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Foreign warriors make a “big impact” in Ukraine
In a forest outside of Kyiv, a small group of Ukrainian soldiers with machine guns pads around silently, listening intently and sniffing the tree trunks.
“If you walk past a tree and it smells like urine,” says Jay, 30, a stoutly built former special forces soldier from Denmark, “that’s because urine starts to release a gas roughly 15 minutes after someone pisses on the tree.”
Jay is giving combat training to the Ukrainian soldiers, and in this lesson, he is teaching them how to detect the presence of Russian troops and patrol frontline areas.
“I want to see you move slow, silent, deliberate,” he tells the men as they fan out among the leafless trees, practicing their patrols and doing evacuation exercises.
Jay, who asked us not to use his last name, is one of the thousands of foreigners fighting alongside the Ukrainians as part of the country’s International Legion. He has seen combat on every major front of the conflict since signing up last March, just days after Russia invaded.
Training sessions like these are among the most important contributions that foreigners are making to Ukraine’s war effort.
One reason that training is so important is that many of the Ukrainians now fighting had no combat experience at all before Kyiv called a general mobilization in response to Russia’s invasion.
“There are some incredible fighters here,” says Michael, 38, an American who co-founded Task Force 31, a non-profit that helps to train Ukrainian troops. “But a lot of the people that are absorbing a lot of this fight were bakers, dentists, doctors.”
Getting the right equipment is also a challenge. For all the headlines about Europe and the US giving the Ukrainians advanced weapons like Leopard tanks, HIMARS rocket systems, and perhaps, soon, even fighter jets, many units in Ukraine still suffer shortages of simpler things like basic training and equipment.
“The Western support is mostly big, heavy armor and artillery pieces,” says Jay. “This is very needed as well, but it doesn't necessarily help the guys on the ground who have to go buy their own boots and buy their own helmet.”
René, a 20-year international legion member from Germany, is part of the effort to rustle up basic gear. He was a bike messenger before the war, but after seeing a now-famous video of a Ukrainian refugee child crossing the Polish border with a bag full of toys, he decided to go fight for Kyiv.
Today he is a drone operator attached to a unit that has seen combat in the Donbas. But he also works to secure, maintain, and repair pickup trucks, which are crowdsourced from elsewhere in Europe, painted in camouflage, and sent to the front.
DIY efforts are commonplace in this war. “It's not only the military that is fighting,” says Rene, “it's also civilians that are doing volunteer work, employed in cars, painting cars, organizing humanitarian aid, helping the civilians at the frontline, helping the animals that got left behind at the frontline.”
Why is Ukraine still in need of such DIY efforts even after a year of war and tens of billions of dollars in support from the US and Europe?
The scale of the effort that’s required to fend off a much larger adversary is one reason.
“They're still fighting a country that spends ten times as much on its military as Ukrainians do,” says Liam Collins, a retired US Special Forces officer who has advised the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. “So they're going to be behind even with a $100 billion investment by the U.S.”
Supply chain and distribution problems may also play a role, as Kyiv still struggles to apportion huge amounts of equipment to the right units at the right time.
There is also the specter of corruption. Despite improvements in recent years, Ukraine still ranks a lowly 116th out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.
And while there is so far no evidence of graft significantly affecting the provision of equipment, President Volodymyr Zelensky last month sacked senior defense officials implicated in the misappropriation of funds.
Meanwhile, on the ground, the work of guys like Jay, Michael, and René continues. If the money isn’t there, they raise it. If the training isn’t sufficient, they do it. If the trucks aren’t there, they find them.
“You don’t have to be shooting to be fighting,” says Jay. “When we train other people, they then pass that knowledge on to their friends. And that way we can make a big impact in this war.”
Michael Tucker contributed reporting to this piece from Ukraine.
Putin's nuclear calculus and the Ukraine Paradox
Immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine, the odds of Moscow using nuclear weapons were low because it seemed likely they'd overrun the country with conventional weaponry. New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger credits NATO.
"Without the NATO support, I don't think the Ukrainians would have held on," Sanger tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
But now, he warns, we're dealing with the 'Ukraine Paradox': the more successful Ukraine gets, the more likely Vladimir Putin will consider using non-conventional weapons. Will that include nukes? Perhaps.
For Sanger, the risk of Putin going nuclear has gone significantly up since the war began in late February.
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In comparing the American military defense spending to China's, former US admiral and best-selling author James Stavridis is concerned that the US is too focused on legacy systems. In a conversation with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World, he discusses the role of the private sector in the development of US defense capabilities and the need to move towards higher end technologies, which he says China has already done. "They get to make decisions and move out with big land armies, tanks, aircraft carriers in ways we are retarded from doing by the messiness, as wonderful as it is, of our democratic system," Stavridis points out.
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Will China become the world’s dominant military power?
America's chief adversary on the global stage is no longer Russia. It's China—a country that has experienced astronomical growth in the last few decades, with an economy that's expanded by $12 trillion dollars in the last fifteen years alone. Much of that economic growth is going straight into military spending, with a defense budget that's seen a nearly seven-fold increase over the past twenty years. And yet, its military spending still pales in comparison to that of the United States. But despite all the money that both nations have pumped into fancy new battleships and armored tanks, they also understand that a key paradigm shift in 21st century warfare is already well underway: The decisive battles of the future will largely be fought—and won or lost—in cyberspace. Ian Bremmer explains where the US stands in this competition.
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The US still enjoys military superiority over China, but for how long? Retired admiral James Stavridis believes it's important to understand how determined China is to establish global dominance. The Chinese defense budget is focused on strategic initiatives including offensive cyber, militarizing space and quantum computing. Furthermore, China's approach to education is intended to secure an advantage. "They're pumping out huge numbers of people with advanced degrees. They're investing government resources into the kind of R&D that we should be doing more of here in the United States," Stavridis tells Ian Bremmer in a GZERO World interview.
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Is the US military’s reliance on technology a vulnerability?
What happens to US defense systems in case of a cyber attack? "The American military needs a Plan B, because these exquisite systems upon which we have come to rely so deeply, because they were invulnerable fighting the Taliban, or fighting Al-Qaeda, they're not invulnerable anymore," argues Admiral James Stavridis (Ret.), who also served as NATO Supreme Allied Commander. He discusses the benefit of having analog alternatives for US military operations in a discussion with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
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“We’re going to see a descent back into chaos” in Afghanistan: Rep. Waltz
Conservative Congressman Mike Waltz (R-FL) explains why he fears that a full US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan will create a power vacuum in Kabul, leading to chaos, destruction, and a national security threat for the US that will eventually require troops to be sent back in. Waltz, a former Green Beret who served multiple combat tours in Afghanistan and elsewhere, shares his concerns in a conversation with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World. He warns, "One of the things I don't know that everyone realizes is when the military goes, those contractors will go, the CIA, our eyes and ears on the ground will go." The interview on GZERO World airs on US public television starting Friday, April 23. Check local listings.
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