Month: February 2022

Jordanian jihadi ideologue, and Al-Qaeda supporter Abu Muhammad Al-Maqdisi, shared several tweets commenting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In his tweets, the jihadi cleric highlighted social media reports that Chechen soldiers are fighting alongside the Russian forces in Ukraine, deeming that as deviant Muslims whose prayers will not be accepted.[1]

Ukraine Will Make Russia Regret This War

The West has underestimated Vladimir Putin again. Time and time again, the aging Russian president has declared that Ukraine is not a real country, that Russia’s historic lands sit in Ukraine, and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a Western puppet and an illegitimate leader. By November, more than 100,000 Russian troops were surrounding Ukraine on three sides, and soon the White House was issuing increasingly dire warnings of a coming attack. And yet somehow, most in the West shrugged. Many smart and experienced experts were convinced Putin was bluffing. They dismissed his saber rattling as merely a ploy to increase his hand at the negotiating table, where he unsuccessfully sought the right to have a veto over which countries joined NATO. Only at that point did Western countries turn up the pressure on Putin.

Russia’s Invasion Could Unleash Forces the Kremlin Can’t Control

Russian forces have struck targets across Ukraine and seized key facilities and swaths of territory. The Ukrainian military is no match for this Russian juggernaut. Although some reports suggest Ukrainian troops have rebuffed attacks in certain parts of the country, it seems more likely that Russian President Vladimir Putin will decide just how far Russia goes into Ukraine. As a retired Russian-speaking CIA operations officer who served in Central Asia and managed agency counterinsurgency operations, I did not think Putin would have attacked Ukraine unless he had already devised a reliable end game, given the costs of an intractable conflict. But Putin’s best-laid plans might easily unravel in the face of popular Ukrainian national resistance and an insurgency.

On February 24, 2022, anti-liberal philosopher Alexander Dugin, in an article titled “It’s All About Ukraine’s Liberation,” stated that Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine is not only to restore the “territorial integrity” of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR),[1] but is about the “liberation” of the whole of Ukraine. Dugin said that the first goal is the “liberation” of Novorossiya (“New Russia”), the name given in the 18th century to the lands of the Black Sea littoral, incorporated into Russia as a result of wars with the Ottoman Empire. It includes Kharkov, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolayev, and Odessa.

Having decided first to recognize the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and then mount a special operation to reverse the pro-Western Maidan revolution of 2014, Russia’s leadership realized that there would be consequences to these actions. As the West made it clear from the outset that its response would take the form of imposing severe sanctions rather than a military, the issue of the economic damage that Russia would sustain naturally surfaced. President Vladimir Putin in his address announcing the special operation conceded that Russia’s economy would be affected but claimed that the government had taken measures to cushion the blow.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will have an impact beyond Europe. Follow along for the latest updates affecting the Mideast region.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could develop into the largest state-on-state conflict Europe has seen since World War II. But the war’s effects will not be limited to the continent.