OPINION:
It was 60 years ago this month that President John F. Kennedy delivered his impassioned speech in defense of liberty, freedom and self-government to 1 million citizens in the then-democratic enclave of West Berlin.
Standing in the shadow of the wall that would divide Europe’s desolate East and from its flourishing West for nearly three decades, the youthful American president said: “There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin.”
Kennedy’s poignant words continue to resonate today, especially in Kyiv, which now sits on the geopolitical fault line just as Berlin once did during the Cold War, between dictatorship and freedom. Allied with Iran, North Korea and China, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s model of autocracy looks to be as transient as that of the Soviet Union he once served — as long as an outmanned, outgunned but still free Ukraine continues to defy the Kremlin’s unprovoked, unjust, savage invasion.
The barbaric Russian army has abducted Ukrainian children, deliberately targeted civilians in their apartments, schools and hospitals, wreaked havoc on the world economy and forced millions of Ukrainian refugees to flee their homeland.
In an interview last month with a pro-Kremlin blogger who was subsequently fired, Mr. Putin’s erstwhile ally, Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, revealed that his organization’s mercenaries had already suffered 20,000 casualties fighting in Ukraine. He also acknowledged that Russia’s goal to demilitarize Ukraine had backfired because Kyiv now boasts a battle-hardened fighting force with an expanding arsenal of sophisticated weapons.
Directing his wrath at Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Armed Forces Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov rather than Mr. Putin himself, Mr. Prigozhin insisted that “nothing is working for us” in the invasion and that Russia should “change [its] top leadership.”
Mr. Putin might appreciate his putative confidant’s serving up scapegoats for Russia’s military failures. Still, Mr. Prigozhin’s public outburst also serves as further evidence of the Kremlin’s failure to end the disastrous squabbling in its senior ranks as it tries to fight a war. Ukraine is poised to take advantage with a counteroffensive against a highly vulnerable, poorly equipped Russian military, which has suffered massive casualties and must defend itself from “Free Russia legion” rearguard attacks, most recently in Belgorod.
But of even greater concern from Mr. Putin’s perspective, Mr. Prigozhin argued that the war in Ukraine has backfired so disastrously that the Kremlin is risking another “revolution” at home. Defeats in foreign wars have long been threat multipliers, both for Russia’s long line of czars and their Soviet successors. Russia’s ill-fated war with Japan resulted in a failed revolution in 1905, which set the stage for the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 after Russia was defeated in World War I. The Soviet quagmire in Afghanistan proved to be a nail in the Evil Empire’s coffin as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Having lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, when subjugated Warsaw Pact nations and Soviet citizens came to identify with freedom-loving West Berliners instead of their putative socialist brethren, Mr. Putin is doubling down on nuclear threats and deploying tactical nuclear weapons to neighboring Belarus, all while boosting the cost of his war and creating more domestic enemies in the process.
That’s why the FBI and CIA recently released videos directed at disillusioned Russian military and intelligence officers who might be interested in sharing their secrets. Quoting Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the CIA video appealed to Russians’ sense of patriotism and family values. Last November, CIA Deputy Director for Operations Dave Marlowe told an audience at George Mason University that the CIA was “open for business” and “looking around the world for Russians who are as disgusted with [the invasion] as we are.”
Mr. Marlowe is banking on Russians seeing through Mr. Putin’s propaganda about enemy Ukrainian “Nazis” at the gates at a time when Russia has become an isolated, subservient resource colony of a dominant China. Mr. Putin’s coldblooded grip on the Kremlin might be increasingly at risk, but the “motherland” is under no such threat. Ukraine, by contrast, is fighting for its very existence and to recapture territory that Russia illegally annexed by force.
With its arsenal of powerful weapons, including thousands of short- and long-range nuclear weapons, and a domestic political scene engulfed in internecine feuds, Russia is more of a threat to global security today than perhaps ever before in its history.
And that’s why intelligence collection and analysis, the building blocks of effective foreign policy, matter more than ever as well.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. Follow him on Twitter @DanielHoffmanDC.
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