MAY 11, 2024 4:00 AM CET
BY KETRIN JOCHECOVÁ AND TOM NICHOLSONIn Slovakia, Robert Fico’s government has shunned the independent press and wants to remake the public broadcaster into a state-run TV channel that could soon be run by a flat-earther.

The government’s goal? Bring the media to heel.

Since winning a Sept. 30 general election, Fico and his coalition allies have dismayed Brussels by seeming to lurch toward the governance style of Hungary’s strongman prime minister, Viktor Orbán, including by abolishing a key anti-corruption office, halting state military support to Ukraine, parroting Moscow talking points, and now attempting to subjugate public media in an attempt to give the coalition even greater control. That’s triggered concerns in Brussels about media freedom and civil liberties in another European Union country

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VENICE, Italy — The yearly package of €3 billion raised from profits on frozen Russian assets is “almost nothing” in the context of Ukraine’s war needs, Justice Minister Denys Maliuska told POLITICO.

The EU on Wednesday approved a plan to use the profits generated by investing frozen Russian assets in Europe — worth between €2.5 billion and €3 billion per year — to buy weapons for Ukraine.

However, as Ukraine grapples with shortages of ammunition, the country’s justice minister was critical of how far those funds could go.

“If we are talking about the needs of Ukraine and the needs of the war, military and non-military, €3 billion is actually almost nothing— we need hundreds of billions in order to win the war,” Maliuska told POLITICO at the G7 justice ministers’ meeting in Venice on Thursday.

“It’s a good first step,” he said.

Taking aim: Army leaders ponder mix of precision munitions vs conventional

Three four-star US Army generals this week weighed in with their opinions about finding the right balance between conventional and high-tech munitions - but the answers aren't easy.

WASHINGTON — This week, US Army Europe and Africa Commander Gen. Darryl Williams kicked off the annual Fires Symposium in Lawton, Okla. with, appropriately, a bit of a bombshell.

“Traditional cannon-based mass fires,” he told the audience, “are still the best solution in an EW environment.”

Williams, a veteran field artillery officer, has had a front row seat for nearly two years assessing some of those challenges and seeing how US provided weapons are working on the Ukrainian battlefield against an adversary with electronic warfare (EW) capabilities. Following decades of investments across the US military in precision capabilities, the claim that simpler weapons may be the best for the modern battlefield raises larger questions about whether the Army has been putting billions over billions of dollars down the wrong hole.

And yet, two other four-star generals speaking this week cautioned that one can’t move too far away from precision weaponry, an indication that Army leadership is still working through the results of the war in Ukraine and thinking through how it could apply to future conflicts with both Russia and China.

Williams himself called precision weapons “essential,” but cautioned that they cannot “supplant the indispensable volume of… unguided cannon fire,” on the battlefield.

Although Williams did not disclose which precision munitions are experiencing higher failure rates, there have been multiple reports of Russian forces jamming or spoofing munitions that rely on GPS.

Last month, for example, Pentagon acquisition chief Bill LaPlante disclosed problems with another weapon that Defense One potentially identified as the Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB). And in May 2023 CNN reported that Russia was using electronic jammers to throw the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) missiles off course.

GMLRS uses GPS guidance and has inertial navigation systems that are not susceptible to EW misdirection. However, that also makes them less precise than when guided by GPS. Regardless, Williams said GMLRS inertial navigation units are helping “offset” challenges inside Ukraine.

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“GPS was a great way to kind of cheaply add precision to every one of its weapons, and now they have to rethink how to do that,” Clark said. “That’s the challenge the DoD running into, these are all supposed to be cheap weapons, we can buy at scale, and [now] making them too sophisticated.”

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During the debate over the most recent Ukraine aid bill that Congress passed, Biden administration officials, legislators, and many in the media proclaimed that this was a Churchillian moment for the United States. Rep. Michael McCaul, for example, repeatedly stated from the House floor and elsewhere, that how you voted on the aid bill determined whether you were Churchill or Chamberlain (referring to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, one of the architects of appeasement in the 1930s). The pro-Ukraine aid forces have invoked the “lessons of Munich” to justify deeper involvement by the United States and NATO in the Ukraine War, but they would be wise to consider that the path they are following might end in what the British historian Niall Ferguson called “the pity of war.”

Pro-Ukraine aid forces repeatedly compare Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hitler and Russian aggression in Ukraine to Hitler’s aggression in Czechoslovakia. Britain and France capitulated to Hitler at Munich, thereby dooming Czechoslovakia and setting the stage for the invasion of Poland and the beginning of the European phase of the Second World War. The pro-Ukraine aid forces claim that if the United States negotiates a ceasefire in Ukraine rather than helping Ukraine to defeat Russia and win the war, it will be another Munich moment--and the Baltic States and Poland will be the next victims of Putin’s aggression.

This, of course, is not the first time U.S. political leaders and their media supporters have invoked the “lessons of Munich” to justify greater involvement in wars. President Truman and his advisers did it in Korea before deciding that it was “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” President Eisenhower’s "domino theory" in Southeast Asia was based on the lessons of Munich, but Eisenhower, unlike his immediate successors, knew better than to send massive numbers of American troops to the jungles of Vietnam. The 58,000 plus American men who died in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and early 1970s did so because our leaders were haunted by the lessons of Munich--they wanted to be Churchill, not Chamberlain.

History is rarely “clear” on these matters, but don’t tell that to professor Christine Adams of Maryland’s St. Mary’s College who wrote an essay in Time magazine entitled “History Makes Clear the Risks of Appeasing Putin,” complete with a photograph of Neville Chamberlain waving the Munich agreement to a crowd of supporters at Heston Airport. The message of her essay is quite simple (or should I say simplistic): Putin is Hitler, Ukraine is Czechoslovakia, and to use her own words: “Appeasement of Hitler didn’t work, and appeasement of Putin threatens the safety not only of Europe but of the world beyond.” What is at stake, therefore, in Ukraine, according to professor Adams, is the safety of the world. If that is so, why doesn’t she advocate sending American troops to Ukraine to fight alongside Ukrainians who are trying to save the world? Professor Adams then accused Republicans, “egged on by former President Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson,” who opposed the Ukraine aid bill as being “pro-Russian.” Winston Churchill, of course, never accused Neville Chamberlain of being pro-Nazi, but then Churchill understood the complexities of history, including the reasons men like Chamberlain sought to avoid a repeat of the slaughter of the First World War.

Winston Churchill, of course, never accused Neville Chamberlain of being pro-Nazi, but then Churchill understood the complexities of history, including the reasons men like Chamberlain sought to avoid a repeat of the slaughter of the First World War.

The Russians simply walked in, Ukrainian troops in Kharkiv tell BBC

32 minutes ago
Jonathan Beale,Defence correspondent
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Denys Yaroslavskyi is angry.

As the Commander of a Ukrainian Special Reconnaissance Unit, he fought in Ukraine’s surprise offensive in Kharkiv in the autumn of 2022, which pushed back an initial Russian invasion all the way back to the border.

But now Denys and his men are facing the prospect of doing the same all over again.

Russian forces have, in recent days, made small but significant gains right along the border in the Kharkiv region.

Their advances are only a few miles deep but have swallowed up around 100km (62 miles) of Ukrainian territory. In the more heavily defended east of Ukraine, it’s taken Russia months to achieve the same.

Denys wants to know what happened to Ukraine’s defences.

“There was no first line of defence. We saw it. The Russians just walked in. They just walked in, without any mined fields” he says.

He shows me video from a drone feed taken a few days ago of small columns of Russian troops simply walking across the border, unopposed.

He says officials had claimed that defences were being built at huge cost, but in his view, those defences simply weren’t there. “Either it was an act of negligence, or corruption. It wasn’t a failure. It was a betrayal”.

​​​​​​​ Opening a new front here in the north is stretching Ukraine’s limited resources. The US delay in approving more military support has starved Ukrainian troops of ammunition.

On average, Ukraine has only been able to fire one artillery round to Russia’s 10. That is now slowly being addressed, with the US support now coming.

But the Kharkiv offensive also highlights problems Ukraine itself has been too slow to address – mobilising enough troops and building adequate defence lines. Re-enforcements being sent to Kharkiv have had to be pulled from other parts of the front and limited reserves.

Ukrainian officials still insist Kharkiv city is not under threat of a ground invasion. But the further the Russian’s advance, the more likely that it will come within range of Russian artillery.

Back in a park in Kharkiv, Denys says he believes Russian forces will try to focus on the East and to capture the entire Donbas. But he says Russia is also trying to exploit Ukrainian weaknesses right across the 1,000km front. In Kharkiv they’ve found one.

“Of course I’m angry,” Denys says. “When we were fighting back for this territory in 2022, we lost thousands of people. We risked our lives.

"And now because someone didn’t build fortifications, we’re losing people again.”