1. DEFENSE

Ukraine moves to send convicts to the front line — minus the rapists and killers

Those convicted of particularly serious crimes, and some categories of corrupt officials, will not be allowed to choose the front over a jail cell.

​​​​​​​After weeks of pressure from civil society, parliament ruled that MPs and some top government officials who have committed crimes would be ineligible to have their sentences commuted, Ukrainian MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak said in a Telegram post from the parliament on Wednesday.

Other prisoners, as long as they weren't convicted of a serious crime, face one condition — no more than three years may remain before the end of their sentences. Requests to be allowed to fight in exchange for freedom must be approved by the courts.

The Anti-Corruption Action Center, a Kyiv-based watchdog, called the vote “a victory with a bitter taste,” given that not all types of corrupt officials were excluded from the law's provisions.

“The list [of those excluded] does not include officials of the President's Office, heads of state-owned enterprises, investigators, prosecutors and judges. Thus, part of the work of anti-corruption bodies in previous years may go under the cat's tail [be in vain],” the watchdog said in a statement.

“After all, many judges, prosecutors and other officials convicted of corruption are already serving their sentences, [and] will now be able to use this mechanism and get out of prison.”

Desperate for recruits after a six-month delay in declaringmobilization, Ukraine’s MPs took a page straight from the book of Russia's Wagner Group mercenary force — which also allows convicts to reduce their jail terms through military service.

The lawmakers hope a regulated, voluntary process will allow Kyiv to mobilize up to 10,000 convicts for the war. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy must sign the bill before it can take effect.

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CONCLUDING CONFLICT: WHY ENDING WAR IS NEVER AN EASY STRATEGY

​​​​​​​Tactics sans Strategy

Despite their primacy in the creation of strategy, directed political objectives can be inappropriately tactically focused and impede the prosecution and termination of conflict, even when generated from outside the military. Political objectives that are inherently tactical will likely lack some larger theory of victory, resulting in protracted wars in which the best possible outcome is a stalemate. During the Vietnam War, the Johnson administration’s flawed policy of attrition within a limited conflict was translated by Pentagon officials into a series of essentially tactical tasks, such as killing more enemy troops or bombing certain targets. As a technologically superior force with over 500,000 servicemembers deployed to Vietnam, the United States was able to conduct these tasks with impunity, generating scores of data and analytics in doing so. The United States remained undefeated in all major battles throughout the war, but failed because its strategy focused on tactical actions and never established defined and feasible outcomes against an opponent fighting an unlimited conflict. The United States’ failure in Vietnam is an example of the pithy quotation often incorrectly attributed to Sun Tzu, “tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” It is essential for strategists to collaborate with policymakers to inform the best use of military force, including identifying political objectives obtainable through military power. Only then can a state work towards termination criteria and know when to end a conflict.