This month we talk about Belarus, Poland, and the 2015 European migrant crisis.
We also discuss Russia, misinformation, and the power of uncertainty.
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Transcript
On November 15, 2021, the astronauts and cosmonauts from the US, Canada, EU, Japan, and Russia living aboard the International Space Station received a call from ground control informing them that a satellite had broken into pieces and they would need to seal off some of the station's modules and retreat to two capsules docked at the station's airlocks, just in case debris from this now-shattered satellite punctured the hull of the station, sucking all their air—and potentially them—out into space.
The satellite in question was launched into orbit by the Soviet Union back in 1982. It was called the Kosmos-1408 and was used from its perch in low-earth orbit for signal intelligence purposes reportedly for about six months, at which point the satellite, which lacked a propulsion system, had an orbit that was too far degraded to be useful for those purposes.
On that day in mid-November, though, it would seem that the satellite, which was still in orbit, just a little above the one occupied by the ISS, broke into hundreds of thousands of pieces, about 1,500 of which were large enough to be tracked by ground-based radars, and much of which is expected to remain in orbit for years, and potentially decades.
What we now know, but didn't know for certain, then, is that this satellite exploded when it was struck by an anti-satellite missile launched from the ground by the Russian military.
Russia's defense minister was quoted by one of the country's news agencies as saying, "A cutting-edge system of the future" had "hit an old satellite with precision worthy of a goldsmith. The remaining debris poses no threat to space activity."
That latter claim, according to all experts in this field who have spoken on the matter, those who have spoken in non-Russian-government-controlled publications, anyway, is false. Very false, actually.
This cloud, again, created hundreds of thousands of pieces of debris. And in space, there's no air, and thus, no friction to slow down anything rotating around the planet, in orbit. As a consequence, even tiny little screws or flakes of paint can move faster than bullets, creating explosive holes in the walls of satellites or space stations or space craft they encounter; so the more debris, the more hazardous space, and especially the orbital area around Earth, is for everyone and everything up there.
The former claim about this being a futuristic technology is also a bit of a fib, as the Soviet Union, the precursor to today's Russian government, successfully tested an anti-satellite weapon in 1968. This 60s-era weapon was ponderous compared to the modern iteration, as it would basically launch a missile into orbit on an intercept path with the intended satellite target, and then, over time, close the distance and explode when close enough to take it out.
This newer version was more akin to the anti-satellite weapons launched by China and India, the former in 2007 and the latter in 2019.
Both countries used a more straightforward kinetic-kill type of missile, that, rather than reaching the proper orbit and then lurking a bit before casually closing the distance with its intended target, would instead aim to hit the thing more directly, offing the satellite target within a few minutes after launch.
These efforts were similar to an American effort in 2008 to destroy a US satellite with a decaying orbit, that satellite containing some hazardous fuel that could have hurt anyone unfortunate enough to be in the area when it crashed down to Earth, so the government ordered the Navy to launch a surface-to-air missile at it, blasting the thing into smaller pieces and destroying that hazardous fuel before it could enter the atmosphere.
These missiles, then, are very similar, to the point of being interchangeable in some cases, to standard surface-to-air missiles. The main difference is in logistical capabilities, and being able to reach further out into space, just beyond the atmosphere, rather than hitting targets that are flying within the atmosphere, where there's still air.
It should also be noted, that during the Cold War, both the US and Soviet Union successfully took out satellites using missiles launched from jets, which is still impressive, but arguably less-so because such missiles start way up high near the edge of space to begin with, and thus the targeting, but also the technology required to get such a projectile into space in operational form wasn't as sophisticated as doing the same from a ground-based launcher.
Such weapons are considered to be valuable, in large part, because satellites are increasingly vital to so many operations down here on the ground. They make GPS services, and the international versions of the same, function. They beam down telecommunication signals, including, increasingly, internet services, and they allow governments and private companies to take photos, shoot live videos, and transmit hidden messages while spying on the hidden messages of others—they're fundamental to a whole lot of modern life, for citizens, governments, businesses, and militaries.
That means, if war were to ever break out between technologically advanced nations, it would be a significant victory to take out your opponent's space-based eyes and ears and mouths early in the conflict; if China and the US ever went to war, for instance, it's strongly suspected that China would start by taking out as many US satellites as possible, as a they underpin significant aspects of US military strength, not to mention everyday conveniences enjoyed by the public, back home.
Unfortunately, such a conflict would almost certainly bring us close, if not all the way to a future defined in part by what's often called Kessler Syndrome; which basically means there's enough bullet-like debris whizzing through the space around the Earth that those pieces blow up all the still functioning satellites and space stations and other craft, which creates more debris, and this chain reaction creates so much rubble, so many bullets of all shapes and sizes, that putting new satellites up there, or even flying spacecraft out to the moon or elsewhere, becomes near-impossible because of how many hazards all those pieces of infrastructure and vehicles would have to face; it would be like trying to drive a car through a WWII battlefield, avoiding all the explosions and machine gun fire coming at you from all directions; it wouldn't be feasible.
This is part of why this new move by Russia, and those other, recent moves by China and India, and to a lesser degree, by the US, lesser because the satellite they blew up was hazardous, but also close enough to deorbiting that the debris didn't stick around for very long before burning up in the atmosphere—but this syndrome and fears surrounding it is part of why these efforts are considered to be so frightening.
It's one thing to worry about a theoretical conflict, and have to make plans for what happens if your opponent evens the odds by knocking out hundreds of billions of dollars worth of orbital infrastructure. It's another entirely to worry that all that infrastructure, yours and theirs and everyone else's, will be destroyed, and no one will be capable of rebuilding it any time in the next several decades, minimum, because of some weapons tests; no GPS, no satellite-augmented communications, nothing.
What I'd like to talk about today, though, are other strategies that aim for a similar utility, and one specific, recent instance of what's being called hybrid warfare, and the consequences of this attack.
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The article I'd like to unspool today comes from The Associated Press, and it's entitled:
Poland PM to hold talks in Europe on Belarus border crisis
To understand what's happening in this piece, I think a few quick summaries of those involved and the state of play might be useful.
The Republic of Belarus is a medium-sized Eastern-European country that has Russia to its east, Ukraine just to the south, Poland to the west, and the Baltic countries Lithuania and Latvia to the north.
When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1990, Belarus declared its sovereignty and achieved independence in 1991.
They adopted a constitution in 1994 and had what is generally considered to have been a fair and free election that same year, but the man who was elected president, Alexander Lukashenko, accumulated power, got rid of people and entities that could challenge his rule, and set up an authoritarian state that is primarily noted for its horrible human rights record and Soviet-ish approach to managing its economy, with the state owning a lot of vital industries.
Belarus also made a deal with Russia in 2000, creating what's called the Union State, which for the moment keeps both countries separate, but which was formed with the intention of someday possibly reunifying them into something Soviet Union-esque.
So Belarus is a strange sort of throwback nation, especially compared to other, modern European nations, in that it's got a lot of Cold War-era baggage, and is more or less in the pocket of Russia—though Lukashenko seems to perceive it as more of a partnership than a suzerain relationship.
Poland is another European country that is, alongside Hungary, but that's not relevant for this story, Poland is a European country that is bucking the larger, general European trend toward more progressive and humanistic policies and governance.
It's different from Belarus, both in how extreme it's deviation is—Belarus is basically a brutal dictatorship, while Poland is a typical European nation with leaders who are far-right ideologues—and in their alliances and allegiances: again, Belarus is diplomatically married to Russia, while Poland is in the European Union, with all that entails, but also part of NATO, which is a military alliance that was set up to counter the influence and aggression of the Soviet Union, back when it was taking over portions of the continent and incorporating those pieces into the Warsaw Pact.
So while Poland is off-kilter from the dominant beliefs and behaviors of the rest of the EU, they're still far afield from Belarus, in terms of brutality and in terms of their relationship with the rest of the world; they're generally considered to be a nation in good-standing for trade and diplomatic purposes, with few caveats, while Belarus is not quite North Korean levels of aggressive and antisocial, but still about as far as you can get from playing nice with everyone else as is possible without going full-on Kim regime.
One more useful bit of context here is the European migrant, or European refugee crisis of 2015; those terms are often used in different ways by folks with different ideological leanings on immigration, as calling it a migrant crisis makes it sound like these were people who just decided to move and then opted to enter Europe without asking, while calling it a refugee crisis addresses the disasters and wars and oppression many of them were facing back home, in some cases to the point where they legitimately feared death if they returned to wherever it was they came from.
I'm going to use the term migrant crisis, as that's the term typically used academically as it literally means a person moving from one place to another; but be aware of that distinction as it's fundamental to understanding the biases and historical context underpinning much of what happened during 2015, and to a lesser degree from 2011 until mid-2016; when this crisis arguably began and ended, respectively.
At the height of the crisis, though, migrants from Syria, fleeing the war that had broken out back home, and folks from Afghanistan, Nigeria, where Boko Haram was waging war against the government, Pakistan, Iraq, where there was also a war, and Eritrea, most fleeing some type of internal or regional conflict, fleeing after they participated in so-called Arab Spring uprisings, and were thus targeted by vengeful governments, or fleeing insurgencies or waves of terrorist violence reached incredible levels, arrived in European nations around the same time, seeking asylum: more than 1.3 million people arrived in 2015 alone, up from 252,000 in 2014, which is closer to the modern average.
The UN estimates that about 5.2 million people reached Europe via illegal—or what are sometimes called "irregular"—channels as part of this multi-year wave by the end of 2016.
Many crossed the Mediterranean, sometimes in tiny boats or rafts which sunk, many people died, some were rescued, and some took overland paths through Turkey headed toward Greece.
One of the consequences of this period and all this migration was that many European countries accepted a lot more immigrants than usual—Germany took on a borderline heroic number, way more than any other European country—and that changed the composition of their populations to varying degrees, and triggered nationalist and in some cases quite racist, isolationist political backlashes; which is part of what led to where we're at, today, with Poland and Hungary's governments being so far afield ideologically from the rest of their EU kin, but this arguably influenced politics in most of these countries at some level, as allowing "outsiders" with different beliefs, who look different, and who, through some lenses at least, are taking employment opportunities from locals—you tend to see a pushback by the threatened or just the opportunistic. Thus, quite a few anti-immigration political parties gained power during and in the years following this wave of new migrants into Europe; which was in some ways destabilizing, but also, in some ways, made these countries less likely to enthusiastically engage with coalitions like the EU and NATO.
And that's a vital point to understand here, because this piece in the Associated Press is about a move by Belarus that was bizarre and incomprehensible to some, but which was a discernible as a clever, novel method of asymmetrical warfare, to others.
What seems to have happened is this:
Beginning in the early summer of 2021 whole lot of migrants fleeing parts of the Middle East and North Africa were flown into the Belarusian capital, Minsk, and then transported, overland, to Belarus' borders with Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania.
Concerns about this effort, which began shortly after Belarus recalled its diplomats from the EU when the Union imposed new sanctions on the country, following their forcing downing of a passenger aircraft flying through Belarusian airspace in order to arrest a passenger who was critical about the Lukashenko regime on the internet, these concerns were initially raised by the Interior Minister of Lithuania, who said in an interview that Belarusian border guards were taking payments from migrants to transport them to the EU border and help them across, illegally.
As the effort grew in scale, though, it became clear this wasn't merely a grift by border guards looking to make some money; these migrants were often ferried vast distances, and in some cases provided wire cutters and axes to cut through border fences—and when some migrants failed to make it across without being caught and were turned back into Belarus, these same border guards would force them to stay in the wilderness near the fence, not allowing them to come back into the country where they were transported, and in some cases would also beat or otherwise abuse them.
It's at this point that some officials in these EU border countries, Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania, began to call this hybrid warfare—which is a type of attack that utilizes a bit of conventional warfare, but blends it with diplomatic machinations and often influence campaigns, like misinformation and electoral interventions. Muddying the informational waters, basically, while also sometimes hacking, doing confusing diplomatic things, or otherwise confounding the responses of those on the receiving end of the attack so they don't have a clear sense of what you're up to, or how to respond.
The so-called "little green men" attack conducted by Russia against Ukraine, which resulted in the former occupying and claiming Crimea out from under the latter, is considered to have been a type of hybrid warfare, because it confused what was essentially an attack on a neighboring country so that outside parties couldn't say for certain what was happening—because Russian troops didn't wear flags on their uniforms, and they mostly just backed up Russia-aligned separatists within the region, who had themselves been prepared with misinformation campaigns for years—which made it diplomatically difficult for outside parties to make demands, but also made it a lot likelier that no one would intervene on Ukraine's behalf: it wasn't clear they were being invaded, and that lack of clarity gave entities like the EU and the US the excuse they needed not to intervene—intervention that could lead to a much larger conflict.
Russia has reportedly engaged in similar behaviors in elections around the world, including in the US and before that in many Eastern European nations, and this is arguably something most countries engage in or try to engage in on a regular basis, but Russia's approach to this style of military action tends to be notable because they're successful a lot more frequently—at least overtly so—than the US or China.
In this case, it looks like Belarus was trying its hand at a similar, unusual, hard-to-define attack, meant possibly to serve as vengeance against the EU, which had recently slapped it with new sanctions, as I mentioned, but possibly was also meant to be part of a larger strategy—designed either by Lukashenko or by Putin, who reportedly gave the effort his blessing, which could mean he played a role in it, could mean he merely gave some advice to Lukashenko, and could mean nothing at all; maybe he just agree to not intervene as they undertook the effort, or maybe the reports were wrong and he had nothing at all to do with it.
Whatever the specifics, though, this was fairly rapidly redefined as an attack by the Belarusian government against the EU, meant to destabilize politics and unity in the region, and maybe just make the EU look bad.
The EU responded accordingly: rather than a loosening of sanctions against Belarus, the airlines being used by Lukashenko to transport migrants from the Middle East and Turkey to Minsk were threatened with sanctions, which turned off the migrant transportation spigot pretty quickly, as none of these airlines wanted to be banned from operating in the EU, and the EU governance agreed to a new collection of sanctions against Belarus, directly, in retaliation for this attack—though as of the day I'm recording this at least those sanctions have been threatened but not implemented, and there's a chance they could be discarded or watered-down as part of some kind of deal with Lukashenko.
EU leaders have been talking to Lukashenko and Putin over the past week or so, and it's likely something will be worked out in the near-future, now that this scheme has been called out for what it is, rather than operating under cloak and dagger conditions.
There's a chance, as was seemingly intended by the Belarusian regime, the EU's reputation for taking in migrants, which is far from perfect but was burnished a bit because of how many people they accepted after that earlier crisis, might be tarnished after this demonstration of what some might perceive as cold-hearted indifference toward the human beings used as pawns in this new migrant crisis, even if this one was orchestrated rather than happening organically.
Also important to note here is that the thousands of people transported to the EU border in this way are human beings who are generally fleeing similar things as those other migrants in prior years : they're in danger, they're understandably trying to escape wars or insurgencies back home—so in addition to this being a somewhat novel and in some ways interesting method of hybrid warfare, it's also a horrifying abuse of people on large scale, as most of these migrants have been stuck in freezing conditions, trapped along border fences between countries, and only recently allowed into rough, indoor, warehouse-based camps back in Belarus; they're also now stuck in legal limbo, making their attempts to go anywhere all the more complicated because they've been flown and bussed around in this way, used as weapons rather than treated as survivors seeking asylum.
And that's the part that might really stick here, because, again, it's politically inexpedient to allow in new migrants, especially from the parts of the world these folks are from, into this part of the EU; it's untenable politically, and it's not something countries geographically deeper into the Union are likely to reach out and make their problem, even though there are plenty of European citizens who, ideologically, believe it's good and right to help such people out.
Thus, even though we're reaching a point where this specific standoff will probably end, it seems likely we'll see more weaponization of human migration in the coming years, as climate change-related events are expected to shuffle more people around, and as conflicts of all sorts continue to make facing the uncertainties and dangers of the road, and of trying to gain access to someplace safer, more prudent than sticking around and facing those known issues back home—and as political parties and leaders in all countries respond accordingly, using these changing variables to grab more power and, in some cases, rally locals against the long-feared threat of barbarians at the gate.
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Show Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_1408
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoatmospheric_Kill_Vehicle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_State
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Belarus%E2%80%93European_Union_border_crisis
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59289998
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-59226226
https://www.vox.com/2021/11/14/22781335/belarus-hybrid-attack-immigrants-border-eu-poland-crisis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_migrant_crisis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_European_migrant_crisis
