kremlin. In 1972, the Communist authorities in Soviet Luhansk decided to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the USSR by transforming a local cemetery into a Friendship of Peoples Park. Once construction got underway, workers soon began uncovering mass graves of people murdered during the Stalin era. This news was suppressed until 1989, when it was belatedly reported in the local newspaper. One year later, a memorial to the victims of Stalinist mass killings was erected at the site.

This initial monument was part of a broader movement for historical justice that emerged in the twilight years of the USSR as local historians, journalists, and officials sought to document the crimes of the Communist authorities in the Luhansk region. Following Ukrainian independence, the opening of national archives made it possible to identify and honor victims of the Communist regime and end decades of censorship that had suppressed knowledge of Soviet crimes against humanity including the Holodomor, an artificially engineered famine in 1930s Ukraine that killed millions of Ukrainians.

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During the early years of Ukrainian independence, Luhansk’s Friendship of Peoples Park remained a space of contested memory. While retaining its old Soviet era name, it gradually acquired a range of new memorials including a monument to Soviet soldiers who fought in Afghanistan, a cross marking the grave of the city’s former mayor, and a memorial to the victims of the Holodomor.

In 2009, following decades of public pressure, the park was renamed as the Garden of Remembrance. At this point, it seemed as though the long task of restoring historical memory in Luhansk was finally complete. However, the onset of Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014 transformed the memory politics of the region once again and revived many of the darkest chapters of the Soviet years.

When Kremlin forces occupied Luhansk in the spring of 2014, they soon began attempting to transform remembrance of the Soviet era. While monuments to Lenin were being dismantled elsewhere in Ukraine, the Russian authorities in Luhansk were erecting new monuments glorifying the Soviet past and celebrating the “liberation” of the city from Ukrainian rule. This mirrored similar processes that were underway in other Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, including nearby Donetsk and the Crimean peninsula.

Curiously, many memorials in Luhansk honoring the victims of the Soviet era initially remained untouched. This changed with the full-scale invasion of February 2022, which led to a more aggressive approach to the eradication of Ukrainian historical memory. In the second half of 2022, the Holodomor memorial in Mariupol was demolished. By summer 2024, the Russian occupation authorities had also dismantled monuments in Luhansk honoring the victims of the Holodomor and the Stalinist Terror.

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The occupation authorities in Luhansk have attempted to justify these measures by framing the Holodomor as a Ukrainian propaganda myth and positioning memorials to the victims of Soviet crimes as “pilgrimage sites for Ukrainian nationalists.” They have also argued that the dismantling of monuments is in response to grassroots demands from the local population.

Russia’s selective monument removals are part of a deliberate strategy to rehabilitate favorable aspects of the Soviet past while whitewashing the crimes of the Communist era. A similarly partisan approach has been adopted toward the historical role of Tsarist Russia. Throughout occupied regions of Ukraine, the Kremlin seeks to craft a narrative glorifying Russian imperialism that legitimizes Moscow’s land grab while suppressing any traces of a separate Ukrainian national identity. In this manner, Putin is weaponizing the past to serve his own present-day geopolitical ambitions.

The demolition of memorials is only one aspect of Russia’s war on Ukrainian national identity. In areas of Ukraine under Kremlin control, anyone deemed pro-Ukrainian is at risk of being detained or simply disappearing. Speaking Ukrainian is considered a serious offense. Ukrainians are pressured into accepting Russian citizenship, while thousands of Ukrainian children have been abducted and sent to Russia, where they are subjected to indoctrination in camps designed to rob them of their Ukrainian heritage.

Unlike earlier attempts to erase entire nations, today’s Kremlin campaign to extinguish Ukrainian identity is taking place in full view of international audiences in the heart of twenty-first century Europe. This poses fundamental challenges to the entire notion of a rules-based international order and represents a major obstacle to any future peace process. As long as Russia remains committed to the destruction of Ukraine, a truly sustainable settlement to today’s war will remain elusive.

Yevhenii Monastyrskyi is a PhD student of history at Harvard University and a lecturer at Kyiv School of Economics. John Vsetecka is an assistant professor of history at Nova Southeastern University.

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PKK penetration of the DAANES has also created a range of negative consequences for Syrians in the northeast, including relentless Turkish targeting of the area, anti-democratic governance by the PYD, systemic corruption, and armed clashes between the SDF and insurgents in Deir ez-Zor. To create conditions for a wider solution to the Syria crisis and satisfy their own interests, Washington and Ankara must find a mutually agreeable course of action; the two countries are due for a strategic dialogue on Syria later this year, where options can be scrutinized. A perennial idea for solving the impasse calls for the United States to facilitate delinking of the DAANES/SDF and the PKK. However, such a decoupling is easier said than done, and its feasibility hinges on US and Turkish willingness to make tough concessions.

Reign of the PKK

Despite unofficial US government claims to the contrary, the PKK has been intimately tied to the governance and security structures of northeast Syria from its inception. The foundational expertise and personnel that enabled the PYD and YPG to defend, administer, and expand their territorial holdings came from veteran PKK members. Turkish, Iraqi, and Iranian Kurds affiliated with the PKK and its franchises flocked to northeast Syria after the outbreak of the civil war in 2011, forming the core of the area’s administrative and military personnel. PKK veterans assumed greater responsibility as Syria’s security situation deteriorated and new adversaries like ISIS confronted the nascent self-administration. Senior YPG leaders were often Syrian Kurds who had spent time fighting abroad, such as future SDF commander Mazloum Abdi.

The network of experienced PKK operatives, or kadros in local parlance, subsequently became the chief conduit for PKK influence in the northeast’s civil and military architecture. While the DAANES has established myriad local political, security, and administrative councils and committees across its territory, power ultimately rests with the kadros assigned to “advise” them; no local authority can overrule the decisions handed down by the often foreign PKK veterans. Key economic functions, such as extracting, transporting, and selling oil from occupied fields in Deir ez-Zor, also fall under the kadros’ purview. Leaders in the DAANES-sponsored local councils have no oversight of the process, creating rampant opportunities for corruption. Smugglers allegedly seek the protection of kadros to protect their operations, and some experts contend that the YPG generates large swaths of its funding from kadros-linked oil diversion.

In the multi-ethnic SDF, kadros are a linchpin of the entire force; they comprise the most experienced fighters and often lead the forces’ non-Kurdish formations. An analysis of YPG casualty figures from 2013 to 2016 showed that nearly half of the militia’s battle deaths were Turkish citizens, demonstrating the importance of foreign fighters on the frontline. During the main phase of operations against ISIS in Syria, units of kadros frequently fought alongside embedded US troops in high-stakes operations, such as in amphibious crossings near Manbij and the liberation of Raqqa. The SDF’s—or, rather, the YPG leadership’s—lack of confidence in Arab partner forces tasked with holding Arab-majority areas like Deir ez-Zor, translated to the appointment of “shadow commander” kadros in these formations as well. PKK leadership reportedly even assigned kadros as minders for SDF commander Abdi.

Kadros are not the only PKK presence in the northeast. The party also works through a proxy known as the Revolutionary Youth (RY), a political organization that conducts civic and military programming but also engages in child recruitment for the PKK. The RY has also been instrumental in the recent PYD-instigated repression of opposing Kurdish political parties operating in the DAANES—a pattern dating back to the earliest days of the civil war in Syria. Offices of the Kurdish National Council (KNC), a Kurdish political alliance closely linked with the Iraq-based Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and opposed to the PKK, are frequent targets of RY-linked arson attacks. In spite of these actions, the SDF and other security elements make no public effort to stymie the RY. In March, the US Department of State delivered a rebuke to SDF leadership over its failures to halt attacks on KNC offices and officials.

Discord in the DAANES

The entrenchment of the PKK has further complicated the already complex dynamics in northeast Syria. Turkey has adopted a more aggressive strategy for countering the PKK in Syria and Iraq, leading to several major military operations, as well as recent assassination and airstrike campaigns targeting DAANES officials, SDF fighters, and civilian infrastructure in the northeast. Non-Kurdish Syrians have their frustrations with the kadros’ rule, as demonstrated by Arab grievances aired during last year’s uprising and ensuing SDF crackdown in DAANES-controlled Deir ez-Zor. The United States is well aware of Turkish concerns and the degree of PKK influence in the northeast, though it has little to show for its efforts to dilute the latter. In spite of years of US-facilitated negotiations between the two Kurdish parties, the PYD continues to obstruct any power-sharing agreement with the KNC.

The situation within the SDF and its civil Syrian Democratic Council counterpart is no less knotted. Insiders and analysts have noted signs of a schism between hardliners and pragmatists within the Kurdish power structures. The former dismisses the idea of delinking from the PKK and eschews any power-sharing settlement with other Kurdish parties; hardliners also allegedly maintain a firm hold on critical political and security functions in the northeast. Meanwhile, pragmatists are open to dialogue and compromise with groups like the KNC; they favor greater international engagement and, perhaps, even breaking with the PKK.

Mazloum Abdi, ostensibly the leader of the pragmatists, claimed in 2020 that the SDF was working to remove foreign kadros from positions of authority and eventually from Syria, stating that “regional Kurdish support” was no longer needed in the DAANES’s extensive network of civic and military bodies. Whether Abdi was unwilling or unable to follow through is an open question, but PKK influence remains just as strong, if not stronger, four years later. Observers on the ground in the northeast have also reported the training of fresh, local Syrian kadros who now operate in areas such as Manbij and Deir ez-Zor, according to speakers in an expert working group attended by the author.

The narrow path to a win-win-win

Beyond its firm grip on power in the area, a complete decoupling of the PKK from northeast Syria also faces obstacles from stakeholders. The PKK has little current incentive to abandon or reduce its presence in Syria while it is losing ground in its traditional refuge in northern Iraq. If claims of oil revenue diversion are correct, hypothesized to constitute 40 percent or more of DAANES oil production, the group also stands to lose a significant fundraising stream connected to the kadros-run extraction operations. The existence of the aforementioned pragmatists might demonstrate some willingness by certain DAANES authorities to delink, but their seeming lack of leverage compared to the more militant hardliners and the lack of incentives from Washington and Ankara dim the prospect of a peaceful transition.

Were the United States and Turkey to agree on the end of direct PKK influence over northeast Syria, a mutually acceptable result would require considerable policy gymnastics from each side. First, Washington must recognize, at least tacitly, that it has empowered the PKK, as refusal to recognize empirical links between the group and the US counter-ISIS campaign in Syria strains credulity and damages mutual trust. Meanwhile, Turkey cannot wish away all the PKK-sympathetic Kurds and others in northeast Syria, even if the party leadership’s grip on the area is broken. A more practical goal for both sides is elevating pragmatist local Syrian elements in the DAANES and SDF and brokering a sustainable peace with Ankara. Reporting on previous US-Turkish compromise attempts indicated that Turkey would accept an opening with the Syrian Kurds in tandem with the expulsion of foreign PKK-linked Kurds, though the path to this might be dubious.

To whatever degree the purging of PKK personnel is operationalized, the effort would presumably create gaps in local administrative, governance, and security capabilities, which would need to be filled. Can the United States contribute to filling such gaps? US policymakers are leaning toward ending the US presence in northeast Syria, and discussions have already occurred on potential exit strategies. However, if an agreement can be reached with Turkey that ejects the PKK from the DAANES, this may incline Washington to invest in its involvement in the northeast to ease the transition from kadros administration to the local bodies already incorporated under the DAANES. Especially critical would be ensuring the competence of security forces tasked with maintaining the fight against ISIS, necessitating closer collaboration between the United States and Turkey.

The odds are slim that the two countries will reach the preconditions and compromises necessary for a delinking deal, let alone smoothly execute it in the face of expected PKK opposition. Still, the strategic logic presents wins for the United States, Turkey, and northeast Syria: Washington eases conflict with Turkey and maintains its Syrian partner, hedged on a commitment of diplomatic energy and finesse rather than new troops or money; Ankara drives a bitter foe from its physical and financial haven on the Syrian border and advances its thaw with Washington; and Syrians in the northeast can take the reins back from foreign militants ruling from the shadows. An agreement on the northeast could also jumpstart wider collaboration on Syria at a critical moment, benefiting millions of Syrians throughout the country still suffering from the fallout of their civil war. With soaring violence and humanitarian needs throughout the country, a burst of joint US-Turkish leadership has the potential to bring the international community back to the table and address the most grievous symptoms of the Syrian crisis.

JP Reppeto is an assistant with the Syria Strategy Project and a former Young Global Professional with the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center & Middle East Programs. Follow him on X: @jp_reppeto

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Despite barely having a navy of its own, Ukraine has managed to sink or severely damage approximately one-third of Putin’s fleet, forcing the bulk of his remaining warships to retreat from occupied Crimea. The war at sea has gone so badly for Russia that by spring 2024, Britain’s Ministry of Defense was already declaring the Black Sea Fleet “functionally inactive.”

The details of this year’s Russian Navy Day program provided some hints of the inglorious reality behind Moscow’s efforts to project naval strength. Tellingly, the traditional parade of Russian warships along the Neva River to the Kronstadt naval base, which usually serves as the centerpiece of the entire holiday, was canceled due to security concerns. In its place, a reduced flotilla took part in a significantly scaled down event that featured around half as many vessels as in previous years.

Despite being by far the smallest Russian Navy Day since the holiday was reinstated in 2017, this year’s event nevertheless represented an excellent opportunity for Putin to honor Russia’s fallen sailors and vow retribution for the country’s unprecedented losses in the Black Sea. In fact, he did nothing of the sort. Throughout his official address, Putin barely mentioned the casualties suffered or the sacrifices made by the Russian Navy during the invasion of Ukraine. Instead, the Kremlin dictator preferred to flush Russia’s Black Sea defeats down the memory hole. He was aided by the loyal Russian media, which carefully avoided any awkward references to the disaster that has befallen the country’s Black Sea Fleet.

As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.

All this brings to mind an old Soviet joke that begins with Napoleon, Julius Caesar, and Alexander the Great looking down from heaven at a Red Army parade on Red Square. Caesar indicates the endless rows of Soviet troops and says, “with so many men, I could have held Germania.” Alexander points to the tanks and missiles and declares, “with such weapons of war, I could have conquered all India.” Napoleon, meanwhile, completely ignores the parade and is instead engrossed in a copy of Pravda. “If I had such a newspaper,” he proclaims, “nobody would have heard of Waterloo.”

Many Soviet jokes have not aged well, but this particular punchline remains as relevant as ever in modern Russia, where Putin has succeeded in creating a propaganda machine every bit as potent as its Soviet predecessor. Today’s Kremlin-controlled multimedia ecosystem is far more sophisticated than its Communist forerunner, but it serves the same basic function of bending reality to suit the whims of Russia’s ruling elite.

For the past decade, Putin has used this unrivaled information weapon to fuel the biggest European invasion since World War II. Kremlin propagandists have managed to convince millions of ordinary Russians that democratic Ukraine is actually a “Nazi state” whose very existence poses an intolerable threat to Russia. Ukrainians have been demonized and dehumanized to such an extent that genocidal anti-Ukrainian rhetoric is now a routine feature on prime time Russian TV.

The success of these efforts is all too apparent, with a wide range of opinion polls, research, and anecdotal evidence pointing to consistently high levels of Russian public support for the invasion. Meanwhile, there is no meaningful anti-war movement in the country, despite widespread knowledge of the horrors taking place in neighboring Ukraine. This is not surprising. After all, as Voltaire once warned, those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

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Putin’s ability to distort Russian reality is genuinely terrifying, but the sheer scale of his propaganda operation could also inadvertently offer hope for the future. Many commentators have argued that failure in Ukraine would lead to the fall of the Putin regime and quite possibly the breakup of Russia itself, but these concerns may be exaggerated. While a third Russian collapse in a little over a century cannot be ruled out, the experience of the past two-and-a-half years gives good cause to believe that Moscow’s disinformation industry is more than capable of rebranding any future retreat from Ukraine in a favorable light, or of burying it completely. In other words, if the Russian media can manufacture a major war, it can also fabricate a suitably plausible peace.

Anyone who still doubts the Kremlin’s capacity to whitewash military defeat in Ukraine hasn’t been paying attention. We have recently witnessed Putin hosting the biggest naval event of the year while studiously ignoring the historic humbling of his southern fleet. It was the same story in 2022, when he ceremoniously announced that Kherson had joined Russia “forever,” only to order his beaten troops to abandon the city just weeks later. Likewise, when Russia lost the Battle of Kyiv during the initial phase of the invasion, the Kremlin refused to acknowledge defeat and absurdly insisted that the retreat from northern Ukraine was a mere “goodwill gesture.” If Putin is eventually forced to end his invasion, it seems safe to assume he will downplay this humiliation in similar fashion.

Since February 2022, Western leaders have found numerous reasons to limit their support for Ukraine. Some are restricted by modest defense budgets and competing domestic priorities. Most are afraid of possible escalation and have allowed themselves to be intimidated by Putin’s talk of Russian red lines. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says many of his country’s Western partners are also reluctant to arm Ukraine because they fear the unpredictable geopolitical consequences of a Russian defeat. This Western alarm over a possible Russian collapse is exaggerated and fails to account for the power of Putin’s propaganda.

If Russia suffers a decisive defeat in Ukraine, past experience indicates that the Kremlin will almost certainly seek to move the goalposts, change the narrative, or devise some other way of rewriting history and claiming victory. Any embarrassing evidence of failure would simply be flushed down the memory hole, along with all the sunken Russian warships of the Black Sea Fleet.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

Further reading

UkraineAlert Aug 1, 2024

Ukraine’s new F-16 jets won’t defeat Russia but will enhance air defenses

By Mykola Bielieskov

Ukraine’s fledgling fleet of F-16 jets will not win the war but should strengthen the country’s air defenses and help protect the civilian population from Russian bombardment, writes Mykola Bielieskov.

Conflict Defense Technologies

UkraineAlert Jul 16, 2024

Russia’s retreat from Crimea makes a mockery of the West’s escalation fears

By Peter Dickinson

The Russian Navy’s quiet retreat from Crimea highlights the emptiness of Putin’s red lines and the self-defeating folly of Western escalation management, writes Peter Dickinson.

Conflict Defense Policy

UkraineAlert Jul 30, 2024

Paris Olympics: Ukrainian dedicates medal to athletes killed by Russia

By Mark Temnycky

Ukrainian fencing star Olga Kharlan has won the country’s first medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics and dedicated her medal to the Ukrainian athletes “who couldn’t be here because they were killed by Russia,” writes Mark Temnycky .

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An instigating ingredient added this past weekend was the disappointing jobs report released on Friday. Analysts expected 180,000 jobs—which would signal a slowdown but still relatively healthy job growth. This was, it seems, what the Federal Reserve expected last Wednesday when it decided not to cut interest rates and its chair, Jerome Powell, said, “the labor market has come into better balance.”

Instead, 114,000 jobs were created in July. This was disappointing, and some believed it signaled that the United States is headed for slower growth than forecast and even—dare one say the dreaded word—a recession. But within a day or two, most market participants had taken a deep breath, recognizing that bad weather probably had an impact, remembering that unemployment was still near historic lows, and aware that US gross domestic product growth was far outpacing that of the rest of the Group of Seven (G7).

Then Japan happened. As several financial commentators have noted, a unique mix of problems is plaguing Japanese markets. The Bank of Japan had stuck to zero interest rates during the global cycle of rate hikes but was forced to intervene last week to avoid further yen depreciation. This now means that Japanese borrowing conditions are becoming tighter as recession risks grow, making it an outlier during the coming easing cycle—just as it was during the global cycle of rate hikes. The record Nikkei index rout on Monday can also be attributed to the export-oriented nature of Japanese firms, which had benefited from the weak yen, until now.

So why then did US markets react so violently Monday? It’s not just the jobs report and it’s not just Japan. Instead, it’s the x-factor ingredient—geopolitics. Specifically, Iran’s likely imminent attack on Israel, as retribution for the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iranian territory.

Pricing in geopolitics is almost always an impossible task for Wall Street. Speculation about equity markets is one thing. Speculation about Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s intentions is usually far outside traders’ field of expertise. With more uncertainty comes more fear—see the VIX index, which is essentially Wall Street’s fear gauge, below—surprisingly showing that the market is more concerned now than it was during Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse in March 2023. In fact, it’s the highest volatility reading since the COVID-19 pandemic, rivaling volatility during the global financial crisis.

What’s especially hard for markets is to navigate a geopolitical crisis intertwined with bad economic news. Individually, either one can be mitigated and hedged against. But together, the two developing at the same time create a haze that can make each situation appear more threatening than it actually is. How then do we find solid ground? Focus on the data.

The US economic data remains strong. The economy is slowing, but it is nowhere near a recession. And in fact, as the chart below shows, it could slow significantly before falling to the level of its G7 peers.

Moreover, data released Monday show that economic activity in the service sector grew more than expected. And remember that the United States is still creating new jobs, even if at a slower pace than before. Gas prices are significantly lower than two years ago at the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. So even if a crisis widens in the Middle East, a slower global economy should keep price increases in check.

Meanwhile, inflation is finally coming back down to the Federal Reserve’s target range of 2 percent. All this signals an economy that is, as long forecast, coming off its breakneck pace. The Federal Reserve should probably have acted sooner by cutting rates last week, but to jump into an emergency session as some have called for is not supported by the data right now and risks creating more panic. The economic fundamentals remain stable.

Geopolitical tensions actually present the greater risk to markets. No one knows how and when Iran will retaliate and what the fallout will be. And as I wrote in February, the relative weakness of the region’s economies means any worsening of the situation could send multiple countries into debt distress and trigger more market failures.

Still, the overwhelming likelihood is that whatever develops in the Middle East this week will be contained to the Middle East. While that may impact energy prices, it is unlikely to trigger wider global economic fallout. To be sure, nothing is guaranteed. The situation could deteriorate and the worst fears could be realized. But it is not the most likely outcome.

So in the days ahead, it’s geopolitical tensions that will likely move the markets more than the macroeconomics. Watch carefully in the coming days (or as Macbeth would say, “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”) as markets recognize this reality and, hopefully, cooler heads prevail.

Josh Lipsky is the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center and a former adviser at the International Monetary Fund.

Data visualizations created by Alisha Chhangani, Mrugank Bhusari, and Sophia Busch.

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Prisoner swaps between Russia and the West have an asymmetric quality: Arms dealers and assassins get traded for journalists and dissidents. Such is the moral calculus between autocratic regimes and those striving to uphold the ideals of democracy and republican governance. It is regrettable that such deals must be struck, but the cost might be quite a bit higher if truth-speakers in the dark spots of the world thought no one would bargain for their freedom in a pinch. So, the multinational deal on Thursday that returned journalists, political dissidents, and friends of the West in exchange for the release of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s cadres can be welcomed and regretted at the same time.

Given the sharp divide between Western democracies and their authoritarian antagonists in Russia, China, Iran, and elsewhere, it is remarkable that deals remain possible at all. The reality of global polarization and great-power competition means that a very small number of countries maintain diplomatic contact and influence across dividing lines, and Turkey is one of the few. Thus, Turkey’s diplomatic efforts, as well as its geographic position, made it a linchpin of the recent prisoner swap. Ankara receives a fairly steady stream of Western criticism for hedging and balancing behaviors keeping the door open to Russia, but Thursday’s deal demonstrates the wisdom of having allies with an open line to rival camps—which is why the West has generally acquiesced to the Turkish balancing act.

The politics of prisoner exchanges have been unfortunately prominent in 2024, in light of the ongoing wars in Ukraine and in Gaza, where Hamas has sought to use Israeli hostages as tools to shape the outcome of the war that followed its October 7 attacks into Israel. There have been previous exchanges of prisoners between Russia and Ukraine, including several facilitated by the United Arab Emirates, some via joint Saudi-Turkish mediation, and roughly fifty other prisoner exchanges done bilaterally or through third parties. But this week’s deal represented a different level of difficulty—politically prominent prisoners and accused spies, a half dozen countries, complex negotiations, and US electoral politics in the mix. Before this week, Ankara had been the site and the facilitator for less high-profile swaps of Russians and Americans, but after the complex deal this week, the trade space may narrow.

The international system has left an era of aspirational globalization and entered an era of hard power-driven geopolitical competition. In this era, diplomatic agility will matter a great deal, especially when coupled with economic and military leverage over prospective negotiating parties. Mediating or facilitating countries must not only have a reputation for even-handedness in the dispute in question, but they also need a degree of trust with the parties and enough geopolitical sway to incentivize cooperation. Turkey meets two key criteria in this regard: It has an imperfect alignment with the West, with sufficient friction to foster understanding of and hedging positions with non-Western powers. It also has relative self-sufficiency in defense matters, which provides it a risk tolerance in diverging from strict adherence to Western policy lines.

Prisoner exchanges, peace talks, and creative diplomacy become more difficult as alignments, bloc behavior, and other aspects of great-power competition reemerge as norms in the international system. While deterrence requires intra-alliance solidarity and discipline, deal-making requires occasional line-crossing, albeit not nonalignment altogether. Ankara clearly favors this aspect of modern statecraft. It remains a robust NATO member, passing the 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense spending commitment this year and solidly supporting collective defense requirements, including significant military support to Ukraine in the current conflict. Yet it engages in line-crossing diplomatic gambits in pursuit of de-escalation with some frequency, including in the Caucasus, Libya, Israel-Palestine (less successfully), and the war in Ukraine.

The swap just completed is in part a fruit of such line-crossing. That Ankara can pull off the balancing act of providing lethal aid to Russia’s enemies, fully supporting Western military deterrence, yet trading and making deals with Moscow in a manner that helps US policy interests is both rare and valuable. So the next time an article in a Western publication claims that Turkey is an ally in name only or not an ally at all due to imperfect alignment, it might be worth remembering that bad allies are a good deal more useful than enemies or neutrals, especially when they have demonstrated military, economic, and diplomatic heft.

Rich Outzen is a geopolitical consultant and nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Turkey with thirty-two years of government service both in uniform and as a civilian. Follow him on Twitter @RichOutzen.

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I am very happy that some of the hostages, including Russian citizens who were captured solely because of their honesty and courage, have been freed. They stood against the war in Ukraine and fought for freedom. Until the moment they were released, I feared that some of them would end their lives in prison.

Who gained freedom thanks to these efforts?

One is seventy-one-year-old Oleg Orlov, a legendary Soviet human rights defender and one of the leaders of Memorial, an organization that received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. Orlov publicly called the Putin regime totalitarian and fascist, and for this, he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison this year.

There is also Sasha Skochilenko, a thirty-three-year-old artist from St. Petersburg. At the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she made a small art performance in which she replaced price tags in a grocery store with anti-war slogans. For this, she was sentenced to seven years in prison. Her imprisonment posed a direct threat to her life: Sasha has a heart defect and bipolar disorder, and in the conditions of a Russian prison, she could have died.

Another example is the schoolboy Kevin Lik, who is now nineteen years old but was arrested while still a minor. He was accused of photographing military equipment and sending the photos to someone abroad. He was accused of state treason. Obviously, the Russian authorities themselves did not believe that a schoolboy could be a spy, and in the end, he was sentenced to only four years in prison, whereas in Russia, espionage usually results in much longer sentences. However, this is practically a child, and he was sentenced to four years in prison.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, a prominent activist and journalist whom Russian special services tried to poison, sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. Ilya Yashin, probably the most famous opposition figure in Russia after Navalny’s death, sentenced to eight-and-a-half years. 

Now Evan, Paul, Oleg, Sasha, Kevin, Vladimir, Ilya, and other hostages of Putin’s regime have gained freedom.

But even on such a day, I cannot stop thinking about the thousands of people who remain in Putin’s prisons. About the poet Zhenya Berkovich. About the politician Alexei Gorinov, who protested against the war from the first day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and is now dying in prison. About Daniil Kholodny, an information technology specialist who was imprisoned for eight years for creating a website for now-deceased opposition leader Alexei Navalny. About thousands of other people.

I do not call them all “hostages” by chance.

I am sure that most people living in Russia feel like hostages. About twenty-five years ago, power in Russia was seized by a gang of terrorists led by Vladimir Putin. All these years, they have been terrorizing the country’s population, imprisoning people for any disobedience, teaching citizens to think that resistance is impossible and useless, doing everything to make Russians develop Stockholm syndrome. It is impossible to help all of them; it is impossible to exchange millions of people. But it is important to remember that thousands of hostages are sitting in Putin’s prisons. And over the years, Putin has successfully turned the whole country into a gulag. And many people feel like hostages, even if they are not behind bars.

Mikhail Zygar is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker, and the founding editor-in-chief of Russia’s only independent news television channel, Dozhd (TVRain). He was recently sentenced in absentia by a Moscow court to eight and a half years in prison for criticizing the Russian army.

A version of this article originally appeared on Zygar’s Substack, the Last Pioneer.

The post As sixteen of Putin’s prisoners come home, don’t forget the millions of hostages who remain appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Based on this feedback, this blog series was started to highlight important information about targeted human rights sanctions as they relate to the Islamic Republic of Iran; major updates on Iranian perpetrators who have been sanctioned for human rights abuses and why; and any other information that may be relevant to affected communities. Input is welcomed from readers, particularly in Iranian civil society, for questions and topics that should be addressed.

This page will be subsequently updated with a Persian translation of the post. 

Background

Despite the numerous sanctions issued against individuals linked to the Islamic Republic of Iran, an “illicit global network of shell companies, banks, and exchange houses” allows many of them to evade the consequences. This is partly due to the complications involved in identifying the true owner of an asset, the “beneficial owner.” A beneficial owner is a natural person—i.e., an individual, as opposed to a legal person or entity—who actually owns or controls a legal entity. 

Why is transparency over beneficial ownership important?

Targeted sanctions generally—though not always—involve freezing the assets of designated individuals or entities. Identifying property, including legal entities, they own or control is, therefore, a key component of sanctions enforcement. 

Increased transparency over beneficial ownership, as well as leaked documents, have yielded examples that highlight why beneficial ownership information is critical for sanctions enforcement. Leaked documents show that Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich changed the beneficial ownership of trusts shortly after the start of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine—seemingly to avoid asset freezes. His seven children are now the beneficial owners of at least $7 billion. When Luxembourg established a public database of beneficial ownership in 2019, investigators used it to map the local activity and businesses of Calabrian crime group ‘Ndrangheta; uncover additional evidence of allegedly corrupt dealings undertaken by former-Argentinian President Mauricio Macri’s family while he was in office; and identify the beneficial owners of properties throughout Europe bought by companies registered in Luxembourg, such as those of an Indonesian businessman accused of human rights abuses and tax evasion.

Such transparency can help investigators identify Iranian-linked assets globally, but especially in jurisdictions where they are known to have traveled. While there are critical privacy considerations that must be taken into account,  obstacles to accessing the information must be limited to ensure as much transparency as possible. This can ultimately increase the effectiveness of targeted sanctions through the identification of all relevant assets which can be promptly frozen, and, where the appropriate legal standards are met, seized.

When do jurisdictions restrict the legal entities of designated persons?

Asset freezes vary depending on the jurisdiction, but they generally prevent designated persons from accessing their property, such as bank accounts, real estate, and other real property, and ban others from engaging in financial transactions with those designated persons. When it comes to legal entities—which may have multiple owners and stakeholders, only some of whom are designated—jurisdictions generally require that designated persons’ ownership or control reaches a certain threshold.

• Australia: The Australian government prohibits dealing with “controlled assets,” which are those owned or controlled by a designated person or entity, but there does not appear to be public guidance or a definition for determining ownership or control.
• Canada: When a property is deemed controlled by a designated person, Canadian persons are prohibited from “dealing in” it. In 2023, Canada amended its Special Economic Measures Act and Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act to include provisions under which a designated person is considered to control an entity when it meets one of three criteria: if they have at least 50 percent ownership or voting rights; they have the direct or indirect ability to “change the composition or powers of the entity’s board of directors”; or, it “is reasonable to conclude” that they are directly or indirectly able to direct the entity’s activities. 
• European Union: If an entity is owned or controlled by a designated person, then the funds and economic resources of that entity must also be frozen. Ownership involves possession of over 50 percent “proprietary rights” or a majority interest. Control is determined according to a non-exhaustive list of criteria, which includes the right or exercise of power “to appoint or remove a majority of the members of the administrative, management or supervisory body”; the right to use all or part of the entity’s assets; and the sharing of financial liabilities of the entity, or guaranteeing those liabilities. 
• United Kingdom: An entity is subject to an asset freeze and restrictions on “some financial services” when it is owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by a designated person. Like Canada, the United Kingdom requires one of three criteria to be met to establish ownership or control: when the person directly or indirectly holds more than 50 percent of the shares or voting rights; when they have the right to directly or indirectly appoint or remove a majority of the board of directors; or when it’s “reasonable to expect” the person would be able to “ensure the affairs of the entity are conducted in accordance with the person’s wishes.”
• United States: The US government uses the “50 Percent Rule”: when one or more “blocked” (i.e., designated) persons own an entity “by 50 percent or more in the aggregate,” then that entity is itself considered blocked. While the United States does not evaluate control under this rule, it may designate the entity itself if it is determined to be controlled by a designated person.

How are jurisdictions changing beneficial ownership frameworks?

To prevent designated persons from hiding their ownership of assets, jurisdictions have strengthened corporate transparency and reporting requirements on beneficial ownership. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF)—an intergovernmental organization tasked with combatting money laundering and terrorist and proliferation financing—released updated guidance on beneficial ownership in 2023. It recommended that countries establish a beneficial ownership register or alternative mechanism to document ownership information. 

• Australia: The Australian government has committed to beneficial ownership reform between January 2024 and December 2025 as part of its Third Open Government Partnership National Action Plan. This will include implementing a public beneficial ownership register, for which the Treasury previously undertook a consultation process in 2022.
• Canada: As of January 22, 2024, all corporations governed by the Canada Business Corporations Act are required to file beneficial ownership (or “individuals with significant control,” or ISC) information. Businesses have been required to maintain their own ISC registers since June 2019 but were not previously required to file them with the government. Some of the information in the filings—such as full legal names, the description of the significant control, the dates of significant control, and certain addresses—will be available through an online search on Corporations Canada, the country’s federal corporate regulator.
• European Union: The EU uses the Beneficial Ownership Registers Interconnection System (BORIS) to link the national registers of member states Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway. This was set up in line with a 2015 European Parliament and Council directive, as amended in 2018. Access to some information is restricted according to national laws. In November 2022, the Court of Justice of the European Union annulled provisions of a directive that granted public access to beneficial ownership information. A new version of the directive would instead grant access to the register to persons with a “legitimate interest” in the beneficial ownership information, like journalists or civil society. In January 2024, the European Council and Parliament reached a provisional agreement that includes provisions to make beneficial ownership rules “more harmonised and transparent,” for example, by clarifying rules to prevent beneficial owners from “hiding behind multiple layers of ownership of companies.” Notably, the beneficial ownership threshold was set at 25 percent.
• United Kingdom: The UK has three registers: for “people with significant control,” for trusts, and for overseas entities. Overseas entities were required to register with Companies House, the country’s corporate regulator, and tell them who the beneficial owners or managing officers were by January 21, 2023. Still, in February 2023, it was reported that almost half the companies required to do so had not. An act in the final stages of legislative approval will include reforms to Companies House, such as identity verification for certain personnel, more effective investigation and enforcement powers, and enhanced personal privacy protections.
• United States: Effective January 1, 2024, as required under the 2021 Corporate Transparency Act, certain “reporting companies”—including US-based corporations and limited liability companies, as well as foreign companies registered to do business in the US—must report information about their beneficial owners to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). This information will be stored in the Beneficial Ownership Information database. The Department of the Treasury issued a final rule that makes money services businesses, casinos, and “other non-bank financial institutions that have anti-money laundering obligations” eligible for access to the beneficial ownership registry. 

Celeste Kmiotek is a staff lawyer for the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council.

Lisandra Novo is a staff lawyer for the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council.

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At least two hundred people have been killed and thousands more injured in protests that included law enforcement firing on protesters, as Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her government face the most serious popular challenge of the past decade. Many Bangladeshis have been arrested, and cases against thousands of people have been filed.

Two weeks of heightened violence has left visible damage to property in cities across the country. Burned buildings stand as testimonies to anger and mayhem, but what remains unknown is the exact number of deaths, injuries, and missing. The extent of the lethal force used by members of law enforcement agencies is unprecedented in the history of the country, which has all too often experienced bouts of political violence since its inception in 1971.

Despite the claim of a gradual return to normalcy, an overwhelming number of police and soldiers are patrolling the streets of major cities, and a shoot-on-sight order is still in place for curfew violators. The government is on edge, economic activity has stalled, and many citizens are in a state of shock and uncertain about what will come next. For Bangladesh watchers, the question is whether Hasina has weathered the political storm or if the current situation is a larger tempest in the making.

How did it begin?

This episode of protest began in early July as peaceful student demonstrations demanding reform of the quota system in public service. This quota system, which reserved 56 percent of government jobs to various categories, was widely considered by students to be discriminatory and was allegedly used by the government as a means of patronage dispensation. The system was scrapped in 2018 after students launched a movement against it, but it was reinstated by Bangladesh’s High Court in June 2024. The government appealed, and the Supreme Court suspended the verdict, scheduling a hearing for August 6. However, students demanded that the system be reformed by enacting a law. The government insisted that there was nothing it could do while the issue is being litigated. The students felt that this was a stealthy way of reinstating the system.

The situation took an ominous turn after activists aligned with the ruling party swooped in on the demonstrators as they protested Hasina’s comments at a press conference on July 14. In that press conference, Hasina likened the demonstrators with collaborators of the Pakistani army during the war of independence in 1971. As the quota system reserves a percentage of government jobs for the descendants of war of independence veterans, Hasina portrayed opposition to the policy as demeaning to veterans. In the following days, the students organized street protests and called for a general strike, which was confronted with force by police and ruling party activists, leading to the deaths of some students. On July 16, the government closed all educational institutions for an indefinite period.

The situation further deteriorated on July 18, as thousands of protesters joined the students on the street; at least twenty-five people died throughout the country and various public buildings were set ablaze in the capital and elsewhere. The government stopped services. Then the government backtracked and offered to negotiate, but by then the protests had transcended the quota issue.

On July 19, demonstrations engulfed the entire country. The number of deaths, the extent of the spread of protests, and the ferocity of police response made it one of the worst days in the history of the country. Curfew was imposed, the military was called in, a shoot-on-sight order was issued, and internet and broadband services were completely shut down. Yet the violence continued for days, and the death toll continued to mount. 

In the meantime, the government met a delegation of the agitating students, and the Supreme Court voided the High Court verdict, issuing guidance to drastically reduce the quota to only 7 percent. However, the government resorted to heavy-handed measures, including allegedly abducting six student leaders of the movement and detaining them without charges. While detained, the student leaders issued a video message on July 28 calling off the movement, but other leaders continued the organize protests.

A perfect storm?

The peaceful student protest transformed into an antigovernment upsurge because of simmering discontent among younger Bangladeshis, as well as in a large segment of the wider society. Economic and political disenfranchisement drove the youth. The economic growth they have heard about for a long time seems to have left them behind. They see very little prospect of a decent job while they witness unbridled corruption and the extravagant lifestyle of a new wealthy class. According to official accounts, unemployment among youth is 15.74 percent and at least 41 percent of youth between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four are not in school, employed, or engaged in job training.

Bangladeshi youth were supposed to be the kingmakers in a free and fair electoral process, the role their predecessors played in the election of 2008. But that opportunity was taken away through fraudulent elections. The government’s disregard for their demands regarding quota reform was symptomatic of a system that cares little for them. Violence perpetrated by the student wing of the ruling party was the instigation that unleashed the anger within the student community.

As for the larger population, resentments originating from rampant corruption by the cronies of the ruling party, impunity enjoyed by party henchmen, utter disregard to the sufferings of the common people, and concentration of power at the hands of one person—Hasina—all came together.

While the regime has a support base, it is bereft of moral legitimacy due to rigged elections. Increasingly, the government also lacked performance legitimacy as the development narrative has been unraveling since summer 2022. Skyrocketing inflation and dwindling foreign reserves have put the government in a precarious situation. In the past decade, Hasina has increasingly relied on force, leading many international organizations, including the Varieties of Democracy Institute, to describe Bangladesh as an autocracy.

What is next for Hasina?

This week, the city streets in Dhaka were filled with cars and buses, and shops and offices are being opened once again. A semblance of normalcy may return in the short run. But the political ground has shifted, and the possibility of a return to the status quo is unlikely. As such, the country is standing at a crossroads.

The number of deaths and the extent of police actions have laid bare the fact that the ruling party and Hasina are entirely dependent on brute force. The upheaval appears to have shaken the regime’s sense of invincibility.

By creating a narrative that her government is facing “terrorists,” Hasina is trying to gain sympathy and tacit support from the international community, or at least their silence. The international community, however, should see through this charade and raise its voice against the gross violations of human rights by a regime that wants to stay in power without a popular mandate.

So, what’s next? Dubbed “Asia’s Iron Lady,” Hasina may double down on more persecution and arrests in an attempt to stem further unrest. This may lead to a closed autocracy in Bangladesh. Alternatively, as discontent continues to grow and demands for her resignation become louder, the country may erupt. 

Ali Riaz is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council South Asia Center and a distinguished professor at Illinois State University.

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We at the Atlantic Council are overjoyed and relieved that Evan has been released after 491 days of wrongful imprisonment in Russia. This is a great day for Evan, his family, and his colleagues at the Wall Street Journal, who worked tirelessly to secure his release. However, it doesn’t diminish our need to speak out against Russia’s crimes not only against Evan but against free speech more broadly.

As Almar Latour, Wall Street Journal publisher and Dow Jones CEO, said at the Atlantic Council’s Distinguished Leadership Awards in May 2023, “Evan’s arrest is a symbolic reminder of the fight that we find ourselves in today. It’s autocrats versus the power of the pen—disinformation versus reliable information as the bedrock of free society.”

Latour’s point was underscored by those released with Evan: two other Americans wrongfully detained—journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and former US Marine Paul Whelan—as well as Russian political dissident and Pulitzer Prize winner Vladimir Kara-Murza, among others. In exchange, a contemptible lot, including a convicted murderer and several hackers and spies, was welcomed back to Russia by President Vladimir Putin.

Watch Latour’s full speech below:

Evan’s resilience and steadfastness are testament to the courage of journalists worldwide who take risks every day in service to freer societies. In partnership with Adrienne Arsht, the Atlantic Council has been proud to champion Evan’s cause through our “Reporters at Risk” series, which highlights those dangers and underscores the importance of supporting their critical work.

The Atlantic Council remains committed to press freedom and defending the safety of reporters at risk like Evan. As a twenty-five-year veteran of the Wall Street Journal, I welcome him home as a colleague. On behalf of the Atlantic Council, we commit ourselves to defending the freedoms he and reporters like him around the world represent.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Where does Europe stand on the green agenda? Are concerns over a wide spread “greenlash” in Europe exaggerated? Why did climate policy not play as much of a significant role in the last European Parliament elections compared to the elections in 2019? Under her next Commission mandate, will Commission President von der Leyen bring continuity on climate change policy in the EU?

On this episode of #AtlanticDebrief, Carol Schaeffer sits down with Nils Redeker, Deputy Director Jacques Delors Centre, to discuss European voter sentiment on climate policies and the future of the EU’s approach.

Fellow

Carol Schaeffer

Nonresident Senior Fellow

Europe Center

Energy & Environment Energy Transitions

The post #AtlanticDebrief – Where does Europe stand on the green agenda? | A debrief from Niels Redeker appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The news broke after the Moroccan royal palace released a communiqué that referenced a letter from French President Emmanuel Macron to the king of Morocco on the commemoration of the silver jubilee of his coronation. The letter states that the “present and future of Western Sahara fall within the framework of Moroccan sovereignty.” In his correspondence with the Moroccan king, Macron added that “France intends to act consistently with this position at both national and international levels.” Although the French position explicitly references Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, it will need more clarification and translation into concrete policies in the coming months.

Nonetheless, the French decision is particularly significant given its colonial past in North Africa and its shared responsibility with Spain in largely determining the postcolonial borders of Morocco, Algeria, and Mauritania. These borders are the origin of many of the current territorial disputes in the region. France’s endorsement of the Moroccan autonomy plan this week follows similar support from Spain in 2022 and recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara expressed by the United States in 2020 and Israel in 2023, along with a growing list of Arab and African nations.

Understanding the French calculus

France’s shift of stance comes as its relations with Morrocco have been strained. Since 2020, Rabat has pressured Paris to break the status quo—a neutrality on the issue apparently intended not to upset either Morocco or Algeria—and take a clearer stance on the Western Sahara. Striking a deal with then-US President Donald Trump in 2020 over the disputed territories and normalizing ties with Israel boosted Morocco’s diplomatic confidence and helped redefine the kingdom’s foreign policy. As a result, the Sahara issue, in the words of the Moroccan king, became “the lens through which Morocco looks at the world.”

As an example of the deteriorating bilateral relations, Mohammed VI reportedly “definitely shelved” relations with Macron and declined state visit requests by the French president last year. In addition, the kingdom started to increase its divestment from business partnerships with France—previously considered its international economic partner of choice. Torn between Morocco and Algeria, France failed to balance its act in the Maghreb after a chain of unfortunate events, including the Pegasus spyware case, a visa crisis, and the recall of Rabat’s ambassador to France in February 2023. Most recently, Morocco refused French aid after the Marrakesh earthquake in September 2023.

France, however, never stopped courting Morocco, because Paris did not want to lose strategically important economic and political ground in Africa. For its part, Rabat did not break its relations with Paris entirely, continuing its intelligence and security cooperation with France. Moroccan forces, for example, are currently helping to secure the Paris Olympics. Morocco also appointed Samira Sitail, a dual national and Makhzan insider, as its ambassador to attempt to stir the stagnant waters.

Rather than trying to deter Morocco’s ambitious Atlantic Initiative—aimed at offering landlocked Sahel countries trade access to the ocean through a $1.2 billion harbor in Dakhla, Western Sahara—France is eying a share of the economic benefits promised by the project. The only catch is how to address the 2021 European Union (EU) court ruling against the Morocco-EU trade deal over Western Sahara, which the Elysée may now advocate to reverse together with other pro-Moroccan EU countries ahead of the final judgment, due in a few months.

Western Sahara and global realignment

Another defining factor in understanding the recent French decision lies in the global realignment behind old Cold War frontiers, and NATO allies engaging in historic contests against increasingly destabilizing forces. Morocco has always been a reliable partner to the global liberal West in its fight against Russian aggression and different terrorist groups. The country is also more-or-less aligned with the United States and France on a common vision of the future. As Iran and its proxies reinforce ties with the Algerian regime, which has been cultivating close relations with Russia since the 1970s, North Atlantic allies fear a new stronghold of antagonists in North Africa.

For the past five decades, Western Sahara has been a major security loophole at the doors of the Mediterranean and the Sahel. With growing rumors about Iranian and Wagner Group presence among Sahrawis in the Tindouf camps in western Algeria, where an estimated 173,600 refugees live, it’s becoming imperative for the United States and European countries to try to resolve the Western Sahara file once and for all.

Disrupting the status quo in the Maghreb

While on paper the French decision to side with Morocco may seem in line with its economic and global priorities, it does come at a price. EU neutrality in the Western Sahara conflict and exclusive reliance on the United Nations peacekeeping mission to maintain the status quo between Rabat and Algiers has been central to stabilizing the region. After the United States and Spain sided with Morocco, Algeria responded by severing diplomatic relations with Morocco in 2021 and recalling its ambassador in Madrid in 2022. Algeria also disrupted gas exports to Spain through Morocco by closing the EU-Maghreb pipeline just as tensions were building around Russia’s gas exports ahead of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The first reaction by Algiers to Macron’s swing toward Mohammed VI described France and Morocco as “colonial powers, new and old.” This was followed on Tuesday by Algeria recalling its ambassador in Paris to express its discontent.

Macron’s decision has alienated an already nervous Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who is running for reelection on September 7. This week’s events may push him deeper into Iranian and Russian arms. Even though not expressly sought by any of the parties, the risk of recent events sparking up a wider regional conflict in the Maghreb is higher than ever. Even if in a way designed to avoid escalation, Algeria will likely feel it necessary to respond in some form.

Sarah Zaaimi is a cultural studies researcher and the deputy director for communications at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center & Middle East programs.

The post France has sided with Morocco on the Western Sahara. How might Algeria respond? appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Click to jump to an expert analysis:

John E. Herbst: Putin’s motivation for hostage trades is personal

Mercedes Sapuppo: The prisoner releases are historic—but the Kremlin’s strategy hasn’t changed

Hanna Liubakova: German national’s case reveals Belarus’s hostage-taking tactics

Brian Whitmore: This wasn’t a Cold War prisoner swap, but rather a negotiation with a crime syndicate

Putin’s motivation for hostage trades is personal

Today’s news is a truly extraordinary event: a large prisoner exchange involving twenty-four captives in seven countries. Russia and Belarus released sixteen prisoners; and the United States, Germany, Poland, Norway, and Slovenia sent eight back to Russia. Those released by Moscow include three Americans held essentially as hostages on trumped-up charges—businessman Whelan and journalists Gershkovich and Kurmasheva—and political prisoners Kara-Murza and Yashin. Belarus released Rico Krieger, a German convicted of “terrorism” in Belarus, who was sentenced to death but then pardoned by Lukashenka’s regime. The most notable prisoner released to Russia is Krasikov, a Kremlin operative who murdered a Chechen activist in Germany.

Two constants drove this deal. The first is Putin’s great interest in securing the release of Russian spies and provocateurs captured and jailed in the West. When he succeeded in trading American basketball player Brittney Griner for Viktor Bout with the United States in December 2022, Putin’s highest priority became the release of Krasikov from Germany. When Putin gave up Griner, he still had Whelan as a hostage for future trades with the United States. Then he added Gershkovich in March 2023 for additional trade bait and Kurmasheva this past spring. The second constant is the Biden administration’s interest in securing the release of all Americans unfairly detained by Moscow. After the Griner-Bout exchange, US efforts to secure the freedom of Whelan and then Gershkovich foundered on the refusal of Germany to include Krasikov—Putin’s prime objective—in any trade.

These constants alone do not explain this deal. The new factor was the arrest of Krieger in Belarus last fall. This gave Berlin a reason to consider releasing Krasikov. Germany’s willingness to do so likely set in motion a long negotiation that led to today’s news. The final deal also gave Putin back Russian operatives in Norway, Poland, and Slovenia; and provided an opportunity to free prominent Russian opposition figures Kara-Murza and Yashin.

It is notable that sixteen prisoners moved West and only eight east. But, as we know from the lopsided trade that sent 215 Ukrainian prisoners of war home in exchange for Putin-favorite Viktor Medvedchuk and others in the fall of 2022, there are times when Putin’s interest in a particular captive persuades him to make an uneven trade.

Still, Putin has the tactical advantage of being able to grab additional hostages from Americans and other Western visitors in Russia. One way for the West to reduce this nasty advantage would be to lower the evidentiary requirements for holding spies from Russia and other US adversaries.

—John E. Herbst is the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a former US ambassador to Ukraine.

The prisoner releases are historic—but the Kremlin’s strategy hasn’t changed

The news that Gershkovich, Kurmasheva, Whelan, Kara-Murza, and Yashin—along with other human rights activists and innocent civilians—have been released from Russia in a prisoner swap is historic. For those now free who were wrongfully detained on contrived and false charges and bravely endured the conditions of Russian detention, today is hugely celebratory. It is also a good day for their families and for all who have been advocating for their freedom, including the Biden-Harris administration. The swap released many who suffered unjustly and marks a positive day for independent media and press freedom.

The timing of this swap—and its scope—indicates that Putin thought it was time to cash out the bargaining chips that he had illegally collected to leverage against the West in the form of innocent Americans and Russian activists. However, it does not suggest that the Kremlin will pull back on its malign tactics of aggression against Ukraine as well as the United States and its allies, and Putin is by no means walking away empty-handed: Russia will welcome home convicted murderers, spies, hackers, fraudsters, and smugglers.

What this swap demonstrates on the Kremlin’s strategic front is a twisted and self-serving pragmatism that is unlikely to translate into a deescalation of Russia’s violence in Ukraine, nor into a new appreciation for international norms. Putin is still a war criminal, and he is still bolstering his autocratic alliances abroad. The drive demonstrated by global leaders and advocates pushing for the release of these unjustly detained journalists and activists should not be the end. Rather, it should be only the beginning of continued work to defeat Putin in Ukraine and deter his aggression, which includes the imprisonment of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers being kept in harrowing conditions in temporarily occupied areas of Ukraine.

—Mercedes Sapuppo is a program assistant at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

German national’s case reveals Belarus’s hostage-taking tactics

The prisoner swap story between Russia and Western countries took an unexpected turn with Belarusian dictator Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s involvement. Krieger, a German national sentenced to death in Belarus, was among the Western prisoners released in Thursday’s exchange. His case gained attention following his pardon on July 30. The unusual circumstances surrounding Krieger’s sentencing had sparked speculation that the Minsk regime was positioning itself for a high-profile prisoner exchange.

Shortly after the pardon, Lukashenka’s spokesperson indicated that Minsk was open to negotiations regarding Krieger, stating that various “proposals” had been made. This suggested that the pardon was a strategic maneuver to facilitate discussions with Germany. Krieger’s exchange demonstrated the Belarusian regime’s manipulative tactics, with speculation arising that he was swapped for Krasikov, a Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) assassin imprisoned in Germany.

Krieger was arrested in Belarus in October for allegedly acting as a mercenary and planting explosives. He appeared in a propaganda video, claiming he wanted to fight in Ukraine but was directed to a mission in Belarus. However, the inconsistencies in the video raise doubts about his claims.

The regime’s actions—capturing a foreigner, sentencing him to death, and then negotiating his release—resemble hostage-taking tactics. While Russia may have reclaimed some of its agents in part through Krieger’s exchange, Lukashenka seems to be sacrificing his relationship with Germany to support Putin’s interests. This mirrors Lukashenka’s previous concessions to Russia, including offering Belarusian territory for the invasion of Ukraine, despite his people’s opposition, or stationing Wagner Group troops in Belarus.

Amid these high-stakes negotiations, the plight of Belarusian political prisoners is often overlooked. Although eighteen political prisoners were released last month, an estimated 1,400 remain imprisoned, many urgently needing medical assistance.

—Hanna Liubakova is a nonresident fellow with the Eurasia Center and a Belarusian journalist.

This wasn’t a Cold War prisoner swap, but rather a negotiation with a crime syndicate

The sweeping prisoner exchange that freed Kurmasheva, Gershkovich, Whelan, and others from Russian captivity was a remarkable diplomatic achievement, and the Biden administration deserves enormous credit for working with the United States’ allies to make it happen. And full disclosure, this one is personal. Two of the released hostages—Kurmasheva, a journalist with whom I worked for more than a decade at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Kara-Murza, a Russian dissident whom I have known for years—are close personal friends. The fact that sixteen hostages of Putin’s regime—including Americans, Germans, British nationals, and Russian political prisoners—are now free is cause for celebration.

That said, we should all use this occasion to reflect on what this prisoner exchange illustrates about the nature of Putin’s Russia. In order to get these hostages released, the United States and its allies needed to free actual criminals who were convicted after receiving the benefit of due process and fair trials in Western courts of law. Among these were a hitman, Krasikov, convicted of an assassination in Germany, and a cybercriminal, Roman Seleznev, who was convicted of bank fraud and identity theft in the United States. This is reminiscent of the United States securing the release of WNBA star and Olympic gold medalist Brittney Griner in exchange for convicted Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout and swapping US Marine Corps veteran Trevor Reed for Russian drug trafficker Konstantin Yaroshenko back in 2022.

One has to wonder, why does Putin want all these hitmen, cybercriminals, arms traffickers, and drug dealers released? And why is he willing to take Western hostages to do so? The answer is simple: The line between the government and the criminal underworld in Putin’s Russia is so thin that it is nonexistent. As I have argued in the past, the Putin regime is effectively a crime syndicate masquerading as a state. The correct metaphor for this prisoner exchange is not the storied Cold War-era swapping of Western and Soviet spies. Instead, it is the result of an unfortunately necessary hostage negotiation with a criminal and terrorist regime.

—Brian Whitmore is a nonresident senior fellow at the Eurasia Center, an assistant professor of practice at the University of Texas-Arlington, and host of the Power Vertical podcast.

Public Event Tue, November 7, 2023 • 3:30 pm ET

Reporters at risk: In honor of Evan Gershkovich

Leading journalists discuss risks facing foreign correspondents, resilience in reporting, and global press freedom.

Civil Society Politics & Diplomacy Resilience Resilience & Society

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Established political parties are now taking steps to win back support. Policymakers around the world should take note of these efforts, such as the use of citizens’ assemblies in Germany, as one way to counter this polarizing environment and rebuild trust in democratic systems.

Growing disillusionment and persistent divides

Germany is a compelling case study for the rise of populist ideology. Nearly thirty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the East-West divide in the country persists. To this day, people in eastern Germany often face fewer economic opportunities, underrepresentation in elite professions, power imbalances, and an aging population. As recently as 2019, 60 percent of Germans in the east perceived themselves as second-class citizens. While on the rise throughout Germany, it is in large part for these reasons that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party resonates in the eastern part of the country, in states such as Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia. Elections in all three in September see the AfD polling in first place.

The AfD was formed in 2013 in reaction to eurozone bailouts for other countries, but the 2015 refugee crisis transformed its platform into the extreme one it has today. When nearly one million migrants entered Germany, a majority of citizens called for an immigration cap. The AfD, weaponizing both economic and social grievances, built itself on and instigated this cultural discontent. The party trademarked “Islam does not belong to Germany” in its 2016 manifesto, and has taken aim at costly climate action to spur discontent with the center and fuel its own base. This approach propelled the AfD to ninety-two opposition seats in the Bundestag in 2017, and in the years since it has established itself as a formidable populist alternative to Germany’s traditional parties closer to the political center.

The AfD’s 2024 manifesto paints a worrying picture of its vision for Germany. The AfD proposes to reduce the net number of annual immigrants to zero and oppose all major climate actions, arguing such government encroachments threaten to unravel the cultural fabric and stability of German society. These extreme stances threaten to endanger the unity of Germany and could hamper international cooperation. The party is largely Euroskeptic, anti-American, and pro-Russian, which drives its urge to scale back on Ukraine aid. Notably, the far-right Identity and Democracy group in the European Parliament kicked out the AfD in May of this year, following scandals surrounding its extreme statements and potential connections to China and Russia.

Nevertheless, the party remains relatively popular in Germany. It scored second among German parties in the European Parliament elections in June and could well secure more than a quarter of seats in state elections this fall. The AfD’s success has inspired other upstart parties on the left. The newly founded left-wing populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), for example, is expected to secure around 20 percent of seats across the three states, appealing to voters that are dissatisfied with the state of Germany’s economy and support for Ukraine.

The populist phenomenon is not exclusive to Germany. It is symptomatic of a general trend in the West. From gains in the European Parliament to momentum heading into the US presidential election, populism does not bode well for the liberal international order, especially at a time when intensifying global challenges demand collective solutions.

The long road to rebuilding trust

One strategy to counter illiberal tendencies and reengage citizens is the establishment of citizens’ assemblies: representative groups of randomly selected constituents that develop policy recommendations on a given issue based on expert briefings and discussions. The assemblies can be implemented at all political levels.

Citizens’ assemblies have been tried before. In various forms, they have been tested by several countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, and France. They all share the goals of bringing participatory democracy to the public and reconnecting with voters who have lost trust in democracy.

These citizens’ assemblies have led to big changes before. In Ireland, the successful 2018 referendum to remove the Eighth Amendment banning most abortions stemmed from a recommendation from a ninety-nine-person-strong citizens’ assembly and helped end years of deadlock over the issue. A similar Convention on the Constitution in the country helped lead the way to the 2015 referendum on marriage equality.

In Germany, ten nationwide citizens’ assemblies have been convened since 2019, covering topics such as “Germany’s role in the world,” “climate action,” and “countering disinformation.” While the practical policy proposals are not binding, they do provide policymakers with valuable insights on current positions, possible compromises, and existing sticking points. Within just five years, the German citizens’ assemblies have grown from being independently organized by a nonprofit to being implemented by the Bundestag—an indication of the growing hope and trust politicians are placing on these fora.

The German approach isn’t perfect. Commentators have identified several challenges facing Germany’s citizens’ assemblies, including the representative selection of participants, the neutrality of moderators and experts, the optimal format and institutionalization of the assemblies, and the effect on participants and nonparticipating citizens.

And in truth, so far, it is too soon to see the impact of these assemblies in Germany. Mostly experimental in design, few concrete recommendations were implemented by policymakers. Some people believe the concept’s success hinges on the assembly on nutrition, food labeling, and food waste, the first citizens’ assembly instituted directly by the German Bundestag, which met in January 2024. The outcomes of this assembly included recommendations on school lunches and new regulations on energy drinks.

The participatory idea behind citizens’ assemblies cannot replace the parliamentary process. To avoid conflicts of legitimacy between participatory and representative democracy, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation recommends that parliaments initiate and mandate the process. It is crucial that the fora are not influenced externally and provide some flexibility regarding approach and outcome. They cannot be expected to arrive at predetermined conclusions and, depending on topic, composition, and mandate, every citizens’ assembly will be unique. To sustainably strengthen democracy and rebuild trust in political processes, it is important to complement the assembly with a broader public campaign. Linking the citizens’ assemblies with parliamentary institutions through the involvement of parliamentarians in the expert briefings could further improve the current system. Alternatively, an assembly could be followed by a referendum, giving citizens beyond those randomly chosen participatory power.

No easy fixes

Citizens’ assemblies alone are not sufficient to head off the rise of populists in Germany anytime soon: The AfD and BSW parties, for example, will very likely make gains in the eastern German elections this fall. Instead, the assemblies should be seen as part of a long-term strategy to address the root causes of voter dissatisfaction. 

It is imperative to see citizens’ assemblies for what they are. Policymakers should not expect a panacea for polarization. Instead, the fora are a piece of a bigger puzzle. Implementing citizens’ assemblies in tandem with regional structural policies can start the process of rebuilding trust in government. Until more citizens feel like they have a real voice in politics, the seeds of populism will likely continue to find fertile ground—in Germany, in the United States, and beyond.

Moritz Ludwig is a young global professional at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center.

Joely Virzi is a young global professional at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center.

The post Can citizens’ assemblies help counter a rising populist tide in the West? appeared first on Atlantic Council.

NATO has established its place among the most successful political and military alliances in history—despite facing very challenging circumstances since its founding—by dint of solidarity, unity of purpose, and resolve.

Today, allies are presented with challenges such as increasing global systemic rivalry and a complex, interconnected, and unstable security landscape, which threaten Euro-Atlantic security. Russia, as the most significant and direct threat for NATO, has been undermining Euro-Atlantic security since its invasion of Georgia in 2008, and its aggression has since expanded in the form of its invasion of Ukraine. In addition, terrorism—in all forms and manifestations—persists. The topic has been on NATO’s agenda since the adoption of the Alliance’s 1991 Strategic Concept and it (specifically, the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States) was the reason the Alliance decided to invoke Article 5 for the first and only time in history. Since 2001, nonstate actors have continued to lodge a series of terror attacks on a number of allies such as the United Kingdom, Spain, France, and Belgium as well as Turkey, which still grapples with terror attacks from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), as well as the latter’s Syrian leg.

NATO allies must maintain their resolve and remain vigilant and ready to face challenges from any direction. Defense is not cheap, and it requires constant attention, care, and investment.

Since joining the Alliance seventy-two years ago, Turkey has contributed to NATO’s security in various theaters of instability and conflicts. Turkey was a bulwark against the Soviet threat in the Cold War period, and it continued to spend significantly on defense, sacrificing the opportunity to spend more elsewhere. For example, Turkey dedicated a level of forces and capabilities NATO in that period that was significant for the Alliance’s security and reduced pressure on allies in Central and Eastern Europe.

Turkey, because it continued to spend on defense, did not benefit from the post-Cold War “peace dividend” to the extent that European NATO allies enjoyed during the early 1990s when the unifying vision to establish a belt of security, stability, and prosperity that included Russia (extending from Vancouver to Vladivostok) was first launched by the United States. During this period, Turkey spent around or above 4 percent of its gross domestic product on defense, while most other allies saw their commitments wane over time.

In the immediate post-Cold War era, Turkey faced challenges from nearby regional conflicts in the Gulf, the Balkans, and the South Caucasus. Yet this conflictual period did not stop Turkey from contributing to NATO efforts designed to protect peace and stability throughout the Euro-Atlantic area and beyond. Turkey actively took part in NATO operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, and it also made significant contributions to the International Security Assistance Forces in Afghanistan, which was followed by the Resolute Support Mission.

Today, Turkey has similarly consistently supported NATO efforts to enhance peace, stability, and prosperity in the Euro-Atlantic area, even despite divergent perceptions in allied capitals about Turkey’s approach to recent global challenges such as Russia’s war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza.

For example, Turkey did join its NATO allies in approving the most recent NATO Strategic Concept, adopted at Madrid in 2022, that identified Russia and terrorism (along with other regional and global challenges) as threats for the Alliance. Turkey is also set to play a pivotal role in the implementation of regional plans launched at the Vilnius summit last year which are dedicated to the defense of Southern Europe against the pervasive challenges in its immediate vicinity.

Turkey’s role in Washington summit outcomes

With the Russian threat looming over European security, it is high time to strengthen the European pillar of NATO. Allies at the NATO summit acknowledged the need to close the gaps between Europe’s defense needs and its capabilities. This includes, as highlighted at the Washington summit, expanding European allies’ defense manufacturing capacity in a coherent, complementary, and interoperable manner. To achieve interoperability will also require Turkey and NATO to find a lasting solution to the spat over the current Turkish administration’s decision in 2017 to procure the S-400 Russian missile system. While expanding capacity, the allies must take into account both the Alliance’s defense priorities and Ukraine’s needs as it continues to face up against Russian aggression.

Turkey can play a crucial role in helping expand the Alliance’s defense capacity through its contributions to collective deterrence and defense. Capabilities being produced by the growing Turkish defense industry cannot be sidelined in the Alliance’s endeavor to enhance deterrence and defense and maintain a technological edge against both state and nonstate adversaries. This will require result-oriented consultations within NATO and especially between European allies and Turkey, conducted with renewed vigor and mutual resolve. To this end, it is high time for the European Union (EU) to revisit its policies that engage only EU members in enhancing Europe’s defense capacity. Today’s challenges require collaboration with non-EU countries, such as Turkey, to the fullest extent.

With terrorism plaguing Turkey’s neighborhood, and with the issue remaining high on Turkey’s agenda, Ankara likely welcomed allies’ commitment (as outlined in the Washington Summit Declaration) to “counter, deter, defend, and respond to threats and challenges posed by terrorists and terrorist organizations based on a combination of prevention, protection, and denial measures with determination, resolve, and in solidarity.” If allies align their perceptions of the threat to Turkey posed by the PKK and its affiliates by including, for instance, deterrence and defensive measures against the threat in the regional defense plan for Southern Europe, this would help ease the friction on this major issue and help erase the Turkish society’s negative perceptions of NATO allies.

The Washington Summit Declaration also included a reference to the 1936 Montreux Convention. While some Turkish observers have oddly argued the reference is ill-intentioned, it is actually a major outcome for Turkey, as the allies reaffirmed their commitments to “regional efforts aimed at upholding security, safety, stability, and freedom of navigation in the Black Sea region.” The communiqué also welcomed the joint endeavor of three littoral allies (Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania) to launch the Black Sea Mine Countermeasures Task Group.

Finally, with the global order at stake—due to Russia’s aggression, China’s growing global influence, and threats to security including terrorism—it has become vitally important to maintain and increase cooperation with southern neighborhood countries. The Alliance recognized this importance at the Washington summit, when it committed to taking a new approach toward its “southern neighborhood.” As part of that approach, the NATO secretary general appointed a new special representative for the southern neighborhood to coordinate NATO’s efforts in that neighborhood. Turkey could play a positive role in improving ties between the Alliance and the southern neighborhood by leveraging the linguistic, kinship, religious, and cultural ties it has with other countries. Turkey could also mobilize opportunities that it has in being part of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and Organization of Turkic States, and in working with the Gulf Cooperation Council and African Union.

The Alliance has once again proven its relevance and value in protecting and defending the Euro-Atlantic area. As it continues to work to keep the Euro-Atlantic area safe, secure, and stable, Turkey has an important role to play.

Mehmet Fatih Ceylan is a retired career ambassador with forty years of experience in international security and defense affairs. Formerly, he served in the Turkish Foreign Ministry and served as Turkey’s ambassador to NATO from 2013 to 2018.

The views expressed in TURKEYSource are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

The post The role Turkey can play in NATO’s post-Washington summit aims appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Female political representation is important. According to 2023 data, only fifty-nine of the 193 member states of the United Nations had a woman head of state or government in their history. Against this backdrop, four countries in the Caribbean have had or currently have women leaders: Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Barbados. But representation still lags behind, with an average of 22 percent of ministerial portfolios and cabinet positions in the English-speaking Caribbean held by women. And according to World Bank data, only four Caribbean countries—Dominica, Guyana, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Grenada—have 30 percent or more seats in national parliaments held by women.

At the same time, greater and more effective female political representation must go hand in hand with bringing gender equity perspectives into all aspects policymaking in ways that improve the lives of citizens. In the Caribbean, women and girls face significant vulnerabilities, and gender mainstreaming is needed to address them, in particular gender-based violence.

The Caribbean has one of the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world. According to UN Women data, 46 percent of women in the Caribbean have experienced at least one form of violence in their lifetime. Jamaica, for example, has the second-highest femicide rate in the world, while 55 percent of Guyanese women have experienced at least one form of violence, including intimate partner violence or nonpartner sexual abuse. And data on gender-based violence is often underreported.

To tackle gender-based violence through gender mainstreaming in policymaking, governments in the Caribbean should work closely with civil society organizations that focus on gender and gender-based violence. They should also work with victims of gender-based violence to understand the bottlenecks of the system and its inadequate responses. With this deeper understanding, governments can map out specific areas to improve support for women victims of gender-based violence.

Governments should also include chief gender officers in key government institutions, particularly within the judicial system and the police. Chief gender officers can help ensure appropriate support, accountability, and sustainability of policies for victims of gender-based violence. These officers should be appropriately trained to bring a gender-sensitive perspective to decision-making processes, and their authority and dedicated office to these issues can help to overcome institutional inertia.

In the legal sphere, these officers should revise and help update legislation through a gender lens, as a mechanism to avoid the perpetuation of laws and norms that might have pervasive negative consequences for women and girls. Within the police, chief gender officers can be trained to welcome and support victims of gender-based violence, helping them as victims instead of discriminating against them. Focus groups commissioned by the Atlantic Council in Jamaica and Guyana, for example, found a lack of trust that institutions, such as the police, can support women victims of gender-based violence. One Jamaican woman explained, “But sometimes you go to the police and the police take your statement and look at you and be like if you wear that then you don’t think the man is going to see you.”

Ensuring that women victims of gender-based violence feel heard and supported could lead to more accurate data on this issue, as underreporting is a significant challenge. This, in turn, could help governments gain a better understanding of gender-based violence and the policies and programs that can help solve it.  

Valentina Sader is a deputy director at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, where she leads the Center’s work on Brazil, gender equality and diversity, and manages the Center’s Advisory Council.

The post The case for chief gender officers in Caribbean states appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Access to justice is a crucial component of the rule of law and the defense of democracy. A robust judicial system ensures that laws are applied fairly and equitably, strengthens confidence in institutions, protects rights, and promotes transparency and accountability, which are essential for democratic stability and economic development.¹ In a global context where threats to democracy are increasing, strengthening access to justice and the rule of law becomes even more critical. An accessible judicial system acts as a safeguard against those threats.² Access to justice for businesses and the general Colombian population is vital to ensure both fairness and economic efficiency. When businesses can resolve disputes quickly and fairly, uncertainty is reduced, fostering a favorable investment climate and sustainable economic development.

This research, based on a holistic and integrated approach, involves two key elements: a thorough understanding of access to justice and a comprehensive view of the justice system. The first element implies that effective access to justice extends beyond the initial approach to legal systems; it encompasses both the entry point and the ongoing journey within the system. The right to access justice is fully realized when it results in a prompt, comprehensive, and enforceable solution. This understanding of access to justice is essential for addressing the multifaceted challenges faced by individuals and corporations in Colombia.

Building on this thorough understanding of access to justice, this research sheds light on the problems faced by actors within the system, which affect companies of all sizes and citizens alike, regardless of their socioeconomic status. It explores the procedural journey, revealing systemic issues and managerial barriers embedded in the justice system. Forty-four percent of respondents expressed medium to high concerns about judicial corruption and threats to judicial independence and impartiality.

The second element is the comprehensive view of the Colombian justice system. Such a view requires data collection regarding the three routes of access to justice in Colombia, all different in nature: the judicial branch; administrative officials with jurisdictional functions; and individual entities that have the right to administer justice, such as conciliators and arbitrators.

The Colombian constitutional system allows the congress to delegate certain judicial powers to specific administrative authorities including superintendencies (regulatory agencies) of industry and commerce, finance, corporations, and health; police inspectors; and family commissariats, among others. However, it is worth noting that administrative authorities’ judicial power excludes criminal prosecutions and proceedings.³ When administrative authorities exercise jurisdictional functions through resolutions, they act as judges rather than as administrative entities. Individuals can choose, preventively, whether to approach judicial-branch judges or superintendencies judges with jurisdictional functions to resolve their disputes.

This report seeks to identify public policy recommendations that can enhance the efficiency and equity of the justice system through a holistic and integrated approach. Tackling access to justice during the process is crucial not only for the private sector, which relies on the justice system to protect its interests, but also for the broader Colombian society. This will ensure that justice is accessible and equitable for all.

“This timely and deeply researched report exposes another one of Colombia’s many paradoxes: although it has perhaps the most legalistic society in the hemisphere, the justice system is widely seen as incapable of delivering consistent and reliable results. The report’s authors suggest specific, concrete, and practical policy recommendations to improve justice delivery. As the report notes, a credible and efficient justice system is key to a thriving democracy, and this report will be a key resource for those committed to justice reform.”

Kevin Whitaker, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, Atlantic Council; Former US Ambassador to Colombia, US Department of State

For all jurisdictions and types of disputes included in this study (both judicial and administrative proceedings), fewer than half of the companies surveyed fully or partially agreed that the duration of proceedings is reasonable. This finding is consistent with the study’s qualitative research component and existing cross-country data on unreasonable civil-justice delays from the World Justice Project (WJP). Colombian scores on timeliness of civil-justice delivery in the WJP Rule of Law Index are lower than those of both best-in-class nations (e.g., Germany or the Netherlands) and regional and income peers in Latin America (See Graph 1).

Delays permeate the system, affecting small, medium, and large companies. When companies were asked about the obstacles limiting effective access to justice when dealing with judicial authorities, the number of legal processes that never concluded scored as the highest obstacle, with 51 percent of companies ranking it as their top obstacle and 15 percent ranking it as a medium level obstacle (See Figure 1).

Similarly, when asked about the obstacles limiting effective access to justice when resorting to administrative authorities, interviewees ranked unjustified delays as the biggest obstacle. Forty-one percent of companies ranked it as the top obstacle and 20 percent ranked it as a medium-level obstacle (See Figure 2).

In terms of judicial independence from hierarchical superiors and other sources, superintendencies perform worse than all other paths to justice, and considerably below all judges (44 percent of companies either totally or mostly disagree that this path is free from this pressure). Critically, in terms of access to justice, it is the second-worst mechanism (34 percent of companies find it difficult to access this mechanism), (See Figure 4).

Report Nov 30, 2023

Advancing US-Colombia cooperation on drug policy and law enforcement

By Atlantic Council US-Colombia Advisory Group

Consumption and price of the drug has remained stable in the United States in recent years. However, the current trend of falling coca leaf and cocaine prices in Colombia present a natural incentive for coca growers to find alternative forms of income, which could mean a higher rate of success for alternative development programs.

Civil Society Colombia

New Atlanticist May 7, 2024

Colombia’s president must focus on economic stewardship in the second half of his term

By Enrique Millan-Mejia and Geoff Ramsey

President Gustavo Petro should adopt a steadier hand on domestic issues and a more cooperative stance toward international private sector investment.

Colombia Economy & Business

Sep 29, 2021

US-Colombia Advisory Group

The Atlantic Council’s US-Colombia Advisory Council, with Senators Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Bill Hagerty (R-TN), as honorary Co-Chairs, is a nonpartisan, binational, and multi-sectoral group committed to advancing a whole-of-society approach to addressing the most vital policy issues facing the US-Colombia relationship—with a recognition of the broader implications for bilateral interests across the region more broadly.

The Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center broadens understanding of regional transformations and delivers constructive, results-oriented solutions to inform how the public and private sectors can advance hemispheric prosperity.

Learn more

The post Justice Fair Play Initiative: The key to improving justice delivery in Colombia appeared first on Atlantic Council.

While previous G20 meetings have been noteworthy for their disagreements, Brazil has emphasized substance and consensus over geopolitics during its G20 presidency. Felipe Hees, the Brazilian diplomat and sous-sherpa of this year’s G20 presidency, explained this strategy on July 25 at an Atlantic Council conference on the sidelines of the meeting. Brasília, he said, has sought to acknowledge fundamental disagreements on geopolitics between some members, and then to sidestep them entirely at the ministerial level. The big question now is: How long can this approach last?

So far, Brazilian officials have chosen to focus on economic development issues that already enjoy widespread support. Last week, this approach resulted in one of the few joint G20 ministerial-level communiqués in the past two years. Released on July 26, this communiqué displays G20 members’ alignment on launching the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty under the Brazilian presidency. It’s an important topic for the host country, since Brazil is the world’s leading producer of soybeans, corn, and meat, and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has emphasized his country’s role in alleviating global food insecurity. At the same time, the issue has a wider resonance. At the Atlantic Council conference, Cindy McCain, executive director of the World Food Program, emphasized that “food security is a national security issue, and it should be labeled as one.”

Climate finance and the energy transition were at the forefront in Rio last week as well. Discussions focused on how to mobilize the public and private sector in achieving climate goals. At the Atlantic Council’s conference, Renata Amaral, the Brazilian secretary for international affairs and development in the Ministry of Planning and Budget, formally called for technical assistance from multilateral development banks for catastrophic weather events, such as the floods in southern Brazil this May. Immediately following the summit, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen headed to Belém, the capital city of the northern Brazilian province Pará. Located near the mouth of the Amazon River, Belém was a symbolic choice for the unveiling of the US Treasury’s Amazon Region Initiative Against Illicit Finance, which is intended to help combat nature crimes.

Another issue that garnered attention last week was wealth inequality, which the Brazilian president spotlighted in his speech on June 24. “The poor have been ignored by governments and by wealthy sectors of society,” he said. Despite disagreements on whether the G20 is the right forum for the issue, it issued the first ever ministerial declaration on taxation. While Brazil’s ambition was to move the needle on a 2 percent global wealth tax, the declaration simply said that ultra-high-net-worth individuals must pay their fair share in taxes. While this fell short of Brazil’s hopes on this issue, the meetings in Rio have done more on building consensus than the past two presidencies, which have been rife with outbursts over geopolitical issues between member states.

In 2022, the then G20 president, Indonesia, saw its plan to build international cooperation for the post-pandemic recovery paralyzed by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February. When finance ministers and foreign ministers met in April and July of the year, officials from Russia and from the United States and Europe walked out of the room when their counterparts spoke. Ministers failed to agree on a communiqué, and negotiations on climate and education also broke down over criticisms of the war. Ahead of the leaders’ summit in November 2022, Western leaders balked at the thought of sharing a table with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ultimately did not attend the summit. In the end, the leaders could only agree to a declaration that was a broad, noncommittal summary of approaches to addressing global challenges.

Last year, India focused its G20 presidency on depoliticizing the issue of the global supply of food, fertilizers, and fuels, as well as on addressing climate change and restoring the foundations of negotiations at the forum. Its strategy was to move geopolitics off center stage by highlighting perspectives from the “Global South,” including formally adding the African Union as a full member, and thus shaping the platform as an action and communication channel between advanced economies and emerging markets.

This was difficult. Shortly into India’s presidency, Russia and China withdrew their support for the text in the Bali statement on Ukraine. At the technical level, none of the ministerial meetings produced a joint communiqué, and New Delhi was forced to issue chairs’ statements instead. Since the leaders’ summit in New Delhi, the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas in October 2023 has made the job of navigating geopolitical tensions all the more difficult for Brazil.

While the Russian and Chinese leaders did not attend last year’s leaders’ summit, the New Delhi Declaration was nevertheless bolder and more specific than its Bali predecessor. It set the agenda for the G20 for the years ahead but offered few specifics on how to achieve these goals.

Will Brazil’s strategy of sidestepping geopolitics work at the leaders’ summit scheduled for November 18-19 in Rio? Finance ministers and central bank governors can ignore geopolitics; presidents and prime ministers often cannot. If Brasília concludes technical negotiations on the various proposals ahead of the leaders’ summit, then consensus-building at the gathering will be easier, as geopolitics will remain just an elephant in the room.

If Brazil is successful, it can end the stalemate that the G20 has found itself in and remake it into a relevant economic coordination body—one that can adequately address the goals of its emerging market and advanced economy members. If Brazilian officials are not successful, however, the forum’s relevance may begin to wane.

It has been in the interest of the last few G20 presidencies to keep up the balancing act between the United States, China, and Russia. Moreover, it is likely that South Africa will follow this approach as it takes on its presidency in 2025. As many of the discussions in Rio noted, however, what happens in the US presidential elections this November could determine both the relevance and the tone of the G20 meetings going forward.

Ananya Kumar is the deputy director, future of money at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center.

Mrugank Bhusari is assistant director at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center.

The post Dispatch from Rio: Can Brazil set the G20 leaders’ summit up for success? appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On July 30, 2024, Vice President and Senior Director of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center Jason Marczak was interviewed on BBC Newshour about the results of Venezuela’s presidential election.

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Jason Marczak

Vice President and Senior Director

Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center

Americas Caribbean

The post Marczak interviewed by BBC Newshour on Venezuela’s election appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Kharlan’s Olympic victory has additional significance for Ukraine as she almost missed out on participating in Paris altogether due to her principled stand over the Russian invasion of her homeland. During the 2023 World Fencing Championship, Kharlan refused to shake hands with a Russian opponent in protest over the war, offering instead to tap blades. The Russian declined this offer and staged a protest of her own, leading to Kharlan’s disqualification and making it virtually impossible for her to take part in the 2024 Olympic Games.

The incident sparked a heated debate over the role of politics in sport and the continued participation of Russian athletes in international events at a time when Russia is conducting Europe’s largest military invasion since World War II. Following a considerable outcry, Kharlan was reinstated and received the personal backing of International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach, himself a former fencer. Meanwhile, Kharlan’s gesture made her a hero to millions of Ukrainians.

As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.

The controversy over Kharlan’s refusal to shake hands with her Russian opponent has been mirrored elsewhere in the sporting arena, highlighting the complex moral issues facing Ukrainian athletes as they compete internationally while their country is fighting for national survival. Ukrainian tennis star Elina Svitolina in particular has attracted headlines for her decision to avoid handshakes with Russian and Belarusian players.

Some critics have accused Ukrainians of politicizing sport, and have argued against holding individual Russians accountable for crimes committed by the Kremlin. Meanwhile, supporters of Ukrainian protest efforts have noted the Kremlin’s frequent use of sport as a propaganda tool, and have also pointed to the often close links between some Russian athletes and the Putin regime.

Eurasia Center events

Online Event Thu, August 15, 2024 • 9:00 am ET

Ukraine’s advance in Kursk: What’s next and implications

Conflict Russia Security & Defense Ukraine

For Ukraine’s Olympic team, participation in this year’s Summer Games is an opportunity to provide their war weary compatriots back home with something to cheer, while also reminding the world of Russia’s ongoing invasion. Since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, many of Ukraine’s Olympic athletes have had to train in exceptionally difficult conditions. Some have been forced to relocate from areas that have fallen under Russian occupation, while all have grown used to the daily trauma of the war and the regular disruption caused by Russian air raids.

Ahead of the Paris Olympics, Olga Kharlan was widely seen as one of Ukraine’s best medal hopes. Born in Mykolaiv, she has been fencing since the age of ten. Prior to the 2024 Olympics, she had already amassed four Olympic medals in a glittering career that has also seen her win six world titles. The thirty-three-year-old Ukrainian star demonstrated her mental strength during the third place playoff in Paris, overcoming South Korea’s Choi Sebin in a dramatic comeback win.

Thanks to her new bronze medal, Kharlan now shares top spot among Ukraine’s leading Olympians with a total of five medals. She claimed her first medal at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 before securing further honors in 2012 and 2016. However, the Ukrainian star says her success in the French capital stands out. “This medal is totally different,” commented Kharlan in Paris this week. “It’s special because it’s for my country. This is a message to all the world that Ukraine will never give up.”

Mark Temnycky is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

Further reading

UkraineAlert Jul 25, 2024

Putin is convinced he can outlast the West and win in Ukraine

By Mykola Bielieskov

The West’s collective fear of escalation and reluctance to commit to Ukrainian victory have convinced Putin that he can outlast his opponents and achieve an historic triumph in Ukraine, writes Mykola Bielieskov.

Conflict Defense Industry

UkraineAlert Jul 22, 2024

Andriy Yermak: Ukraine and NATO are restoring Europe’s security architecture

By Andriy Yermak

Together with the country’s allies, Ukraine has set out on the path to restore the European security architecture, writes the head of Ukraine’s Office of the President Andriy Yermak.

Conflict Defense Industry

UkraineAlert Jun 12, 2024

Ukraine is making the Russian occupation of Crimea untenable

By Olivia Yanchik

Ukraine’s growing air strike capabilities are decimating Russian air defenses in Crimea and making the occupation of the peninsula increasingly untenable, writes Olivia Yanchik.

Conflict Defense Technologies

The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

Read more from UkraineAlert

UkraineAlert is a comprehensive online publication that provides regular news and analysis on developments in Ukraine’s politics, economy, civil society, and culture.

The Eurasia Center’s mission is to enhance transatlantic cooperation in promoting stability, democratic values and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe and Turkey in the West to the Caucasus, Russia and Central Asia in the East.

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The post Paris Olympics: Ukrainian dedicates medal to athletes killed by Russia appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Does the new EU-Serbia lithium deal undermine democracy? The European Union’s recent memorandum of understanding with Serbia on raw materials has sparked debate across the Balkans. Signed during German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit, the MoU revives a controversial lithium mining project, drawing opposition from many Serbians.

In this episode, Nonresident Senior Fellow Ilva Tare is joined by Ivan Vejvoda, Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences and Head of Europe’s Futures Project in Vienna, to dissect this complex issue.

Does Mr. Vejvoda share the criticism that the EU and Germany are prioritizing lithium access in Serbia over essential democratic principles like environmental protection, rule of law, and independent media?

With concerns about weak independent institutions and a critical public sphere in Serbia, can the country uphold high environmental and social standards?

How can the EU ensure that such agreements maintain rigorous environmental and social principles?

Could this agreement reduce Serbia’s reliance on China, and what might be the broader geopolitical implications?

Join #BalkansDebrief for an in-depth discussion on the potential impacts of this deal and the geoeconomic and geopolitical interests of the EU in the Western Balkans.

#BalkansDebrief is an online interview series presented by the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center and hosted by journalist Ilva Tare. The program offers a fresh look at the Western Balkans and examines the region’s people, culture, challenges, and opportunities.

Watch #BalkansDebrief on YouTube and listen to it as a Podcast.

Fellow

Ilva Tare

Resident Senior Fellow

Europe Center

Albanian English

The Europe Center promotes leadership, strategies, and analysis to ensure a strong, ambitious, and forward-looking transatlantic relationship.

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The post #BalkansDebrief – Does the new EU-Serbia lithium deal undermine democracy? A Debrief with Ivan Vejvoda appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On July 30, 2024, Senior Fellow Geoff Ramsey of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center was quoted in The New York Times about the Venezuelan election.

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Geoff Ramsey

Senior Fellow

Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center

Civil Society Democratic Transitions

The post Ramsey quoted in The New York Times about Venezuela’s presidential election appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On July 30, 2024, Senior Fellow Geoff Ramsey of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center was interviewed on BBC’s World Business Report about the Atlantic Council’s Memo to the President outlining scenarios and paths forward for Venezuela.

More about our expert

Staff

Geoff Ramsey

Senior Fellow

Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center

Civil Society Democratic Transitions

The post Ramsey interviewed by BBC World Business Report appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The overthrow of Gaddafi’s regime led to more of a decade of intermittent civil war and conflict, dismantling of state institutions, and rampant kleptocracy, turning Libya into a battleground for competition between external powers. Meanwhile, Italy has seen nine governments since the Libyan revolution. These governments have come to power against a backdrop of political instability and economic uncertainty, the rise in populism and “sovranismo” (sovereignism), and geopolitical tensions in Italy’s eastern and southern neighborhoods. Irrespective of Rome’s different ruling coalitions, the crisis in Libya resulted in a rethink of Italy’s geopolitical posture and strategic orientation toward the North African country, questioning Rome’s approach to international intervention and national priorities, the resources and tools of its foreign policy, and its projection of power over the wider Mediterranean region. The conclusion of the debate has been that a stable Libya is strategically crucial for Italy, for political, security, and economic reasons.

However, the last decade has seen the gradual fading of Rome’s influence over Libya and the downsizing of its ambitions. The political leverage Italy historically possessed in Libya dwindled over the years. How did Italy squander its political capital and credibility in Libya? How could a country with prominent interests and a strong economic interest fail in Libya? The focus on short-term gains over long-term strategy played a pivotal role. Understanding the root causes of this marginalization is crucial for reshaping Italy’s approach to Libya and revitalizing its role in the region.

Migration policies have undermined Rome’s credibility in Libya

Between 2014 and 2017, over six hundred thousand migrants arrived in Italy, most departing from Libyan shores after enduring extensive journeys across Africa. Many suffered violence, forced labor, and sexual exploitation in both formal and informal Libyan detention centers. The migration issue became a focal point in Italian politics for several reasons: from challenges in managing the reception and integration of migrants once they arrived, to political exploitation of unfounded fears about terrorist infiltration and cultural clashes, to concerns about the country’s democratic stability during a period of economic uncertainty.

In 2017, amidst peak concerns about a surge in migrant arrivals and with Italy gearing up for elections, Interior Minister Marco Minniti introduced a new strategy for addressing the Libyan crisis. Stabilizing Libya became not just a priority in itself, but a means to control migration flows and counter transnational threats. Rome engaged extensively: it worked closely with the Government of National Accord (GNA) led by Fayez al-Sarraj, signing agreements, providing financial aid and technical support, and becoming the first Western nation to reopen its embassy in Tripoli. Italy also established connections with Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar in the east; engaged with southern tribes, cities, and municipalities; and even interacted with less-transparent groups like militias and armed factions, despite their involvement in smuggling and trafficking, which Italian authorities publicly denied but independent investigations corroborated. This approach proved effective as migrant arrivals dropped dramatically from July 2017, as evidenced by arrival data.

Despite changes in leadership and shifting political coalitions in Rome, the core strategy remained consistent even after the Government of National Unity, led by Abdulhamid al-Dabaiba, took office in Tripoli in 2021. Italy saw different governments come and go: Giuseppe Conte’s “yellow-green” government (2018–19), Conte’s “yellow-red” government (2019–21), followed by Mario Draghi’s national unity government (2021–22), and now Giorgia Meloni’s leadership since October 2022.

However, new dynamics emerged as migrant departures shifted from the west to the east of Libya in recent years. Rome responded by increasing engagement with eastern Libyan authorities both politically and economically. This shift was highlighted by Haftar’s visit to Rome in May 2023 and a subsequent meeting held by Meloni in Benghazi on May 7.

So far, Italy, along with EU funds, has allocated almost €479 million to the “externalization” of its border to Libya, i.e. the act of empowering foreign actors to stop migrants from reaching Italy. However, this strategy of externalizing migration management—funding patrols and technology, and investing significant political attention and resources—has had significant unintended consequences. By treating militias as interlocutors, even indirectly through recognized institutions or actors with national ambitions, Italy inadvertently empowered and legitimized ambiguous players. This has altered local power balances and undermined prospects for peace in Libya. Since the implementation of this policy, evidence has emerged of its destabilizing effects and distortions of local equilibria, influenced by Italy’s perception of threats and insecurity stemming from migration policies.

Italy’s leverage of foreign actors was not aimed at stabilizing Libya but rather at addressing Italian perceptions of insecurity

Despite its interactions with local actors, Italy has not been among the most influential players shaping Libya’s dynamics. Other countries such as Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Russia, France, and Qatar have exploited Libya’s internal divisions to advance their own domestic and international agendas. This interference has spoiled prospects for the establishment of stable Libyan institutions, state reconstruction, and durable peace. 

In this complex scenario, Rome has struggled to effectively stabilize Libya or facilitate consensus among Libyan factions based on international law and the desires of the Libyan people. Instead, Italy has mainly offered symbolic support for UN efforts without substantial mediation efforts or concrete peace proposals following the underwhelming results of the Palermo conference, a two-day conference in November 2018 intended to advance the UN-sponsored stabilization process for Libya.  

In the complex web of Libyan, regional, and international agendas, Rome has primarily used foreign relationships to advance its migratory policies and address minor issues. For instance, with the UAE, one of the most involved foreign players shaping Libyan internal dynamics through its strong support to Haftar, Italy leveraged its influence to secure the release of fishermen arbitrarily detained by Haftar’s forces. Last year, Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani visited the UAE twice, with migration from Libya featuring prominently in his discussions. The UAE’s president, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, then took part in the International Conference on Development and Migration in Rome, marking the start of the “Rome Process.”

Even with Ankara, Rome sought to align on its priorities in Libya. In 2020, Turkey emerged as a decisive actor in countering Haftar’s assault on Tripoli, supporting western Libyan authorities, under both the Sarraj and Dabaiba governments. Despite initial concerns about Ankara’s growing influence exerted over Tripolitania, and despite political competition and overlapping economic interests, Rome sought Turkey’s “solidarity” on the migration issue, which emerged as a central point of recent Italy-Turkey bilateral meetings.

Interestingly, Turkey’s recent imposition of visas for Bangladesh citizens entering the country was cited as an example of cooperation between Rome and Ankara. In 2022, more than 15,200 Bangladeshis arrived in Italy, with many transiting through Libya, about a third of whom travelled through Turkey. To avoid tensions with Ankara, Rome refrained from taking a more assertive stance on other contentious strategic issues, such as energy resource exploitation in the Eastern Mediterranean and maritime borders.

Another significant aspect of the Rome-Ankara entente involves Egypt, another key player in Libya. Rome leveraged recent regional diplomatic efforts to establish a triangular dialogue with Egypt and Turkey on Libyan issues, aiming to bridge differences and engage major supporters of the two rival power centers in Libya’s west and east.

Ambiguity between western and eastern authorities marginalized Rome’s ambitions in Libya

To control migration flows, Rome has blurred the lines between Libya’s western and eastern authorities. Initially a staunch supporter of the Skhirat Agreement, which led to the establishment of the GNA at the beginning of 2016, Italy found itself dealing with a divided country as Libya remained split between competing centres of power. This situation prompted then Italian minister of interior Marco Minniti to establish connections with Haftar during his tenure, integrating him into Italy’s new approach to the Libyan crisis.

This trend was further strengthened under the following two governments led by Conte (2018–21). Haftar’s presence at the Palermo conference in 2018, originally aimed at reconciling Libya’s factions, was seen more as a personal gesture to Conte than a genuine effort to forge an agreement with Tripoli.

Italy’s ambiguity peaked in April 2019 when Haftar attacked Tripoli. Conte declared that “Italy is neither in favor of Sarraj nor of Haftar, but of the Libyan people.” When Sarraj requested Italy to send troops and support, Rome did not officially respond, prompting Tripoli to seek and ultimately received crucial support from Ankara. Turkey’s military backing of the GNA gave Ankara significant political and economic influence over Tripolitania, sidelining Italy and diminishing its presence, role, and ambitions in Libya.

As another sign of Italy’s waning influence, the Bilateral Assistance and Support Mission in Libya (MIASIT), which includes the “Hippocrates” Task Force and the military field hospital in Misrata, has been downsized. 

Rethinking a new Libya policy for Italy

Over the past decade, Italy’s influence over the Libyan crisis has steadily declined. This decline can be attributed to two main factors: first, Italy prioritized managing migration over consistent efforts to stabilize Libya. Second, Rome played an ambiguous role by engaging with both western and eastern Libyan authorities, which complicated its diplomatic and  strategic approach.

Today, Italy seems willing to revitalize its role in North Africa (as well as in the Sahel and the rest of the continent) with the “Piano Mattei” (Mattei Plan), named after the founder of Italy’s ENI energy group. The late Enrico Mattei was known for advocating fairer relations across the Mediterranean. A steering committee has been formed, and initial pilot projects in nine African countries are set to begin soon. Notably, Libya is not among these countries, although during Meloni’s visit to Tripoli in May 2024, memoranda of understanding on health, education, and sport were signed under the Mattei Plan’s framework. However, merely enhancing development cooperation is insufficient to reestablish Italy’s influence in Libya.

To achieve this, the Italian government needs to fundamentally rethink its approach to migration. This involves moving away from polarizing political debates and shifting focus from securitizing migration to recognizing its political, demographic, and economic potential for Italy’s future. Instead of solely emphasizing police and border controls, Italy should centralize discussions on these broader impacts.

In Libya, this shift would diminish the economic power and political legitimacy that Italy unintentionally bolstered among various local and regional “spoilers of peace.”  Moreover, Italy’s reduced dependence on Libyan energy resources—marked by the lowest natural gas exports in thirteen years in 2023—should embolden Italian leadership. This could open up opportunities to propose innovative pathways to peace and national reconciliation with its southern neighbor.

Italy and Libya share deep historic ties. Rome played a crucial role in Libya’s international rehabilitation in the 1990s and has a longstanding tradition of political, economic, social, and cultural connections with Libyan counterparts. This relationship reached a symbolic peak when Italy decided to reopen its embassy in Tripoli in 2017, despite the exodus of many other international actors. Today, it’s time for Italy to make up for lost opportunities and strengthen its ties with Libya.

Karim Mezran is director of the North Africa Initiative and resident senior fellow with the Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council focusing on the processes of change in North Africa. Mezran holds a PhD in international relations from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, a JD in comparative law from the University of Rome (La Sapienza), an LLM in comparative law from the George Washington University, an MA in Arab studies from Georgetown University, and a BA in management from Hiram College.

Aldo Liga is a research fellow for the Middle East and North Africa Centre at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies. He is also a PhD candidate at the Institut Français de Géopolitique (University of Paris 8). He holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from the “Cesare Alfieri” (University of Florence) and a master’s degree in international security from Sciences Po Paris.

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China’s global influence operations have received increasing attention in the national security community. Numerous congressional hearings, media reports, and academic and industry findings have underscored China’s increased use and resourcing of foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) tactics in its covert operations both in the United States and abroad.

In response, US government offices the Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC), the Global Engagement Center (GEC), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), among others, have made strides in raising awareness of the issue and charting pathways to increase the resilience of the US information ecosystem to foreign influence. To date, however, the efforts to counter the influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have been fragmented. That fragmentation is indicative of a lack of cohesion around the concept of influence operations itself.

Across the government and nongovernment sectors alike, there is considerable variation regarding the definition and scope of information manipulation. For example, the Department of State’s (DOS’s) GEC has an expansive definition, which includes “leveraging propaganda and censorship, promoting digital authoritarianism, exploiting international organizations and bilateral partnerships, pairing cooptation and pressure, and exercising control of Chinese-language media.” Others define it more narrowly as disinformation and propaganda spread by a foreign threat actor in a coordinated, inauthentic manner, and largely occurring on social media platforms.

This variation is a reflection of the holistic and multifaceted nature of Chinese influence. Coercive tactics and influence operations have long been a central part of China’s strategic tool kit and core to how it engages with the outside world. Because China conceives of the information domain as a space that must be controlled and dominated to ensure regime survival, information operations are part of a much bigger umbrella of influence that spans the economic, political, and social domains. It may be more useful to think of information manipulation as existing within the broader conceptual framework of China’s weaponization of the information domain in service of its goal to gain global influence.

As previous work by the Digital Forensic Lab (DFRLab) has shown, China’s approach to the information domain is coordinated and proactive, taking into account the mutually constitutive relationships between the economic, industrial, and geopolitical strategies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The aim of its efforts is to gain influence—or “discourse power”—with the ultimate goal of decentering US power and leadership on the global stage. One of the main mechanisms through which the CCP seeks to achieve this objective is by focusing on the dominance of information ecosystems. This ecosystem encompasses not only narratives and content that appear in traditional and social media but also the digital infrastructure on which communication systems rely, the policies that govern those systems at the international level, and the diplomatic strategy deployed by Beijing’s operatives abroad to gain buy-in for the CCP’s vision of the global order.

The DFRLab’s previous two reports, which explored China’s strategy and the impacts of its operations abroad, found that the United States will not be successful in addressing the challenges of Chinese influence if it sees that influence as separate from the interconnected economic, political, and technical domains in which its strategy is embedded.

To this end, the DFRLab hosted a series of one-on-one expert interviews, conducted research and workshops, and held a virtual roundtable discussion with scholars and practitioners with expertise on or experience in addressing authoritarian influence and information operations, US government processes and policies around these issues, and Chinese foreign policy. This issue brief is part of a larger body of work that examines the Chinese government’s interests and capabilities and the impacts of party’s efforts to shape the global information ecosystem. The focus of this report is on how the US government can best respond to those challenges, including the architecture, tools, and strategies that exist for addressing PRC influence and information manipulation, as well as any potential gaps in the government tool kit.

This report finds that, to mount the most effective response to Chinese influence and the threat it poses to democratic interests at home and on the international stage, the United States should develop a global information strategy, one that reflects the interconnected nature of regulatory, industrial, and diplomatic policies with regard to the information domain. A core assumption undergirding this concept is that US policymaking space tends to over-index on the threat of information manipulation in particular while under-indexing on the core national interest of fostering a secure, interoperable information environment on a larger scale.

The limits of understanding Chinese influence as systemic and part of a broader strategy has sometimes led US response to be pigeonholed as an issue of strategic communications, rather than touching on the information and technology ecosystems, among others, where China focuses its information and influence efforts. Responding to Chinese influence with government messaging is not sufficient to address the complex nature of the challenge and places the United States in a position of reactivity.

In short, understanding that the CCP (1) integrates its tech industrial strategy, governance policy, and engagement strategy and (2) connects its approach at home to how it engages abroad, the United States needs to do the same, commensurate with its values. It should not respond tit-for-tat but rather have a collective strategy for a global competition for information that connects its tech strategy to its governance approach to its engagement around the world.

That is not to say that a US strategy on information resilience should mirror China’s, or that such a strategy should be developed in response to the PRC’s actions in the information domain. Nor is it to say that the United States should adopt a similar whole-of-government approach to the information domain. There are silos by design in the US system and important legal and normative foundations for the clear delineation of mission between them. What this issue brief argues for is a strategic breaking down of silos to facilitate proactive action versus a dangerous breaking down of legally required silos.

This report emphasizes that the United States should articulate how major initiatives like the CHIPS and Science Act, regulatory approaches like the recent executive orders on AI and data security, and the DOS’s recent cyberspace and digital policy strategy are part of a cohesive whole and should be understood and operationalized as such.

The strategy should outline what the United States stands for as much as what it is against. This requires that the United States frame its assessment of threat within a broader strategy of what its values are and how those values should be articulated in its regulatory, strategic, and diplomatic initiatives to promote open information environments and shore up information resilience. This includes working with allies and partners to ensure that a free, open, and interoperable internet is a global priority as well as a domestic one; developing common standards for understanding and thresholding foreign influence; and promoting connectivity at home and abroad. One finding of this report is that the United States is already leaning into its strengths and values, including championing policies that support openness and continuing support for civil society. This, along with the awareness of influence operations as the weaponization of the information domain, is a powerful response to authoritarian attacks on the integrity of both the domestic US and global information spaces.

The United States has a core national security interest in the existence of a rules-based, orderly, and open information environment. Such an environment facilitates the essential day-to-day tasks related to public diplomacy, the basic expression of rights, and investment in industries of strategic and economic value. Absent a coherent strategy on these core issues related to the integrity of the United States’ information environment that is grounded in an understanding of the interconnected nature of their constitutive parts, the challenges of foreign influence and interference will only continue to grow. This issue brief contains three sections. For sections one and two, experts in different aspects of the PRC’s information strategy addressed two to three main questions; during the course of research, further points were raised that are included in the findings. Each section represents a synthesis of the views expressed in response to these questions. The third section comprises recommendations for the US government based on the findings from the first two sections.

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The post Effective US government strategies to address China’s information influence appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On July 28, 2024, Senior Fellow Geoff Ramsey of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center was quoted on NPR’s All Things Considered about Venezuela’s contested election.

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Geoff Ramsey

Senior Fellow

Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center

Civil Society Democratic Transitions

The post Ramsey quoted on NPR’s All Things Considered appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On July 29, 2024, Vice President and Senior Director Jason Marczak of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center was quoted by The Hill about Venezuela’s contested election.

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Jason Marczak

Vice President and Senior Director

Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center

Americas Caribbean

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On July 29, 2024, Senior Fellow Geoff Ramsey of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center was interviewed on DW’s The Day (broadcast on PBS in the United States) about the evolving situation following Venezuela’s presidential election.

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Geoff Ramsey

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On July 29, 2024, Vice President and Senior Director Jason Marczak of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center was quoted by AP about Venezuela’s contested election.

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Jason Marczak

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The post Marczak quoted by AP on Venezuela’s election appeared first on Atlantic Council.

He’s not giving up without a fight. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s election commission declared him the winner in Sunday’s vote, despite ample evidence of fraud and intimidation. Opposition candidate Edmundo González declared victory as the United States and other countries expressed concerns about the results. What will be the opposition’s next move? How will Maduro respond? And what role will regional and global powers play? We polled our experts for the answers.

• Jason Marczak (@jmarczak): Vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center
• Iria Puyosa (@NSC): Senior research fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab
• Geoff Ramsey (@GRamsey_LatAm): Senior fellow at the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center

How to steal an election

• The stage was set for this moment in the months leading up to the vote, when the regime banned opposition leader María Corina Machado, with González ending up on the ballot. Then, as Jason points out, only small delegations from the United Nations and the Carter Center were allowed to monitor the vote, meaning “the González campaign could only count on its own observers to verify results.” 
• The González camp said he won about 70 percent of the votes that his team was able to verify—while Venezuela’s National Electoral Council claimed that González won 44 percent of the vote, with Maduro earning 51 percent. Jason notes that “it would be a mathematical miracle for Maduro to prevail” based on how the opposition has described the votes that it has seen.
• The public isn’t fooled, Iria tells us, noting the “outpouring of messages and videos on social media” from witnesses on the ground indicating their certainty that González won. “This is strengthening the opposition’s unity and determination to continue its fight for the restoration of democracy,” she adds.
• As of this afternoon, those voters are mobilizing in the streets, creating a new test for the regime. “Maduro has to convince the ruling elite that he can keep things under control, but both he and the military know that he can’t govern a country in flames,” Geoff says. “He’s effectively inviting the biggest loyalty test he’s faced in years.”

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Pressure from abroad

• In addition to the “serious concerns” expressed by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, several countries throughout the region called for more transparency around the vote count—including neighboring Colombia, where, as Jason notes, “President Gustavo Petro has maintained a close relationship with Maduro.”
• Without full results and an independent audit, “the international community has no choice but to respond with swift condemnation and diplomatic pressure,” Geoff says, with the United States and its allies in Latin America and Europe playing a crucial role.
• That international pressure will be important to uphold the will of Venezuelans, but there are self-interested reasons for regional and international powers to push for change. Jason says another six years of Maduro will lead to “new outward migration flows and new transnational criminal activity that will extend far beyond Venezuela’s borders.”

Crackdown at home?

• The major point of contention will be sanctions, which the United States reimposed in April after the Maduro government didn’t uphold its end of last year’s deal to hold free and fair elections. “I doubt Venezuelan elites are eager for six more years of repression, sanctions, and economic catastrophe,” Geoff says.
• The opposition, therefore, should “exploit divisions within the ruling coalition,” Iria says. At the same time, opposition leaders should “find ways to address public discontent without exposing the population to the violent repression experienced in 2017.”
• And if Maduro were to return to the bargaining table, it would look very different from the negotiations between the government and the opposition, Iria tells us. Now, she says, negotiations would no longer be about electoral conditions “but rather on Chavismo’s exit from power after its defeat in the voting booths. The next six months will be a crucial period of intense conflict in Venezuela.”

The post Can Maduro hold onto power? appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Click to jump to an expert analysis:

Jason Marczak: The international community must apply pressure for a full, transparent vote count

Geoff Ramsey: Maduro is inviting the biggest loyalty test he’s faced in years

Iria Puyosa: A new cycle of heightened political turmoil looms over Venezuela

Diego Area: The world must stand with Venezuelans in their fight for free elections

The international community must apply pressure for a full, transparent vote count

The day after Venezuelans voted in massive numbers, it’s crystal clear that Maduro, a deeply unpopular authoritarian leader, was always going to claim electoral victory whether by hook or by crook. With most international observers banned from coming to the country to monitor the vote (except small United Nations and Carter Center delegations), the González campaign could only count on its own observers to verify results. The voting tabulations that opposition observers could verify (about 40 percent of the tabulations) showed González receiving 70 percent of the vote—a far cry from the 44 percent of votes that the country’s National Electoral Council claimed that González won.

It is important that the votes of the Venezuelan people are not an exercise in futility. Votes must be credibly counted. Here, it is imperative that the international community of democracies continue to resoundingly denounce fraud and take appropriate action. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken noted “serious concerns that the result announced does not reflect the will or the votes of the Venezuelan people.” Similar concerns have been raised in nearby Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic. European partners have also raised concerns. Even in Colombia, where President Gustavo Petro has maintained a close relationship with Maduro, Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo made a “call for the total vote count, its verification, and independent audit to be carried out as soon as possible.”

The international community must continue to exact pressure so that the will of the Venezuelan people can ultimately prevail. Not doing so would mean being complicit in the disenfranchisement of the Venezuelan people. But another six years of Maduro will also have reverberations, including new outward migration flows and new transnational criminal activity that will extend far beyond Venezuela’s borders.

—Jason Marczak is the vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.

Maduro is inviting the biggest loyalty test he’s faced in years

More than twelve hours after polls closed, the fact that authorities still haven’t released the full vote count tells you everything you need to know about yesterday’s election. It seems that Maduro has decided to condemn Venezuela to six more years of conflict and isolation. Unless the government backs up its claim of victory with the full results and opens the count up to audits from observers, the international community has no choice but to respond with swift condemnation and diplomatic pressure.

This isn’t over yet. Maduro has to convince the ruling elite that he can keep things under control, but both he and the military know that he can’t govern a country in flames. He’s effectively inviting the biggest loyalty test he’s faced in years. I doubt Venezuelan elites are eager for six more years of repression, sanctions, and economic catastrophe. The opposition, under María Corina Machado’s leadership, has maintained unity and message discipline, and has the evidence in hand to document fraud and mobilize the public against Maduro’s blatant power grab. The role of the United States and its allies in Latin America and Europe will be crucial. It’s time for greater multilateral coordination in order to push the government to respect the will of the people and restore Venezuelans’ fundamental right to elect their leaders.

—Geoff Ramsey is a senior fellow at the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.

A new cycle of heightened political turmoil looms over Venezuela

The presidential elections in Venezuela turned out as forecasted: a high voter turnout, what appeared to be a decisive electoral win for the democratic opposition, and a blatant fraud that disregarded the will of the voters. 

Due to the relatively small voting centers and the presence of witnesses from local communities, the population is convinced—as we’ve seen in an outpouring of messages and videos on social media—that González won in all electoral districts. This is strengthening the opposition’s unity and determination to continue its fight for the restoration of democracy. 

Maduro’s loss of political legitimacy has left the ruling coalition vulnerable to increased instability. It will likely resort to further repression against the political opposition and organized civil society. The increase in information censorship in the week leading up to the elections is a clear sign of the severe restriction of civic space. 

The democratic opposition, led by Machado, must aim to exploit divisions within the ruling coalition to weaken its power base. The Unitary Platform must also find ways to address public discontent without exposing the population to the violent repression experienced in 2017. 

On the international front, Maduro is facing isolation from Latin American democracies, the United States, and Europe. Former allies, such as Brazil under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Colombia under Petro, were among the first to demand transparency in the election results. It now falls upon the United States to reevaluate the Qatar agreements. The negotiations would no longer be centered on electoral coexistence but rather on Chavismo’s exit from power after its defeat in the voting booths. The next six months will be a crucial period of intense conflict in Venezuela. 

—Iria Puyosa is a senior research fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

The world must stand with Venezuelans in their fight for free elections

No one thought it would be easy to remove an autocrat from power, but yesterday marked a new height in the Venezuelan government’s abuses to impede the will of the people. The people of Venezuela and their leadership have endured an epic journey to overcome obstacles and unite around the ideal of change. The disqualification of candidates like Machado and Corina Yoris, who represented genuine alternatives, and the subsequent voter suppression efforts and significant irregularities in the process, illustrate the regime’s determination to retain power at any cost.

Maduro’s actions to undermine the democratic process and steal this election pose grave consequences for the future of the country and have a direct impact on Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. By stifling free choice, the regime is not only eroding democratic institutions but also exacerbating the country’s humanitarian crisis. As a result, Venezuelans will continue to flee in search of opportunities and freedoms denied at home, contributing to an already critical migration crisis.

The world must stand with Venezuelans in their fight for a future where elections are not merely symbolic but are actual pathways to change. The integrity of the democratic process is crucial not only for Venezuela’s stability but also for the prosperity of the entire region.

—Diego Area is a deputy director at the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.

The post Experts react: Maduro is clinging to power after a disputed election. What’s next for Venezuela? appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On July 28, 2024, Senior Fellow Geoff Ramsey of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center was quoted by the Washington Post about Venezuela’s contested election.

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Geoff Ramsey

Senior Fellow

Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center

Civil Society Democratic Transitions

The post Ramsey quoted in the Washington Post on Venezuelan election appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On July 28, 2024, Senior Fellow Geoff Ramsey of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center was interviewed by BBC News about the Venezuelan presidential election taking place that day.

Venezuela is STILL waiting for results in its presidential election.

An exit poll predicts an opposition victory but both sides sound confident.

"If the ruling socialist party actually has the results then the electoral authorities should be able to prove it."@GRamsey_LatAm pic.twitter.com/wtG4DOO9U4

— Carl Nasman (@CarlNasman) July 29, 2024

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Geoff Ramsey

Senior Fellow

Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center

Civil Society Democratic Transitions

The post Geoff Ramsey interviewed by BBC News on Venezuela’s election appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On July 28, 2024, Senior Fellow Geoff Ramsey of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center was quoted by Bloomberg about Venezuela’s contested election.

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Geoff Ramsey

Senior Fellow

Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center

Civil Society Democratic Transitions

The post Ramsey quoted by Bloomberg about Venezuela appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On July 28, 2024, Senior Fellow Geoff Ramsey of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center was quoted on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday about Venezuela’s election.

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Civil Society Democratic Transitions

The post Ramsey quoted on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On July 26, 2024, Senior Fellow Geoff Ramsey of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center was quoted by the Los Angeles Times about Venezuela’s election.

More about our expert

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Geoff Ramsey

Senior Fellow

Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center

Civil Society Democratic Transitions

The post Ramsey quoted in Los Angeles Times on Venezuela’s election appeared first on Atlantic Council.

This is the first international investigative report presenting factual findings and legal conclusions on violations during the conflict. The COI found that Hamas and other Palestinian militants committed war crimes and violated international humanitarian and human rights law in their October 7, 2023, attack, and Israeli authorities and security forces committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, and violated international humanitarian and human rights law, in their military campaign in the Gaza Strip. These findings and the robust evidence backing them may support future accountability proceedings.

About the COI

The UN Human Rights Council established the COI in May 2021, mandating it to investigate all alleged violations of international humanitarian and human rights law in Palestinian territories and Israel leading up to and since April 13, 2021—a date marking an increase in protests and violence in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza sparked by disruptions at the al-Aqsa Mosque and the anticipated eviction of Palestinian families from East Jerusalem.

The COI is led by three independent and impartial experts, supported by a team of investigators and analysts. The standard of proof is “reasonable grounds,” following most other UN human rights investigative bodies, including those on Myanmar, Syria, Ukraine, and Venezuela. Facts are reported “where, based on a body of verified information, an objective and ordinary prudent observer would have reasonable grounds to conclude that the facts took place as described,” and legal conclusions are reported where “facts meet all the elements of a violation or abuse.”

The COI based its June report on thousands of forensically verified open-source items, more than 350 items received from public calls for submissions, and witness and survivor interviews in Turkey and Egypt, where individuals had fled, as well as remotely. The COI sent one request for information to the state of Palestine (represented by the Palestine Liberation Organization), which provided “extensive comments.” Israel did not respond to the COI’s six requests for information and access to the territory. However, officials denounced the COI, alleging prejudice and antisemitism—echoing allegations from prior UN investigative mandates concerning Israel—and reportedly restricted witness communication.

October 7, 2023, attack

The COI found that members of Hamas’s military wing, other Palestinian armed groups, and Palestinian civilians committed war crimes and violated international humanitarian and human rights law in their October 7, 2023, attack.

The COI detailed the war crimes of murder and intentionally directing attacks on civilians, committed by shooting and killing eight hundred civilians at twenty-four kibbutzim and civilian locations on October 7, 2023. The report details the horrific methods by which militants killed—systematically moving from house to house, shooting at hiding and fleeing civilians, setting homes on fire, and killing civilians at a music festival, in public toilets, in public shelters, and at bus stops and along roads. Among the dead were forty children, including a nine-month-old shot and killed while hiding with her mother, and 130 people aged sixty-five and older. Through these acts, militants also committed the war crimes of torture and cruel or inhuman treatment and destroying or seizing the property of an adversary. The COI also described unlawful attacks at military outposts, including killings of soldiers who were hors de combat.

Palestinian militants’ indiscriminate rocket fire toward populated places in Israel—killing eighteen civilians on October 7, 2023, and in following weeks—also constitutes the war crimes of murder and intentionally directing attacks on civilians.

Palestinian fighters also committed the war crime of outrages upon personal dignity by desecrating corpses, including burning, mutilating, lacerating, decapitating, and undressing and subsequently exhibiting bodies.

The COI confirmed acts of sexual violence against women and men at the Nova music festival, Route 232, Nahal Oz military base, and kibbutzim Re’im, Nir Oz, and Kfar Aza on October 7, 2023. Evidence included restraints placed on women, positions of and signs of violence on victims’ bodies, and disseminated imagery of undressed bodies. The COI also found that gender-based violence was “perpetrated in similar ways in several locations and by multiple Palestinian perpetrators,” with patterns including abducting women with force or threats, coerced close physical proximity to abductors, treatment of women’s bodies as “victory trophies,” and gendered slurs. The COI could not verify reports of rape, sexualized torture, and genital mutilation due to lack of access to victims, witnesses, and crime sites, nor did it find evidence that militants were ordered to commit sexual violence.

Finally, the COI found that militants committed the war crime of taking hostages—often combined with outrages upon personal dignity and inhumane treatment, including sexual and gender-based violence, assault, harassment, and intimidation—by abducting 252 people from Israel (approximately twenty security forces and the remainder civilians, including thirty-six children) and brought them to Gaza. As of May 21, half of the hostages were released or rescued, with the remainder in captivity, whether alive or dead.

Military response in Gaza

The COI found that Israeli authorities and members of the security forces committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, and violated international humanitarian and human rights law, in their military campaign in Gaza.

Israeli authorities and forces perpetrated the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, evidenced by the imposition of a total siege for two weeks, from approximately October 9 to 20—with water shut off and no aid allowed in—followed by meager aid deliveries, with measures hampering entry of aid and restricting or blocking specific items. The COI concluded that authorities imposed the siege as retribution for militants’ October 7, 2023, attack and that aid restrictions were intended “to instrumentalize and weaponize the provision of necessities” and hold hostage the Gazan population “to achieve political and military objectives,” constituting collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli forces also attacked humanitarian convoys, further limiting aid availability and distribution.

Israeli authorities and forces also committed “[e]xtermination, as a crime against humanity”—”the killing one or more persons, including by inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population, … [as] part of a mass killing of members of a civilian population”—based on attacks on civilians and humanitarian aid restrictions.

Israeli authorities and forces also committed the war crimes of murder and intentionally directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects, as well as the crime against humanity of murder. Israeli officials’ statements evidence permissive changes in targeting practices—launching more strikes than in prior conflicts, targeting locations with “an inkling of intelligence,” and using more intense weaponry with wider impact areas—resulting in significantly higher casualties than in prior Israel-Hamas conflicts and a higher proportion of women and children killed. The report detailed instances in which Israeli forces targeted civilians who were clearly unarmed, including civilians sheltering at a church, a child holding a white flag, and three unarmed Israeli hostages. The COI also found Israel’s military campaign consistent with the Dahya doctrine, a military strategy to use “overwhelming and disproportionate force against civilian areas and infrastructure” to defeat the enemy.

The COI noted it continues to investigate reports that Hamas and other militants operate from civilian locations, but it could not verify evidence Israeli authorities publicly presented. The COI made no finding regarding Hamas’s use of human shields.

The COI found that Israeli evacuation orders constituted the war crime and crime against humanity of forcible transfer. From October 7, 2023, to December 30, 2023, more than eighty orders instructed civilians to leave their neighborhoods and go to areas that effectively constituted safe zones with legal protections. However, many evacuation orders were unclear and confusing, had insufficient or unstated time frames, and/or were difficult or impossible to comply with due to chaos along evacuation routes—including Israeli checkpoints where individuals were forced at gunpoint to strip and “walk for prolonged periods without clothes,” a lack of transport, inadequate support for vulnerable persons, and Israeli and Hamas attacks on and harassment of evacuees. Moreover, evacuation orders were issued alongside or in the context of authorities’ statements dehumanizing Palestinians, labeling all Gazans as Hamas, referring to the second Nakba, and calling for the removal of Gazan civilians and the establishment of Israeli settlements. Accordingly, the evacuation orders did not constitute an advance effective warning to civilians, but instead amounted to forcible transfer. Israeli forces also attacked safe zones and destroyed entire communities and residential areas that were evacuated, leaving nothing for families to return to.

The COI also documented Israeli forces’ commission of the war crimes of sexual violence, outrages upon personal dignity, and sexual and gender-based violence amounting to torture or inhuman and cruel treatment, as well as the crimes against humanity of gender persecution and torture and inhuman and cruel treatment. Israeli forces compelled public stripping and nudity “in many locations,” with victims “blindfolded, kneeling, and/or with their hands tied” while subject to interrogation, verbal or psychological abuse, and/or coerced physical acts. “[M]en and boys were targeted in particular ways,” including Israeli forces repeatedly filming and photographing them with images disseminated online and family and community members forced to watch. Women were also targeted with specific forms of psychological violence and sexual harassment, including online shaming and doxing, sexualized graffiti, and invasion of personal privacy, including by soldiers rifling through lingerie. These acts were aggravated by violating Gazans’ modest and private social practices and disseminating humiliating content online that would be almost impossible to remove. The COI concluded that the sexual and gender-based violence “was intended to humiliate and degrade the Palestinian population as a whole.” The pattern of forced public stripping and nudity indicated it was either ordered or condoned, and the prevalence and severity of sexual and gender-based crimes suggest they are part of Israeli operating procedures.

Impact of the report

The COI is not a court or a tribunal, and it cannot prosecute or ensure legal accountability. However, it can issue recommendations to promote accountability and support accountability mechanisms, including by sharing evidence with domestic, regional, and international courts. Thus, while the report itself will not result in trials, its documentation can advance investigations and contribute to future prosecutions of Palestinian and Israeli forces and authorities. These cases may proceed at the International Criminal Court (ICC)—where the prosecutor has applied for arrest warrants for Hamas and Israeli officials—or in domestic courts. The COI is also recommending these accountability steps—that ICC member states support and cooperate fully with the Office of the Prosecutor’s investigation and that states parties to the Geneva Conventions, Convention against Torture, and the Genocide Convention investigate core international crimes under domestic or universal jurisdiction.

While investigations and prosecutions may take years, legal accountability is essential to recovering and healing from a conflict that has resulted in “months of losses and despair, retribution and atrocities.” As the COI concluded: “The only way to stop the recurring cycles of violence…is to ensure strict adherence to international law.”

Elise Baker is a staff lawyer with the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Litigation Project. Previously, she worked at the United Nations International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism on Syria and led Physicians for Human Rights’ Syria Mapping Project, which documented attacks on Syria’s health care system.

The post Unpacking the UN findings of war crimes by Hamas and Israel since October 7 appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Mere moments after the announcement, Macron declared that he would not name a prime minister until after the conclusion of the Olympic Games in August. Until then, a caretaker government under Prime Minister Gabriel Attal will remain in place. Still, the potential of an NFP prime minister spooked the markets, as the party’s economic policies would trigger even more deficit spending. The spread of France’s ten-year bond yield against Germany’s increased by five basis points, reflecting a loss in confidence in the French government’s finances. 

But even after the Olympics, Castets is unlikely to be tapped to form a government. Instead, the parties of the center, center right, and center left will have to endure a tedious drill from which France’s constitution has spared them for decades: negotiations. 

The moderate “Republican Right” (DR) appears ready to play ball and recently put forward a set of policy proposals complete with two red lines that will inform the negotiations. But a deal including the Republicans would not be enough: The centrists would need the more moderate forces from the NFP (read: excluding the far left) to support—or at least not oppose—a government for the time being.

The negotiations behind an arrangement that would bring Communists, Gaullist Republicans, Greens, and centrists under the same banner is likely to be every bit as complicated as one would imagine. But in the likely case that the NFP fails to clear the bar for government formation, this would become the only option. The question then becomes: What could this political hodgepodge compromise on? 

Synchronized steering

Despite having lost the legislative election, the Macron-supporting center block will not concede much on any of its policy laurels. Reversing the controversial and hard-won increase of the retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four, for example, will be off the table. 

The center right has also set explicit red lines: that there be no tax increases and that fiscal reform not hurt pensioners. 

Taking into account these constraints and the need to manage France’s strained fiscal situation, there is not much negotiating flexibility left. Nevertheless, the centrist coalition must consider some concessions and secure certain inducements if they hope to bring the Republicans, Socialists, and Greens onside. 

1. Green reindustrialization

The adoption of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in the United States prompted pushback from many European states. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire and his German counterpart Robert Habeck claimed the legislation was not compatible with World Trade Organization principles and called for the “defense” and green reindustrialization of the European Union (EU). 

In July 2023 the French National Assembly unanimously agreed on the creation of a “national strategy” for green industry, which lays out a plan for the 2023-2030 period. One week later, a Green Industry Law was approved at first reading and later adopted in October 2023. Like the IRA, France’s Green Industry Law seeks to meet environmental objectives (reducing forty-one million tons of CO2 by 2030, or 1 percent of France’s total footprint) and economic ones (positioning France as a leader in green and strategic technologies, while reindustrializing the country). As part of the law, the Green Industry Investment Tax Credit (C31V) was established to encourage companies to carry out industrial projects involving batteries, wind power, solar panels, and heat pumps. The C31V is expected to generate €23 billion in investment and directly create forty thousand jobs by 2030. 

While in opposition, the Socialists and Greens voted against the law and other left parties abstained. All cited the lack of specificity and actual green commitments in the industrialization-centered bill. However, if the centrist bloc offered to revisit the bill or introduce new, more targeted standards and legislation, it could serve as a powerful inducement to win the Greens and Socialists’ support. Given that this French counter to the IRA involves private-sector mobilization and promises reindustrialization, it has the added benefit of being (just about) fiscally feasible and acceptable to the right. 

2. Rewarding effort

The thirty-five-hour work week was first introduced into French law by Lionel Jospin’s Socialist-led government in 2000, and it has since become a cornerstone of the left’s platform. However, the fact that most employees still work above the legal thirty-five-hour limit has led to a system where they can take half days or full days off to compensate for extra hours. 

In August of 2022, Macron’s government successfully passed an amendment that allowed firms to buy these hours back from their employees, essentially transforming them into paid overtime. 

As part of the center right’s current proposal, the group is seeking additional flexibility in the thirty-five-hour work week by reducing taxation on overtime, on top of cutting overall social charges paid by employees. The center right has been fairly nonspecific about how much these would be cut, most likely to avoid alienating the left. However, the main way the Republicans propose to fund this—a cap on unemployment benefits at 70 percent of the minimum wage—would be a red flag for the parties which could otherwise be lured out of the NFP.

3. Balancing budgets

France’s large budget deficit, which in 2023 soared to 5.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), raises the stakes. In May, S&P Global Ratings downgraded the country’s long-term credit rating from “AA” to “AA-” and the European Commission reprimanded France for exceeding the EU’s deficit cap of 3 percent of GDP. Today, the Commission formally opened proceedings against France and six other violating countries, directing them to immediately take corrective measures to rectify their fiscal deficits or else face financial sanctions from Brussels. 

Both S&P and the Commission forecast positive economic growth, but emphasize the urgent need for France to address its public finances. Growth alone will not be enough to overcome the fiscal hurdles ahead. 

Reconciling the center right’s rejection of any tax hikes and the need to provide parties of the left with guarantees on social spending for them to abandon the NFP will be very challenging indeed. But there is some room for compromise. 

Shortly after Macron’s arrival at the Élysée Palace for his first mandate in 2017, he moved to slash France’s contentious wealth tax, replacing it with a real estate tax. A flat tax of 30 percent on capital gains was also introduced. The decision came as part of Macron’s pro-business platform in a bid to curb the flight of French millionaires from the country, and it drew sharp criticism from political opponents who labeled him “president of the rich.”

The centrist bloc could offer to reintroduce a progressive taxation scheme on capital gains. In the spirit of France’s goal of green reindustrialization, the centrists could move to keep the favorable 30 percent flat tax for green technologies to encourage investment, while introducing a progressive scheme in other sectors. If they do decide to favor green industrial investment, the tax benefit would have to apply to capital gains accrued throughout the EU—not only France—so as to not violate single market rules. 

Sticking the landing

Negotiations will be more of a marathon than a sprint. Macron is unable to call for new elections for at least the next twelve months, so until then, this parliament will have to find a way to work together. 

After the formation of a government—which Macron has indicated will not begin until after the Olympics—the next major challenge facing French policymakers is to pass the yearly budget by December. This grueling event will be made all the more difficult by today’s unprecedentedly divided National Assembly.

Whichever government emerges from current negotiations will risk having its spending plan voted down immediately. Fortunately for France, the constitution contains a proviso that would allow the state to carry on. Essentially, if the Assembly cannot agree on a new budget, the plan approved for the previous fiscal year will roll over. 

However, recycling this year’s budget would still create a projected deficit of 4.4 percent. This would again violate the EU’s 3 percent cap and fall well short of the deficit reduction the markets—the ultimate referees of how France is faring—are hoping to see. 

Charles Lichfield is the deputy director and C. Boyden Gray senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center

Gustavo Romero is an intern with the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center.

At the intersection of economics, finance, and foreign policy, the GeoEconomics Center is a translation hub with the goal of helping shape a better global economic future.

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The post What French economic policy may look like after the Olympics appeared first on Atlantic Council.

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The turbulence of the current political climate cannot be overstated. Netanyahu’s schedule has been plagued by constant turmoil. Biden’s recent bout with COVID-19, the campaign obligations of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, and confusion about who would preside over—or even attend—the joint session of Congress convened in the prime minister’s honor have all complicated logistics. This, at a time when the upcoming US elections in November are already absorbing the vast share of America’s attention. None of this commotion detracts from the importance of high-level engagement at this critical juncture.  

In his face-to-face encounter with Biden, Netanyahu had a pivotal opportunity—which one hopes that he didn’t squander—to synchronize Israeli and American objectives for the remaining six months of the Biden presidency. He would have done wisely to move beyond pithy slogans and platitudes and, instead, provide detailed outlines of his plans for the future of the Gaza Strip and West Bank, the festering conflicts with Lebanon and Iran, and the drive to further Israel’s integration into the Middle East. Coordination with the United States is a force multiplier for Israel. Discord weakens its hand.

Netanyahu is advocating what his aides have dubbed a “new way” of confronting Iran—the same country that featured prominently in his previous, and no less controversial, appearance on Capitol Hill in 2015. Summoning memories of Pearl Harbor and Winston Churchill to draw parallels between World War II and the present moment, he appealed to Congress on July 24 for the United States to take a more aggressive approach toward combatting the Islamic Republic by bolstering support for Israel’s war on Hamas and helping to craft a new Abraham Alliance to “counter the growing Iranian threat.” That plea comes on the heels of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s July 19 warning that Iran is “probably one or two weeks away” from producing enough fissile material to manufacture a nuclear weapon.

The general themes of the prime minister’s case will undoubtedly resonate with the president. But significant gaps endure. The pace of ongoing negotiations to facilitate freedom for the captives in Hamas custody and an end to the fighting in Gaza has fallen short of Biden’s expectations. The US has also been known to encourage Israel toward restraint when responding to the provocations of Iran and its regional proxies.

When Netanyahu and Biden met privately in the Oval Office, both leaders came armed assuredly with extensive wish lists. The prime minister will have beseeched the president to continue having Israel’s back for as long as it takes the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to defeat its enemies resoundingly. (They likely disagreed on what that actually entails.) More specifically, Netanyahu will have repeated his request for unimpeded access to American weaponry and asked that the Biden administration remain steadfast as a bulwark to prevent the imposition of international sanctions against Israel. He will have sought US backing for his vision of a demilitarized and deradicalized Gaza—one where Israel will maintain security oversight while Palestinians who favor coexistence with their Israeli neighbors exercise civilian control—and for Israeli measures to defend against threats from Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Above all else, he will have implored Biden to leverage the full weight of America’s power in order to halt Iran’s malign influence and thwart its nuclear ambitions.

The president will have pushed the prime minister to line up behind US-sponsored efforts to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza and win the release of all those being held hostage. He will also have pressed Netanyahu to contribute to de-escalating rising tensions across the region. In that context, Biden will have reiterated his call for Israel’s government to articulate a pathway that can lead to eventual Palestinian statehood as a prerequisite to the creation of a broader multinational framework—analogous to the “Abraham Alliance” which Netanyahu previewed before Congress—that can function as a means to counter Iranian belligerence decisively.

Echoes of Biden’s words to Netanyahu would have surfaced in the prime minister’s subsequent conversation with Harris, who has now stepped further into the limelight as the senior-most administration figure to deliver public comment on the discussions with the Israeli leader. That said, the White House readout of her meeting with Netanyahu included a pointed reference to “extremist settler violence and settlement expansion” as destabilizing elements in the West Bank. Where the vice president appears also to have deviated from Biden is in the intensity of her reaction to Gaza’s humanitarian predicament, about which she intoned on July 25 that “we cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent”—prompting a senior Israeli official to express concern that her remarks could “be interpreted by Hamas as daylight between the US and Israel, thereby making a deal harder to secure.”

The clock is ticking. Biden, no longer inhibited by the constraints of a re-election bid, is primed to make legacy moves and determined, by his admission, to “keep working to end the war in Gaza, bring home all the hostages, and bring peace and security to the Middle East and end this war.” Caveats notwithstanding, these are all objectives that Israelis can embrace wholeheartedly. Given the uncertainty of what may transpire after January 20, Netanyahu—whose political legacy hangs in the balance—should hasten to roll up his sleeves, attach Israel’s wagon to Biden’s train, and pray it reaches that destination.

Shalom Lipner is a nonresident senior fellow for Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council. From 1990 to 2016, he served seven consecutive premiers at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem. Follow him on X: @ShalomLipner.

The post Netanyahu comes to Washington on a ‘wing’ and a prayer appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On July 18, former US President Donald Trump accepted his party’s nomination as the Republican presidential nominee for the November election together with his running mate, J.D. Vance. Both politicians share an isolationist vision for US foreign policy that could have serious implications for European security.

What might a potential Republican presidency mean for Europe, especially regarding support for Ukraine? Which lessons might China take from a weakened transatlantic security partnership? Should Europeans be more prepared for a potential second term of former president Trump?

On this episode of #AtlanticDebrief, Rachel Rizzo sits down with Nico Lange, Senior Fellow at the Munich Security Conference and the Center for European Policy Analysis, to discuss his impressions from the Republican National Convention and implications of a potential Trump presidency on European security.

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The post #AtlanticDebrief – What did the RNC mean for Europe? | A Debrief from Nico Lange appeared first on Atlantic Council.

During the 1990s, some Russians claimed the dictatorial Lukashenka model was exactly what the troubled and oligarchic Russian Federation needed. Although always opposed to the Belarusian language and broadly aligned with Moscow, Lukashenka tenaciously maintained his independence when Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, skillfully extracting benefits from both the Kremlin and the West.

This independence was severely undermined by the massive grassroots protests that erupted in Belarus in the wake of the country’s 2020 presidential vote. Large numbers of Belarusians believed reformist opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya had won the election and took to the streets to protest. Lukashenka only survived thanks to Russian support. This left him far more reliant on the Kremlin and significantly reduced his room for maneuver.

In February 2022, Lukashenka allowed Putin to use Belarusian territory to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. However, it soon became clear that things were not going according to Putin’s plan. Russia’s heavy losses during the initial weeks of the invasion restored some of Lukashenka’s independence, while disquiet in his own armed forces and some quarters of the security services convinced him that further direct involvement in Russia’s war would be folly. Since then, Lukashenka has provided training and equipment to Russian forces, but has resisted pressure to join the invasion.

As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.

Putin remains eager to exploit Belarus’s resources and strategic position to threaten Kyiv once more and to target Western supplies entering Ukraine from Poland. Belarus could also play an important role in the future, if Russia seeks to intensify hybrid hostilities against the Baltic states or to launch a direct attack. This looks unlikely as long as Lukashenka remains in power. The Belarusian dictator may therefore represent a status quo which fundamentally favors Ukraine and its allies more than Russia.

If Putin continues to fail in his immediate objective of occupying all of Ukraine’s Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions, there is a real possibility that he will ultimately lose patience with Lukashenka and move to either replace him or otherwise compel Belarus to join the invasion. Moreover, it is almost certain that Putin will attempt to secure Belarusian human and material resources if Lukashenka dies before him.

Many Belarusians already know what would await them if Putin fully incorporated and militarized their country. They would experience an oligarchic raiding of businesses, covert or overt mobilization, and the extinguishing of the traditionally Western-looking aspect that is an important part of Belarusian national identity.

In contrast, if Belarusians manage to maintain their independence and empower a reformist leadership, they can begin moving towards European integration, with European Union membership an eventual possibility. In this context, it is vital that all Belarusians, including political elites along with members of the military and security forces, receive assurances that they have a viable alternative to the Kremlin vision for their country’s future.

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Articulating a European future for Belarus does not need to entail talk of NATO membership. Instead, it should involve acknowledging the possibility of removing sanctions, enhancing access to EU travel, education, and capital, and eventually embracing Belarus’s modest population of 9.2 million people under democratic leadership and after deep structural reforms.

From a purely practical standpoint, European integration would not be an insurmountable task. Lukashenka’s repressive regime has actually resulted in relatively good infrastructure conditions for Belarusians, especially in rural areas, compared to most other former Soviet republics. Belarus boasts a highly educated and comparatively young demographic. Prior to the 2020 protests, the country had burgeoning IT and entrepreneurial sectors.

A Belarus free of Russian military entanglements and increasingly aligned with the Euro-Atlantic community instead of the developing Russia-China-Iran-North Korea axis of autocracies would contribute significantly to the security of Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic states. A Belarusian geopolitical pivot toward the West could also encourage transformation inside Russia itself and compel more Russians to embrace a post-imperial identity.

Failure to articulate the possibility of a European future for Belarus leaves the Euro-Atlantic community at risk of being caught off guard without a plan when Belarus does, indeed, reach its fork in the road. This may come sooner than many are prepared for. By taking steps now to engage with Belarusian society, the EU can strengthen its own foreign policy credentials as a major geopolitical player, mitigate against the risk of a rapid Russian militarization of Belarus, and set the stage for a cooperative relationship with Belarusians in the years to come.

Richard Cashman is a nonresident fellow at the Centre for Defence Strategies.

Further reading

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The West’s collective fear of escalation and reluctance to commit to Ukrainian victory have convinced Putin that he can outlast his opponents and achieve an historic triumph in Ukraine, writes Mykola Bielieskov.

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The Russian Navy’s quiet retreat from Crimea highlights the emptiness of Putin’s red lines and the self-defeating folly of Western escalation management, writes Peter Dickinson.

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The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

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The post The West should articulate the possibility of a European future for Belarus now appeared first on Atlantic Council.

It was already clear some time before the NATO summit that there would be no serious discussion of a membership invitation for Ukraine. Instead, the emphasis would be on improving the existing partnership, with alliance leaders preserving as much room to maneuver as possible when dealing with the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Post-summit coverage focused on the official communique declaring Ukraine’s “irreversible path” to future NATO membership, but not everyone saw the wording of the joint statement as a breakthrough. Indeed, some skeptics interpreted this latest rephrasing of NATO’s open door for Ukraine as an indication that the alliance is still no closer to agreeing on a specific time frame regarding Ukrainian membership.

The summit was not a complete anticlimax, of course. A number of countries pledged additional air defense systems to Ukraine, meeting one of Kyiv’s most urgent requests to help protect the country from Russian bombardment. There were announcements regarding the imminent arrival of the first F-16 fighter jets in Ukraine, while additional mechanisms to coordinate weapons deliveries and enhance cooperation were unveiled.

NATO members also agreed in Washington to allocate forty billion euros for Ukrainian military aid next year. While this figure is certainly significant, it falls far below the level of funding needed to ensure Ukrainian victory. This is not a new issue. While the collective GDP of the West dwarfs Russia’s, Western leaders have yet to mobilize their financial resources to provide Ukraine with an overwhelming military advantage. As a consequence, it is the much smaller Russian economy that is currently producing more artillery shells than the entire Western world.

As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.

The modest progress made at the NATO summit reflects a lack of urgency that has hampered the Western response ever since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion. There is little chance this hesitancy will provoke a change of heart in Moscow. On the contrary, Russian policymakers are far more likely to regard the West’s current posture as proof that the war is going according to plan.

Unlike the West, the Kremlin has a clear and coherent vision for a future Russian victory in Ukraine. This involves gradually wearing down Ukrainian battlefield resistance with relentless high intensity combat along the front lines of the war, while extensively bombing civilian infrastructure and population centers across the country.

In parallel to these military measures, Russia will also continue to conduct diverse influence operations targeting Ukrainian and Western audiences, with the goal of undermining morale and sowing division. This will leave Ukraine increasingly isolated and exhausted, leading eventually to collapse and capitulation.

The Russian authorities believe Ukraine will struggle to maintain the attention of its Western allies, and are encouraged by growing signs that many in the West now view the invasion as a stalemate. Putin himself appears to be more confident that ever that the West will lose interest in the war, and expects Western leaders to reluctantly pressure Kyiv into a negotiated settlement on Russian terms.

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Ukraine’s advance in Kursk: What’s next and implications

Conflict Russia Security & Defense Ukraine

Since the invasion began nearly two and a half years ago, Western leaders have failed to demonstrate the kind of resolve that would force Putin to revise his expectations. Instead of flooding Kyiv with the very latest tanks, jets, drones, and missiles, Ukraine’s partners have consistently slow-walked military aid while imposing absurd restrictions on the use of Western weapons.

The West’s messaging has been equally inadequate. Rather than publicly committing themselves to Ukrainian victory, Western leaders have spoken of preventing Ukrainian defeat and of standing with Ukraine “for as long as it takes.” This is not the language of strength that Putin understands.

Confronted by continued signs of Western indecisiveness, the Russian dictator is now escalating his demands. His most recent peace proposal envisaged Ukraine ceding all lands already occupied by Russia along with significant additional territory not currently under Kremlin control. There can be little doubt that he remains as committed as ever to the complete surrender and subjugation of Ukraine.

Putin knows he could not hope to match the collective might of the democratic world, but this does not discourage him. Instead, he fully expects continued Western weakness to hand Russia an historic victory in Ukraine. Unless the West is finally prepared to translate its vast financial, military, and technical potential into war-winning support for Ukraine, he may be proved right.

Mykola Bielieskov is a research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies and a senior analyst at Ukrainian NGO “Come Back Alive.” The views expressed in this article are the author’s personal position and do not reflect the opinions or views of NISS or Come Back Alive.

Further reading

UkraineAlert Jul 16, 2024

Russia’s retreat from Crimea makes a mockery of the West’s escalation fears

By Peter Dickinson

The Russian Navy’s quiet retreat from Crimea highlights the emptiness of Putin’s red lines and the self-defeating folly of Western escalation management, writes Peter Dickinson.

Conflict Defense Policy

UkraineAlert Jun 12, 2024

Ukraine is making the Russian occupation of Crimea untenable

By Olivia Yanchik

Ukraine’s growing air strike capabilities are decimating Russian air defenses in Crimea and making the occupation of the peninsula increasingly untenable, writes Olivia Yanchik.

Conflict Defense Technologies

UkraineAlert Jul 18, 2024

Ukraine’s drone success offers a blueprint for cybersecurity strategy

By Anatoly Motkin

Ukraine’s rapidly expanding domestic drone industry offers a potentially appealing blueprint for the development of the country’s cybersecurity capabilities, writes Anatoly Motkin.

Conflict Cybersecurity

The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

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The post Putin is convinced he can outlast the West and win in Ukraine appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The Opening Ceremony tomorrow evening will abandon the usual constraints of a stadium for a parade of athletes down the River Seine, with boats carrying national delegations. With eighty giant screens set up around the city, and with cameras capturing the action on every vessel, the largest in-person audience ever will cheer 10,500 athletes as they make their winding, six-kilometer way to the Place du Trocadéro, with the Eiffel Tower directly facing it, for the Olympic protocol and torch lighting.

The Paris Olympics thus will serve as a refreshing, democratic (small d) antidote to several recent authoritarian-hosted Games. It will be a celebration of the individual and the freedom-drenched collective, in the country of the 1789 French Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment’s notions of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.”

By comparison, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics unfolded just before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and just after Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin entered their bloody, “no limits” partnership. The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics were tarnished by revelations of Russia’s state-sponsored doping program and set the stage for Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics before them signaled Xi’s rise as China’s most powerful and autocratic leader since Mao Zedong, and Putin’s Russia invaded neighboring Georgia during the Games.

The Olympics never take place in a political vacuum, and this year’s context is chilling: wars in Europe and the Middle East and growing tensions in Asia, all of which contribute to the biggest threats to global order since the 1930s.

“The world is really longing for something unifying among all these tensions and confrontations,” International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach noted in a recent must-read Washington Post feature. Bach added that the Paris Olympics could be that something. Speaking last November at the United Nations, the IOC president worried that the world was in a “dangerous downward spiral . . . Political, social, and economic divisions are gaining more ground.”

The Washington Post’s Les Carpenter writes, “Many in the Olympic world are hoping these Games will do what Los Angeles did 40 years ago” at the 1984 Summer Games.

Those Olympics followed the US-led boycott, joined by more than sixty countries, of the 1980 Moscow Summer Games to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. The Los Angeles Games also set the stage for one of the most dramatic expansions of democracy in history.

They transpired toward the end of US President Ronald Reagan’s first term and five short years before the Berlin Wall’s fall, which was followed by the Soviet Union’s collapse. They were a demonstration of a vibrant US democracy, full of confidence and determined to shape its times.

The games also marked a new, successful business model for the Olympic movement. They were run by a young travel executive named Peter Ueberroth, who introduced rich television deals and corporate sponsorships that produced more than two hundred million dollars in profit. The Soviets and many of their allies boycotted, and US athletes won four times more gold medals than anyone else.

It’s hard to say what legacy the Paris Games might have, though their context feels less promising than Reagan’s “morning in America.” From tomorrow through August 11, the Paris Olympics will coexist with the continued reverberations from French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for snap parliamentary elections, which resulted on July 7 in victory for the New Popular Front, a broad alliance of left-wing parties, and an unexpected defeat for the far right, with a prime minister yet to be chosen.

In the United States, a particularly divisive and decisive election will follow in November, amid an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden’s withdrawal as a candidate.

There have been worse contexts for Olympics.

In 1936, Adolf Hitler used the Berlin Games to rally fascism ahead of World War II; five Games have been cancelled due to wars; Munich’s 1972 Olympics were blighted by a terrorist attack that killed Israeli athletes. Putin has launched invasions of northern Georgia, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine during the period of “Olympic truce,” when for the week ahead of the Games and the week after world leaders agree not to attack other countries.

Here’s the 2024 backdrop: The years that followed the Los Angeles Games saw more countries than ever become democratic—a formidable wave of democracy that lasted more than two decades. This stopped around 2006, and democracy has been in relative decline since then, according to Freedom House, the V-Dem Institute, and the Atlantic Council’s own Freedom and Prosperity Indexes.

When the final medal is awarded and the last athlete departs, the Paris Olympics will likely have reflected more than shaped our geopolitical scrum. They won’t signal autocratic rise, as did those in Beijing and Moscow before them, but it’s probably too much to expect that, like Los Angeles, they will be followed by a positive wave of democratic change.

The good news is that the next five Olympic Games, including both winter and summer, are in Milan-Cortina, Los Angeles, the French Alps, Brisbane, and Salt Lake City. Each will be held in a country that democratically elects its government, and each can be a milestone to measure if democracies are on a winning trajectory.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post Dispatch from Paris: The Olympics of hope begin on the River Seine appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The absence of an independent electoral administration in Syria is not news to anyone. The electoral authorities are deeply embedded within the judicial and executive structure and operate as extensions of the ruling party’s apparatus, rather than as impartial overseers of the electoral process. This integration ensures that electoral commissions at all levels, from national to regional, strictly adhere to the governing party’s agenda.

The administration is not a centralized system under a single hierarchical institution. Instead, it involves multiple governmental and judicial bodies. At the top of this system is the Supreme Judicial Elections Committee (SJEC), which in practice is appointed by presidential decree instead of by the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) as required by the law. The SJEC is neither equipped nor mandated to implement elections, as it does not have staff or offices for election operations.

Below the SJEC are the governorate-level subcommittees. Nominally, these should be the key institutions in managing election operations other than the candidacy process, which is managed by the nomination committees that work independently from the governorate subcommittee.

Both committees are staffed by judges who approach their work by focusing on providing legal cover for processes implemented by other institutions, rather than actively managing electoral operations.

These committees suffer from the same lack of independence as the rest of the judicial system in Syria, as the president wields significant control over the judicial system overall. He is a member of the SJC and appoints the Supreme Constitutional Court, which handles election appeals.

However, even if the judicial committees were more independent, they would have little control over the process: the Ministry of Interior (MoI) is the key operational entity. It is tasked with various matters, such as managing the voters register, custody over all the electoral documents, procurement and management of sensitive election materials, and logistics.

At the local level, election day operations are managed by election committees composed of civil servants appointed by governors. These committees are part of the governmental structure and do not report to the SJEC, further eroding the processes’ independence. The committees are hardly trained, as their training consists of oath-taking ceremonies with little focus on the actual procedures.

The lack of comprehensive regulations that are supposed to operationalize the election law exacerbates these issues. With judicial commissions reduced to issuing appointments and loose guidance, many aspects of the elections remain unregulated. This regulatory vacuum gives the MoI and election committees significant discretion in implementing electoral procedures.

In conclusion, the Syrian electoral administration system is designed to centralize control under the president through the judicial system, governors, and the MoI. This structure eliminates any meaningful chance for truly independent elections, as every key aspect of the electoral process can be traced back to presidential influence or control.

All this raises the question: what are the options for credible management of elections in Syria? Can the system be reformed by focusing on key problematic aspects? That said, the system is so deeply flawed that it needs to be rebuilt entirely for elections to enjoy any credibility. The standards required are familiar and often used in post-conflict settings, such as establishing a new independent electoral management body with authority to both regulate and implement elections and whose leadership is appointed through a consensual process. Until that is possible, United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2254 attempts to provide a transitional fix, stating that elections should be “administered under supervision of the United Nations.”

However, the term “supervision” has various forms and definitions, even within the UN framework, and the UN’s role has ranged from approving steps in the management of the process to “conducting” elections as part of the peace process, as it did in Cambodia, Eastern Slavonia, or East Timor. Yet, such deep involvement of the UN in Syrian elections would require a high degree of political consensus among the UNSC members, which is hard to envision.

On the other hand, when examining the system and the candidacy process, it is apparent that the laws and procedures—or lack thereof—are tools serving a single purpose: eliminating candidates not endorsed by the Baath Party.

The constitution neither protects nor restricts the right to run in assembly elections. Instead, candidacy is entirely regulated by an election law adopted in 2014 by presidential decree. This law introduces several unfair limits on this right. Some restrictions, like the ten-year Syrian nationality requirement, seem minor but impact those with unregularized status (except for Hasakah’s Kurds, who were designated as foreigners or “ajanib”) and potentially up to 4 million Syrians living overseas.

There are a few more restrictions of particular concern for those who opposed the Assad regime, such as the exclusion of those who have been sentenced for a “felony or misdemeanor that is dishonorable and shakes the public trust.” These offenses are defined by the decree of the justice minister and disqualify all those sentenced for political reasons. However, even if the offense does not fall into this category, all criminally convicted individuals automatically lose their civil and political rights, including the right to stand for office, for ten years after serving their prison sentence.

Those eligible to apply for candidacy must navigate a process that is only vaguely regulated, giving judge-led committees considerable flexibility in deciding on nominations. For example, committees may request an “accredited certificate” proving literacy even when candidates present university degrees. Another quirk requires candidates who wish to contest a “worker or famer” seat to prove they are not listed in industrial or commercial registers.

As presented in the electoral system article, candidates not running on the Baath-endorsed National Unity (NU) List have minuscule chances of being elected. What, then, explains the large number of candidates for the 250 seats in the assembly? For example, in the SJEC accepted 11,341 applications in the 2016 elections, 8,735 in 2020, and 9,194 in 2024. The answer is that the Baath Party encourages members to apply in massive numbers as an indicator of vigorous and credible political competition. Registering for candidacy with the SJEC is only the first prerequisite for becoming a Baath candidate. The second step is the Baath Party process, in which the aspirants compete for the endorsement. This is colloquially called “primaries,” but “consultation” would be a more accurate term.

Without a real election campaign—as a case in point, the NU lists of candidates were only published six days before the polls—hyping up the primaries is essential for the illusion of choice. And, because the Baathists not featured on the NU lists have little chance of winning a seat, the primaries are more important than the polling. Most of the aspirants not included in the list withdrew before election day, so only 1,516 candidates are heading to the polls.

Despite being central to elections, the primaries are still just theatrics rather than a genuine competition. While they look like a proper election process on the surface, their results are not binding. The participation of Baathists is wide and includes an “electronic voting system” that could be easily manipulated and does not guarantee secrecy, and “the party independent election commission” oversees the process. Yet, the result of voting is only advisory. The final say remains with the top Baath Party body, the Central Command, which regularly tweaks the results, claiming to have taken into consideration the “opinion of the general public.” That outcome is regularly criticized on social media.

The Baathists on the NU List were announced, with a delay of two days, on July 9 and for unclear reasons. Baath-affiliated media justified the delay by arguing it was to “ensure fair representation, support the democratic process, and respect the voters’ will in a balanced manner.” But the concurrent news of the dismissal of the nineteen incumbent members of the assembly for “low ideological awareness,” and the lifting of the immunity of another seven members due to corruption, attracted interest and was a matter of debate in social media.

A cursory review of the NU lists reveals that the number of incumbents (fifty-eight) is somewhat lower than in the 2020 elections (sixty-eight), which might reflect the above-mentioned renewed party leadership. The Baath strategy appears to be the promotion of lower-tier loyalists to rebuild party discipline. A deeper analysis of that trend is warranted and should examine why the governorates with the highest turnover are Damascus, Deir ez-Zor, Idlib, Tartous, and Raqqa. On the other hand, Daraa (where five out of eight candidates are incumbents) and al-Hasakah (with six incumbents out of eleven) seem to have only a few replacements.

The number of women in the assembly is consistently trending downward—in 2020, it dropped from thirty-three to twenty-eight—and this year’s elections did not reverse that trend. Twenty-two female candidates are now on the NU list (12 percent), even fewer than in 2020 when NU featured twenty-five women. The Baath Party could easily endorse more women if it wanted to promote women’s participation, as the 2020 elections show that women have minimal chances to be elected outside of the NU lists (only 1.5 percent of the non-NU candidates are women), so the Syrian parliament will likely remain one among those with the lowest representation of women in the world.

The candidates running for the uncontested seats are colloquially called “independents.” More than one thousand of those remaining in the race competed for the sixty-five seats. They sometimes formed “independent candidate lists,” mostly in urban governorates like Damascus and Aleppo. These are often businessmen or militiamen closely affiliated with the regime, supporting the facade of diversity. In some cases, they feature prominent personalities, such as the Damascus list “From Damascus For You Syria,” which includes Mohamed Hammam Miswati and Bilal Naal, assembly incumbents with close ties to the Assad regime. Another Damascene list is “Sham List,” which features the incumbent Mohamed Hamsho (sanctioned by the European Union and the United States). Others, like Wael Melhem from Homs, ran without forming a list and count on personal prominence.

And while the polls were held on July 15, the elections were effectively over at the end of the primaries. The candidates on the National Unity list will sit in the assembly. If there was hope for even a minor opening of political space, the regime sent a clear message: there was no interest in political reforms. Elections are only an aspect of internal Baath consolidation, and the assembly will have free rein for constitutional amendments needed to allow Bashar al-Assad to stay in office beyond 2028.

Vladimir Pran advises electoral authorities, governments, and political leaders on transitional, electoral, and political processes.

Maroun Sfeir advises international and local civil society organizations, political groups, and electoral authorities on electoral and political processes.

The post Syrian elections are decided before election day appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Below, our experts break down Netanyahu’s message to Congress and what his visit to Washington reveals about the future of US-Israel relations.

Click to jump to an expert analysis:

William F. Wechsler: The “Abraham Alliance” idea is new, but not fully developed

Jonathan Panikoff: Netanyahu’s rhetoric today is less meaningful than his meetings tomorrow

Emilia Pierce: Netanyahu’s math that civilian casualties in Rafah have been “practically none” doesn’t add up

Thomas Warrick: Netanyahu lays out a vision for postwar Gaza, but the serious talks are just starting

Carmiel Arbit: The controversies plaguing Netanyahu at home followed him to Washington

The “Abraham Alliance” idea is new, but not fully developed

Netanyahu has proved once again that he is an excellent orator, but this address was almost entirely a collection of statements he’s made previously, packaged for a new audience and carefully balanced for the US election cycle to give talking points to both political campaigns.

The most important new policy idea offered was the creation of an “Abraham Alliance” that would build on the ad-hoc coalition that shot down Iranian missiles headed to Israel in April. Netanyahu knows that work on this is already underway, led by the United States. But these discussions are best held in private, through military-to-military channels. The Gulf states are reluctant to be seen as building mechanisms that will protect Israel but leave them on the front lines in any confrontation with Iran. Indeed, the Gulf’s public and diplomatic strategies toward Iran have gone in the opposite direction, with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, and now Bahrain working to reestablish formal ties and improve commercial relations with Tehran.

—William F. Wechsler is the senior director of Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council. His most recent US government position was deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and combating terrorism.

Netanyahu’s rhetoric today is less meaningful than his meetings tomorrow

Before Netanyahu’s address to Congress began today, CNN posted a video report with the headline, “What to expect from Netanyahu’s high stakes speech to Congress.” It was curious framing—the speech was never high stakes and nothing in its delivered content altered that reality. 

For many on the left, represented by the large swath of Democratic lawmakers who didn’t attend, there was nothing that the prime minister could have said today that would have changed their opinion of him or Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza. For many center-left Democrats, centrists of both parties, and some Republicans, there was little he could have said to diminish their broader support for Israel, even while they maintain contempt for Netanyahu as its leader. And for many on the right, who view any criticism of Israel as inappropriate, there was unlikely to be anything the prime minister could have said to temper their support of him or Israel.

That does not mean that the speech wasn’t powerful and well-delivered. It was. Among the prime minister’s long-standing political gifts has been his eloquence in both Hebrew and English. His recognition of President Joe Biden’s support, especially in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on October 7, 2023, his criticism of those US protesters who have aligned themselves with Iran, and Hamas’s use of Palestinian civilians as human shields were all points strongly delivered that deserve to be highlighted.

But how much more powerful would the speech have been if it had contained the same robust defense of Israel and its military operations in Gaza, while also acknowledging the humanitarian tragedy that exists there today? How much more impactful would the speech have been if it had recognized that even if the Hamas-led health ministry numbers are inaccurate by having inflated numbers and not distinguishing between civilian and terrorist deaths, that still leaves at least twenty thousand innocent Palestinians who have perished during this conflict? War always results in civilian casualties. It’s a horrid reality. But recognizing that reality would have shown light on Netanyahu’s own humanity, which many view to be lacking.

Juxtaposed against today’s speech, what will be rather high-stakes are tomorrow’s meetings between Netanyahu and Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Negotiators have been trying for months to reach an elusive temporary ceasefire in which hostages held in Gaza would be returned to Israel and Israel would pause military operations in the Gaza Strip.

For months, Netanyahu and Hamas’s leader in Gaza (and the mastermind of October 7) Yahya Sinwar have actually been aligned in their goals to avoid a ceasefire. Sinwar is convinced that more fighting, and more Palestinian deaths, are a long-term net positive for Hamas. Netanyahu, who has been changing the terms of Israel’s requirements, is desperate to try to stay in office. As a result, the press accounts of tomorrow’s meetings and the potential for a ceasefire, whether temporary or permanent, are likely to be far more important than anything the prime minister said today in the Well of the House.

—Jonathan Panikoff is the director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative. He is a former deputy national intelligence officer for the Near East at the US National Intelligence Council.

Netanyahu’s math that civilian casualties in Rafah have been “practically none” doesn’t add up

Whatever viewers started the day believing about Israel’s war in Gaza is almost certainly what they will end the day believing. If viewers can agree on any one thing, it is likely that the speech contained little if any new information and certainly no surprises. However, two points from Netanyahu’s speech do merit additional scrutiny.

The first is the civilian harm caused by the Israel Defense Force’s (IDF’s) air and ground operations in Gaza. As social media has been flooded with graphic images of the humanitarian devastation, Netanyahu would have been better served by acknowledging the ongoing human toll and making good-faith arguments about civilian harm. In his speech today, he claimed that civilian casualties in Rafah were “practically none,” when former members of his military forces paint a very different picture. It is not a good-faith argument to claim that civilian deaths are “practically none,” when sources both external and internal to the IDF have reported serious concerns about lax rules of engagement and a breakdown of discipline. Additionally, investigations have shown that after executing short-notice evacuations from densely populated areas, the IDF has established “no go” areas where individuals are considered a threat and shot on sight regardless of demographics or whether that person was armed. If Netanyahu wants to defend the IDF’s treatment of civilians, those arguments must at the very least be made in good faith and with a clear-eyed assessment of the facts.

The second is Netanyahu’s framing of the northern threat from Hezbollah. Though his remarks on Hezbollah were relatively brief, they made an impression. Right or wrong, he clearly framed Hezbollah as an existential threat to Israel that cannot be disentangled from their wider struggle against Hamas, the Houthis, and ultimately Iran. One possibility is that this speech was meant to set the stage for a ground incursion into southern Lebanon and soften global public opinion on such a decision. However, opening a new active front against Hezbollah would be catastrophic for many reasons, both humanitarian and strategic. For civilians living in both southern Lebanon and northern Israel, an active conflict would spell further displacement and suffering. For the beleaguered IDF, it would mean a full-scale war against a well-armed adversary and make further regional spillover ever more likely.

While Netanyahu’s fourth speech to Congress may go down in history as the highest number of congressional addresses by a foreign leader, it will likely be remembered for little else—except perhaps his commitment to a misleading representation of humanitarian realities.

—Emilia Pierce is the deputy director of operations and finance at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs.

Netanyahu lays out a vision for postwar Gaza, but the serious talks are just starting

Netanyahu’s speech to Congress laid out his vision for postwar Gaza: a civilian administration run by Palestinians who do not seek to destroy Israel and are willing to live side by side in peace. While Netanyahu and his top advisers have said similar things before, the reported meeting convened on July 18 by UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed with top US and Israeli advisers shows that serious talks on postwar Gaza are just starting.

The key words to understand in Netanyahu’s speech are “de-militarization” and “de-radicalization.” Demilitarization means that Hamas should not be allowed to rule postwar Gaza, but it also means that Hamas cannot be allowed to follow the path of Lebanese Hezbollah—of letting someone else govern Gaza while Hamas rearms so that it can attack Israel again. Biden said something similar on May 31, as did US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on May 15 and July 1. Top US and Israeli officials are thus aligned on the goals, but with no agreement on a realistic, common plan to achieve them.

The key to how demilitarization can be achieved is a serious approach to what Netanyahu called de-radicalization. This will require taking control of Gaza’s institutions of governance away from Hamas or those who would tolerate Hamas’s re-armament. It will take a serious plan for keeping Hamas from killing the Palestinians who Netanyahu envisions would eventually govern Gaza. This is one of the practical steps that may come out of the discussions started in Abu Dhabi. There are a number of serious plans for how to do this, but as Netanyahu told Congress, it will take Israel, the United States, Arab nations, and Palestinians—all of them—to make this a reality.

—Thomas S. Warrick is a senior fellow and director of the Future of DHS Project at the Atlantic Council. He served in the Department of State from 1997-2007 and as deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism policy at the US Department of Homeland Security from 2008 to 2019.

The controversies plaguing Netanyahu at home followed him to Washington

Before heading to Washington for his fourth address to Congress, Netanyahu had promised to deliver a unifying speech—to stay above the political disarray that has overtaken Washington, promote bipartisan support for the US-Israel relationship, and commit to a path to ending the war in Gaza. Insofar as he praised both Biden and former President Donald Trump, he was certainly less partisan than he was in his 2018 address decrying the Iran nuclear deal. Yet Netanyahu, aided by the extremism of his far-right coalition, has continued to preside over the politicization—and potential weakening—of the US-Israel relationship. Very little he said in today’s speech—which also failed to address a path forward—will change that.

By some accounts, roughly half of the Democrats from the House and Senate were absent from the event; compare this with the fifty-eight who sat out his address in 2018 and the five who boycotted Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s speech earlier this year. Democratic legislators are fed up with Netanyahu, who has all but endorsed Trump publicly and whose right-wing rhetoric and kowtowing to extremists is anathema to the party’s values. Their patience for the war in Gaza has waned significantly in the months since October 7, as the death toll among Gazans and hostages alike only grows in the absence of a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.

Yet despite this snub from so many members, Netanyahu will still have meetings with Biden, Harris, and both House and Senate minority and majority leadership. No matter how disliked Netanyahu may be, or how politically charged the war in Gaza may be for many Americans, the meetings underscore the enduring strength of the relationship between the two nations—or, as Netanyahu put it, that the victories of the countries are shared.

Still, Netanyahu’s addresses to the United States are never really intended for American audiences alone, and he is deft in leveraging both negative and positive receptions in Washington to bolster his standing at home. The divisions and controversies plaguing Netanyahu in Israel followed him to Washington. His tribute to the hostages rang hollow for many Israelis—including those present in the Capitol today. Several family members of hostages being detained during Netanyahu’s speech was a startling image for Americans—and a reminder of the complexities of what’s at stake almost a year into the war.

—Carmiel Arbit is a nonresident senior fellow in the Middle East Programs and the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council.

The post Experts react: What Netanyahu’s address to Congress reveals about the state of US-Israel relations appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Since US President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Harris on Sunday, she has emerged as the likely Democratic nominee. So what might US foreign policy look like if she wins the presidency? For Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, there are ample clues in her work in the Americas over the past three-and-a-half years. Her approach: Listen to a broad array of stakeholders, act, follow up, and then adjust tactics as needed. This approach can take time to implement, but it also proves adaptive to unexpected challenges.

Although the United States’ southern border was not specifically part of the portfolio handed to her, Harris’s indirect involvement—through her role in seeking to reduce migratory push factors in northern Central America—has received considerable scrutiny, especially among those who criticize the Biden administration’s approach to migration. The data at this point indicate that the Biden administration has made progress in reducing the number of migrants arriving at the US border from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to levels last seen toward the end of the Trump administration, even as increased migration from other countries has contributed to a high level of overall encounters at the border.

At the same time, more work is clearly needed to ensure that migration levels from northern Central America do not jump back up. It is imperative that the efforts undertaken as part of the ongoing “root causes” strategy carry forward no matter who wins the US election in November. This means ensuring that local organizations have the technical and financial resources to improve opportunities for job creation and human-capital development and also to combat often-endemic corruption. These and other conditions are needed not just to dampen the drive to migrate but also to create longer-term economic security that ultimately benefits the national security of the United States and partner countries.

In one example of her “listen, act, then follow up” approach, Harris traveled to Guatemala and Mexico in June 2021. A month later, she rolled out a five-pillar strategy that revolved around working with in-country partners to address the root causes of Central American migration, noting that “migration to our border is also a symptom of much larger issues” and admitting from the start that “progress will not be instantaneous.” She subsequently visited Honduras in January 2022. In March 2024, she welcomed Guatemala’s new president, Bernardo Arévalo, to the White House for more discussions. This approach suggests that Harris could govern in a manner where decisions are carefully thought out and where a multitude of factors are taken into account before acting.

In its three years, the five-pillar strategy has produced more than $5.2 billion in commitments from companies and organizations to invest in the region while supporting local development in areas of high emigration. And there are signs that migration from the region is now slowing. The number of Guatemalans encountered at the southwestern border last month (11,485) was the second-lowest since November 2020. The number of Hondurans (8,896) was the lowest over the same period. Overall, the proportion of migrants encountered at the US border who are citizens of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador has dropped from 49 percent (March 2021) to 18 percent (June 2024).

Still, reflecting the shift in migrant patterns, including new or growing countries of origin, the overall number of migrant encounters by border authorities remains high (130,419 in June) as compared to the last full month of the previous administration (73,994 encounters in December 2020).

Though it has been less high-profile than her Central America work, Harris has also given substantial attention to addressing the many significant challenges facing the United States’ Caribbean neighbors. As she has explained it, doing so is a US national security priority that cannot be overlooked.

In June 2023, just over a year after virtually hosting leaders of fifteen Caribbean nations, Harris became the highest-ranking US official to visit The Bahamas, where she co-hosted the US-Caribbean Leaders Meeting. That meeting—and her overall engagement—has been focused on establishing a greater US presence in the Caribbean at a time in which it’s becoming increasingly apparent that Caribbean prosperity yields benefits for the United States too. The region’s geographic proximity also means that there is a national security imperative for the United States to be more fully engaged in a partnership with the Caribbean.

In keeping with her typical approach, Harris met with Caribbean leaders first to hear their priorities before crafting a strategy. Her priorities started with climate change and the energy transition, expanded to food security, and then extended to security and arms trafficking. At that June 2023 meeting, she announced $100 million of US assistance to address these issues, including Haiti’s ongoing humanitarian crisis. (In parallel with these efforts, the Atlantic Council organized the PACC 2030 Climate Resilient Clean Energy Summit on the sidelines of her Bahamas trip.) Still, as with her Central America portfolio, substantial progress will not happen overnight.  

Over the coming days and weeks, Harris will set about defining what her foreign policy might look like. In the course of her work as vice president with Central America and the Caribbean, at least, she has taken on tough issues that don’t lend themselves to easy, quick solutions. And she has followed through on implementation, adjusting tactics along the way as the situation on the ground evolves. As she seeks to become commander-in-chief at a time of deep global instability, she will have no shortage of complicated challenges to confront.

Jason Marczak is the vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.

The post What Kamala Harris’s record in Central America and the Caribbean reveals about her foreign policy approach appeared first on Atlantic Council.

What EU reforms will make enlargement successful? Why should Europe focus on the Balkans? What are the potential opportunities and challenges for EU enlargement and the Growth Plan for this region?

Join Nonresident Senior Fellow Ilva Tare in this episode of #BalkansDebrief as she interviews Enrico Letta, former Prime Minister of Italy and current President of the Institut Jacques Delors. With his extensive experience in European Union affairs and his recent influential report on the future of the Single Market, Mr. Letta provides deep insights into the necessary reforms for successful EU enlargement.

In this episode, Mr. Letta discusses his advocacy for the “Regatta Method” over the “Big Bang” approach for EU enlargement, emphasizing the importance of allowing each country to join when ready rather than waiting for the slowest in the region. He also elaborates on his proposed blueprint for EU enlargement success, which includes critical reforms such as on veto rules and the creation of a “solidarity enlargement facility.”

Discover the future of the EU and the vital steps needed to integrate the six Western Balkan countries into the new Single Market, as envisioned by Enrico Letta, a staunch advocate of enlargement in the Western Balkans.

#BalkansDebrief is an online interview series presented by the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center and hosted by journalist Ilva Tare. The program offers a fresh look at the Western Balkans and examines the region’s people, culture, challenges, and opportunities.

Watch #BalkansDebrief on YouTube and listen to it as a Podcast.

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The Europe Center promotes leadership, strategies, and analysis to ensure a strong, ambitious, and forward-looking transatlantic relationship.

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The post #BalkansDebrief – What EU reforms will make enlargement successful? A Debrief with Enrico Letta appeared first on Atlantic Council.