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From Vox
4 unanswered questions about the future of the Ukraine war -
As the Ukraine war enters its second year, both Ukraine and Russia still believe they can achieve their objectives on the battlefield. | Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
A year into the conflict, what’s next?
Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation” in Ukraine one year ago, igniting the largest conflict in Europe in decades.
This is the state of play as the Ukraine war enters year two. Both Ukraine and Russia still believe they can achieve their objectives on the battlefield, which makes it hard to see any clear pathway to a negotiated end to the conflict. But that could change, depending on how the next weeks, and months, unfold.
And depending on how they do, it may raise new questions — like just how sustainable the West’s “unwavering support” is, or how much longer Russia can pursue its current strategy. Wars are unpredictable, and Ukraine has proven that again and again.
Below are some of the big unknowns as the war reaches, and exceeds, the year mark.
Who’s winning right now — and what’s next in the war?
Kyiv did not fall. Not in a matter of days, as predicted, and not a full year into the war. A creative and resilient Ukrainian resistance combined with confounding logistical and tactical missteps from the Russian military transformed the contours of the conflict.
The front lines have remained largely the same since, with no decisive advantage for either Russia or Ukraine right now.
Russia used its partial mobilization to bring more people to the front, shoring up defensive lines that made it harder for Ukraine to keep pushing forward. Ukraine has also dug in, preparing for a possible Russian attack. A mild, muddy winter also made any major moves difficult.
Russia has tried to take Bakhmut in Donetsk for months, and while troops are advancing — taking nearby towns, like Soledar — it has been very slow and very costly. It is an attritional battle, with high casualties, especially for Russia, which has been relying on prison recruits associated with the Wagner Group as cannon fodder in combat.
Still, the Ukrainian military has also used lots of ammunition and firepower in fending off these advances. It is burning through thousands of rounds of ammunition daily, at a rate potentially faster than it can be replaced by Western backers. Ukraine is likely gearing up for its own counteroffensive in the spring, but it will need more munitions, along with the Western tanks and infantry fighting and armored vehicles that have been promised. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has described it as a “race against logistics” between Ukraine and Russia, and their respective backers.
All of this makes it hard to see exactly how either Russia or Ukraine could dramatically shift the front lines in the next weeks or months. The attritional nature of the war is straining resources on both sides. Ukraine still has momentum from last fall, but Russia’s retreat allowed it to take up more defensible positions — for example, on the other side of the Dnipro in Kherson. That will make it that much harder for Ukraine to break through this time around. There are also questions about how new, more advanced Western weapons might influence the battlefield — and when promised support, like tanks, will get to the front lines, and what that will mean for Ukraine’s own likely counteroffensive.
How much more can the West give to Ukraine — and will it want to?
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been an extraordinarily effective advocate for his country. That, combined with Ukraine’s successes on the battlefields, helped overcome some of the potential hesitation in Western capitals about backing Kyiv.
But there are real questions about the sustainability and longevity of this support, for two reasons: practical limitations and political will.
Right now, Western officials are trying to find ways to balance both needs. The US and Europe are trying to ramp up production of armaments; the Pentagon is raising its production of artillery shells by 500 percent in two years. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently said that the US and its partners are trying to help train Ukrainian soldiers in different maneuver tactics on the battlefield so they can preserve more ammunition.
But the rush to ramp up weapons aid and the push to show a united front comes with a bit of subtext: Ukraine needs to show that it can keep making gains on the battlefield in the coming weeks and months. If it’s unable to dramatically change the map in its expected counteroffensive, and Ukraine and Russia stay engaged in this attritional battle, trading towns here and there while exhausting ammo, the reality of a long, drawn-out war may change the calculations in Brussels, Berlin, and Washington.
“This is not an endless source of assistance. Everyone understands that in the West, and that at some point, there has to be a line drawn, where it’s no longer sustainable for us,” said Sergiy Kudelia, an associate professor of political science at Baylor University.
Right now, the West seems willing to give Ukraine what it needs, to let Kyiv capitalize on this particular moment. But Ukraine is unlikely to recapture all of the territory within its internationally recognized borders, and this war could start to turn into a stalemate. If that happens, it may give way to a new kind of Western solidarity: one that supports Ukraine but also begins to quietly pressure them to negotiate.
“That kind of pressure will come from reversals on the battlefield, and political pain at home — whether it’s energy or inflation,” said Jim Townsend, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy.
Putin is banking he can outlast the West’s commitment to Ukraine, so there’s an incentive and an imperative for the US and its partners to make any signals quietly. Few are naive about how incredibly difficult this will be, and how untrustworthy a negotiating partner Putin has proven to be. But even if the war ended tomorrow, Ukraine requires massive investments to rebuild, and likely some sort of security guarantees and continued security assistance. Russia and Ukraine will be neighbors forever, no matter what.
How long can Russia wage war?
The Russian military has made missteps, big ones, and is suffering heavy losses of both manpower and equipment. The country has reportedly deployed the majority of mobilized troops to Ukraine, and there are real questions about how well equipped, supplied, and trained those soldiers are, especially for counteroffensive operations.
But Russia started the war with a much larger arsenal and population, which will help it sustain its side of the conflict. And as Putin’s speech on the eve of the invasion anniversary again made clear, Russian leaders are preparing the Russian public for a long war.
Putin illegally annexed four Ukraine regions(Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia) in the fall of 2022, though Russia didn’t fully control any of those regions. A 2020 constitutional amendment makes it illegal for a Russian leader to cede any territory once it’s been declared part of Russia, which means it is going to be politically very difficult for Putin to give up the effort to take those areas, either militarily or through some sort of negotiated settlement.
“Doubling down isn’t merely the choice that they made, but it’s also, increasingly, the only choice they’ve left themselves,” said Gavin Wilde, a Russia expert and senior fellow in the technology and international affairs program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It’s hard for me to discern whether that’s self-sabotage or an effort to get the West to understand — or the US in particular — how existential they’ve chosen to make this conflict, and all the escalatory implications that that entails.”
Ihor Tkachov/AFP via Getty Images
This aerial photograph shows a damaged church, used by Russian troops as a makeshift hospital, in the village of Mala Komyshuvakha, in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine, on February 22, 2023.
Militarily, there are still very real questions about whether Moscow has solved any of its manpower and equipment problems. Russia is reportedly suffering a staggering number of casualties, both of its troops and of its prison recruits from the Wagner Group. The human wave attacks, beyond being terrifyingly gruesome, are unlikely a real long-term strategy.
But a grinding war likely still favors Russia. Russia just doesn’t have the same type of time pressure as Ukraine to prove it can keep winning — or, at least right now, there’s no real indication that it does. Putin’s regime looks pretty stable for the moment.
“We’ve seen very successful management of both elite defections — there are no visible cracks in Putin’s ruling elites — and also of societal discontent, even with mobilization. There were minor protests here and there, but by and large, it was contained,” Kudelia said.
As Russia launches this new offensive, and if it continues to struggle on the battlefield — while also incurring major casualties — both elite and public opinion in Russia could splinter. This is by no means predicting some sort of unraveling of Putin’s power, but it may shape how Russia, or Putin, frames or fights this conflict.
Another thing that might affect elite and public opinion: the further isolation of the Russian economy. So far, the Kremlin has also proved pretty darn resilient against Western sanctions, including on its banking sector, technology imports, and oil and gas. These penalties are hurting Russia, but they are not a fatal blow to its economy — which shrank, but not dramatically.
“They are hurting, but they are not hurting to the point that could get Putin to change his calculus,” Emily Harding, deputy director and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said on a recent panel discussion.
There are a bunch of reasons for this. The Russian state intervened in ways that helped soften the sting of sanctions. Sanctions are extensive, but many, like those on energy, are still limited in scope. The US, Europe, and other partners — about 30 total — signed on to some version of sanctions, but the rest of the world did not. Those gaps, including from major economies like China and India, have made sanctions less effective and offered Russia a financial lifeline.
The US and its partners are continuing to impose additional sanctions, but this is largely tightening existing penalties and an effort to close gaps in sanctions that Russia or its friends could exploit.
One area where sanctions do seem to be working is on technology imports, specifically the kind of advanced tech required for modern weapons — everything from helicopters to precision munitions. Russia has tried to get around this through sanctions evasion and repurposing chips from commercial products to replace or repair equipment. But this isn’t sustainable in the long term, and over time, Russia’s military capabilities are likely to be severely weakened. Russia may already be conserving things like precision-guided missiles.
Russia is also facing other constraints. Like Ukraine, it is tearing through its stocks of ammunition and artillery. Russia has mobilized many, many soldiers, but all of those troops need to be equipped, and Russian industry also has limitations. This is why Russia is reportedly getting things like artillery from North Korea and drones from Iran (two countries also under heavy sanctions, for what it’s worth). But if China actually does step in and give military assistance to Russia, as the US has warned, that could give Moscow a boost.
All of this is to say that Russia is facing real challenges militarily and economically, but none of it yet seems like the knockout punch. And, importantly, none so far seem to have shifted Putin’s calculus.
What has the Ukraine war taught us about conflict now?
The Ukraine war has “reminded everybody how horrible war is, and how horrible it could get — and that’s without even using nuclear weapons,” said Joseph Nye, a US foreign policy expert and university distinguished service professor emeritus and former dean of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
That war is brutal and horrible is not exactly a new observation, but the war in Ukraine is both a war of the future and a war of the past. Technological advances on the battlefield — tools like drones — are reshaping the war, but they’re also not transforming conflict into something never before seen. Right now, traditional instruments of war — ammunition, artillery, armored vehicles, ground troops, trenches — are anchoring this conflict.
“This is a war of incremental, not dramatic, transformation. I think everyone expected perhaps a transformation, or replacement of conventional warfare with new cyber means and using AI and new technologies. What we’re actually seeing is, all of that is happening alongside conventional warfare,” said Branka Marijan, senior researcher on military and security implications of emerging technologies at Project Ploughshares. “Artillery’s still important; that’s not going to go away. If you want to hold territory, you’re still going to need to deploy troops. You’re still going to use tanks.”
Militaries are learning that even as they invest in new technologies like cyber and artificial intelligence, they can’t forgo stockpiles of artillery, either. “Lesson one is really: you need to buy stockpiles for the long war,” said Cynthia Cook, director of the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group and a senior fellow in the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
But having the tools to fight a war, whether artillery or precision missiles, only goes so far. Before the war, Russia, on paper, had the world’s second strongest military. “Morale to organization, to training to logistics, to doctrine and strategy, those are all human things that you can’t automate your way out of, you can’t necessarily innovate your way out of,” Wilde said.
And on the battlefield and off, the Ukraine war has shown the limitations on how much countries can innovate out of the brutality of war.
How Ukraine could become America’s next forever war -
People standing near a Ukrainian national flag watch as dark smoke billows following an airstrike in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, on March 26, 2022. | Aleksey Filippov/AFP via Getty Images
The US never had an exit strategy for Iraq and Afghanistan. Does it have one for Ukraine?
The United States is good at getting involved in wars and not as good at getting out of them.
A year on, the Russia-Ukraine war has no end in sight. The war is at a semi-stalemate, and both Russia and Ukraine are sticking to their demands. Ukraine has been able to defend itself against Russian aggression in large part due to the $29.8 billion worth of weapons and equipment that the US has sent so far. While the US has hit some limits, it is sending ever more advanced weaponry and provides Ukraine with intelligence to help it target Russia more effectively. Ukraine cannot continue the war without Western military and economic support.
All of which raises the question of whether the Russia-Ukraine conflict is entering forever war territory.
The US’s post-9/11 wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan turned into decades-long conflicts because the objectives kept shifting, because they were guided by ideological goals, and because they were enabled by legal authorizations that gave policymakers room to expand the wars. The situation in Ukraine is obviously different from US engagement in Iraq or Afghanistan — for one, the US does not have troops on the ground in Ukraine. But when I asked former high-ranking military officials and national security experts about the risk of protracted war in Ukraine, they told me that those other forever war factors are currently present in the US’s support for the Ukraine war.
The Biden administration does not view the war as endless. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in October, “certainly we don’t want to see a forever war,” and he blames Russian President Vladimir Putin for the war’s continuation. But there’s a lot of time between here and forever. And in statement after statement after statement, officials describe the US’s enduringcommitment to Ukraine. (Neither the White House nor the Pentagon replied to interview requests.)
“This is going to be a generational conflict between the West and Russia,” says historian Michael Kimmage of Catholic University, who has researched Putin’s strategy in the war. “The further the West moves in, the more Putin is going to be motivated to keep on going,” he told me. “This is going to be the mother of all forever wars, because of the nature of the adversary.”
So what can the US learn from its interventions in its Middle East forever wars? In the first year of the Iraq War, a young Gen. David Petraeus said he would repeat the mantra to himself, “Tell me how this ends.”
These days, Petraeus is retired from active duty and shares on social media daily Ukraine war situation reports from the Institute for the Study of War, where he is a board member. “I think the most important question has to do with how one might see this war ending,” Petraeus wrote in an email. “Related to that is the critical question of what needs to be done to convince Vladimir Putin that the war in Ukraine is not sustainable for Russia on the battlefield in Ukraine and also on the home front in Russia.”
But there are other ways of posing the question. Thomas Pickering, a former career ambassador who served in Russia and rose to be undersecretary for political affairs at the State Department, says the potential for a nuclear conflict means the US does have to think about “whether it would make sense to try to terminate the war on an advantageous but not perfect basis.”
“I don’t [think] Ukraine has to become a forever war or even a frozen conflict; in fact, we need to do everything that we and our allies and partners can to enable Ukraine and ensure that this does not become a forever war,” Petraeus, now a partner at the private equity firm KKR, added.
Talking about how and why Ukraine is becoming a forever war, then,is a fine place to start.
Lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan
The global war on terrorism was a sprawling and ill-defined project.
After 9/11, the US was responding to an attack on its soil, but then the George W. Bush administration expanded its international campaign to target not just al-Qaeda but the concept of terrorism — one that somehow the US is still fighting today. Though President Joe Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, US troops are still in the Middle East, and many aspects of the counterterrorism wars endure.
The way that Bush’s interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan began made that possible. Congress approved a joint resolution against threats to the US homeland in 2001 that was so broad that it evolved as the threats did. That vote authorized the use of military force against “nations, organizations, or persons” connected to the 9/11 attacks, and in 2002, Congress passed another broad authorization on Iraq that two decades later is used to counter the Islamic State terrorist group.
The US’s goals in Iraq, for example, ran the gamut of eliminating the risk of purported weapons of mass destruction,regime change, nation-building, countering Iranian influence, and then debilitating ISIS. US troops remain there in 2023. And when there were opportunities to end the initial invasion of Afghanistan — like when hundreds of Taliban fighters surrendered to the US — the Bush administration rejected them. Even now, 18 months after the US withdrew its last troops from Afghanistan and more than a year after the US assassinated perhaps the last known planner of the 2001 attack, the initial authorization has yet to be repealed.
As Rep. Barbara Lee, the only lawmaker who voted against the authorization of military force in Afghanistan in 2001, warned just days after the 9/11 attacks: “We must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.”
Some of the lessons of the Bush and Obama years seem to have been put into action. Strategists now recognize that a small footprint is better than a massive US presence of hundreds of thousands of troops, and that much can be accomplished by partnering with another country’s military (instead of having “boots on the ground”). From the first 20 years of the war on terrorism, the US learned well that corruption among recipients of aid is corrosive to US interests. That commanders on the ground offer overly rosy assessments of progress in a self-deceptive process that ends up extending the war is now a truism.
Throughout, the American people are somewhat willing to ignore ongoing US wars, even when US soldiers are deeply involved.
Mustafa Ciftci/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Ukrainian soldiers attend shooting training near the frontline in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on February 18, 2022.
Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images
A man sweeps near a poster depicting a Ukrainian soldier that reads “Unbreakable. Unconquered. Unstoppable” in Kyiv on February 22, 2023.
But perhaps what the US ought to have learned from the forever wars is the importance of practicing humility and not underestimating one’s enemies. A more difficult lesson to put into practice is the importance of incorporating dialogue and negotiations with adversaries into policy.
Mara Karlin, a top civilian strategist appointed by Biden to the Pentagon, wrote a 2021 book on what the US learned from the post-9/11 wars.In The Inheritance: America’s Military After Two Decades of War, she details how wars without clear ends affect the morale, preparedness, and even civilian control of the military. Karlin warns of the danger of “overreacting to threats and attacks, as the United States did in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks” and of “under-responding, as the United States has done in its persistent inability to recognize and act on the growing security threats posed by China and Russia to the U.S.-led global order over the last decade or so.”
Karlin didn’t respond to a request for comment. But that a key Pentagon leader in 2021 worried more about a US underreaction to Russia than the potential for another endless war shows how committed a leading strategist in the Biden administration may be toward a long-haul fight.
How Ukraine can become America’s next forever war
The striking parallel between the US’s long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the ongoing war in Ukraine is the rhetoric surrounding the conflict.
The US role in supporting Ukraine has been framed as ideological. Biden from the get-go described the conflict in terms of good versus evil, democracy against autocracy.
Does the US “stand for the defense of democracy?” Biden asked again in his recent State of the Union address. “For such a defense matters to us because it keeps the peace and prevents open season for would-be aggressors to threaten our security and prosperity.” And senior State Department official Victoria Nuland wrote in testimony to Congress last month that “Ukraine’s fight is about so much more than Ukraine; it is about the world our own children and grandchildren will inherit.”
The Biden administration may believe that. But rhetoric like that is also how wars continue in perpetuity. It’s how the objectives creep, the goalposts shift. Ideological struggles are not so easy to win.
By some metrics, the objectives that the US set out to achieve in Ukraine have already been achieved. Christopher Chivvis, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explained that the US in the past year has managed to avoid a direct war with Russia, made Russia suffer a strategic defeat, and kept the NATO alliance unified. Ukraine has also maintained its sovereign independence.
Continued unqualified support is“good in the sense that it puts pressure on the Russians to try to moderate their more extreme objectives,” Chivvis told me. “But it’s not likely to get the Ukrainians to think seriously about restraining their own war aims, because they see the whole set of Western nations backing them to the hilt.”
Though many experts told me that it’s time to begin plotting the contours of talks between Russia and Ukraine, neither side sees value in negotiating right now.
The types of military support the West is giving to Ukraine — including US and German tanks and British promises to train Ukrainian pilots on their fighter jets — acknowledge this reality and could help contribute to it, argues Chivvis. The most advanced and heavy weaponry, like the US’s Abrams tanks, likely won’t arrive till next spring. “The trend is toward more and more military support to the Ukrainians, and they have no real reason as of now to limit their own war objectives,” says Chivvis, who previously worked as a US intelligence officer in Europe. “So it’s hard to see how it ends at this point.”
And yet, the longer the war goes on, the more people will die in Ukraine and Russia, and the risks for the war to spiral out of control are real. As Pickering put it, the US risks stumbling into “an endless war punctuated by nuclear use.”
What happens when the war keeps going
The war to defend Ukraine may be more coherent than the war on terrorism, but it also appears ill-defined in terms of goals and strategies.Analysts who might not agree on much else do agree that there isn’t enough of a debate on what outcomes the US seeks.
The Biden administration, for its unprecedented mustering of allies through NATO, Europe, and elsewhere, has left some gaps unfilled. Deferring to Ukraine, as Biden’s national security leaders have consistently done in public interviews, is not a strategy.
Kay Nietfeld/picture alliance via Getty Images
Ukrainian soldiers stand in the square in front of St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv on February 20, 2023, after the visit of President Biden.
Less attention has been paid to how this conflict might end in a way that serves US interests in Europe and the world, according to Samuel Charap, an analyst at the RAND Corporation. And those trying to have that conversation about how to end the war, he told me, are sometimes cast as Russian sympathizers. But there is an urgency to have these difficult conversations. “We know that, for example, conflicts that last more than a year are more than likely to continue to go on for 10 years,” Charap told me.
“I don’t think that we should tolerate a war that stretches on for years, because if we do, it means that we are tolerating greater risk that the war will spread,” said Evelyn Farkas, a former Obama defense official who now directs the McCain Institute think tank. “If we knowingly accept a war that will go on for years, then I think we are taking on a moral hazard because Ukrainians are dying every month this war goes on.”
The toll on human life is unfathomable, and the long-term effects on the country will be many. Kurt Volker, a former ambassador to NATO now at the Atlantic Council think tank, is worried about how the wartime mentality has forever changed Ukrainian institutions. “We’re going to have to help Ukraine get back to normal,” he told me.
“You have the presidential administration basically running everything. You have one centralized media operation for news for the country, which is highly censored,” Volker said. “These are things that can’t go on in a normal society. So they’re going to have to decentralize. They’re going to have to open new media outlets, going to have to have political pluralism in terms of political parties and competition — all kinds of things that they are not currently grappling with.”
The rebuilding of Ukraine will require massive investments, too. The country’s energy infrastructure will need to be rebuilt, and just keeping its economy afloat in the meantime may require up to $5 billion a month, the International Monetary Fund has estimated. After the hot conflict ends, the US commitment will likely continue. But an end to the conflict seems increasingly hard to find.
A Defense Department leader, Celeste Wallander, was recently asked at a Washington think tank event whether the Pentagon is planning for a negotiated outcome or an outright Ukrainian victory on the battlefield. “It is difficult ahead of time to precisely predict how an armed conflict will end,” Wallander said, though she did emphasize that “it ends in Russia’s strategic failure, no question,” and that the US will support the choices made by Ukraine as to whether it would negotiate with Russia.
But Wallander and her colleagues in the Biden administration have left open the question of how the US would extricate itself from this conflict. Without having a clear answer of how this ends or how the US will get out, they presuppose that Washington will be in this war for the long haul.
A new indictment shows how Sam Bankman-Fried’s political influence worked -
Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, leaves a New York courtroom on February 16, 2023. | Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg via Getty Images
One FTX executive donated to “woke shit for transactional purposes.” Another gave to Republicans.
Disgraced cryptocurrency executive Sam Bankman-Fried secretly spread his political influence by “steering tens of millions of dollars of illegal campaign contributions to both Democrats and Republicans,” federal prosecutors alleged in a new indictment of Bankman-Fried filed Thursday.
Bankman-Fried took credit for more than $38 million in publicly disclosed campaign donations in the 2022 election cycle. But, prosecutors say, he hatched a “scheme” in which millions more in company money would be given to yet more candidates and groups — only that money would be given in the name of other company executives, not his own.
Per federal campaign finance law, contributions to individual candidates and party committees are capped at several thousand dollars per cycle, but there is no cap on donations to super PACs. The catch is that all those contributions, and the donors’ identities, must be disclosed to the Federal Election Commission.
That’s what Bankman-Fried didn’t want, say prosecutors. He wanted to play all sides of the political system and spread his influence, but he “did not want to be known as a left-leaning partisan, or to have his name publicly attached to Republican candidates,” they allege.He also wanted to steer more money to candidates to whom he had already given the maximum allowable donations, according to the indictment.
So, he got two FTX executives to play those roles — one to be the “left-leaning partisan,” and one to be the Republican donor. The executives aren’t named in the indictment, but the details and public campaign disclosure information strongly suggest that they are Nishad Singh and Ryan Salame, respectively. Each gave tens of millions in campaign donations in the 2022 cycle, but the money really came from Bankman-Fried’s companies, the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and hedge fund Alameda Research, prosecutors say.
This is known as a “straw donor” scheme, which is illegal. Conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza was indicted for a similar offense in 2014, but at a much smaller scale — he sent $20,000 through straw donors, but Bankman-Fried may have sent tens of millions.
Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to an earlier indictment filed by these same prosecutors in December, charging him with several counts of fraud and with conspiring to launder money. He has not yet entered his plea on the new indictment.
How Bankman-Fried’s campaign donation scheme worked, according to prosecutors
Bankman-Fried and a political consultant working for him, unnamed in the indictment, allegedly would pick candidates or groups they wanted to fund, and Singh would put his name on the donations to the more left-leaning causes. Per the indictment, the political consultant told Singh, “in general, you being the center left face of our spending will mean you giving to a lot of woke shit for transactional purposes.”
In 2022, Singh’s donations included $4 million to Reproductive Freedom for All, a group supporting an abortion rights ballot initiative in Michigan; $2.25 million to Women Vote!, the independent expenditure arm of Emily’s List, a group supporting pro-abortion-rights women candidates; and $1.1 million to the LGBTQ Victory Fund, money used to support Becca Balint’s winning Democratic primary bid for Vermont’s congressional seat.
Per the indictment, Singh was uncomfortable making that LGBTQ Victory Fund contribution, apparently because he was not gay, but he eventually agreed there was no one “trusted at FTX [who was] bi/gay” who could have made it instead.
Prosecutors also claim Bankman-Fried and others coordinated donations on “an encrypted, auto-deleting Signal chat” called “Donation Processing.” They say that at one point, an FTX employee was told to send $107,000 from Bankman-Fried’s personal account to the New York State Democratic Committee — but that Bankman-Fried later asked for the money to be sent from Singh’s account instead. Singh has recently been preparing a plea deal with prosecutors, Bloomberg News reported last week. Two other executives associated with Alameda or FTX, Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, have already pleaded guilty to fraud charges.
Salame, meanwhile, spent big on Republican candidates and pro-Republican groups, giving around $24 million in publicly disclosed donations. The indictment claims some of that was “directed by Bankman-Fried and funded by Alameda.” Salame gave $15 million to a Super PAC funding various GOP congressional candidates. Separately, about $1.5 million of it also went to support his girlfriend, Michelle Bond, who lost the GOP primary for a New York congressional seat. Salame has not been charged.
Disclosure:In August 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, awarded Vox’s Future Perfect a grant for a 2023 reporting project. That project is now on pause.
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Ukraine war: One year in 87 seconds on anniversary - On 24 February 2022, Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine, hoping to take over the country in a matter of days.
Moldova warns of Russian ‘psy-ops’ as tensions rise - Moldova’s pro-EU leaders reject Russian claims that Ukraine plans to attack its breakaway territory.
Ukraine war: The real reason for China’s charm offensive over Ukraine and Russia - The West may come away unimpressed - but convincing them was never likely the main goal for Beijing.
Ukraine war: Six sporting lives lost - ‘We will not forgive, or forget’ - Numerous Ukrainian sportspeople signed up to fight after Russia invaded a year ago. Not all those who swapped the sports field for the battlefield have survived the conflict.
From Ars Technica
Rocket Report: SpaceX may see revenue spike in 2023; Terran 1 gets a date - “Each Artemis mission will be properly characterized as a test mission.” - link
81% of international flights into NYC had SARS-CoV-2 in waste, small trial finds - The study demonstrated feasibility as COVID surveillance nose-dives worldwide. - link
EU seeks input on making tech companies pay for ISPs’ network upgrades - EU opens proceeding that could mandate direct payments from content providers. - link
A world of hurt for Fortinet and Zoho after users fail to install patches - Attackers are capitalizing on organizations’ failure to patch critical vulnerabilities. - link
Valve used secret memory access “honeypot” to detect 40K Dota 2 cheaters - Publisher is publicizing its methods to send a message to would-be exploit users. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
What weighs more, a gallon of water, or a gallon of butane? -
Traffic Cop: Yes ma’am, I’m afraid you were speeding.
Older Woman: Oh, I see.
Traffic Cop: Can I see your license please?
Older Woman: Well, I would give it to you but I don’t have one.
Traffic Cop: Don’t have one?
Older Woman: No. I lost it 4 years ago for drunk driving.
Traffic Cop: I see…Can I see your vehicle registration papers please.
Older Woman: I can’t do that.
Traffic Cop: Why not?
Older Woman: I stole this car.
Traffic Cop: Stole it?
Older Woman: Yes, and I killed and hacked up the owner.
Traffic Cop: You what!?
Older Woman: His body parts are in plastic bags in the trunk if you want to see.
The traffic cop looks at the woman and slowly backs away to his car while calling for back up. Within minutes 5 police cars circle the car. A senior officer slowly approaches the car, clasping his half drawn gun.
Officer 2: Ma’am, could you step out of your vehicle please!
The woman steps out of her vehicle.
Older woman: Is there a problem sir?
Officer 2: My colleague here tells me that you have stolen this car and murdered the owner.
Older Woman: Murdered the owner? Are you serious?!
Officer 2: Yes, could you please open the trunk of your car, please.
The woman opens the trunk, revealing nothing but an empty trunk.
Officer 2: Is this your car, ma’am?
Older Woman: Yes, here are the registration papers.
The traffic cop is quite stunned.
Officer 2: My colleague claims that you do not have a driving license.
The woman digs into her handbag and pulls out a clutch purse and hands it to the officer.
The officer examines the license quizzically.
Officer 2: Thank you ma’am, but I am puzzled, as I was told by my officer here that you didn’t have a license, that you stole this car, and that you murdered and hacked up the owner!
Older Woman: Bet the lying bastard told you I was speeding, too!
A man answers his door to find a somber-looking police officer standing on his porch. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, sir,” the officer says, “but it looks like your wife has been hit by a bus.” -
The man replies, “Yeah, but she’s got a great personality.”
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Ihor Tkachov/AFP via Getty Images
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