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segunda-feira, 17 de outubro de 2022

Inside the U.S. Effort to Arm Ukraine - Joshua Yaffa (The New Yorker)

 Inside the U.S. Effort to Arm Ukraine

Since the start of the Russian invasion, the Biden Administration has provided valuable intelligence and increasingly powerful weaponry—a risky choice that has paid off in the battle against Putin.

By Joshua Yaffa

The New Yorker, October 17, 2022

 

“The counter-offensive would show that it’s one thing to take part in helping the victim,” Ukraine’s defense minister said, “another to realize you can punish the aggressor.”

 

In early September, Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister, travelled from the center of Kyiv to a U.S. airbase in Ramstein-Miesenbach, Germany, where NATO officials were gathering to discuss military support for Ukraine. The trip, a distance of about twelve hundred miles, roughly the equivalent of travelling from New York to Minneapolis, lasted the better part of a day. Because there are no flights out of Ukraine, Reznikov had to take a car to the border and a plane the rest of the way. As he set off from the capital, he couldn’t help but hope for good news. Ukrainian forces had opened a second flank in an ambitious counter-offensive, a surprise operation in the direction of Russian-occupied territory in the Kharkiv region. “I learned not to raise my expectations too high,” Reznikov said, “especially in wartime.”

Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, appointed Reznikov defense minister last November, just three months before the Russian invasion. Reznikov is a lawyer and a longtime fixture of Kyiv politics, a veteran of the Soviet Air Force and an avid skydiver. He now serves as a lead negotiator securing the Western arms his country needs to continue its fight. “I get a certain request from the generals,” he said.“Then I explain to our partners the need for it.”

At the time of Reznikov’s trip to Ramstein, the war was in what he called its third phase. “The first phase was simply to hold off the enemy in those places where they managed to break through,” he said. This was the battle for Kyiv and for Ukraine’s survival as a sovereign state, which Russia effectively lost. “The second was to stabilize the front and achieve something resembling an equal opposition of forces on the battlefield.” Russia, which had occupied a number of key cities in Ukraine’s south and east, retained a sizable advantage in terms of heavy weapons; its long-distance missiles could rain down terror and death across the battlefield and beyond, clearing the way for its troops to advance. But Ukraine received enough artillery systems and munitions from the U.S. and other NATO states to mount an adequate response. “This allowed the country’s military and political leadership to think seriously about the third phase,” Reznikov said. “That is, launching an offensive operation.”

Vladimir Putin had effectively embraced the stalemate of the war’s second phase, wagering that, as the front lines held and the conflict increasingly disrupted global energy and food supplies, the Ukrainian public would tire of the war and the West’s commitment would wane. There was some basis for questioning the durability of U.S. and NATO support—it seemed to strengthen in proportion to Ukraine’s ability to repel Russian forces. “We have seen U.S. arms supplies contribute to real success on the battlefield, which has in turn consolidated support for providing more,” a Biden Administration official involved in Ukraine policy told me. “But one could imagine things reversed: if the former were not the case, then maybe the latter wouldn’t be, either.”

As spring turned to summer, Reznikov sensed a growing weariness in some Western capitals. The attitude, he said, was, “O.K., well, we helped Ukraine resist, we kept them from being destroyed.” Reznikov and other officials wanted to demonstrate to their partners in the West that the Ukrainian Army could reclaim large swaths of Russian-occupied territory. “The counter-offensive would show that it’s one thing to take part in helping the victim,” Reznikov said, “another to realize you can punish the aggressor.”

In July, military officials from Ukraine, the United States, and the United Kingdom converged at a base in Europe to plot out possible scenarios. The Ukrainians’ starting point was a broad campaign across the southern front, a push to liberate not only the occupied city of Kherson but hundreds of square miles in the nearby Mykolaiv and Zaporizhzhia regions. The military planners met in three rooms, divided by country, where experts ran the same tabletop exercises. They often worked twenty hours a day, with American and British military officials helping to hone the Ukrainians’ strategy. “We have algorithms and methodologies that are more sophisticated when it comes to things like mapping out logistics and calculating munitions rates,” a senior official at the Defense Department said. “The idea was not to tell them what to do but, rather, to give them different runs to test their plans.”

The initial tabletop exercises showed that a unified push across the southern front would come at a high cost to Ukrainian equipment and manpower. It looked ill advised. “They ran this version of the offensive many times and just couldn’t get the model to work,” the Defense official said.

In the south, Ukraine had been battering Russian positions with American-provided precision rocket systems. In response, Russia’s generals had moved a considerable number of units out of the Kharkiv region, in the northeast, to back up forces near Kherson. The assembled planners settled on an idea that would take advantage of this vulnerability: a two-front offensive. Shortly afterward, Reznikov was informed of the plans. “It wasn’t the first time I was struck by our military’s ability to come up with unexpected solutions,” he said. “I understood it was up to me to get them the necessary weapons.”

In late August, Ukrainian ground forces started their push toward Kherson. It was a slow, grinding operation, with both sides suffering heavy losses. A week later, troops dashed toward Russian lines in the Kharkiv region, a move that clearly caught Russian military leaders off guard. With so many units relocated to the south, a number of territories in the northeast were guarded by under-equipped Russian forces and riot police with little combat experience. Many of them simply abandoned their positions and ran off, leaving behind crates of ammunition, and even a few tanks. Ukrainian troops sped through one town after another, often on Western-supplied fighting vehicles, such as Humvees and Australian Bushmaster armored personnel carriers.

Reznikov was still en route to the Ramstein Air Base when he first received a text message about the breakthrough near Kharkiv. The Ukrainian armed forces had retaken Balakliya, a key gateway city in the region. Reznikov pictured the map in his head, counting the next towns likely to be liberated. He was travelling with a small delegation that included top officials from the general staff and military intelligence, who were also receiving updates from the front. They began comparing notes. Ukrainian units moved east, toward Kupyansk, an important logistics hub, then spread north and south, retaking key roads and rail junctions. By the time Reznikov landed in Germany, on September 8th, paratroopers had reached the Oskil River, thirty miles behind what had been the Russian front line just hours before. Within days, the Ukrainian military recaptured more than seven hundred square miles of territory.

The next morning, Reznikov met with Lloyd Austin, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, and Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They had been briefed on the counter-offensive, and joined Reznikov in tracking the military’s progress on a map. Both maintained their composure, Reznikov noted, but they were clearly excited. “Their faces were glowing,” he said. “They knew what was happening, and what this meant.”

In the afternoon, Reznikov addressed a group of thirty NATO defense ministers. “The success of Ukraine’s counterattack is thanks to you,” he said.

He later told me, “Of course, I meant the U.S. most of all.”

Prior to this year’s invasion, officials in Kyiv often felt as if the political establishment in Washington viewed their country as little more than a bit player in a geopolitical game. “Ukraine was not considered to have its own agency,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Zelensky, said, “but rather as just one of the many elements in managing the relationship with Russia.”

In 2014, Putin had ordered Russian troops with no insignia—the so-called little green men—to Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea, and sparked a separatist conflict in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine. At the time, Ukraine retained a largely Soviet-style military, with a baroque bureaucracy and Cold War hardware. Zelensky’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, appealed to Barack Obama for more and better weapons. Obama’s concern, according to the senior Defense official, was that, “if we escalated, the Russians would counter-escalate, and the conflict would spiral.” Joe Biden, then the Vice-President, was more inclined to provide arms. The Defense official said, “He had the position that if Putin had to explain to Russian mothers why caskets were coming back home, that could affect his calculus.”

Ukrainian officials were particularly adamant in their requests for one weapon: the shoulder-fired Javelin anti-tank missile, which takes its name from the similarity of its flight path to that of a spear—the missile arcs nearly five hundred feet into the air, then back down, striking a tank or armored vehicle from above, where it’s most vulnerable. “The Javelin was the one thing the Ukrainians understood they really needed,” Ben Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser in the Obama White House, said. “It was also a purely defensive weapon, which, they hoped, could make it relatively easier for us to supply.”

Obama declined to provide any lethal arms at all. Instead, the Administration focussed its efforts on training Ukrainian forces. At a base near Yavoriv, in western Ukraine, fifteen miles from the Polish border, instructors from the U.S. and other NATO countries taught the principles of small-unit tactics and trained a new branch of Ukrainian special forces. Still, Carol Northrup, who was then the U.S. defense attaché at the Embassy in Kyiv, said, the Ukrainians “were much more interested in our stuff than our advice. They would say, ‘We want stuff.’ And we’d answer, ‘We want to train you.’ ”

Donald Trump came into office promising improved relations with Russia, which alarmed officials in Kyiv. But his Administration approved the Javelins. The first shipment—about two hundred missiles and thirty-seven launchers—arrived in Ukraine in the spring of 2018. The following year, an anonymous whistle-blower revealed that, during an official phone call with Zelensky, Trump had implied that future Javelin sales could be linked to a “favor.” The President wanted Zelensky to look into an obscure conspiracy theory suggesting that the Ukrainian government, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 Presidential election, and to order the investigation of a case involving the work of Biden’s son Hunter on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. The exchange led to Trump’s first impeachment trial. It also unlocked U.S. military aid for Ukraine: Congress, with bipartisan support, insured that a package worth two hundred and fifty million dollars was released.

Zelensky saw Biden’s election as a chance to re-start relations with the U.S. In the spring of 2021, Russia began assembling troops and equipment on the Ukrainian border. That September, during a meeting with Zelensky at the White House, Biden announced an additional sixty million dollars in security assistance, including more Javelins. The two Presidents projected an air of mutual interest and bonhomie, but Zelensky left Washington without commitments on two key issues, both of which he had raised with Biden: creating a path for Ukraine’s admittance to NATO, and preventing the startup of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would allow Russia to circumvent Ukraine in supplying natural gas to Germany and the rest of Europe.

That fall, intelligence data showed that Russia had positioned more than a hundred thousand troops along the Ukrainian border. “At that point, we weren’t yet sure if Putin had made the ultimate decision to invade,” a person familiar with White House discussions on Ukraine said. “But it was without doubt that he was giving himself the capability to do so.”

In November, Biden dispatched the director of the C.I.A., William Burns, on a secret trip to Moscow. Burns had previously served as the U.S. Ambassador to Russia and had often dealt with Putin personally. In the course of two days, Burns met with Putin’s inner circle of advisers, including Alexander Bortnikov, the director of Russia’s Federal Security Service, and Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Kremlin’s Security Council. He also had an hour-long phone call with Putin, who, wary of COVID and increasingly isolated, was hunkered down in his Presidential residence in Sochi. Burns thought that Putin sounded cool and dispassionate, as if his mind was nearly made up. Upon returning to Washington, Burns relayed his findings to Biden. The message, according to Burns, was that “Putin thought Zelensky a weak leader, that the Ukrainians would cave, and that his military could achieve a decisive victory at minimal cost.”

In January, Burns made a trip to Kyiv to warn Zelensky. The Orthodox Christmas had just passed, and a festive atmosphere lingered in Ukraine’s capital, with decorations lining the streets. Zelensky understood the implications of the intelligence that Burns presented, but he still thought it was possible to avoid a large-scale invasion. For starters, he was reluctant to do anything that might set off a political and economic crisis inside Ukraine. He also worried that mobilizing the military could inadvertently provide Putin with a casus belli. Burns was sympathetic with the dilemma, but he emphasized that the looming danger was not hypothetical. Burns specifically told Zelensky that Russian forces planned to seize the Hostomel airport, twenty miles from the capital, and use it as a staging point for flying in troops and equipment.

At the White House, a “Tiger Team,” made up of experts from the State Department, the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs, and intelligence agencies, carried out exercises to anticipate the shape of a Russian attack. After Putin came to power, two decades ago, the Kremlin leadership had advertised a wide-scale effort to modernize its armed forces. The C.I.A. and other Western intelligence agencies concluded that Russia’s military would overwhelm Ukraine. Intelligence assessments at the time were that Putin expected Russian forces to seize Kyiv within seventy-two hours. “We thought it might take a few days longer than the Russians did,” the Defense Department official said, “but not much longer.”

Outwardly, Zelensky acted as if war were not inevitable. “The captains should not leave the ship,” he said near the end of January. “I don’t think we have a Titanic here.” But he did take the prospect of a Russian invasion seriously. “There’s a difference between what you articulate with the public and what you are actually doing,” Oleksiy Danilov, Zelensky’s national-security adviser, said. “We couldn’t allow for panic in society.”

Behind the scenes, Zelensky and other top Ukrainian officials were asking the U.S. for a significant infusion of weapons. “At each phase, they just said give us everything under the sun,” an Administration official said. “We tailored what we provided to the actual situation they were facing.” In late January, the Administration announced that it was sending a two-hundred-million-dollar package of military aid, which included three hundred more Javelins and, for the first time, Stingers, the man-portable anti-aircraft systems, or MANPADs, that had played a key role in the mujahideen’s defeat of the Red Army in Afghanistan. “You can’t take over a country with MANPADs,” the Defense Department official said. “But you can defend an airport from an airborne assault.”

U.S. Air Force transport planes, carrying crates of arms, began landing several times a week in Kyiv. The Biden Administration had also declassified summaries of its intelligence assessments, issuing public warnings that a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent. Many U.S. officials believed that Zelensky wasn’t ready to accept the urgency of the threat. In multiple conversations with Biden, Zelensky brought up the negative impact that the talk of war was having on Ukraine’s stock market and its investment climate. “It’s fair to say the fact that those issues remained a priority item as late as they did raised some eyebrows,” the person familiar with the White House’s Ukraine policy said.

Six months earlier, the Taliban had seized power in Afghanistan within days of the U.S. withdrawal. The Biden Administration had wagered that the U.S.-backed Afghan Army could fight the Taliban to a stalemate over the course of several months. When it came to the Russian threat in Ukraine, U.S. defense and security officials erred on the side of alarmism. “I think in some ways we transposed the Afghan experience onto the Ukrainians,” the senior Defense Department official said. Podolyak, Zelensky’s adviser, felt that the warnings coming from Washington and elsewhere were incomplete: “They would say, ‘The Russians will attack!’ O.K., then, what’s the next step? Are you with us? And it felt like there was no answer.”

Another underlying source of unease was that U.S. officials had little understanding of the Ukrainian plan to defend the country, or even if such a plan existed. General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was speaking several times a week with his counterpart in Kyiv, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces. Milley pressed Zaluzhnyi for information about how Ukraine would defend itself, including a request for detailed inventories of weapons stockpiles. Milley also offered his own strategic vision—an emphasis on dispersed mobile units, multiple lines of defense across the country, and a mixture of conventional forces and partisan warfare. “Our message was not, ‘You guys are about to get steamrolled, so you should just sue for peace,’ ” a U.S. military official said. “Rather, the message was that you are about to get steamrolled, so you have to get your defenses majorly shored up.”

Zaluzhnyi seemed hesitant to provide any details. Not only was he protective of his plans, he refused to share the placement of arms caches, which he was constantly moving and camouflaging to keep them from being destroyed or captured by the Russian Army. Some U.S. officials worried that Zaluzhnyi, like Zelensky, didn’t fully believe the U.S. intelligence. “Others were convinced he believed it, and had war plans on hand,” the military official said, “but wanted to keep them secret from Zelensky.”

Given Zelensky’s reluctance to put the country on a war footing, there was speculation that Zaluzhnyi may have been trying to avoid the possibility of being asked to scale down his preparations. If this was the case, the U.S. military official said, it’s possible that Zaluzhnyi didn’t want to share them with Milley because he was afraid that Milley would then brief the White House, which would in turn say something to Zelensky.

Finally, in February, Zaluzhnyi agreed to share his plan for defending Ukraine. A defense attaché from the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, an Air Force colonel, was summoned to a meeting at the general-staff headquarters and shown a one-page sketch of Ukrainian positions and defensive schemes. She was not given a copy, and was permitted to take only handwritten notes. Even having stipulated these conditions, Zaluzhnyi was less than forthcoming. His subordinates showed the attaché a false version of the plan, masking the full scope of the defensive campaign.

Ultimately, Zaluzhnyi’s strategy was to prevent the capture of Kyiv at all costs, while, in other areas, letting Russian forces run ahead of their logistics and supply lines. The idea was to trade territory in the short term in order to pick off Russian units once they were overextended. “We trusted no one back then,” a senior Ukrainian military official said. “Our plan was our one tiny chance for success, and we did not want anyone at all to know it.”

In the war’s early days, Biden told national-security officials at the White House and the Defense Department that the U.S. had three main policy interests in Ukraine. “One, we are not going to allow this to suck us into a war with Russia,” a senior Biden Administration official recalled. “Two, we need to make sure we can meet our Article 5 commitments with NATO.” (Prior to the invasion, the Biden Administration had sent several thousand additional soldiers to NATO member states in Eastern Europe and the Baltic region, to show that the U.S. military was prepared to defend them.) “And, three, we will do what we can to help Ukraine succeed on the battlefield,” the official continued. “The President was clear: we do not want to see Ukraine defeated.”

From a bunker in Kyiv’s government quarter, Zelensky led a conference call with Ukrainian officials twice a day, at ten in the morning and ten at night, on the subject of arms supplies. The U.S., along with the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Poland, and the Baltic states, was sending anti-tank weapons, MANPADs, and small arms. But to the Ukrainians, who were suddenly in a fight for survival, these shipments seemed trivial. They wanted more powerful weaponry, including fighter jets, tanks, air defenses, and long-range artillery and rockets. “The deliveries were not so big, not like we would have liked to see,” Danilov said. “No one believed that we could hold out.”

Zelensky displayed tremendous courage by remaining in Kyiv. According to Reznikov, the country’s security services were tracking three Chechen hit squads sent to assassinate the Ukrainian President and other top politicians. Zelensky also proved an adept leader, projecting an air of defiance to promote cohesion at home and support internationally. Two days into the invasion, the Associated Press reported that Zelensky had rejected a U.S. offer to evacuate him from Kyiv, saying, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” A senior U.S. official said, “To the best of my knowledge, that never happened.” The official added, “But hats off to Zelensky and the people around him. It was a great line.”

Ukrainian forces managed to keep Russian transport planes from landing at the Hostomel airport. In the countryside around Kyiv, Russian armored convoys were stranded beyond the reach of their supply lines and became easy targets for ambushes and drone strikes. Washington’s fears about the country’s armed forces now seemed misplaced. “Obviously, it turned out they had a plan,” the U.S. military official said. “Because you don’t whip the Russians like that and expertly execute a mobile defense in depth without one.”

The Ukrainians benefitted from another factor that the U.S. had not considered: Russian hubris and disorganization. Putin had planned the invasion with a small circle of trusted advisers, who settled on a lightning-fast raid to overthrow Zelensky and his cabinet. Ukrainians were finding dress uniforms inside the Russian military vehicles that they captured—the invading forces had thought that within a matter of days they would be marching victorious down the streets of central Kyiv. Instead, they found themselves deep in Ukrainian territory without access to basic necessities like food and water. As the Defense Department official put it, “We presumed they had their shit together, but it turns out they didn’t.”

Ukraine’s early success changed attitudes in Washington. “The Ukrainians were putting up a good fight, which helped open the floodgates for a lot more military assistance,” the Defense Department official said. Even so, the Biden Administration did not give Kyiv everything it wanted. One wish list circulating around Washington said that Ukraine needed five hundred Javelin missiles per day; at the start of the war, the production of Javelins was only around two thousand per year. Other proposals aired in public by Zelensky and top Ukrainian officials, such as a no-fly zone maintained by NATO aircraft and air defenses, were non-starters. “Our interests highly overlap, but they are not identical,” the Defense official said. “When we say things like ‘That is escalatory and could draw NATO into the fight,’ they are, like, ‘Yeah, good. How could it get any worse for us? It’s already existential.’ Frankly, if I were them, I’d have the same view.”

A moment of tension erupted between Milley and Zaluzhnyi. Ukraine wanted more MIG-29s, a Soviet-designed plane that Ukrainian pilots had flown since the eighties. Kyiv reached a tentative deal with Poland, in which Poland would deliver two dozen jets, and the U.S. would give American-made F-16s to Poland as a replacement. The Biden Administration worried that flying aircraft from NATO territory into Ukraine’s contested skies would be seen as a clear escalation. U.S. officials were also skeptical of the planes’ usefulness to Ukraine. The MIG-29 is primarily an air-to-air-combat interceptor—not a ground-attack plane that might, say, provide aerial support to infantry or attack a tank column—and Russia’s more advanced fighter, the Sukhoi Su-35, could easily outmaneuver it. Zaluzhnyi told Milley that Ukraine had almost no fighter jets left. Milley insisted that Ukraine still had plenty. The two did not speak for more than a week. “Early on, their conversations were formal and matter-of-fact,” the U.S. military official said. “One would say his long piece, and the other would say his. Now the tone is more familiar, warmer, friendlier. They talk about their families.”

No one knew for sure how Russia would respond to Western arms shipments. U.S. officials believed that Putin would escalate given one of three scenarios: if the Russian military faced utter collapse on the battlefield, if Putin felt an immediate threat to his own rule, or if the U.S. or NATO militaries directly intervened in Ukraine. As for Putin’s likely response, officials in Washington forecast a range of worrying possibilities, from carrying out a nuclear-bomb test in the Arctic to detonating a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. But the assessment was also that, in the end, Putin could be deterred. A senior U.S. intelligence official said, “It’s not like he wants World War Three, either.”

In early April, the Russian military announced a full pullout from the Kyiv region, essentially an admission that its initial combat aims had failed. Now it was shifting tactics to an artillery assault in the Donbas, using missile strikes to level cities and towns before sending in ground forces to seize the rubble. This meant that Ukraine required heavy artillery of its own. “There’s not much a unit with some Javelins can do if you have two hundred tanks coming at you,” the senior Ukrainian military official said.

At the time, according to Ukrainian generals, the Army had enough artillery ammunition to last for two weeks of intensive fighting. Ukraine used 152-millimetre shells, a family of ammunition that many former Warsaw Pact member states inherited from the Soviet Union. NATO forces use 155-millimetre shells, and the two systems are not interchangeable. The problem was not merely the depleting stocks of Soviet-calibre munitions inside Ukraine—they were becoming increasingly hard to find anywhere in the world. At the start of the war, Western governments and private arms dealers had negotiated transfers from places such as Bulgaria and Romania. Among the largest caches were those the U.S. and NATO had designated for Afghan security forces, which had been sitting unclaimed in warehouses in Eastern Europe since the Taliban takeover. Belarus, where Russian troops had amassed before the invasion, had sizable stores of artillery ammunition, but Russia’s ally certainly wasn’t going to give it to Ukraine. Rear Admiral R. Duke Heinz, the director of logistics for the U.S. Army’s European Command, said, “We were seeing fewer and fewer countries raise their hands to say they had munitions to donate.”

That left another option: Ukraine would have to switch to NATO-calibre weaponry. On April 26th, defense ministers from more than forty countries, including all the NATO member states, met at the U.S. airbase in Ramstein. Austin, the U.S. Defense Secretary, opened the proceedings. “Ukraine clearly believes that it can win, and so does everyone here,” he said. “I know we’re all determined to do everything that we can to meet Ukraine’s needs as the fight evolves.”

Prior to the summit, the U.S. had agreed to transfer ninety M777 howitzers to Ukraine, the first time it would be providing the country with heavy artillery. The M777, which was designed to support infantry operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, was more powerful and more accurate than Ukraine’s existing howitzer-style artillery. “Austin called and said the decision has been taken,” Reznikov said. “I understood we crossed a certain Rubicon.”

Within days, the first contingent of Ukrainian soldiers—two-man teams made up of a gunner and a section chief—arrived at a U.S. Army training facility in Grafenwöhr, in southern Germany. Over six days, U.S. instructors taught them how to set up and move the M777, how to manually line up a target, and how to maintain the gun’s levels of nitrogen and hydraulic fluid. As one U.S. trainer put it, “This isn’t a gun you can beat the crap out of and will keep humming along.”

The Ukrainian soldiers in Grafenwöhr struck their American counterparts as highly motivated. During one lunch break, a Ukrainian soldier reported that his village had just come under Russian shelling; the rest of the Ukrainian troops stood up without finishing their meal and returned to their training. “They’re not here for R. and R.,” Brigadier General Joseph Hilbert, who oversees the facility, said. “They want to get back and put these things to use.”

By the end of the month, eighteen M777s were flown to bases in Eastern Europe and brought to the border with Ukraine. Under the cover of night, the howitzers were transferred to small convoys of unmarked trucks driven by Ukrainian teams. As the war has progressed, U.S. defense officials have opened other routes, shipping equipment on rail lines across Europe and through ports on the North Sea, in Germany. Putin and other Russian officials have threatened to target these transfers. But, according to Heinz, not one has come under fire. “Russia is aware of how security assistance gets into Ukraine,” the senior Defense Department official said. “But, so far, they have refrained from attacking those hubs, because they don’t want a war with NATO.”

The M777s allowed Ukraine to mount a defense in the Donbas. “In any war, of course, it’s not only about quantity, but quality,” Roman Kachur, the commander of Ukraine’s 55th Artillery Brigade, said. “There’s a difference when you’re fighting with a modern weapons system or one that hasn’t been significantly updated since the days of the Second World War.” For weeks, his forces had faced heavy artillery fire from a fortified Russian position near Donetsk, a Russian-occupied city in the Donbas. “We couldn’t knock the enemy out of there, because we simply couldn’t reach him,” Kachur told me. Then the M777s arrived. “Within three or four days, the Russians had pulled all their artillery out of there,” he said. “It’s a new situation. We are dictating their behavior to a certain degree.”

The U.S. does not have the ability to monitor the howitzers’ locations and conditions from afar, or electronically limit where they could be used. “Once this equipment gets to them, it belongs to them,” the senior Biden Administration official said. “We don’t have a scorecard.” Occasionally, bad news arrived from the field. In one case, forces in eastern Ukraine moved a number of M777s from a firing position to a barn, and within minutes a Russian missile hit the location, destroying both the guns and the trucks used to transport them.

Even as another seventy-two systems arrived—along with dozens of NATO-compatible howitzers from France and Germany—Ukrainian generals estimated that Russian artillery pieces outnumbered Ukraine’s by seven to one; each day, Russian forces were shooting some twenty thousand shells, pummelling cities such as Severodonetsk and Lysychansk. Zelensky said that, in June, as many as a hundred Ukrainian soldiers were being killed every day. It was the most difficult moment in the war for Ukraine, with Russia—fitfully and at great cost to its own forces—blasting through Ukrainian defenses and capturing territory one metre at a time.

Washington encouraged Ukraine to rely on judicious planning and the efficiency of Western weaponry rather than try to outshoot the Russian military. NATO had chosen a similar strategy in the latter stages of the Cold War, when it found itself with far fewer tanks and artillery than the Soviet Union. “We told the Ukrainians if they try and fight like the Russians, they will lose,” the senior Defense Department official said. “Our mission was to help Ukraine compensate for quantitative inferiority with qualitative superiority.”

Ukraine has a fleet of reconnaissance drones and a loose network of human sources within areas controlled by the Russian military, but its ability to gather intelligence on the battlefield greatly diminishes about fifteen miles beyond the front line. U.S. spy satellites, meanwhile, can capture snapshots of troop positions anywhere on earth. Closer to the ground, U.S. military spy planes, flying along the borders, augment the picture, and intelligence intercepts can allow analysts to listen in on communications between Russian commanders. Since the invasion, the U.S. and other Western partners have shared a great deal of this information with Ukraine. Mykola Bielieskov, a defense expert at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, in Kyiv, said, “That’s a major field where the U.S. is helping us.”

One evening in April, at an intelligence-coördination center somewhere in Europe, Ukrainian military officers asked their American and NATO counterparts to confirm a set of coördinates. This had become a common practice. Ukrainian representatives might ask for verification of the location of a Russian command post or ammunition depot. “We do that, fair game,” the senior Biden Administration official said. In some cases, U.S. intelligence and military officers provide targeting information unsolicited: “We do let them know, say, there’s a battalion moving on Slovyansk from the northwest, and here’s roughly where they are.” But, the official emphasized, Ukrainian forces choose what to hit. “We are not approving, or disapproving, targets.”

The Biden Administration has also refused to provide specific intelligence on the location of high-value Russian individuals, such as generals or other senior figures. “There are lines we drew in order not to be perceived as being in a direct conflict with Russia,” the senior U.S. official said. The United States will pass on coördinates of a command post, for example, but not the presence of a particular commander. “We are not trying to kill generals,” the senior Biden Administration official said. “We are trying to help the Ukrainians undermine Russian command and control.”

Still, Ukraine has so far killed as many as eight generals, most of them at long range with artillery and rocket fire. The high death toll is partially a reflection of Russian military doctrine, which calls for top-down, hierarchical operations. In most cases, mid-ranking Russian officers and enlisted soldiers are not empowered to make decisions, creating a need for generals to be positioned closer to the front. “They were depending on them to control and direct troops,” the U.S. military official said. “It’s a huge operational catastrophe.”

“I know they should be invited to our house next, but can’t we just give them the cash equivalent and call it even?”

The Ukrainian request in April concerned the suspected location of the Moskva, a Russian naval cruiser and the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet. Could U.S. intelligence confirm that the ship was at a certain set of coördinates south of the Ukrainian port city of Odesa? The answer came back affirmative. Soon, officials in Washington began to see press reports that the ship had suffered some sort of explosion. On April 14th, the Moskva disappeared into the Black Sea.

Kyiv said that two Ukrainian-made Neptune anti-ship missiles, fired from onshore near Odesa, had hit the Moskva —a statement that was confirmed by U.S. intelligence agencies. Russia never admitted that the strike took place, instead blaming an onboard fire and stormy seas for the loss of the ship. Some forty Russian sailors are reported to have died.

After the arrival of the M777s, the Ukrainian Army increasingly shared information with the U.S. about the condition of its weaponry on the battlefield, something it had not always been eager to do. Reznikov described it as a “mirror reaction” to Washington’s initial approach to the war. “You see they don’t trust you with serious weapons,” he said, “so why should you trust them?” But, as the U.S. and other Western powers increased their commitments, the relationship improved. According to Reznikov, “When we received one package of assistance after another, and we could see there was a real desire to help, it allowed us to come to an agreement and reach a genuine dialogue.” A Western diplomat in Kyiv told me, “It’s a common story here. You can be incredibly wary, until you’re not. Then you become trusting and open.”

When the U.S. military carries out operations with a partner force, such as a fellow NATO member state, it coördinates battle movements on a common operational picture, or COP, a single digitized display showing the location and composition of forces. “We don’t quite have that with Ukraine,” the military official said. “But it’s close.” Ukrainian commanders feed information to the U.S. military, which allows for an almost real-time picture of its weaponry in Ukraine. “These days we know similar information about what we have given to Ukraine as we know about equipment in our own military,” the official said. “How many artillery tubes are functioning, what’s down for maintenance, where the necessary part is.”

In May, Ukrainian artillery crews, using M777s along with some Soviet-era systems, fired on a large contingent of Russian forces that was trying to cross a pontoon bridge on the Siverskyi Donets River. Intelligence provided by the U.S. appeared to allow the Ukrainians to identify the moment of the Russian column’s crossing. It was one of the single biggest losses for the Russian Army since the war began. Dozens of tanks and armored vehicles were destroyed, left charred along the river’s swampy banks, and as many as four hundred Russian soldiers were killed.

For months, Ukraine had one U.S. weapons system at the top of its wish list: the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS. Whereas the M777 can hit artillery pieces, troop formations, tanks, and armored vehicles at what is known as tactical depth, around fifteen miles, HIMARS can reach an entirely different target set: ammunition depots, logistics hubs, radar systems, and command-and-control nodes, which tend to be situated considerably farther behind enemy lines. The HIMARS system is mounted on a standard U.S. Army truck, making it able to “shoot and scoot,” in military parlance. Colin Kahl, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, has described HIMARS as the equivalent of a “precision-guided air strike,” delivered from the back of a truck.

The Ukrainian military could only take advantage of the HIMARS’ extended range if its soldiers had intelligence on where to strike. “Precision fires and intelligence are a marriage,” the U.S. military official said. “It’s difficult to have one without the other.” The dilemma for the Biden Administration was not whether to give HIMARS to Ukraine, but which munitions to send along with them. Each system can carry either a pod with six rockets, known as GMLRS, with a range of forty miles, or one surface-to-surface missile, or ATACMS, which can reach a hundred and eighty miles. “It’s not HIMARS that carries a risk,” the Defense Department official said. “But, rather, if it was equipped with long-range missiles that were used to strike deep in Russian territory.”

Putin is extremely paranoid about long-range conventional-missile systems. The Kremlin is convinced, for example, that U.S. ballistic-missile defense platforms in Romania and Poland are intended for firing on Russia. Even if Ukraine agreed not to use HIMARS to carry out strikes across the border, the mere technical capability of doing so might prove provocative. “We had reason to believe the ATACMS would be a bridge too far,” the Defense official said.

The battlefield realities inside Ukraine were another determining factor. “The imperative was ‘What does Ukraine need?’ ” the Defense official said. “Not what they are asking for—what they need. And we do our own assessment of that.” The Biden Administration asked for a list of targets that the Ukrainian military wanted to strike with HIMARS. “Every single grid point was reachable with GMLRS rather than ATACMS,” the Defense official said.

There was one exception: Ukraine expressed a more ambitious desire to launch missile strikes on Crimea, which Russia uses for replenishing its forces across the south and which is largely beyond the reach of GMLRS. During the war-game exercises held over the summer, when the possibility of ATACMS came up, it was clear that Ukraine wanted them to “lay waste to Crimea,” the Defense official said. “Putin sees Crimea as much a part of Russia as St. Petersburg. So, in terms of escalation management, we have to keep that in mind.”

In multiple conversations, U.S. officials were explicit that the HIMARS could not be used to hit targets across the border. “The Americans said there is a very serious request that you do not use these weapons to fire on Russian territory,” the Ukrainian military official said. “We said right away that’s absolutely no problem. We’ll use them only against the enemy on the territory of Ukraine.” As with other weapons platforms, there is no technical mechanism to insure compliance. Officially, the U.S. has signalled that all Ukrainian territory illegally occupied by Russia since 2014—not only that which it has taken since February—is fair game for HIMARS strikes. “We haven’t said specifically don’t strike Crimea,” the Defense official told me. “But then, we haven’t enabled them to do so, either.”

The first batch of HIMARS appeared on the battlefield late in June. Within days, videos circulated of Russian equipment and munitions depots outside Donetsk exploding in clouds of fire and smoke. Reznikov announced that the military had used HIMARS to destroy dozens of similar Russian facilities. In response, the senior Biden Administration official said, Russian forces “have had to adjust their tactics and maneuvers,” moving command posts and munitions depots out of range—which also diminishes their utility in battle. “They are very mindful of the presence of HIMARS,” the official said.

Each launcher costs roughly seven million dollars. According to some calculations, Ukraine could fire more than five thousand GMLRS missiles per month, whereas their manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, was only producing nine thousand a year. “We said straightaway, ‘You’re not going to get very many of these systems,’ ” the Defense Department official said. “ ‘Not because we don’t trust you but because there simply isn’t an unlimited quantity of these on planet Earth.’ ”

In July, Russia’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, instructed commanders in Ukraine to “prioritize the targeting of the enemy’s long-range rocket artillery weapons with high-precision strikes.” Two weeks later, Russia claimed to have destroyed six HIMARS systems. At the time, the U.S. had provided a total of sixteen launchers; Germany and the United Kingdom had given nine similar systems. U.S. officials insist that all of them remain intact and functional.

In preparation for its counter-offensive this summer, Ukraine used HIMARS to repeatedly strike Russian command posts and ammunition depots in the Kherson region. Several missiles hit the Antonivskyi Bridge, which connects the city to the eastern bank of the Dnipro River. Russian units inside Kherson risked being cut off from resupply lines and logistics support. “The use of HIMARS in the south contributed to a high attrition rate of Russian troops and hardware,” Bielieskov, the defense analyst in Kyiv, said. “The whole Russian group on the right bank of the Dnipro is dependent on a very small number of crossings.”

The U.S. had also begun to supply Ukraine with AGM-88 HARM missiles, launched from military aircraft, which home in on electronic transmissions from surface-to-air radar systems. The missiles are designed to be carried by U.S. fighters, such as the F-16, but the Ukrainian Air Force figured out a way to mount them on their MIG jets. The senior Defense Department official said, “It was pretty MacGyvery, and opens up the possibility to think of what other munitions could be adapted to Ukrainian platforms.” The HARM missiles created a dilemma for Russian forces. They could either turn on their radar batteries and make themselves vulnerable to HARM strikes, or keep them turned off and lose the ability to detect Ukrainian aircraft and armed drones, namely the Turkish-made Bayraktar.

U.S. military and intelligence circles have debated the reason that Putin has not yet attempted an escalatory move to discourage further arms shipments on Ukraine’s western border. “As we have gotten deeper into the conflict, we realized we could provide more weapons of greater sophistication and at greater scale without provoking a Russian military response against NATO,” the Defense Department official said. “Was it that we were always too cautious, and we could have been more aggressive all along? Or, had we provided these systems right away, would they have indeed been very escalatory?” The official went on, “In that scenario, Russia was the frog, and we boiled the water slowly, and Russia got used to it.”

The embarrassment of the Kharkiv retreat revealed a fundamental weakness of the Russian forces: they had been degraded, in terms of both personnel and equipment, to the point at which they could no longer hold on to captured territory while trying to carry out major offensive operations. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military was receiving fresh waves of NATO-trained conscripts and Western arms. Throughout September and into October, Ukrainian forces pushed farther, reclaiming the entirety of the Kharkiv region and moving into towns and villages in the Donbas, the “protection” of which was Putin’s stated aim for the war. “We continue to see that Putin’s political objectives are not matched to what his military can achieve,” the senior U.S. intelligence official said.

This paradox is a potentially destabilizing factor. U.S. intelligence agencies had assumed that if Putin were to face what he regarded as an “existential” threat he would feel forced to escalate, possibly with chemical or nuclear weapons. “But seeing as how he understands his own legacy and place in history,” the senior U.S. official said, “a humiliating setback in Ukraine can also begin to look existential.”

After Kharkiv, with the momentum of the war shifting against Russia, Putin moved to double down on what increasingly appeared to be a losing hand. In a speech on September 21st, he announced a series of referendums to annex Russian-occupied territories in southern and eastern Ukraine and ordered a “partial” mobilization of conscripts in Russia. (It soon became clear that the draft could reach up to a million Russian men.) Putin said that Russia was not battling just the Ukrainian Army but “the entire war machine of the collective West.” In a final, ominous threat, he seemed to suggest a willingness to use nuclear weapons to defend the parts of Ukraine that he intended to annex. “If the territorial unity of our country is threatened, in order to protect Russia and our nation we will unquestionably use all the weapons we have,” he said. “This is no bluff.”

The annexation of these territories—which was finalized in Russia on October 5th and quickly refuted by the rest of the world—effectively announced a fourth phase of the war. Putin has now staked his rule on an ability to hold these lands, which he has declared, with great fanfare, to be inexorably a part of Russia. His wager is that the escalation will not deter Ukraine so much as its backers in the West. Will the U.S., for example, debate the use of its weapons in strikes on Russian targets in Kherson as it had about targets in Crimea? “We have not sorted all the way through that,” the U.S. military official said. “But it’s clear we’re not going to be bullied around by what Putin decides to call Russia.” The senior Biden Administration official said, “We monitor Russia’s nuclear forces as best as we can,” and “so far we haven’t seen any indication that Putin has made a serious move in that direction.”

In Kyiv, the prospect of a Russian nuclear attack is both horrifying and a nonfactor. “Ukraine has no choice but to liberate all its territories,” Podolyak, Zelensky’s adviser, said, “even if there exists the possibility of strikes with weapons of mass destruction.” Ukraine has no nuclear weapons of its own—it gave up its arsenal in 1994 in a treaty signed by the United States and Russia, among others—so any response would have to come from the West. “The question is not what we will do,” Podolyak said, “but what the world’s nuclear powers will do, and whether they are indeed ready to maintain the doctrine of deterrence.” He called on Western nuclear powers, particularly the U.S., to make their response clear up front: “Send a message to Putin now, not after he strikes—‘Look, any missile of yours will lead to six of ours flying in your direction.’ ”

In early October, Russia launched a series of missile strikes on Kyiv and a number of other cities, killing more than three dozen people and damaging civilian infrastructure across the country. The attacks, which came in response to a large blast that damaged the bridge connecting the Russian mainland to Crimea, offered renewed force to Ukraine’s calls for Western air defenses. According to the senior Defense official, the challenge in providing such weapons is more technical than political: “There aren’t that many spare air-defense systems to give.” The U.S. military is not going to pull its existing Patriot batteries or NASAMs—two ground-based air-defense systems Ukraine has been requesting—from, say, South Korea or the Middle East. They have to be manufactured and procured. However, the Defense official said, Ukraine should be receiving the first two NASAMS in late October or early November, with more to follow.

The Biden Administration has also announced a military-aid package worth more than a billion dollars, bringing the total amount the U.S. has spent on arming Ukraine over the past year to sixteen billion. Among the key items in this package were an additional eighteen HIMARS systems, more than doubling the number in Ukraine’s arsenal. Ukrainian officials are now eying a number of items that, they argue, would allow even more aggressive counter-offensives: modern NATO-standard battle tanks, fighter jets such as F-16s, and the long-range ATACMS for striking logistics and ammunition hubs in Crimea.

Reznikov is certain that such deliveries are inevitable. “When I was in D.C. in November, before the invasion, and asked for Stingers, they told me it was impossible,” he said. “Now it’s possible. When I asked for 155-millimetre guns, the answer was no. HIMARS, no. HARM, no. Now all of that is a yes.” He added, “Therefore, I’m certain that tomorrow there will be tanks and ATACMS and F-16s.”

With the help of the U.S. and NATO, he went on, Ukraine’s military has shown that Russia can be confronted. “We are not afraid of Russia,” he said. “And we are asking our partners in the West to also no longer be afraid.” ♦

Published in the print edition of the October 24, 2022, issue, with the headline “Arming Ukraine.”

More on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

 

More on Ukraine

Annals of Diplomacy

October 24, 2022 Issue

 

O novo imperador, de um Império quase inteiro, expõe os seus planos (Deutsche Welle)

O ambicioso plano de Xi Jinping no Congresso do PCC

William Yang
CGTN, 17/10/2022
há 2 horas

Presidente chinês resumiu em discurso as conquistas do governo nos últimos cinco anos. Taiwan, seguranças nacionais, autossuficiência foram tema no evento em que Xi prepara o caminho para um terceiro mandato.

Deutsche Welle, 17/10/2022

Em tom triunfante, o presidente chinês, Xi Jinping, destacou as conquistas de sua sigla durante a abertura do 20º Congresso do Partido Comunista Chinês (PCC) neste domingo (16/10). E prometeu uma série de reformas e mudanças visando promover o rejuvenescimento da nação chinesa.

Ao discursar para cerca de 2.300 membros do partido único, Xi defendeu a estratégia de zero covid, dizendo que as medidas de controle da pandemia "protegeram a vida e a saúde”, e que as decisões para impor o "governo dos patriotas” em Hong Kong ajudaram a mudar a situação da região "de caos para governança”.

Além disso, embora Pequim insista em lutar pela reunificação pacífica com Taiwan, nunca renunciaria à opção de usar a força para alcançar esse objetivo: "As rodas da história estão girando em direção à reunificação da China e ao rejuvenescimento da nação chinesa. A reunificação completa da pátria pode e deve ser alcançada."

Discurso sem muitos conflitos

Wen-Ti Sung, professor de Estudos Taiwaneses da Universidade Nacional Australiana, atualmente residente em Taipei, considerou discurso de Xi muito menos agressivo do que esperavam certos analistas: "Ele diz que a ‘reunificação completa da nação deveria e precisaria acontecer', mas é muito vago sobre como pretende fazer isso."

"Enquanto alguns analistas taiwaneses temiam que o presidente chinês apresentasse novas estratégias para resolver a questão com Taiwan, seu discurso sinaliza um desejo maior de preservar a continuidade, em vez de mudança. Ele mencionou determinação firme e capacidades fortes para se opor à independência de Taiwan, mas não especificou um plano ou cronograma. A intenção é aumentar ainda mais a ambiguidade quanto ao cronograma e à urgência da unificação com Taiwan."

Além de enfatizar o sucesso do Partido Comunista Chinês na superação de desafios, Xi também destacou "mudanças rápidas na situação internacional”, elogiando os esforços da legenda para "manter a equidade e a justiça internacionais, defender a prática do multilateralismo genuíno e se opor claramente a todos os tipos de hegemonia e políticas de poder”.

À medida que aumenta a tensão geopolítica entre a China e os países ocidentais liderados pelos Estados Unidos, Ian Chong, cientista político da Universidade Nacional de Singapura, afirma que a ênfase no multilateralismo significa que a China continuará desafiando e competindo com Washington. "Quando se fala de multilateralismo, muitas vezes significa que Pequim trabalhará por meio de instituições internacionais, principalmente as Nações Unidas e as agências da ONU, para combater o que considera influência dos EUA."

Ênfase em ideologia e autoconfiança

Embora o discurso seja amplamente visto como uma continuação das políticas do governo de Xi Jinping na última década, o cientista político Ian Chong considerou notável a ênfase do líder chinês em valores não tangíveis: "Uma das maneiras de Xi Jinping lidar com os desafios, inclusive com a desaceleração da economia e a rivalidade da China com os EUA, é enfatizar a disciplina e a ideologia partidária."

Durante o discurso, Xi descreveu o marxismo como a ideologia orientadora do PCC, e que é "responsabilidade histórica solene” dos membros do partido continuarem "abrindo novos capítulos na adaptação do marxismo ao contexto chinês”.

Ao apresentar a visão para os próximos cinco anos, em meio aos crescentes desafios econômicos, Xi disse que Pequim continuará a promover a prosperidade comum, melhorar a distribuição de riqueza e acelerar o desenvolvimento de um sistema habitacional. Ele também destacou a necessidade de crescimento por meio de uma economia de mercado socialista e estratégias de dupla circulação doméstica-internacional.

Buscando educação de classe mundial

Dexter Roberts, membro do Conselho do Atlântico, criticou o discurso de Xi por não explicar muito sobre o conceito de "prosperidade comum”: "Foi uma declaração sem muita informação, e não há muitos detalhes sobre como eles realmente vão fazer isso."

"Também acho que a prosperidade comum tem,  na liderança e na cabeça de Xi, um elemento de punição aos ricos. Muitas das repressões contra empreendedores e grandes empresas de tecnologia na China estão relacionadas à segurança econômica e de dados."

No entanto, Iris Pang, economista-chefe do ING para a China, acredita que Pequim está tentando colocar a prosperidade comum sob um novo signo, destacando a necessidade chinesa de construir uma educação de classe mundial, "e isso dará à geração mais jovem a oportunidades de subir na pirâmide da riqueza – e eles têm um canal para fazer isso adequadamente".

E com os EUA aumentando seus esforços para impedir o acesso da China a tecnologias de semicondutores, Xi prometeu se concentrar no "desenvolvimento de alta qualidade" que priorizaria educação, ciência e tecnologia: a China "acelerará a realização de um alto nível de autossuficiência científica e tecnológica e autoaperfeiçoamento".

Para Dexter Roberts, a ênfase de Xi na "autossuficiência" indica que Pequim quer provar que pode "seguir sozinho", embora possa ser um desafio. "Não acho que Xi entenda quão difícil seria para eles a nacionalização de alta tecnologia em sua cadeia de suprimentos."

Modernização militar e fortalecimento de "seguranças"

Ao lado da autossuficiência, Xi também enfatizou a importância de continuar os esforços de modernização militar, prometendo acelerar a "modernização da doutrina militar, a organização do Exército, dos militares, e de armas e equipamentos".

Xi destacou a importância de fortalecer uma ampla gama de "seguranças" no país, mencionando a palavra cerca de 50 vezes ao longo do discurso. Ele instou a China a fortalecer sua base de segurança nacional melhorando o sistema de alerta precoce e garantindo o fornecimento de alimentos e energia.

David Bandurski, codiretor do China Media Project,considera o conceito de segurança nacional um dos sinais mais claros do discurso. "É uma continuação completa do que vimos sob o governo de Xi. Podemos deduzir com relativa certeza que eles estão falando dos Estados Unidos, e parte disso se refere a preocupações internas de segurança do desenvolvimento ou do trabalho."

No geral, alguns especialistas acham que, com o discurso do domingo, Xi está ampliando a visão e a direção traçadas na última década. Para Holly Snape, especialista em política chinesa da Universidade de Glasgow, em vez de estabelecer novas metas, o discurso de Xi reforça uma visão estreita de "modernização definida pelo partido”.

Moldando a história para traçar o futuro

Snape acreditar ser "importante que Xi tenha liderado a elaboração do discurso, pois isso permitiu que ele aprofundasse e consolidasse o pensamento que começou a definir, principalmente em 2017”.

Bandurski, do China Media Project, acrescenta que o relatório político entregue por Xi no domingo serve, principalmente, para sinalizar o poder do presidente chinês e posicioná-lo na história do Partido Comunista. "A história está sempre bem na mira do Partido Comunista, e interpretar e expandir a história é realmente a chave para Xi sinalizar seu poder. Tudo gira em torno de contar a história básica de que os últimos cinco anos foram um grande sucesso e mostrar por quê.”

O Congresso do Partido Comunista é realizado a cada cinco anos, e até o fim do presidente chinês deverá garantir um terceiro mandato Na ocasião, o Partido Comunista Chinês também divulgará a formação de sua nova liderança.


domingo, 16 de outubro de 2022

Xi Jinping se torna imperador, e apresenta seus grandes planos para a China, exemplo para o mundo segundo ele (WP)

Depois de Deng Xiaoping, a China tinha encontrado uma maneira de escapar da maldição da sucessão, criando um sistema de alternância no poder, limitados os mandatos a dois, num equilíbrio entre diversas tendências no PCC, tecnocratas, comunistas, conservadores e globalistas. Xi está rompendo com isso, criando um mandato interminável para ele. Sabemos como isso é um trampolim ao poder absoluto.

 

Xi presents China as ‘new choice’ for humanity as he readies for next term 

By Christian Shepherd and Lily Kuo

The Washington Post, October 16, 2022 

 

Chinese President Xi Jinping is applauded as he waves to senior members of the government as he arrives to the opening ceremony of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in Beijing on Oct. 16. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Chinese leader Xi Jinping pledged Sunday to turn China into a “great modern socialist country” that represents a “new choice” for humanity, as he opened a Chinese Communist Party meeting where he is expected to secure a precedent-breaking third term.


From a lectern onstage at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Xi spoke without a mask for an hour and 45 minutes to open the twice-per-decade meeting that sets the national agenda for the next five years.

Xi declared that the new “core mission” of the party is to lead a country “united in struggle” to be a powerful, modern socialist nation by 2049, a hundred years after the People’s Republic was founded. As the most powerful Chinese leader in decades, Xi has promoted his nationalist vision of a “Chinese dream” to reclaim the nation’s place at the center of global affairs.


Under banners that read, “Long live the Chinese Communist Party” and “Fully Implement Xi Jinping Thought,” delegates in the packed hall followed along with their own copies of his remarks, turning the pages in unison, studiously taking notes and applauding enthusiastically. The meeting, broadcast on the state-run CCTV, caught some delegates sleeping.

Xi said China’s “great rejuvenation” is now an “irreversible historical process” and the party had already created a “new choice” for humanity with its unique path to modernization — a nod to China’s emergence as an alternative to Western democracies.

The congress adds urgency to Xi’s ambition at a time when China’s economy is slowing and Beijing faces renewed criticism from Western nations over aggression toward Taiwan and its close partnership with Russia.

For China to become a military, economic and cultural power, he added, the party will need to navigate “abrupt changes” in the international situation and be ready to weather “high winds and dangerous storms.”

“In recent years, Xi has been placing a lot of emphasis on calling on the party leadership to revive a spirit of struggle,” said Dali Yang, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Chicago.

Analysts are closely watching the six-day meeting for signs that recent criticism of the party may have weakened Xi or other politicians. Former Chinese vice premier Zhang Gaoli made his first public appearance since he was accused by Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai of sexual assault.

Xi did not mention the war in Ukraine or Beijing’s deteriorating relationship with the United States, which ordered export bans earlier this month that could cripple China’s high-tech aspirations. He briefly touched on China’s increasingly criticized “zero covid” policy, claiming it had earned his country “international acclaim.”


When Xi took office in 2012, the smooth transfer of power was seen as a sign that China’s political system had evolved from personal rule toward a system of regularized leadership transitions. But Xi defied expectations.

With unending anti-corruption campaigns and an emphasis on discipline, he took charge of the party. The rest of Chinese society was brought in line with security clampdowns that pushed human rights activists underground and crushed resistance in Hong Kong and the far western province of Xinjiang. Under his rule, international criticism of China has been met with fierce pushback from “wolf warrior” diplomats.

The gathering will conclude when delegates formally approve Xi’s report, pass changes to the party constitution and choose a new Central Committee. The committee then meets and appoints a new 25-member Politburo and the seven-member Standing Committee, which is the apex of power.

Xi is almost certain to be reinstated as general secretary and head of the party’s Central Military Commission, his two most important positions.


Observers are watching who will be promoted to join him on the Politburo for any signs of challenges to Xi’s rule or an anointed successor. But after a decade of Xi concentrating power in his own hands, few consider either outcome probable. Term limits for the presidency were scrapped in 2018, clearing the way for Xi to rule for life if he so chooses.

“Xi Jinping is aiming not just for a third term but for a fourth term as well,” said Willy Wo-Lap Lam, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation think tank. “He has 10 more years to choose his successor.”

Xi’s leadership style, characterized by a preference for splitting people into enemies and friends, means he is not someone who is willing to compromise, said Chien-Wen Kou, a political scientist at National Chengchi University in Taiwan.

“This tells us how he thinks about dealing with enemies,” Kou said. “He essentially will not make a concession on his basic principles, whether for China-U.S. ties, relations with Taiwan or his approach to corrupt officials.”


Even if there is resistance to Xi’s agenda, it is unlikely to appear during the carefully scripted congress. After months of closed-door negotiations between Xi and other top-ranking officials, the work report broadcasts policy prescriptions to the party’s rank-and-file. For the party, the choreographed process, culminating in a vote by show of hands to rubber-stamp the new agenda, is a way to bolster legitimacy in line with claims that China, too, is democratic.

Many of Xi’s most significant updates to China’s policy outlook took place at the last party congress, in 2017, when he announced a “new era.”

“Xi has tried to revive some Maoist policies for the economy,” such as focusing on state-owned enterprises, tackling inequality and creating a system of “internal circulation” as a way to prepare for decoupling from the United States and the West, Lam said.

In a nod to these goals, Xi called “high-quality” growth the primary task of the next stage of China’s development and said internal circulation — a bid to bolster domestic markets to become self-reliant — should be made “lively and reliable.” He said the party would continue to support “common prosperity,” one of his key slogans.

Ever stronger party leadership, guided by Xi’s personal ideology, was a common theme of the speech. Channeling Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China, he said the military — the “barrel of the gun” — must forever listen to party orders. And the party will never change, Xi added, because it had learned the art of “self-revolution” to break historical cycles of rising and falling governments.

Under Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, the party experimented with small moves toward what it called “intraparty democracy,” allowing a straw poll by senior officials as a way of gauging support for various leaders to reach the Politburo and its Standing Committee.

Xi scrapped those changes in 2017. Instead, he met with party elders one by one to gather recommendations, helping him prevent the formation of cliques that could challenge his power. “It’s another example of Xi Jinping’s paranoia,” said Susan Shirk, a scholar of Chinese politics at the University of California at San Diego.

Tighter control doesn’t necessarily mean Xi will get the outcomes he wants. In a recently published bookShirk argues that Xi’s centralized power and top-down pressure on officials pushes cadres toward overenthusiastic praise and over-compliance with Xi’s objectives, which can lead to policy mistakes. “The bandwagoning of subordinates to prove loyalty and protect their own careers leads to overreach,” she said.

Shirk argues that Xi is unlikely to use his third term to change course. “He’s really boxed himself into a tough next five years,” she said. “After the congress, subordinates will be all the more intimidated and fearful unless Xi diffuses his personal authority to share it with other senior leaders.”

Just before the speech, CCTV interviewed Jiang Lijuan, a local official from Zhejiang province, who breathlessly praised Xi’s “personal guidance” in the development of her village. She said the residents had formed a habit of watching the evening news to “see what the general secretary was up to, just like you would care for a family member.”


Lyric Li in Seoul and Vic Chiang and Pei-Lin Wu in Taipei, Taiwan, contributed to this report.

 

 


Xi Jinping diz que China não descarta usar força em Taiwan (Deutsche Welle)

 Alguma surpresa?

Xi Jinping diz que China não descarta usar força em Taiwan

Deutsche Welle, 16/10/2022

Líder chinês abre Congresso do Partido Comunista a caminho de um terceiro mandato. Em discurso, ele afirma que Pequim tem controle total de Hong Kong e tomará "todas as medidas necessárias" para fazer o mesmo com Taiwan.

https://www.dw.com/pt-br/xi-jinping-diz-que-china-n%C3%A3o-descarta-usar-for%C3%A7a-em-taiwan/a-63456460?maca=bra-GK_RSS_Chatbot_Mundo-31505-xml-media

O presidente da China, Xi Jinping, abriu neste domingo (16/10) o 20º Congresso do Partido Comunista com um discurso duro em relação a Taiwan, afirmando que não descarta o uso da força para garantir o controle total da ilha autogovernada, que Pequim considera território chinês.

"Insistimos em lutar pela perspectiva de uma reunificação pacífica com a maior sinceridade e com os maiores esforços", disse o líder chinês. "No entanto, não estamos comprometidos em abandonar o uso da força e nos reservamos a opção de tomar todas as medidas necessárias."

Em recado à comunidade internacional, Xi acrescentou que "resolver a questão de Taiwan é assunto do próprio povo chinês, e cabe ao povo chinês decidir".

"As rodas históricas da reunificação nacional e do rejuvenescimento nacional estão avançando, a reunificação definitivamente deve ser alcançada e a reunificação definitivamente será alcançada", afirmou, arrancando aplausos de seus companheiros de partido.

Em resposta às declarações de Xi, Taipei declarou que não cederia sua soberania nem comprometeria a liberdade e a democracia. O gabinete presidencial de Taiwan enfatizou que ambos os lados compartilham a responsabilidade de preservar a paz e a estabilidade no Estreito de Taiwan e na região, e que entrar em combate não é uma opção.

Taiwan é uma ilha autogovernada desde 1949, com regime democrático e politicamente próxima de países do Ocidente. A China, no entanto, a considera parte de seu território e exige que os países escolham se vão manter relações diplomáticas com Pequim ou com Taipei.

A ilha esteve recentemente no centro de uma tensão geopolítica, depois que a presidente da Câmara dos Estados Unidos, Nancy Pelosi, fez uma visita a Taiwan, provocando a fúria de Pequim. Em resposta, o governo chinês realizou exercícios militares ao redor da ilha.

Os EUA não têm laços diplomáticos formais com Taiwan e reconhecem a República Popular da China, com sede em Pequim, como "único governo legal". No entanto, Washington não reconhece explicitamente a soberania chinesa sobre Taiwan e continua fornecendo armas à ilha.

Xi mencionou ainda outro território sensível de sua gestão, Hong Kong, sobre o qual a China já alcançou um "controle total", segundo o líder chinês. Pequim reprimiu duramente os movimentos dissidentes na região após amplas manifestações pró-democracia em 2019.

O presidente afirmou que as medidas tomadas em Hong Kong restauraram a ordem e garantiram que a região semiautônoma seja governada por patriotas. Segundo ele, Hong Kong "entrou num novo estágio, no qual restaurou a ordem e está pronto para prosperar".

O Congresso do Partido Comunista Chinês ocorre a cada cinco anos e elege o líder do país. Na China, não há eleições diretas para presidente. No fim da reunião de uma semana, que reúne quase 2.300 membros do partido único, Xi deve ser confirmado para um inédito terceiro mandato à frente do país, tornando-se o líder mais poderoso da China desde Mao Tsé-Tung.

Congresso do Partido Comunista Chinês
O Congresso do Partido Comunista ocorre a cada cinco anos e reúne seus mais de 2 mil membrosFoto: Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo/picture alliance 

Reforço das Forças Armadas

Em seu discurso de abertura de uma hora e 45 minutos, o presidente defendeu ainda um crescimento militar e tecnológico mais rápido, a fim de promover o "rejuvenescimento da nação chinesa".

Objetivo da gestão de Xi, esse conceito inclui reavivar o papel do partido como líder econômico e social, retornando ao que o presidente chinês considera como era dourada depois que a legenda assumiu o controle total do país, em 1949.

Ele acrescentou que o Exército de Libertação Popular, braço militar do partido, deve "salvaguardar a dignidade e os interesses básicos da China", aludindo a uma lista de disputas territoriais e outras questões diante das quais o governo em Pequim afirma estar pronto para ir à guerra.

A China está atualmente em desacordo com os governos do Japão, da Índia e de nações do Sudeste Asiático em relação às suas reivindicações territoriais.

Pequim, com o segundo maior orçamento militar do mundo depois dos Estados Unidos, está tentando estender seu alcance por meio do desenvolvimento de mísseis balísticos, porta-aviões e postos militares avançados no exterior.

"Trabalharemos mais rápido para modernizar a teoria militar, o pessoal e as armas", declarou Xi. "Reforçaremos as capacidades estratégicas dos militares."

Elogios ao regime

Xi Jinping também não poupou elogios ao Partido Comunista, que disse estar assegurando a estabilidade social, preservando a segurança nacional e defendendo vidas.

Segundo ele, a legenda única da China "ganhou a maior batalha contra a pobreza na história da humanidade" com as políticas domésticas de Pequim de priorizar o avanço da prosperidade compartilhada. O governo pretende acelerar a criação de um sistema habitacional e aprimorar o sistema de distribuição de riqueza, afirmou o político.

Após ser alvo de críticas por meses devido à restrita política de covid zero da China e seu impacto econômico, Xi elogiou a medida afirmando que ela ajudou a proteger "a segurança da vida e a saúde física dos cidadãos ao máximo".

Ele acrescentou que o país "obteve grandes resultados positivos na prevenção e controle geral da epidemia", mas se absteve de afirmar se a política rigorosa chegaria ao fim em breve.

O presidente também prometeu resolver a questão do declínio da taxa de natalidade na China. "Estabeleceremos um sistema de políticas para aumentar as taxas de natalidade e buscar uma estratégia nacional proativa em resposta ao envelhecimento da população", disse.

Especialistas afirmam que a segunda maior economia do mundo pode sofrer danos como resultado de um declínio populacional iminente.

O líder de 69 anos também destacou o progresso chinês na defesa do meio ambiente. Ele prometeu a continuação de uma "revolução energética" e a promoção do uso limpo do carvão, ao mesmo tempo em que aborda a poluição do solo, do ar e da água.

ek (AP, Reuters, Lusa, AFP)


Manifesto pela democracia, da Confraria PAZ, do Rio Grande do Sul

Tenho a honra de fazer parte desta confraria gaúcha, mesmo morando fora do estado, mas participando de atividades que se realizem online.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Defender a democracia é derrotar a extrema-direita no Brasil e no RS

Confraria PAZ - Plinio Alexandre Zalevski 

            Nunca o Brasil esteve tão alterado, tão fragmentado, tão maltratado. Nunca nossas instituições foram tão tensionadas e constrangidas; nunca tivemos tanto ódio, preconceito e mentira circulando pelas ruas e pelos lares. No próximo dia 30 de outubro, iremos às urnas para lutar contra a desumanidade e para impedir que posições de extrema-direita, de perfil neofascista, se consolidem no Brasil.    

            Votaremos em defesa da Democracia cujos valores exigem debates respeitosos em torno de ideias para o Brasil; liberdade de imprensa, transparência e prestação de contas; laicidade do Estado, respeito à Constituição e reconhecimento do Poder Judiciário como instância legítima para dirimir conflitos. 

            Votaremos em defesa da Ciência, da Cultura e da Educação, para que o Brasil volte a investir em pesquisa; para encontrar soluções adequadas às nossas maiores mazelas e agregar riqueza pelo desenvolvimento de tecnologia; para que nossas escolas e universidades tenham os recursos necessários; para que nossos professores sejam valorizados e respeitados; para que o Brasil firme um pacto em defesa da educação pública de qualidade que permita que todas as nossas crianças tenham direito a um futuro digno. 

            Votaremos em defesa de nossas florestas e dos povos indígenas, em favor de políticas de desenvolvimento sustentáveis, conscientes de que o Brasil poderá cumprir um papel chave na Comunidade das Nações, liderando a luta contra o aquecimento global que ameaça a própria vida humana no Planeta.

            Votaremos pela inclusão social, em favor de políticas públicas capazes de erradicar a miséria, enfrentar o racismo estrutural e superar o processo de precarização do trabalho que condena milhões de brasileiros a regimes de superexploração e negação de direitos trabalhistas elementares.

            Votaremos para a redução da violência, por um governo que seja capaz de construir políticas de segurança com base em evidências; que combata a violência doméstica e reduza os feminicídios; que reforme e modernize nosso modelo de polícia, assegurando carreira e proteção aos profissionais da segurança; que enfrente os fatores de risco das dinâmica criminais investindo também na prevenção, na ressocialização e na criação de oportunidades de educação e emprego para os jovens.

            Bolsonaro é a antítese de tudo isso. Nunca foi capaz de sustentar um debate respeitoso. Pelo contrário, normalizou a agressividade e a torpeza diante de seus interlocutores; ameaçou e perseguiu jornalistas; ofendeu mulheres, gays, quilombolas, professores, artistas, moradores das periferias e nordestinos; estruturou, com recursos públicos, o “gabinete do ódio” para destruir a reputação dos que não se submetem aos seus arroubos autoritários e a sua mediocridade, restringiu o acesso às informações de interesse público, inclusive durante a pandemia onde a transparência era essencial para salvar vidas; decretou sigilo de 100 anos sobre muitas informações relevantes, desde os contratos superfaturados da aquisição da Covaxin até a visita de pastores no Palácio do Planalto e aos dados sobre o assassinato de Genivaldo de Jesus Santos, asfixiado por policiais rodoviários federais no porta-malas de um camburão. 

            Bolsonaro permitiu a montagem do “orçamento secreto”, articulado por sua base de apoio no Congresso Nacional, de forma a garantir o apoio do “Centrão” ao seu governo. Desde 2020, isso já soma 45 bilhões de reais, o que oficializou o maior esquema de corrupção da história republicana. Bolsonaro manipulou a fé para objetivos político-eleitorais e amparou pastores que negociavam propinas em ouro para liberação de recursos no Ministério da Educação; ameaçou o Poder Judiciário e atacou sistemática e repetidamente autoridades da República e chefes de Estado. Atacou a Ciência, desprezando a gravidade da Pandemia, boicotando a compra de vacinas e produzindo a mais desastrosa gestão da pandemia de que se tem notícia. Bolsonaro desmontou o sistema de proteção ambiental brasileiro e a Funai, estimulando o desmatamento e o garimpo ilegal e atacando os direitos dos povos indígenas. Por conta da ausência de qualquer compromisso com as populações mais fragilizadas, o Brasil voltou ao “mapa da fome” e milhares de famílias passaram a viver nas ruas, exiladas em seu próprio País. Na segurança pública, Bolsonaro não desenvolveu um só programa ou melhoria, mas sua insistência em facilitar a compra de armas de fogo, incluindo rifles, e sua determinação em impedir a efetivação dos mecanismos de controle e rastreio de munições, tem sido muito funcional à ação das milícias e das facções criminais que passaram a adquirir armamento de grosso calibre com a utilização de CACs “laranjas”. No plano internacional, além de hostilizar nossos mais importantes parceiros comerciais, Bolsonaro envergonha o Brasil por suas atitudes e pelo alinhamento com autocracias, o que coloca ao Brasil País o desafio de recuperar seu prestígio na comunidade internacional.

            Nesse 2º turno, as eleições no RS são disputadas pelo deputado Onix Lorenzoni (PL), um fiel seguidor de Bolsonaro e por Eduardo Leite (PSDB), um jovem líder político que possui inequívoco compromisso com a democracia, a ciência e a dignidade. Mesmo os que divergem da agenda de reformas propostas por seu governo reconhecem em Eduardo um gestor competente e sério que foi capaz de assegurar avanços em diferentes áreas.       

            Por essas e muitas outras razões, no firme compromisso de contribuir com a PAZ e com a desradicalização tão necessária, as pessoas abaixo-assinadas, de diferentes posições político-ideológicas, manifestam seu apoio às candidaturas de Lula e Alckmin (13) para a Presidência e de Eduardo Leite e Gabriel Souza (45) para o Governo do Estado.

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Brasil vive o maior êxodo de sua história (Deutsche Welle)

 


MIGRAÇÃOBRASIL

Brasil vive o maior êxodo de sua história

13 de dezembro de 2021

Número de brasileiros no exterior saltou de 1,9 milhão em 2012 para 4,2 milhões hoje. E o fenômeno tende a prosseguir: em 2018, 70 milhões afirmaram que deixariam o país se pudessem.

Deutsche Welle, 15/10/2022

Uma conjunção histórica de fatores tem feito com que muitos brasileiros achem mais verde a grama do vizinho. Em um fenômeno sem precedentes na história do país, este início de século registra o maior movimento de migração de cidadãos brasileiros rumo a outros países pelo mundo.

Segundo um levantamento do Ministério das Relações Exteriores, o número de brasileiros vivendo no exterior saltou de 1.898.762 em 2012 para 4.215.800 hoje — os últimos dados foram consolidados a partir de informações coletadas pelos consulados em 2020. No período, portanto, o aumento foi de 122%. E, pela quantidade atual de expatriados, pode-se dizer que cerca de 2% dos brasileiros moram hoje em um país estrangeiro.

"Esse movimento de saída de brasileiros nos últimos anos é inédito e, de fato, representa a maior diáspora da história brasileira", analisa Pedro Brites, professor na Fundação Getúlio Vargas.

Se o Brasil foi construído, desde a colonização portuguesa, por levas e levas de imigrantes — de várias partes do mundo, em ondas sucessivas — o atual momento indica uma virada de maré, como se o país que sempre recebeu agora tivesse se tornado um "exportador de gente". "O Brasil passou a ser um lugar de onde as pessoas saem. Isso significa que a sociedade de afluência que aqui se formou está extinta", comenta o sociólogo Rogério Baptistini Mendes, professor na Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie.

"Agora o horizonte é sombrio, com a experiência do desemprego estrutural contemporâneo, associado aos males herdados: a desigualdade e a exclusão do passado", completa o sociólogo.

Vontade de sair

E o fenômeno tende a prosseguir. Uma pesquisa realizada pelo Instituto Datafolha em 2018 indicou que, se pudessem, 70 milhões de brasileiros maiores de 16 anos se mudariam para o exterior. No recorte por qualificação, essa era uma vontade de 56% dos adultos com curso superior.

Infografik Brasilianer im Ausland Wie viele? PT

De acordo com levantamento publicado este ano pelo Centro de Políticas Sociais da Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 47% dos brasileiros entre 15 e 29 anos gostaria de deixar o país, se possível. É um recorde histórico. Entre 2005 e 2010, este era o desejo de 26,7% dos jovens; de 2011 a 2014, anseio de 20,1%.

"Em geral, todos movimentos migratórios são ocasionados por motivações religiosas, perseguições políticas, guerras ou questões econômicas. As crises econômicas pelas quais o Brasil tem passado nos últimos anos fez com que muitos decidissem emigrar buscando melhores condições de trabalho, quer sejam profissionais altamente qualificados, ou de baixa qualificação", contextualiza a historiadora Renata Geraissati Castro de Almeida, pesquisadora de imigração na Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) e na Universidade de Nova York, nos Estados Unidos.

"No cenário atual, de aumento da inflação, afetando o preço do que consumimos no dia a dia, a alta do dólar, e com a ausência de perspectivas de melhorias, a situação tende a piorar", acrescenta.

Brites enumera como sendo três as razões que motivam essa diáspora de brasileiros. Em primeiro lugar, "o mais relevante deles", segundo o professor: a economia. "Ao longo dos últimos anos, o Brasil tem perdido postos de emprego em pontos-chave, com enfraquecimento de setores como a engenharia civil, baixo investimento em tecnologia, pesquisa e desenvolvimento. Essa mão de obra qualificada tem procurado oportunidades fora", exemplifica.

"O Brasil atravessa um período de baixo crescimento econômico, estagnação relativa da economia. Isso efetivamente tira perspectivas de oportunidades de boa parte da população, que passa a procurar mecanismos para seguir sua vida", afirma.

Infografik Brasilianer im Ausland Wohin? PT

O segundo fator é a instabilidade política, um cenário que se agravou com o movimento de impeachment da então presidente Dilma Rousseff e, em 2018, a eleição de Jair Bolsonaro. "Essa turbulência acirrada afasta parte da população do nosso país", reconhece o professor.

"Por fim, há a questão da violência urbana, uma chaga social brasileira crônica que sempre tem de ser considerada. As pessoas buscam outras opções, nos Estados Unidos e na Europa, para tentar levar uma vida um pouco mais tranquila e segura", diz o especialista.

"A instabilidade econômica e política do país na última década, associada a um crescimento da violência, e das taxas de desemprego tem servido de gatilho para que muitos decidam buscar melhores oportunidades de emprego e qualidade de vida em outros países", resume a historiadora Castro de Almeida.

País do futuro?

Para o sociólogo Mendes, "a saída de brasileiros é indício de algo mais grave do que o encerramento de um ciclo de desenvolvimento". "É o processo civilizatório, de construção da nação imaginária, que sofre um abalo profundo", pondera.

"É fato que, do ponto de vista econômico, o Brasil moderno, com mercado interno forte sustentado no setor industrial e capaz de oferecer empregos de qualidade aos cidadãos, está quase que definitivamente sepultado", prossegue o sociólogo. "Mas o principal é que os grupos no poder promoveram uma ruptura com a própria história e, portanto, como o povo, sem oferecer nenhum tipo de projeto alternativo de futuro. O país é apresentado aos viventes como um acampamento de estranhos, não uma sociedade política. Um certo discurso que junta agentes do mercado, governantes e líderes religiosos neopentecostais conduz à lógica do salve-se quem puder ou, em termo mais brandos, o mundo é dos eleitos. Isso explica a fuga do desastre."

Em outras palavras, as gerações atuais já não se iludem mais com o discurso de que o Brasil é o tal "país do futuro". "Sem emprego, renda e assistência, em um cenário absolutamente hostil, sair passa a ser a solução", diz Mendes.

"O Brasil, terra do futuro, já não faz mais parte do imaginário de uma geração de brasileiros que vaga errante em busca daquilo que imagina ser uma boa vida: salário, segurança, educação, assistência. Ou seja: comunidade política organizada. É o paradoxo das ideias que conduziram ao poder o representante dos que negam o Estado e a própria política", contextualiza.

Em termos de destinos escolhidos, a América do Norte e a Europa estão entre as principais escolhas. Nos próximos dias, a DW Brasil vai contar histórias de emigrantes brasileirosnos destinos que mais os acolhem ao redor do mundo. São biografias distintas, ligadas por alguns pontos em comum: a superação e a esperança.

Ou, como comenta o sociólogo Mendes, "em todos os casos, o que está em causa é a ideia de que a vida vai mudar para melhor no país de chegada"