Speaking on Monday about Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, Ukraine’s foreign minister said “please don’t drag us into your [America’s] internal political processes.”  Unfortunately, Republicans appear intent on doing precisely that, as they repeat the false Russian claim that the Ukrainian government interfered in the 2016 US election.

Republicans see this as part of their effort to defend President Trump. In doing so, they put at risk America’s long-standing support for its Ukrainian partner.

The US government and large bipartisan majorities in Congress have backed Ukraine since the early 1990s, when it regained independence following the Soviet Union’s collapse. By the end of the decade, Congressionally-approved assistance for Ukraine had reached USD 300-400 million per year.

When Ukrainians took to the streets in the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2013-2014 Revolution of Dignity, their striving for democracy won interest and support from both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill.

Such Congressional support offered Kyiv grounds for comfort when Trump became president in 2017. Candidate Trump had suggested he might recognize the illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia. He also questioned the sanctions imposed on Moscow for its seizure of Crimea and subsequent aggression in eastern Ukraine.

Despite Trump’s apparent skepticism about Ukraine and his reluctance to criticize Vladimir Putin (or Russian actions), Congress continued to back Ukraine. It regularly voted by wide margins to approve funding for reform and military assistance for Kyiv while pressing the administration to bolster sanctions on Russia.

Things took a turn last September with the revelation of Trump’s effort to extort Ukraine’s president into investigating his possible 2020 political opponent by withholding an Oval Office visit and military assistance. The president’s alleged abuse of power led to his impeachment by the House of Representatives in December.

I tried to assure my Ukrainian interlocutors that, whatever President Trump did, they had an ace in the hole: the bipartisan support their country enjoyed from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. This was support that, if necessary, would produce veto-proof votes to aid Ukraine. Today, I am not so sure.

It has long been clear that Trump buys Moscow’s disinformation line that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 US election. It is true that individual Ukrainian officials criticized candidate Trump, just as officials from many European countries did. But it was Russian intelligence agencies, with Putin’s approval, that hacked the Democratic National Committee’s e-mails and gave them to Wikileaks. It is Russia’s Internet Research Agency that used social media to sow division among Americans.

However, in November and December as they sought to defend Trump against impeachment, Republicans began to make the Russian argument that Ukraine had interfered. There were many examples of this from Republicans who will sit in judgment as the Senate conducts the impeachment trial. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) commented, “I think both Russia and Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election.” Meanwhile, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) argued, “There’s no difference in the way Russians put their finger early on, on the scale and how Ukrainian officials did it,” and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) stated bluntly, “Ukraine blatantly interfered in our election.”

We can expect more such charges in the coming days. Republicans have put themselves on a slippery slope as regards support for Ukraine.

Will Republicans who assert that the Ukrainian government interfered in the US election vote in the future to approve assistance for Ukraine? And, if they can separate their espousal of the Kremlin’s talking point from their votes on assistance, how do they defend to constituents and others less sympathetic to Ukraine a vote to assist the country that they say interfered in the 2016 US election?

This is dangerous ground that could undermine US support for a country whose success is in America’s national interest.

Steven Pifer, a William Perry research fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, is a former US ambassador to Ukraine.

Read the Rest at The Atlantic Council

In a story released on Christmas Day, 2019, the Washington Post reported that U.S. Cyber Command is “developing information warfare tactics that could be deployed against senior Russian officials and oligarchs if Moscow tries to interfere in the 2020 U.S. elections through hacking election systems or sowing widespread discord.” According to this story, one option being explored is the targeting of “senior leadership and Russian elites (though probably not President Vladimir Putin, which would be considered too provocative)” to demonstrate that the “sensitive personal data” of these individuals could be hit if the election interference did not stop. The Post article also quotes Lawfare’s Bobby Chesney saying that such actions would send “credible signals to key decision-makers that they are vulnerable if they take certain adversarial actions.” Photo: U.S. Cyber Command Public Affairs

Read the Rest at The LawFare Blog

For the first time in the history of the Leonard M. Rieser Award, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists gave an honorable mention. The honor goes to Ivan Andriushin, Cecilia Eiroa-Lledo, Patricia Schuster, and Evgenii Varseev for their essay “Nuclear power and global climate change.”  (Photo is of the authors.)

This essay, written by an a team of two Russian and two American young researchers sprung from a collaboration under the umbrella of the U.S.-Russia Young Professionals Nuclear Forum (YPNF), a project established by CISAC’s Siegfried Hecker to encourage dialogue on critical nuclear issues between the younger generations of nuclear engineers and scholars in the US and Russia.

The essay that received the Rieser honorable mention was one of a series of articles born out of the YPNF program. “Their articles are of interest because they represent the views of some of the younger generation of professionals working together across cultural and disciplinary divides,” said Hecker.  “We were particularly struck by the following comment in their essay reflects on the perceived urgency of the task at hand: ‘We are the first generation that is experiencing the dramatic effects of global climate change and likely the last that can do something about it.” 

Since its first meeting in 2016, the YPNF meets alternatively in Moscow and Stanford, with its agenda designed to promote an open-minded approach to consideration of technical and political challenges presented by the use of nuclear power in energy production and in the military realm. The participants represent not only two different countries, each a world leader in nuclear scholarship, research, and technology expertise, but also a range of disciplines from nuclear engineering to particle physics to international relations to anthropology. 

On the 4th YPNF in Moscow in November 2018, one forum exercise was on The Future of Global Nuclear Power. It was designed to have the young professionals take a close look at the benefits and challenges facing nuclear power globally and to examine and debate the role that nuclear power should play globally in this century. The backdrop for the discussion was the trend of the declining share of electricity produced by nuclear power plants in the world electricity. In the past few years, it dropped to only 11% of global electricity in spite of increasing concerns about the impact of burning fossil fuels on global climate change. This exercise was the start of the winning essay.

Read the Rest at Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

The sixth Young Professional Nuclear Forum (YPNF6), sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute (MEPhI), was held at MEPhI, Moscow, on November 4-7, 2019.

The mission of the forums is to foster collaboration between young professionals from Russia and the United States in the nuclear power and nonproliferation fields. The forum allows them to discuss and evaluate pressing global nuclear issues during times that the two governments are not cooperating and are not in serious dialogue. In recent years, the two governments have severely restricted opportunities and venues that previously used to be open to experienced nuclear professionals on both sides to cooperate with each other.  The benefits of nuclear cooperation were clearly demonstrated in hundreds of mutually beneficial collaborative projects by Russian and American nuclear professionals during the breakup of the Soviet Union and in the 20-plus years that followed.

These forums allow Stanford University and MEPhI to prepare the next generation to help rejuvenate cooperation once the governments realize that cooperation in the nuclear arena is essential. The young professionals participating in these meetings are upper level undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, young faculty and junior specialists. They are the new generation who will be stepping in to solve the mounting challenges including nuclear security, nonproliferation, nuclear disarmament and how to mitigate the effects of climate change and toxic pollution of the planet.

The November 2019 meeting included two and a half days of lectures and group work on two exercises – one on a “World free of nuclear weapons” and the second on “The impact of nuclear accidents on the future of nuclear power.”

Most young professionals acknowledged – or came to realize – the enormity and complexity of Nuclear Zero as both a study area and a goal. At the same time, many noted that this very complexity provoked deeper thinking and the discussion opened new perspectives, especially for those on the engineering side. The young professionals also realized that they share more common ground on the issue of Global Zero than one might have thought.

The feedback on the nuclear accidents exercise also showed several notable takeaways. The aspects that appealed to the young professionals were: the comparative approach that pushed them to look beyond the known facts into similarities and specifics across the three accident cases; a perspective that integrated the technical, social, and cultural angles; and such examination being directly relevant to improved safety of nuclear energy, the objective close to heart to many of them who see their future as nuclear professionals.

It is also interesting that in this exercise the young professionals noted differences of perspective and opinion rather than similarities. As has been the case in all previous forums, these differences were valued and accepted as leading to a richer, more productive, discussions.

Their reports were sufficiently impressive that we have decided to follow the model of YPNF4 and have the young professionals turn the six short articles to be published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. We have the go-ahead from the editor of the Bulletin.

In addition to the working sessions, the forum provided the opportunity for personal interaction and connections. The young professionals rated their overall satisfaction of the meeting as 8.6 out of 10 expressed a strong preference to stay engaged between the forums working on collaborative projects.

On the whole, the response to the 6^th YPNF seems to show a growing engagement and sense of ownership by the young professionals on both sides. The forum presented various opportunities for the young professionals to learn about issues, each other, and each other’s countries. Young professionals approached many of the senior experts individually with questions both within and beyond the Forum discussion areas and exchanged contacts for future interaction.

The forum was supported by MEPhI, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the MacArthur Foundation.

After decades of inaction and stalemate, there are small but significant signs that the U.S. government may finally be ready to meet its legal commitment to manage and dispose of the more than 80,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel at 74 operating and shut-down commercial nuclear reactors sites in 35 states across the country. The signs of progress include:

• Only a few weeks ago, the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved bipartisan legislation to authorize the storage of used fuel at an NRC-licensed interim storage facility and provide funding for the development of a long-term repository.
• Similar legislation has had hearings and is pending in the Senate, and less than a week after the House committee action Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) introduced a parallel bill to the House legislation and called on his colleagues for bipartisan support.
• A comparable bill passed the House in the previous Congress by a vote of 340-72.
• Congressional leadership on this issue includes Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) in the Senate, as well as highly motivated members in the House.
• The Trump administration’s last two budget proposals included funding for a spent fuel interim storage site, in addition to funding for Yucca Mountain. 
• Two private entities have filed license applications with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to construct and operate consolidated interim storage facilities, and the NRC is moving forward to process these applications.

These actions reflect an increasing recognition that the management and disposal of used nuclear fuel is an issue that need to be addressed, particularly if nuclear power is going to have a role in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Read the Rest at The Hill

Americans show much less tolerance for war crimes than they did during the war in Vietnam.

Read the Rest at Washington Post

In Aug. 2019, Bobby Chesney (from Strauss Center at the University of Texas at Austin) and Max Smeets (from ETH Zurich and also Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC)) convened a workshop in Amsterdam focusing on military operations in the cyber domain, from a transatlantic perspective. The “Transatlantic Dialogue on Military Cyber Operations—Amsterdam” gathered experts from military, civilian, and academic institutions hailing from a range of countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia, and France.

Read the Rest at Lawfare Blog

For more than two weeks now, a stream of current and former U.S. officials, this week including Amb. Bill Taylor, have described to Congressional committees the White House’s sordid effort to outsource American foreign policy to the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who sought to advance the personal political interests of Donald Trump. Faced with compelling testimonies to the effect that the president subverted U.S. national interests to his own, the White House has begun to trash those officials.

Even for this White House, that is a despicable new low.

The testimonies make clear that President Trump insisted on a quid pro quo, as his Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney confirmed in an October 17 press conference (he later tried to walk it back, but watch the video of the press conference). The president wanted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate a long-debunked charge about former Vice President Joe Biden, his possible opponent in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. President Trump also wanted the Ukrainians to check whether the Democratic National Committee’s e-mail servers might have ended up in, of all places, Ukraine (no one has offered evidence to suggest that they have).

Smoking guns are the stuff of spy movies. In real-life intelligence-gathering, they are exceptionally rare. That’s why the business of intelligence typically requires collecting and analyzing fragments of information—putting together secret nuggets with unclassified information—to try to make sense of complex reality. If nothing else, the whistle-blower who filed a complaint against President Donald Trump clearly followed his or her training. SECOND PARAGRAPH I’ve spent 20 years reading intelligence reports and researching the U.S. intelligence community. And I’m not automatically inclined to believe the worst allegations about any administration; everyone has agendas and incentives to reveal information, some more noble than others. Trump and his allies have dismissed the complaint as hearsay and accused the whistle-blower of acting on political motives. But a close reading of the whistle-blower’s lengthy complaint, which accuses Trump of “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” yields a lot of concrete leads for investigators to follow.

Here are three things I learned:

Read the rest at The Atlantic

This article originally appeared in the Ukrainian journal Novoye Vremya.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy may meet President Donald Trump this weekend in Warsaw and is expected to travel to the United States later in the fall.  This gives Mr. Zelenskyy the opportunity to reinforce Kyiv’s relationship with the United States.  It also offers the opportunity to try to establish a connection to Mr. Trump, something that has proven elusive for most foreign leaders.  Here are a few suggestions for Mr. Zelenskyy on dealing with the American president.

Mr. Zelenskyy should bear in mind that Mr. Trump lacks a strong grasp of the U.S. interest in and what is at stake with regard to Ukraine and the conflict that Russia wages against it.  His administration has pursued sensible policies in supporting Kyiv, strengthening NATO and sustaining sanctions on Moscow.  By all appearances, however, Mr. Trump does not instinctively agree with the necessity of his administration’s own policies.  Witness his recent suggestion about inviting Vladimir Putin to join with other G7 leaders when he hosts the G7 summit next year.

Mr. Trump is not detail-oriented.  He reportedly reads little, leading White House staff to resort to graphs and pictures to capture his attention.  The smart way to approach Mr. Trump is to avoid detail, sticking instead with a few clear and easily understood themes.

Flattering the American president would not hurt.  North Korean leader Kim Jong-un appears to have mastered that.  North Korea has reduced none of its nuclear or ballistic missile capabilities—in fact, they have increased—but Mr. Trump swoons over Mr. Kim’s letters and professes not to be bothered by Pyongyang’s shorter range ballistic missile tests.

That said, keep expectations for flattery modest.  No European leader invested more heavily in flattering Mr. Trump than former British Prime Minister Theresa May.  She gave him a state visit in June with all the bells and whistles.  Yet Mr. Trump could not resist sending a series of tweets denigrating her handling of the Brexit conundrum and all but welcoming her replacement.

This underscores the point that, in many foreign policy relationships, Mr. Trump is transactional.  He will be asking what can America get, or what can he get.

Mr. Zelenskyy thus should consider whether there is a topic on which he could offer Mr. Trump a win-win.  Progress toward resolving the Russia-Ukraine conflict in Donbas could provide such an issue.  Real movement toward peace would be a major win for Kyiv, but it could offer Mr. Trump a win as well.  He has repeatedly made clear his desire for improved U.S.-Russia relations, and a genuine settlement in Donbas could lift the biggest obstacle to his goal.

The question is how to shape a proposal to accomplish this.  Bringing Mr. Trump into the current Normandy negotiating format in a way that made it appear as if Mr. Trump sparked a breakthrough would appeal to the Nobel Prize-hungry American president.

However, the key to peace in Donbas lies in Moscow.  The Kremlin seems interested in sustaining a simmering conflict as a means to pressure the government in Kyiv.  Still, aligning interests with Mr. Trump on pressing for peace would be a plus for Mr. Zelenskyy.

While in the United States, the Ukrainian president should not neglect the Congressional leadership.  Both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill support Ukraine and display considerable skepticism toward Russia.  Congress could serve as a check on Mr. Trump should he choose to pursue his less well-thought-out ideas on Russia.

Mr. Zelenskyy’s American interlocutors in Congress want Ukraine to succeed, with success measured by its progress in becoming a normal democratic, market-oriented and prosperous European state.  In the past, developments in Ukraine have disappointed both Ukrainians and the country’s friends in the West.  To the extent that Mr. Zelenskyy can make a persuasive case that this time it is different—that he and the new parliament will take the tough steps to achieve success—he will return home having forged a stronger basis for the U.S.-Ukrainian relationship.  He can bolster his case by coming to Washington with one or two signature reforms under his belt, such as an end to the moratorium on sales of private agricultural land.

One last piece of advice.  Mr. Zelenskyy and his team should be wary of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to drag Ukraine into U.S. domestic politics.  That would risk making Ukraine a partisan political issue in America, which could undermine the bipartisan support that Ukraine has enjoyed since regaining independence in 1991.

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Steven Pifer is a William Perry fellow at Stanford University and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.