Archive by Author

Puerto Rico status bill introduced in House

Lawmakers in the House introduced a bill that would end Puerto Rico’s status as a territory, allowing the island’s residents to choose between three status options.

The bill, a result of negotiations between lawmakers who supported statehood for the territory and lawmakers who wanted to hold a status convention, was formally introduced by Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee.

“Finding a resolution to Puerto Rico’s political status has been one of my top priorities as Chair of the House Natural Resources Committee. But I know that the decolonization of Puerto Rico shouldn’t be a decision made by lawmakers in Washington alone. That’s why I’m so proud of both the work and commitment of my colleagues toward incorporating feedback from the leaders and residents of Puerto Rico into this final bill,” said Grijalva in a statement.

The bill’s three options for an upcoming status referendum are statehood for Puerto Rico, independence from the United States, and a third option, described as “sovereignty in free association with the United States.”

The third option would put Puerto Rico in a similar situation as the Marshall Islands, Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia — former U.S. trust territories that gained independence in the 20th century and signed a compact of free association.

Under the bill, Puerto Ricans would head to the polls to vote on a federally sponsored plebiscite with all three options on the ballot, and a runoff if any option fails to get more than 50 percent of the votes in the first round.

Before that can happen, however, the bill needs to be rushed through Congress before a new legislature is ushered in following November’s midterms.

“We should be able to pass it out of committee in July and then have a floor vote in September. The Senate will have plenty of time after that to respect the will of the people of Puerto Rico,” said Rep. Darren Soto (D-Fla.), one of the lead sponsors of the bill.

The bill’s passage through the House seems likely, as negotiations to build the consensus legislation were sponsored and hosted by House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.).

In the often tense negotiations, statehood proponents Soto and Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González-Colón (R-P.R.) faced off against two top status convention proponents, New York Democratic Reps. Nydia Velázquez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“In this bill, we have a compromise that does not stack the deck in favor of one outcome or another but establishes a fair and democratic process for self-determination. I thank my counterparts, both Democrat and Republican for their good-faith efforts in putting this legislation together,” said Velázquez in a statement.

“I am proud of the joint collaborative effort that we have achieved to provide a mechanism to end Puerto Rico’s unjust territorial status. With this legislation, Congress rejects the status quo and allows voters to decide their future with three constitutionally viable options,” said González-Colón.

While the bill does have a measure of bipartisan support, bolstered by González-Colón’s sponsorship, it’s unclear whether all Senate Democrats and at least 10 Senate Republicans will vote for it to become law.

And a packed Senate schedule could present another challenge for the bill, although its prospects could rise during a lame duck session.

Still, if the bill were to pass Congress, its options would need to be aptly communicated to Puerto Ricans.

While most polls show discontent with the current territorial status, widely perceived as a colonial vestige, the island’s politics have long centered around the question of statehood versus sovereignty.

The Puerto Rico Status Act includes funding for an educational program to teach Puerto Rican voters the consequences of each option ahead of a plebiscite.

Since the bill’s preliminary language was introduced in May, the issue of U.S. citizenship under the independence and free association options has emerged as a key battleground.

Under independence, Puerto Ricans who are already U.S. citizens would be allowed to keep their citizenship, but their children would not inherit U.S. citizenship or nationality.

Under free association, Puerto Ricans who are already U.S. citizens would keep their citizenship, and would inherit their citizenship to their children if both parents are U.S. citizens as long as the first Articles of Free Association last.

However, a birth within Puerto Rican territory would no longer grant U.S. citizenship to a child.

Under statehood, the U.S. citizenship of Puerto Ricans would come under the protection of the U.S. Constitution and become essentially irrevocable.

Source: TEST FEED1

With 9-8-8 mental health hotline about to launch, massive funding gaps remain

On Saturday, 9-8-8 — the new three-digit version of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline — will go live, becoming the go-to number to dial during mental health emergencies. But despite significant federal investments, the majority of the country isn’t prepared to reap the full benefits of 9-8-8. To expedite this historic debut, state leaders must immediately enact the basic phone bill fee laws needed to pay for it.

Our home state, Colorado, is one of just four states across the country that have passed such a law, establishing the long-term cash flow needed to cover the call centers, response units, and staff this new hotline will rely on to save lives.

As driving forces behind Colorado’s 9-8-8 rollout efforts and phone fee legislation, we know that passing this sort of bill is often no small feat. But it’s also abundantly clear to us that enacting a capped surcharge on 9-8-8 callers’ monthly phone bills helps to ensure that money for 9-8-8’s implementation doesn’t run out.

A reliance on alternative funding options — such as one-time federal grants from the Department of Health and Human Services — simply won’t provide the volume of funds needed to meet this country’s vast mental health needs. Take, for instance, a one-time grant of $250,000 to Delaware’s Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health: It’s a great start, but it won’t even cover the cost of getting a single call center off the ground. Nor will a one-time grant of $250,000 to North Dakota’s State Department of Health and Human Services pay for the fleet of vehicles and extensive expert training needed to reach and triage mental health emergencies in the state’s most rural areas for perpetuity. These sorts of band-aid funding solutions simply aren’t up to the task of meeting demand for mental health services in this country.

And the herculean undertaking of providing for America’s mental health needs has never been greater. While the push to institute 9-8-8 began within the last decade, the system has been broken for much longer. Today, millions of 9-1-1 calls are placed each year due to mental health emergencies, and the youth mental health crisis has only exacerbated this trend.

Unfortunately, many of the well-meaning loved ones and bystanders who witness mental health emergencies and call 9-1-1 for help actually inadvertently place those suffering from mental health challenges in harm’s way. People with untreated mental health needs are 16 times more likely to be killed during a police encounter than other civilians engaging with law enforcement, and as many as 80 percent of the 11.2 million people who are incarcerated in the U.S. each year have some form of unmet mental health need.

The new 9-8-8 hotline offers a simple, but elegant solution to this dire situation: Shorten the mental health emergency hotline to just three digits, thus empowering Americans to efficiently place calls directly to teams of professionals who are trained specifically in compassionate mental health response protocols.

Unfortunately, given the hyper-local nature of placing, routing, and responding to emergency calls, we need action at the state level to ensure that 9-8-8’s promise to deliver care — not cuffs — to those with unmet mental health needs is kept. As it stands, one in six calls to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline end without the caller connecting with a counselor, and that will not change without heightened funding.

Only Virginia, Nevada, Washington and Colorado have enacted the full suite of state funding laws needed to have 9-8-8 in working order by Saturday. And the crown jewel of these critical legislative packages are the aforementioned phone bill fee laws. It’s worth noting that these phone fees are quite low. Colorado’s, for example, is 18 cents per caller per month, and is capped at 30 cents per caller per month under the state’s 988 Suicide Prevention Lifeline Network law, which went live Jan. 1 of this year. Other state caps range from 25 to 75 cents per bill. 

What makes it particularly egregious that leaders in 46 states haven’t created similar funding mechanisms is that mental health support and suicide prevention appears to be one of the few things that all of us — Democrats and Republicans alike — can agree on.

Take for instance, the bipartisan gun reform bill, which President Biden recently signed into law. The new bill will appropriate $1 billion to meet Americans’ mental health needs via community behavioral health centers, telehealth services, suicide prevention, school-based mental health support and provider training. This bipartisan act at the federal level feels nearly miraculous given our hyper-partisan political environment, but it does give us hope that states with mixed political ideologies can pass 9-8-8 caller fee bills as well.

Elected officials in the remaining 46 states must expedite the passage of 9-8-8 service user surcharge laws, or risk further delays to 9-8-8’s historic debut and — more importantly — risk losing lives due to inadequate call response bandwidth.

Moe Keller served as a Colorado state senator for 8 years and as a Colorado state representative for 8 years before that. She co-authored Colorado’s 9-8-8 state legislation, which implements the suicide prevention call line. She is retiring as director of advocacy for Mental Health Colorado.

Vincent Atchity, Ph.D., is president & CEO of Mental Health Colorado, a state affiliate of Mental Health America. He has worked nationally to disentangle mental health and criminal justice, and has served on two Colorado governors’ behavioral health task forces and the Colorado Opioid Epidemic Symposia Steering Committee. He currently serves on the Colorado Public Defender Commission, the Colorado Jail Standards Commission, the Denver District Attorney Advisory Council on Mental Health, the Colorado School of Public Health Behavioral Health Initiative Advisory Board, as well as on the board of STRIDE Community Health, a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) serving Metro Denver. Follo0w him on Twitter @atchityCO

Source: TEST FEED1

So many broken systems, but this one has a fix

In December 2020, with paychecks halted and millions of Americans teetering on the edge of eviction, Congress acted swiftly to pass the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) to keep people in place to slow the spread of COVID-19. Despite the quick passage of the bill, every state struggled for months to get the money into the hands of those it was intended to help.

This is not the first time the states have failed to meet expectations in this way (like the Affordable Care Act). Quickly launching a new program today requires a level of agility and flexibility that most state and local governments do not possess, whether for building a non-trivial website, cutting $20,000 of checks a day or protecting those systems from fraud. Yet, Congress routinely authorizes funds, expects results and then complains when they do not materialize quickly.

This cycle is dysfunctional at best, and harmful at worst. Months passed before ERAP dollars reached tenants and landlords. By August 2021, only 11 percent of ERAP funds had been disbursed. The websites created by the states to administer the program offered some of the starkest examples of the problem. New York’s ERAP website was filled with technical glitches that prevented applicants from submitting their applications. Texas’ site was so problematic that by April, fewer than 0.02 percent of relief applicants had succeeded in accessing the benefit, triggering sharp criticism and a vendor change. Texas eventually did the same thing that many other states had done — they hired Neighborly, a vendor that launched ERAP sites for 442 localities. 

“You were expecting grantees to do something they’ve never done before, at scale. Setting up IT systems, hiring people, letting people know that systems are available — all this takes time and we don’t have time,” said Elayne Weiss, Director of Housing, Community Development and Insurance Policy at the U.S. House Financial Services Committee. “We had to build a system from scratch.”

In 2022, building a system from scratch should be the exception, not the rule. There is a better way.

Many elements of ERAP’s implementation and administration were identical nationwide. It makes no sense that 400-plus jurisdictions all had to figure out how to implement separate websites, separate call centers and separate payment systems for new programs that had, with modest variations, the same goals and constraints.

When creating new programs, the federal government can and should do more than disburse money bundled with thick binders of policy requirements. It could have quickly established shared websites, correspondence engines, call centers and payment operations. States and localities could have been asked early on to decide whether to opt into these services. These federal systems also could have established sensible default rules from which states could diverge if they chose.

This idea is not new — Login.gov (which both authors were involved in creating) and the US Web Design System are federally maintained services that allow local governments to access technical components they may not have the capacity, time or expertise to build themselves. The General Services Administration (GSA) has recently taken a big step to shape what shared services might look like at the federal level, launching Quality Service Management offices, which will purchase technical solutions that can serve the needs of multiple federal agencies. In the private sector, startup CoProcure has found success helping local governments make cooperative purchases. Last year, localities spent over $100 million on its platform, a drop in the bucket of an estimated $2 trillion of taxpayer dollars that are spent each year on vendor contracts. It is nonetheless a good indicator that local governments are looking for a better way to serve their people.

Pending and future legislation would improve this state of affairs. A rare bipartisan bill would enable federal departments to share technical tools and services with localities, eliminating wastefully redundant spending of federal tax dollars. When Congress legislates federal programs for states to implement, those laws should offer optional help from the federal government — rather than flinging funds in the direction of the states and hoping for the best.

At the time when public trust in their government is low, seamless, efficient and timely delivery of assistance and services is not only achievable, but deeply needed. Imagine if, instead of jurisdictions paying contractors to build hundreds of separate websites for ERAP, the federal government had created a single point of entry and sent applicants to the right site for their zip code, where they then quickly filled out a form and received needed funds. The Paycheck Protection Program, which was implemented in April 2020, was a good example when millions of applicants were delighted to discover that funds had seemingly materialized in their bank accounts overnight.

Despite the early missteps, the ERAP story has a happy ending. More than 3.7 million households who were at risk of eviction were kept in their homes. We don’t know how many people were evicted because they couldn’t access funds in time. The ERAP experience shows that we are a nation that can do hard things, but we must modernize our systems for the digital age. Enabling more federally shared services would be a huge step in that direction.

Hana Schank is a senior adviser for public interest technology at New America, previously with the United States Digital Service at the Department of Homeland Security.

Aaron Snow is a faculty fellow at Georgetown University’s Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation, and was previously the CEO of the Canadian Digital Service and a founding member of 18F, a consultancy inside GSA.

They both worked to develop one of the federal government’s first technical shared services — login.gov.

Source: TEST FEED1

Biden greets Saudi crown prince with fist bump

President Biden greeted Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman with a fist bump on Friday ahead of the controversial face-to-face meeting between the two men in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Footage displayed on Saudi state television showed Biden emerging from his limo and fist-bumping the crown prince, who is known by his initials MBS, before the two entered Al Salam Royal Palace.

Biden then met privately with King Salman of Saudi Arabia, before holding a larger meeting with his team, MBS and Saudi ministers. Reporters were briefly allowed into the room, capturing images of Biden, MBS and other officials seated at a long table inside the palace.  

There had been questions leading up to the meeting Friday about how Biden would greet the crown prince, whom Biden previously condemned on the campaign trail over the murder of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

The White House said the president would “minimize contact” with other officials on the multi-day trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia, citing the spread of COVID-19 variants. But that policy led to speculation that Biden would use it as an excuse to avoid shaking hands with MBS, and Biden complicated the plans by shaking some hands while in Israel.     

Still, the Saudi foreign ministry quickly publicized images of Biden fist-bumping and walking with MBS. Images released by the government also showed Biden shaking hands with the Saudi king.

The meeting between Biden and MBS has been intensely controversial due to the U.S. intelligence community assessment that the crown prince approved the assassination of Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

Biden told reporters Thursday that he does not shy away from raising human rights issues in meetings with other leaders but stopped short of committing to discussing Khashoggi’s murder with MBS.  

“The president believes very strongly that his ability to be effective as a leader and his ability to engage effectively diplomatically depends on his ability to be able to have direct diplomacy without playing out all of these issues in the press,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters aboard Air Force One earlier Friday.

“Now, what he will stand behind and send a very clear message on, and did yesterday, is the proposition that fundamental issues of human rights are going to be on the agenda,” Sullivan added. 

While campaigning for president in 2020, Biden pledged to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over Khashoggi’s murder. The president took a cooler approach to the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia during his first year in office than his predecessor, Donald Trump.

The White House announced plans for Biden’s Middle East trip, including a stop in Saudi Arabia, earlier this year amid domestic pressure over high gas prices. 

Biden is expected to discuss energy security in his meetings with the Saudis, though the White House has signaled there will not be an immediate announcement on boosting oil production on the trip.  

The White House also described the trip as an effort by Biden to reassert U.S. presence in the Middle East, at a time of rising threats from Russia and China. Biden sought to usher in warmer ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, seeing some success as he became the first U.S. president to fly directly from Israel to Saudi Arabia on Friday. He is also seeking cooperation on threats from Iran and wants to bring an end to the war in Yemen. 

Biden was greeted at the airport by the governor of Makkah, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., and consular officials. The greeting paled in comparison to the elaborate reception given to Trump, who made his first foreign trip as president to Saudi Arabia. 

Updated: 1:14 p.m.

Source: TEST FEED1

Dear Democrats: I am not a taco

When Joe Biden played “Despacito” from his phone to a crowd of Hispanic youth in September 2020, I rolled my eyes and thought the pandering from the Biden family couldn’t get any worse. 

Then in March 2021, Jill Biden tried to say “Si Se Puede” to a Hispanic crowd in California and absolutely butchered the phrase. Surely, I thought, this is what rock bottom looks like. 

And then, First Lady Jill Biden took the stage in San Antonio and compared Hispanic Americans to “breakfast tacos.”

At that moment, Biden and Democrats diminished my community’s rich and diverse culture in an attempt to pander. It’s dismissive, condescending and disrespectful. 

While it might be easy to laugh at Jill Biden, we should remember this wasn’t off the cuff: She read these prepared remarks from a teleprompter. This was a planned speech that dozens of Biden officials saw and signed off on. It’s a revealing window into how this Democratic administration views Hispanic Americans.

We should note that Jill Biden made her ridiculous comment at an event called the “LatinX IncluXion Summit.” The term Latinx is an attempt by Democratic elites to erase the fundamentals of the Spanish language in order to feel good about themselves. It speaks to a broad disdain among many Democrats and their mainstream media allies for the Hispanic community. There’s a reason only 2 percent of Hispanic Americans refer to themselves as Latinx, while 40 percent find it offensive.

I’ll put it this way: This comparison is less surprising when you consider that the far-left is the same crowd who tried to change a thousand-year-old language from the comfort of the safe spaces they created on their college campuses. 

I cannot believe I am writing this but: Dear Democrats, we are not a monolithic group looking to be patted on the head with references to our food and music.

We are Americans concerned with the same things that other Americans worry about: filling up our gas tanks, getting a good education for our kids and living in our communities without fear of violent crime. Unfortunately, Joe Biden has made all of these things harder to do. Gas prices are through the roof, far-left woke warriors are pushing radical ideologies on our kids and violent crime is spiking in cities run by Democrats. Democratic failures have made it harder to achieve the American dream that so many Hispanics — like my parents — came to this country to pursue.

I am hopeful, though: there’s a wave of Hispanic Republicans flipping the script on the very Democrats that have taken our votes for granted. Take Rep. Mayra Flores (R), who recently won an election in a deep-blue part of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. She ran on the oh-so-radical platform of “Dios, Familia y Trabajo” — God, family, and work. The New York Times promptly labeled her a “far-right Latina” for daring to discuss her values. This is the same kind of dismissive labeling that Biden and Democrats have gotten so good at.

Give us competent leadership, not twenty seconds of “Despacito.” Under President Trump and Republicans, Hispanic unemployment rates hit record lows, the economy boomed and Mexico was using its own military to guard and secure its own border. None of that is the case now. There is a reason that only about 24 percent of Hispanic voters approve of Joe Biden’s performance in office: It’s because he has failed us on the issues that matter. Biden could drill in America to drive down gas prices, respect parents who raise concerns about their kids’ education, support our police, and secure our border.

Sadly, he is probably more likely to call me a churro than do any of that.

I look forward to helping elect Republicans to turn our country around and deliver real results for all Americans. If any shell-shocked Democrats want to understand why they’ve lost the trust and respect of Hispanic Americans, I’m happy to grab lunch and explain. 

Tacos will be on me.

Danielle Alvarez is the Republican National Committee’s communications director. 

Source: TEST FEED1

Vance campaign reports more than $2.3 million in Q2 fundraising

Ohio Senate Republican nominee J.D. Vance reported more than $2.3 million in second quarter fundraising for this year, far less than the $9.1 million his Democratic opponent, Rep. Tim Ryan, announced last week.

A press release from Vance’s campaign on Thursday noted that the $2.3 million figure is the total contributions he received from JD Vance for Senate Inc., Ohioans for JD and Vance Victory.

“A major part of Vance’s campaign includes speaking directly with voters and local groups across the state and building an unmatched coalition of supporters at the grassroots level. Vance’s strong numbers indicate his solutions-focused message continues to resonate with Ohioans,” the press release said. 

On Friday, Ryan announced he raked in more than double the amount of money he reported in first quarter fundraising of this year, which was $4.1 million. The average campaign donation was $37.49 for the second quarter of 2022, which also saw close to 90,000 new donors.

Ryan is among a slew of Democrats running for Senate who have reported significant fundraising hauls for this latest quarter. Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, running for Senate in the Keystone State, reported $11 million, while Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), who is challenging Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), raked in more than $12 million. 

Incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) reported more than $17.2 million. 

A USA Today Network Ohio-Suffolk University released last month showed Vance edging past Ryan by more than 2 percentage points, though it is within the poll’s margin of error, meaning the two were essentially tied between likely Ohio voters. 

Source: TEST FEED1

CDC study shows meteoric rise in number of Americans injecting drugs

A recently-released study by the Coalition for Applied Modeling for Prevention (CAMP) and funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) highlights the colossal rise in injection drug use (IDU) in the United States in recent years.

CAMP’s study estimates that in the last decade, IDU has gone up exponentially. The most recent data from 2018 estimated that approximately 4 million Americans injected drugs. This is a five-fold increase from the last approximation in 2011.

The burden of fatal and non-fatal overdoses among those who inject drugs has also gone up sharply, according to CAMP’s research. Injection-related overdose deaths tripled from 2007 to 2018. Data also shows that there are about 40 non-fatal overdoses for every fatal overdose of IDU.

“Our estimate of the number of people who inject drugs in the U.S. indicates that services need to be substantially expanded — this includes services to meet harm-reduction needs and efforts to reduce escalating rates of overdose mortality, as well as services to address the spread of infectious diseases,” said Dr. Heather Bradley, a lead author of a study cited by CAMP in their findings, from Clinical Infections Diseases.

The CDC warns that “people who inject drugs are at high risk for HIV if they use needles, syringes, or other drug injection equipment.”

The CDC estimates that a third of people who inject drugs share syringes, needles, or other drug injection equipment.

Though new cases of HIV are down overall, the CDC reports that about 10 percent of new HIV cases in the United States are people who inject drugs.

Hepatitis C cases have also skyrocketed in recent years. According to the CDC, in 2011 there were an estimated 2,700 cases of Hepatitis C, and in 2019 the number leapt up to approximately 57,500.

The CAMP researchers note the findings in the study “provide valuable insight” to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on IDU in the U.S.” and give researchers and public health officials information they can use to try to implement harm reduction in IDU.

Source: TEST FEED1

A sobering view of the Ukraine war from behind the new ‘Iron Curtain’

Western press coverage of the war in Ukraine seems to have gone through a full cycle: from horror at the invasion to ebullience over Ukraine’s courageous victory around Kyiv to horror again as the bodies pile up in the Donbas region. A new, surprisingly candid analysis from the Russian side is revealing, regarding the state of the war and the ominous dangers that continue to lurk in the background.

To be sure, Russian military commentators have been gloating lately about troop successes in Mariupol and the relatively rapid fall of Severdonestk, so this article by Yevgeny Fedorov in Military Review (Военное Обозрение) could have been intended to bring the high-flying Russian commentariat back down to the gruesome reality of the Ukraine war. The analysis is structured around a few provocative questions prompted by a previous Russian article: Why hasn’t Russia exploited its airpower advantage? Why hasn’t Russia succeeded in deploying large, mobile forces? And why hasn’t Russia cut off the significant flow of Western arms to Ukrainian forces on the front lines?

The first question concerns Russian air superiority, or lack thereof. The original question, as related by Fedorov, wondered how it is that the Russian Air Force does “not hang over the heads of the enemy for days.” The answer states succinctly that NATO radar aircraft (AWACS) are “hovering like vultures near to Ukraine around the clock,” providing real-time intelligence on all Russian aircraft sorties, including from the time they leave their Russian bases. With this kind of tracking, Ukrainian air defense systems can operate with their own radars turned off — making them much harder to detect. By turning on their fire control radars only at the last moment before engagement, the Russian target aircraft have “minimal time to make evasive maneuvers.” 

Thus, extensive NATO radar capabilities make the work of the Russian Air Force significantly more costly.

A second question speculates on the possibility of Russian mobile airborne operations into the enemy’s rear — namely, aimed at strategic points in western Ukraine. The Russian military expert notes the possibility: “We are talking about an offensive along the Lutsk-Lviv-Uzhgorod line from the territory of Belarus. On the map it turns out very beautifully — the troops [deploying] from north to south with a swift motion along a 500- to 700-kilometer march.” Yet the possibility of launching such a parachute or heliborne strike is quickly dismissed, given the vast amount of intelligence information that NATO is sending to Ukraine. Fedorov explains: “In general, in any military operation, the factor of surprise plays … a key role, which, unfortunately, the [Russian] forces are deprived of at the strategic level. [Therefore, we would require] a 3- to 4-fold advantage in manpower and equipment.” 

An unstated admission is that Russia no longer has the nearly unlimited manpower resources that it historically wielded.

However, it is the discussion regarding interdicting Western weapons flows that is most disturbing. The author makes a comparison to the Soviet war in Afghanistan, observing that this situation is not like cutting off “the supply channels of the Mujahideen from Pakistan. … Blocking several rat trails in the mountains is much easier than keeping several hundred kilometers of the border [of Ukraine] under control.”

Noting technical difficulties and cost constraints in destroying Ukrainian bridges, Fedorov concludes: “The beautiful idea of blocking the supply of weapons … on the western borders of Ukraine is shattered by a lot of uncertainties.” He also mentions the consequences of destroying dams that also form key bridges over the Dnepr. But in evident desperation, the Russian expert observes that one way to completely halt the flow of Western weapons to Ukraine would be to “smash the entire transport infrastructure with several dozen tactical nuclear strikes.” 

The good news is, the analysis does not seem to carry the theme forward as a serious proposal, though similar warnings are heard with increasing regularity among Russian strategists.

This Russian news article stands as a sober reminder that a severe danger of escalation, including the use of nuclear weapons, remains. But it is worth underlining that the Kremlin is not on the cusp of total victory and that Ukraine, together with the West, still wields some cards.

Many Western strategists are starting to agree with Henry Kissinger’s advice that peace negotiations should begin. And yes, that might well mean pressuring Kyiv to come to the table and grapple with unpleasant realities. A future Ukraine, albeit in a smaller form, still could thrive and build a prosperous, secure future under European tutelage. 

Compromises could ease the way to a bright future. For example, accepting various Russian territorial acquisitions could pave the way for Moscow to finally drop its fervent objection to Ukraine receiving sophisticated arms and other assistance from NATO, ensuring a fortified neutrality that preserves Kyiv’s autonomy. Both sides could then claim a substantive “victory” — the prerequisite for halting this war. On the economic side, Russia might even agree to pay substantial reparations to Ukraine and help fully open the vital port of Odessa, in return for significant sanctions relief. 

Such compromises could help stave off a global recession and the growing prospect of a world food crisis.

As many as 50,000, or even more, already have died in this tragic war. Will the relevant leaders wait for another 50,000 to die in the coming months before calling a halt to the carnage and putting some realistic peace plans on the negotiating table?

Lyle Goldstein is the director of Asia engagement at Defense Priorities and a visiting professor at the Watson Institute of Brown University. Follow him on Twitter @lylegoldstein.

Source: TEST FEED1