Ukraine’s security service blew up a railway connection linking Russia to China, in a clandestine strike carried out deep into enemy territory, with pro-Kremlin media reporting that investigators have opened a criminal case into a “terrorist attack.”
The SBU set off several explosions inside the Severomuysky tunnel of the Baikal-Amur highway in Buryatia, located some 6,000 kilometers east of Ukraine, a senior Ukrainian official with direct knowledge of the operation told POLITICO.
“This is the only serious railway connection between the Russian Federation and China. And currently, this route, which Russia uses, including for military supplies, is paralyzed,” the official said.
Four explosive devices went off while a cargo train was moving inside the tunnel. “Now the (Russian) Federal Security Service is working on the spot, the railway workers are unsuccessfully trying to minimize the consequences of the SBU special operation,” the Ukrainian official added.
Ukraine’s security service has not publicly confirmed the attack. Russia has also so far not confirmed the sabotage.
“On the Itikit — Okusykan stretch in Buryatia, while driving through the tunnel, the locomotive crew of the cargo train noticed smoke from one of the diesel fuel tanks. The train was stopped, and two fire extinguishing trains were sent from nearby towns to help. The movement of trains was not interrupted, it was organized along a bypass section with a slight increase in travel time,” Russia’s state railroad company RZHD said in a statement on Thursday.
This story has been updated with additional reporting.
YEREVAN, Armenia — Azerbaijan has agreed to reopen the only highway linking Armenia to the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh provided local leaders accept aid from Azerbaijan as well, a senior Azerbaijani official told POLITICO on Saturday.
The news comes after authorities in the ethnic Armenian-controlled exclave — inside Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized borders — announced earlier in the day that it would accept humanitarian shipments from the Russian Red Cross via an alternative road from Aghdam, inside Azerbaijani government-held territory.
According to Hikmet Hajiyev, foreign policy adviser to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, “Azerbaijan expressed its consent as a goodwill gesture to ensure simultaneous opening” of the so-called Lachin Corridor for ICRC cargo. The road connects the mountainous territory to Armenia. The acceptance, he said, would pave the way for a separate deal to allow passage from Armenia. “In the Lachin checkpoint, Azerbaijan’s customs and border regime must be observed,” he said.
For close to two months, aid organizations including the Red Cross have said they have been unable to transport supplies of food and fuel into Nagorno-Karabakh, despite a 2020 ceasefire agreement between the two sides guaranteeing free use of the road under the supervision of Russian peacekeepers. With essential provisions running low, local Armenians say a humanitarian crisis is already unfolding and the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, last month issued a report warning that a “genocide” was under way.
Both the U.S. and the EU have urged Azerbaijan to reopen the Lachin Corridor. The South Caucasus country denies it is orchestrating a blockade, and has insisted the Karabakh Armenians must accept humanitarian supplies from inside Azerbaijan.
Arayik Harutyunyan, the former de facto president of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, told POLITICO in July that he would refuse to accept the supplies despite a deteriorating humanitarian situation because “Azerbaijan created this crisis and cannot be the solution to it.”
Harutyunyan, who resigned last month amid the ongoing crisis, was due to be replaced on Saturday in a presidential election. However, according to Hajiyev, the “sham elections” are a “serious setback and counterproductive” for the situation.
Instead, he reiterated a call from the Azerbaijani government for the Karabakh Armenians to lay down their arms and accept being governed as part of Azerbaijan. “It is the only way to a lasting peace where Armenian and Azerbaijani residents of Karabakh can live and coexist,” he said.
Hajiyev later clarified in a statement on social media that the Lachin Corridor would not be opened immediately, but under the terms of a deal allowing indefinite access for Azerbaijani aid from Aghdam.
Vladimir Putin’s strongman mask is slipping — and Ukraine sees opportunity in the chaos.
Warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s short-lived mutiny over the weekend exposed Putin’s tenuous grip on the levers of power, the disunity within his ranks and the weakness in Russia’s own border defenses. The ease with which Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenaries were able to take control of Russian territory and march to within 200 kilometers of Moscow — and the videos of Russians cheering for them — showed Putin’s regime is far from invincible.
“Today the world saw that Russia’s bosses do not control anything,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his evening address late Saturday. “In one day, they lost several of their million-plus cities and showed all Russian bandits, mercenaries, oligarchs and anyone else how easy it is to capture Russian cities and, probably, weapons arsenals.”
Switching from Ukrainian to Russian, Zelenskyy continued in what was clearly a message to Putin’s apparatchiks: “The man from the Kremlin is obviously very afraid and is probably hiding somewhere, not showing himself. I’m sure he is no longer in Moscow … He knows what he’s afraid of because he himself created this threat. All the evil, all the losses, all the hatred — he foments it himself. The longer he can run between his bunkers, the more you will all lose, all of those who are connected with Russia.”
Putin, a fan of historic parallels, on Saturday morning invoked the specter of the Russian civil war, which broke out in 1917 as the country was fighting the First World War — an indication of how seriously he appeared to view the Prigozhin threat.
But perhaps Putin ought to look to the failed 1991 August Coup against then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Back then, Communist Party hardliners furious at Gorbachev’s attempts to ram through reforms detained the leader at his dacha in Crimea and rolled their tanks into Moscow. Like Prigozhin’s failed mutiny, the August Coup of 1991 was short-lived — it only lasted three days. But the fallout was catastrophic for the Soviet Union — it led to a loss of confidence in the Communist regime, and by December of 1991, the USSR was no more.
Wagner’s role in Putin’s war
Wagner mercenaries have played an important role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As an unofficial arm of the Kremlin’s armed forces, recruited from Russia’s prisons and alleyways, they have been among Putin’s most expendable men.
A force with a capacity for horrific savagery — including executions of deserters with sledgehammers — Prigozhin’s men were thrown into the most brutal battles — offcuts in Russia’s famous military meat-grinder.
Last winter, when Russian forces were depleted and demoralized in the wake of a surging Ukrainian counteroffensive that took back Kharkiv and Kherson, Moscow used Prigozhin’s mercenaries to plug gaps in the battlefront and give his regular troops breathing space.
As Wagner mercenaries held the line over the winter, Russia was able to replenish its dwindling arms supplies, and call up and train a fresh wave of conscripts to throw into the trenches.
Prigozhin’s forces were also instrumental in the battle for Bakhmut, the strategic town in eastern Ukraine that has seen some of the heaviest fighting and highest Russian casualties of the war.
What happens to Prigozhin’s forces now?
On Sunday, Prigozhin’s mercenaries started pulling out of Russia’s southern Voronezh region, which is situated along a highway that the Wagner Group wanted to use to march on Moscow, and from Rostov-on-Don, the Russian city close to the Ukrainian border seized by Wagner on Saturday.
The question is, where will they go now?
With Prigozhin out of the way, the Wagner mercenaries will either go back to where they came from or sign contracts with the Russian Ministry of Defense | Stringer/AFP via Getty Images
With Prigozhin out of the way (and likely avoiding all windows, doorknobs, teacups and umbrellas during his supposed exile in Belarus), the Wagner mercenaries — 25,000 of them, if Prigozhin is to be believed — will either go back to where they came from, or sign contracts with the Russian defense ministry.
Indeed, Russian military bloggers have speculated that Prigozhin launched his offensive on the country’s military leadership in response to the Kremlin seeking to defang him by integrating his mercenaries into the army. (Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu earlier this month ordered all “volunteer detachments” at the front in the Ukraine war to sign contracts with the ministry by July 1 — which Prigozhin vowed to oppose.)
But the Wagner mercenaries who do sign contracts may not make much of a difference on the battlefield now.
“Wagner bought the Russian army time over winter,” said Mick Ryan, a military strategist and retired Australian Army major general. “But with or without Wagner, it’s going to be difficult for Russia to win this war,” he added.
“As we’re seeing now, there’s a big difference in will on the two sides,” Ryan said. “The Ukrainians are absolutely dedicated to saving their country, they’re fighting for their freedom. The Russians are kind of interested in fighting Ukraine — and kind of interested in fighting each other.”
And to what extent can Putin ever trust his new recruits, who were ready to storm Moscow under Prigozhin’s command?
“Russia has just lost 25,000 soldiers,” Retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, a former general of the U.S. forces in Europe, told Times Radio on Sunday, referring to the Wagner mercenaries. “Every one of them is going to be looked at with suspicion and seen as unreliable.”
Putin’s humiliation a boost for Kyiv
With the full-scale war in its 16th month and Putin’s forces deeply entrenched in Ukraine’s south and east, Kyiv has struggled to make significant gains in its counteroffensive.
But the extraordinary events on Saturday gave Ukraine’s forces a much-needed morale boost.
“For our soldiers, it was also very motivating,” Ukrainian MP Kira Rudik, from the liberal Holos party, said in an interview with Times Radio. “It is a great proof that you can fight Russia and you can win [against] Russia and it’s very good that the world has seen that.”
Kyiv’s forces have been hitting Russian positions in the south and the east of Ukraine, looking for a way to push through the Kremlin’s line, like they did last year.
Prigozhin’s antics have forced the Kremlin to shore up control of Russian territory rather than direct the entire might of its armed forces at Ukraine. That provides an opening for Kyiv — if it can get the gear it says it needs to push through Russia’s positions.
A person holds a Wagner Group flag in Rostov-on-Don | Roman Romokhov/AFP via Getty Images
Zelenskyy, in his Saturday address, renewed his call for the West to supply Ukraine with more weapons, to enable the country to take advantage of Putin’s moment of weakness. “Now is the time to provide all the weapons necessary,” Zelenskyy said, name-checking U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets and tactical missile systems.
“If the Ukrainians are able to exploit this, particularly in the east, near Bakhmut, at the end of the day they just need one breakthrough,” said Ryan, the military strategist. “If they punch through Russian defenses and keep that penetration open, the Russians are going to be in real trouble — they are very brittle. The Ukrainians just need to do this once. And the Russians are going to be chasing their tails thereafter.”
Ominous signal for Putin
Prigozhin’s macho-man missives railing at Russia’s military leadership tapped into a general sense among his countrymen that the “special military operation” isn’t going as well as it ought to, given what they view as Ukraine’s military inferiority.
While the warlord stopped just short of directly blaming Putin for Russia’s lackluster battlefield performance, he insinuated in his barrage of posts on Telegram late Friday and early Saturday that the Russian president had at the very least been manipulated by those in his circle.
Prigozhin’s implication: That Putin is out of touch, weak, easily bamboozled — the polar opposite of the image the strong-man leader has carefully cultivated over his decades at Russia’s helm.
And Prigozhin’s attacks seem to have found a receptive audience.
The scenes in Rostov, where crowds of Russians welcomed the Wagner mercenaries with chanting and cheering, revealed the extent to which support is waning for members of Putin’s inner sanctum — particularly his Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and his overall commander of the war on Ukraine, General Valery Gerasimov.
Perhaps even more telling was Wagner’s superstar exit as its tanks and heavily armed forces pulled out of Rostov. The crowds applauded, whistled, waved Wagner flags, and yelled “Great job! Great job!” and “Wagner! Wagner!” — just hours after Putin labeled Prigozhin and his followers traitors.
“I think what the world has seen is that Putin is not almighty,” said Rudik, the Ukrainian MP. Referring to the deal negotiated by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko under which Prigozhin would depart for Belarus in return for being spared prosecution by Russia, she said: “I think the situation was very, very much like the Wizard of Oz, where Prigozhin looked for the great and terrible Putin and it turned out that it was just a man who was really scared and had to have a leader of another country, so-called President Lukashenko, to talk to him to get him in his senses.”
“What happened [Saturday] was not the end,” Rudik added. “It was the beginning, to show that Putin does not control the country and that he’s not invincible, and that if you have enough strength you can try and fight him. And I think for many nationalistic movements in Russia, they were waiting for the opportunity.”
While the Northeast is ramping up efforts to electrify the diesel-powered truck fleets that rumble through its major freight corridors, the region lacks a vision for what the increased electricity demand will mean for the grid and vehicle charging infrastructure.
A new study headed up by National Grid, the utility company, aims to lay out a clear path forward.
Brian Wilkie, National Grid’s director of transportation electrification in New York, said the two-year study will pinpoint future critical charging locations along highways in nine Northeast states, and advise as to where major transmission upgrades will be needed.
The study is pulling together transportation planning and electric transmission distribution planning expertise, “two sectors of the economy that never really talk to each other,” Wilkie said.
A multi-state approach
It’s clear that future power demands along the highways will be significant. A study released last year by National Grid projected power demand growth across 71 highway charging sites in New York and Massachusetts. It determined that as soon as 2030, more than a quarter of those sites will require a level of charging capacity equal to the demand of an outdoor professional sports stadium.
And by 2045, some of the most high-demand locations will require charging capacity equivalent to the electric load of a major industrial site.
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The upgrades required, including high-voltage, transmission-level interconnections, will be costly and take four to eight years to complete, the report concluded.
The expanded study will cover Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. While that swath of land extends well beyond National Grid’s service territory, “if you don’t have a more regional view, you fail to study it properly and you don’t allow for the type of cooperation that is required across state borders,” Wilkie said. “The transportation sector doesn’t honor state lines.”
The study is being funded with a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, which announced the award last month as part of the Biden administration’s efforts to accelerate the creation of zero-emission vehicle corridors across the country.
The project “is extremely well-timed,” said Sarah McKearnan, senior manager for clean transportation at Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management, known as NESCAUM, a nonprofit association of state air quality agencies and a participant in the study.
“Over the next five years, states will have access to very significant levels of federal funding to expand public charging stations,” she said. “This project will provide essential input that Northeast states can use to guide decisions about how to spend that funding.”
NESCAUM facilitates a zero-emission vehicle task force that last year released a multi-state action plan for electrifying medium- to heavy-duty vehicles. The plan highlights the need for state and utility coordination to plan for grid transmission and distribution capacity, something the National Grid study will help lay the groundwork for.
Big rigs and big data
Zero-emission trucks are expected to expand rapidly throughout the region in coming years, not least because all of the states in the study group except New Hampshire are signatories to a memorandum of understanding promising to work together to foster widespread electrification of those vehicles.
In addition, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey have adopted California’s Advanced Clean Trucks rule, which requires truck makers to sell an increasing number of zero-emission vehicles beginning with model year 2025.
The trucking industry is preparing for that transition, but they also understand that they won’t be able to sell zero-emission trucks at scale if the infrastructure isn’t in place to support them, said Diego Quevedo, utilities lead in Daimler Truck North America’s infrastructure and consulting department for zero-emission vehicles.
Daimler Truck North America, the country’s largest commercial vehicle manufacturer and a participant in the National Grid study, began studying the feasibility of zero-emission vehicles in 2017. Their goal is to have a zero-emission vehicle offering in every lineup that they sell by 2039, in order to transition all customer fleets to zero-emission by 2050, Quevedo said.
The company has about 40% of the country’s market share in Class 6 through 8 trucks, “anywhere from your really big U-Haul box trucks all the way to the semi-tractor trailers you see on the highway,” he said.
What they bring to the National Grid study is data. They use a software system that pings GPS coordinates from their Class 8 vehicles out in the field — some 230,000-250,000 tractors nationwide. The data is aggregated and anonymized so there is no specific customer information.
“You can look at where these vehicles operate, where they are stopping, how long they stop, how far they travel before they stop,” Quevedo said. “Assuming that those vehicles in the future are battery electric, you can determine what the future load requirements will be to replenish those electric miles that they’re traveling. It can give utilities very good insight into the future hotspots for load.”
David Mullaney, a principal at RMI’s carbon-free transportation team and a core participant in the study, said they will be looking at truck traffic through existing highway truck stops, as well as the ports of New York and New Jersey.
“But we don’t look at every truck stop out there,” said Mullaney, who has done similar modeling studies elsewhere in the U.S. and co-authored the earlier National Grid study. “We are preliminarily looking at places with proximity to big electrical infrastructure, where it is cost-effective to bring more electricity to.”
Targeting high-traffic sites that can connect to the transmission system more easily will allow charging infrastructure to be scaled more quickly and result in “no-regrets” investments, McKearnan said.
Who pays?
Perhaps the biggest challenge in getting all this done is figuring out how to pay for it. Utilities typically spread the cost of infrastructure investments across their ratepayer base, with regulator approval. But in this case, “it would be deeply unfair to put it on the average ratepayer,” Mullaney said.
Federal and state governments may need to think more broadly about who is benefiting from these investments, and spread the costs around accordingly, he said. For example, trucking companies who longer have to pay for diesel, truck stops that are selling more products because trucks stop there to charge, and the public, whose health benefits from cleaner air.
“We have to look at high diversification of revenue streams,” he said.
Wilkie agrees that it will require more creative thinking about how to allocate the cost of this infrastructure. One idea is highway toll stratification, in which electric trucks pay higher tolls to offset some of the costs.
“We’re going to have to change the paradigm a bit,” he said. “But we can’t let that conversation stop us from taking action.”
NATO allies finally agreed earlier this year that China is a “challenge.” What that means is anyone’s guess.
That’s the task now facing officials from NATO’s 30-member sprawl since they settled on the label in June: Turning an endlessly malleable term into an actual plan.
Progress, thus far, has been modest — at best.
At one end, China hawks like the U.S. are trying to converge NATO’s goals with their own desire to constrain Beijing. At the other are China softliners like Hungary who want to engage Beijing. Then there’s a vast and shifting middle: hawks that don’t want to overly antagonize Beijing; softliners that still fret about economic reliance on China.
U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith insisted the American and NATO strategies can be compatible.
“I see tremendous alignment between the two,” she told POLITICO. But, she acknowledged, translating the alliance’s words into action is “a long and complicated story.”
Indeed, looming over the entire debate is the question of whether China even merits so much attention right now. War is raging in NATO’s backyard. Russia is not giving up its revanchist ambitions.
“NATO was not conceived for operations in the Pacific Ocean — it’s a North Atlantic alliance,” said Josep Borrell, the EU’s top diplomat, in a recent interview with POLITICO.
“Certainly one can consider other threats and challenges,” he added. “But [for] the time being, don’t you think that we have enough threats and challenges on the traditional scenario of NATO?”
The issue will be on the table this week in Bucharest, where foreign ministers from across the alliance will sign off on a new report about responding to China. While officials have agreed on several baseline issues, the talks will still offer a preview of the tough debates expected to torment NATO for years, especially given China’s anticipated move to throttle Taiwan — the semi-autonomous island the U.S. has pledged to defend.
“Now,” said one senior European diplomat, “the ‘so what’ is not easy.”
30 allies, 30 opinions
NATO’s “challenge” label for China — which came at an annual summit in Madrid — is a seemingly innocuous word that still represented an unprecedented show of Western unity against Beijing’s rise.
In a key section of the alliance’s new strategic blueprint, leaders wrote that “we will work together responsibly, as Allies, to address the systemic challenges” that China poses to the military alliance.
It was, in many ways, a historic moment, hinting at NATO’s future and reflecting deft coordination among 30 members that have long enjoyed vastly different relationships with Beijing.
The U.S. has driven much of the effort to draw NATO’s attention to China, arguing the alliance must curtail Beijing’s influence, reduce dependencies on the Asian power and invest in its own capabilities. Numerous allies have backed this quest, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Lithuania and the Czech Republic.
China is “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it,” the U.S. wrote in its own national security strategy released last month.
NATO is a wide-ranging alliance | Denis Doyle/Getty Images
But NATO is a wide-ranging alliance. Numerous eastern European countries lean toward these hawks but want to keep the alliance squarely focused on the Russian threat. Some are wary of angering China, and the possibility of pushing Beijing further into Moscow’s arms. Meanwhile, a number of western European powers fret over China’s role in sensitive parts of the Western economy but still want to maintain economic links.
Now the work is on to turn these disparate sentiments into something usable.
“There is a risk that we endlessly debate the adjectives that we apply here,” said David Quarrey, the United Kingdom’s ambassador to NATO.
“We are very focused on practical implementation,” he told POLITICO in an interview. “I think that’s where the debate needs to go here — and I think we are making progress with that.”
For Quarrey and Smith, the U.S. ambassador, that means getting NATO to consider several components: building more protections in cyberspace, a domain China is seeking to dominate; preparing to thwart attacks on the infrastructure powering society, a Western vulnerability Russia has exposed; and ensuring key supply chains don’t run through China.
Additionally, Quarrey said, NATO must also deepen “even further” its partnerships with regional allies like Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
While NATO allies can likely broadly agree on goals like boosting cyber defenses, there’s some grumbling about the ramifications of pivoting to Asia.
The U.S. “wants as much China as possible to make NATO relevant to China-minded Washingtonians,” the senior European diplomat said. But, this person added, it is “not clear where NATO really adds value.”
And the U.K., the diplomat argued, is pressing NATO on China because it is “in need of some multilateral framework after Brexit.”
Perhaps most importantly, a turn to China raises existential questions about Europe’s own security. Currently, Europe is heavily reliant on U.S. security guarantees, U.S. troops stationed locally and U.S. arms suppliers.
“An unspoken truth is that to reinforce Taiwan,” the European diplomat said, the U.S. would not be “in a position to reinforce permanently in Europe.”
Europeans, this person said, “have to face the music and do more.”
Compromise central
Smith, the U.S. ambassador, realizes different perspectives on China persist within NATO.
The upcoming report on China therefore hits the safer themes, like defending critical infrastructure. While some diplomats had hoped for a more ambitious report, Smith insisted she was satisfied. The U.S. priority, she said, is to formally get the work started.
“We could argue,” she said, about “the adjectives and the way in which some of those challenges are described. But what was most important for the United States was that we were able to get all of those workstreams in the report.”
But even that is a baby step on the long highway ahead for NATO. Agreeing to descriptions and areas of work is one thing, actually doing that work is another.
“We’re still not doing much,” said a second senior European diplomat. “It’s still a report describing what areas we need to work on — there’s a lot in front of us.”
Among the big questions that remain unanswered: How could China be integrated into NATO’s defense planning? How would NATO backfill the U.S. support that currently goes to Europe if some of it is redirected to Asia? Will European allies offer Taiwan support in a crisis scenario?
Western capitals’ unyielding support for Kyiv — and the complications the war has created — is also being closely watched as countries game plan for a potential military showdown in the Asia-Pacific.
Asked last month whether the alliance would respond to an escalation over Taiwan, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told POLITICO that “the main ambition is, of course, to prevent that from happening,” partly by working more closely with partners in the area.
Smith similarly demurred when asked about the NATO role if a full-fledged confrontation breaks out over Taiwan — a distinct possibility given Beijing’s stated desire to reunify the island with the mainland.
Instead, Smith pointed to how Pacific countries had backed Ukraine half a world away during the current war, saying “European allies have taken note.”
She added: “I think it’s triggered some questions about, should other scenarios unfold in the future, how would those Atlantic and Pacific allies come together again, to defend the core principles of the [United Nations] Charter.”
