Daily-Dose

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From New Yorker

From Vox

A military analyst explains Russia’s massive troop buildup near Ukraine’s borders.

President Joe Biden has again said that Russia could invade Ukraine in a matter of days. Secretary of State Antony Blinken appeared before the United Nations Security Council on Thursday, narrating a possible course Russia may take as it launches an invasion.

Skepticism is always warranted. But Russia does have 150,000 troops placed at different points along the Ukrainian border, an undeniable threat that makes war possible. Still, it is hard to fully understand what this massive military buildup actually looks like in real time.

Vox spoke to Scott Boston, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation who specializes in Russian military capabilities. Boston focuses on the military side — so he couldn’t fully weigh in on the diplomatic or political dynamics at play among Russia, Ukraine, the US, and Europe. But what he’s been seeing for weeks has created a sense “that it’s been growing over time to something.”

Historically, at least compared to the Soviet era during the Cold War, Russia’s force is small, Boston said, but it’s “essentially an invasion force.”

The buildup means, for Boston, that troops are prepared to invade, if those orders come. And right now, there is no compelling evidence of deescalation on the ground. “We’re really at the point where the next things that we might see really could be the things that Russia would do to actually start an attack,” Boston said. “They don’t have to do a lot else to prepare militarily.”

Having an invasion force does not mean that Russia will use it, Boston said. But if it does, it may take time for the world to fully understand the devastation, as one tactic Russia might use is to jam up communications. “It might be a while before we start to see the cellphone videos, or people getting text messages or phone calls, out of areas where the Russians have entered,” Boston said. And as Russia’s capabilities far exceed Ukraine’s, depending on how this unfolds, it could be catastrophic: an incalculable and incomprehensible tragedy that may be hard for the world to grasp.

“It’s hard for me to say anything other than a sense of alarm or dismay,” Boston said. “I work on the Russian military and land warfare. The fact that my two main subject areas are suddenly in demand is deeply concerning.”

“I would,” he added, “very much like to go back to obscurity now.”

The conversation, edited and condensed for length and clarity, is below.

Jen Kirby

Russia has built up tens of thousands of troops at the Ukrainian border. A frenzy last week suggested a Russian invasion was imminent. Then Moscow talked about a “partial pullback,” a claim the West was skeptical about, maybe for good reason. Where are we now?

Scott Boston

We’re not at the end of the road, but we’ve reached the point that the US intelligence community and a lot of Russia military watchers — particularly in DC, but also more broadly — we’ve been watching this happen for months. You almost reach this point where you feel there’s this sense of inevitability, that it’s been growing over time to something.

In the beginning of December, declassified information in the Washington Post said Russia was planning to grow to over 100,000 [in] battalions, tactical groups, land forces — and we’re there. The president [Joe Biden] said that there are 150,000 Russian military personnel. The 150,000 number is the newest.

We’re now at the point where — with Russian forces largely deployed, potentially to positions from which they could launch attacks — there is no longer a period where we can count on any deal of warning. There’s no longer a period where we should expect that we would see any further movements of units moving across Russia on trains, for example.

For now, it’s a period of essentially tactical warning. But if Russia does decide to do something, it could be any day now, is how I would say it.

Jen Kirby

When you say tactical warning, what do you mean by that?

Scott Boston

We’re really at the point where the next things that we might see really could be the things that Russia would do to actually start an attack.

They don’t have to do a lot else to prepare militarily. They’re not literally up on the border, but they wouldn’t be. That doesn’t give them as much flexibility in where they cross. It’s in their interest to have some ambiguity about what they’re going to do.

That ambiguity, however, comes from the fact that they have a great many things that they could do. They can threaten Ukraine from Crimea, and on the coastline in their south and especially in the southwest. They border, or are, in some cases, already inside Ukraine in the Donbas, of course, as well as in Crimea. They’re in the north, in Belarus, in multiple locations.

The surprise could be “what happens, where does it come from?” Not “does it happen?”

Map of Russia and Ukraine Christina Animashaun/Vox

Jen Kirby

Essentially, if Russia wanted to start a war, there’s not much more it needs. Both in terms of personnel and equipment — everything is kind of in place right now.

Scott Boston

Very nearly, yes.

Part of that depends on how they want to do it, how they want to sequence it. If they wanted to do something smaller, they could have done it a while ago. If they wanted to start with an air and missile and cyber campaign, for example, to go after Ukrainian leadership targets and high-priority military targets, if they wanted to do that before they launched the land operation, they could have done that.

There is at least one thing — I think this is the big one — that I’ve heard multiple analysts say that’s sticking out in my mind. A lot of people have noticed that this time — and in contrast with, say, 2014 [when Russia annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine] — we are not hearing the drumbeat to the Russian population of the necessity for war.

Now, what does this imply? Well, it could be that, as the US intelligence community has indicated on more than one occasion, Russia could be seeking to carry out a false flag operation that might galvanize Russian attitudes. They might think they could do that quickly and thus preserve potentially both the element of surprise, but also their flexibility. If they spent the last month building their population up: “Let’s go do this, let’s get this done,” then, there wouldn’t be any surprise. They also wouldn’t really be able to effectively back down if they decided not to do it.

Jen Kirby

That makes sense. What I don’t fully understand is what we’re talking about when we say 150,000 Russian troops are at the border. I have this image of Russian soldiers hanging out in tents, but I assume that’s not quite accurate. Can you paint a picture of what this buildup looks like?

Scott Boston

The way the buildup happened, we saw a number of units from farther away deploy to the area before we saw some of the highest-readiness, locally deployed units move.

Some of those units had also deployed there in April last year as part of the earlier buildup. We saw that they were at the one of the garrisons at Yelnya [a Russian town], a few hundred kilometers from the Ukrainian border, near the Belarusian border. But they were at that garrison. We followed them around a little bit, watching them on commercial satellite imagery. That’s where they ended up until about two weeks ago, when all of a sudden we saw Yelnya emptying. So these different units that had been in this garrison suddenly picked up and relocated to positions near the border. Some of those locations were tent cities. Not necessarily a tactical layout. But it’s a field-expedient one, because it’s closer.

If you’ve flushed forces — so that they are to be ready for an attack — they are going to go to ground, they’re going to disperse, they are going to camouflage, they are going to be more difficult to see.

Almost everyone now has sent most of the forces that we would expect. There’s probably still a few on the way, but the very best Russian units now are starting to be represented, like the airborne troops, elements of First Guards Tank Army — they have great names.

Jen Kirby

First Guards Tank Army, you said?

Scott Boston

They formed that unit after they invaded Ukraine, that came together in 2015-2016.

A colleague of mine recently asked, “How long have the Russians been building up on the border with Ukraine?” And I told him, “about eight years now” — which was half-joking, but also, Russia has been systematically building forces on the border. Two combined-arms armies, three divisions in those two armies; four now. They’ve reinforced Crimea. A sizable chunk of the forces that surround Ukraine are Russian units that are permanently stationed there, and that have been reinforced annually, at least, since the invasion of Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Jen Kirby

I’ve seen this described as something like “the largest troop buildup in Europe since World War II.” What does that mean, exactly?

Scott Boston

What makes this different is that this is a deployed force. In a historical sense, all of the armies in Europe are a shadow of their Cold War selves. The force that the Soviet Union, at the head of the Warsaw Pact, had available for combat operations in the 1980s, was larger than the force that has been deployed around Ukraine.

However, they never mounted up and went into jump-off positions and forward loaded fuel and ammunition, and basically threatened to go. There were some scary moments, like the Able Archer incident in 1983, where mutual misunderstandings could have led to a really, really bad outcome.

This is essentially an invasion force. I’m not saying that’s what they’re going to do for certain. But that’s what they have prepared to do.

Let me also just make that that point really clear. It seems to me that Russia’s armed forces and the government forces that might support them have been told to prepare for a large-scale invasion of Ukraine. Whether they get the order to go, or if they get the order to do a narrower option that is smaller in scale or shorter in duration, while they preserve the ability to threaten to do the larger-scale operation, we don’t know what they’re going to do with it.

Jen Kirby

Can I ask — well, why? My understanding is the Ukrainian army couldn’t really hold off the Russians. Russia seems to have amassed enough capabilities to completely overwhelm Ukraine, though they could potentially do it with a lot less resources or personnel. I’m just trying to understand why they have escalated to this extreme level?

Scott Boston

There’s a few things embedded in that are worth teasing out.

As I mentioned, all of the armies in Europe are smaller than they used to be. Russia’s army is 20 percent of the size of the Soviet Army. That has implications because — although I think there is good reason to believe they have substantial advantages in a high- intensity conventional war against Ukrainian forces — they do not have unlimited soldiers. They have a numerical advantage in a military-to-military sense, but they have a relatively small number of personnel to try to occupy an enormous land area with a population of at least 40 million people.

We are assured that the Ukrainian population will rise up and resist. I do not know how many — hard to tell in advance. Russia has a lot of control over how many people they have to manage, because they can decide how much terrain they want to conquer. What this thing looks like in the long run still could really be challenging. There’s a lot that can go wrong for Russia.

Russia also brought forces from practically as far as the coast of the Pacific Ocean. Thousands of kilometers of movement, mainly on trains. They brought combat aircraft, and we’re now seeing combat attack helicopters. They’re positioning all these forces. A lot of it is very visible. Those of us who follow the Russian military are kind of like, “Why are we seeing all this stuff?”

I think that is part of the message. I think they are doing this from the perspective of “Boy, if they just roll over, and we don’t actually have to kill everyone to go do this, then it will be a lot easier for us.” If they’ve calculated that there’s a chance that could work, Russia may have calculated that it’s a twofer. It could put a lot of pressure on Ukraine, which [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky, for whatever reason, has basically ignored. If that doesn’t work, then we can always still attack. Russia has to understand there’s a lot of risks in an operation like this.

Jen Kirby

What do you mean by that?

Scott Boston

It’s one thing for [the US and NATO allies] to be like, “Well, we are going to stay the hell out of this thing in Ukraine.” It’s one thing for everyone to be very, kind of academically, “Oh, clearly Ukraine’s not part of NATO, we’re not going to be involved [in sending troops].” It’s another thing for bombs to fall in a village and kill a bunch of innocent civilians, or refugees to start to reach the Polish border, or large-scale civilian casualties. At a certain point: Are we just going to sit here and watch Ukraine burn and do nothing?

It’s not going to feel very satisfying to impose sanctions. Let’s say we impose damaging sanctions. Russia will certainly be arguing, “Well, we’re doing this for what we think are very good reasons; since we think your sanctions are completely unjustified, we’re going to retaliate against you.”

Here’s one of the most concerning things. Russia’s strategic nuclear forces exercise could potentially take place in the next weeks. This is part of a Russian approach: how do we, as Russia, ensure NATO is deterred from intervening?

One of them is absolutely to remind everyone of the available tools in their nuclear arsenal. I don’t even want to get near that. I don’t even want to think about that — the fact that they’re going to be waving this around.

Jen Kirby

That’s all really terrifying. It sounds like what you’re saying is that once you start a war, the idea that it can be a contained thing is not realistic. But that can be so hard to grasp before it happens.

Scott Boston

There’s multiple levels of things we don’t know. There’s a lot we don’t know simply about what kind of information is going to be getting out of Ukraine. As part of a military campaign, shutting down internal communications in Ukraine is entirely a foreseeable thing Russia might do. It might be a while before we start to see the cellphone videos, or people getting text messages or phone calls, out of areas where the Russians have entered.

Let’s say we’re starting to find out what’s happening. It is not going to be clean war. Russia has, at best, I would say, an early-1990s level of precision guided-strike capability compared to the West. So maybe 10, maybe 20 percent, of the munitions they’re going to be dropping from aircraft are precision. A great deal of their firepower is old-school, unguided artillery. GPS makes that a little more accurate. They’ve got some other tools like UAVs [unarmed aerial vehicles; basically, drones] that should help them be a little faster and more accurate with their legacy rocket and cannon artillery. But they are fundamentally indiscriminate weapons. Fighting happens among people. It happens where people live. It’s scary.

The scale is another thing that we don’t really understand. We haven’t had that kind of high-intensity combat, especially between two sides that have relatively modern weapons, in a very long time — certainly haven’t had it in Europe. We might be about to learn a lot of things, or relearn a lot of things, because I think people think they understand what war looks like — in a lot of cases, that might be affected by conflicts that [the US has] been involved in. This will be different, and we don’t know how it will be different.

I personally find it very difficult to stayed detached from from this, because I just think about what it must be like to be there. I don’t particularly envy the Russian soldiers that have to do this. But at the same time, imagine being a Ukrainian soldier, or civilian, and trying to think about how you’re going to defend your home when you are facing an adversary that potentially has enormous advantages in long-range strike capabilities, enormous advantages in air capability, has cyber capabilities that could take out your ability to communicate. Those are areas where Russia has enormous military advantages.

That will probably get you to lopsided outcomes. It’s not that Russian tank crews are going to be so much better than Ukrainian tank crews. But once you get into the melee, modern warfare is just a blizzard of high-explosive blast and fragmentation. It’s a really hostile place for anyone to be in. Russia is largely going to try to fight this at arm’s length, and I think that they have the tools to allow themselves to do that to a significant extent. It is later on, against armed members of the population, or armed former military continuing to resist, where we could see a lot of the Russian casualties.

Jen Kirby

It is hard to stay detached because it just sounds so horrific.

Scott Boston

The thing that really gets me is that no one, no country, will be better off as a result of this war.

Jen Kirby

Russia has been doing these military exercises — in the Black Sea, and Belarus. Is this just flexing their muscles? Is it a dry run? Maybe they’re in two separate buckets, but broadly, what are they doing these exercises for?

Scott Boston

It is a pretty typical action for them to carry out exercises. Since Sergey Shoygu took over as minister of defense in 2013, Russia has brought back what they call surprise combat readiness inspections. That is; on short notice, go out to the field and go train to do your wartime mission kind of thing. It’s part of their increased focus on readiness.

Well, it turns out, of course, that short-notice readiness exercises are a wonderful excuse to have soldiers out getting ready to do something else, too. In this case, it probably strains credibility a little bit that you would transport units from the eastern military districts to Belarus unannounced in order to have an exercise. They probably could have found a place between, like, Vladivostok and Minsk, to have done it on Russian territory if they really want to exercise those guys.

In the Black Sea, specifically, there’s exercises, which is one of the ways they could potentially menace the coastline east or west of Crimea, but particularly west. You’ve probably noticed they have been moving additional surface combatants at least from other fleets into the Black Sea. We have some amphibious warships from the Baltic Fleet and some from Northern Fleet. So all the way up in, like—

Jen Kirby

Like the Arctic Circle?

Scott Boston

Yes, exactly. They’re probably enjoying the weather on the trip through the [Mediterranean Sea] compared to December north of the Arctic Circle. But they came a long ways to hold exercises. I don’t know how much I could expect that they came there to exercise and then just leave.

Jen Kirby

So my general conclusion from our conversation is that there’s very little evidence that Russia has deescalated, at least based on your analysis.

Scott Boston

Although I would love to be wrong, I can’t really point to anything that I find convincing. I would love for them to deescalate. This is for all the reasons that we talked about.

It’s very difficult to imagine that they would go to all this trouble and accept what they think is essentially nothing in response.

Jen Kirby

Well, I guess my question is: can we be stuck in this awful standoff, where Russia is threatening war, indefinitely?

Scott Boston

I don’t know if this is more pessimistic or more optimistic. Years is definitely out; more than a few months is probably a pretty big lift.

Here’s part of why: At a certain point, there’s just going to be a lot more friction keeping them there. You are transporting food and fuel to them, to maintain them in field conditions. It is a higher burden; it probably costs somewhat more, having them out in the fields like that.

But the cost to them would be over time. There are large portions of Russia that have less military force in them than maybe in decades, maybe longer. A lot of Russia is uncovered because they brought so much to Ukraine. At a certain point, your conscripts only serve for 12 months, so your last group of spring conscripts are getting short. They are not in the combat units, but it is unimaginable to me that there aren’t some conscripts in some of the support or combat support units around Ukraine and Crimea, and in Belarus.

I don’t know what reason they would have to prolong being in the position that they’re in.

If I had to guess what happens next — I probably shouldn’t — but I would guess a false flag operation or some provocation. When it happens, we’ll probably know what it is. But I don’t know what it will be. Some provocation to justify military use. And then the question is: how big do they go? How quickly? Do they try to stage some sort of knockout blow that cows the Ukrainian government into giving up quickly? Or do they go isolate Kyiv and try to directly bring about the end? It is very difficult to imagine any of this stuff.

Jen Kirby

It’s really hard.

Scott Boston

I studied the Russian military for a while. One of the things that was noteworthy in Russia’s past uses of force is that they were not maximalist. They do not sign on for large-scale, long-term occupations. They don’t like to tie their hands like that. They also don’t generally like to show you what they’re doing in advance.

There’s a bunch of things about this that don’t quite work. But taken as a whole, it’s still difficult to escape the view that I think they brought their military there to use it in some way, quite likely in a substantial way.

Jen Kirby

Since I do have you, I have to ask you about the mud.

Scott Boston

It never hurts to have the ground frozen instead of muddy. Rasputitsa [apparently “time without roads”; it happens in the spring, from melting snow, and in the fall, from rains, and makes everything muddy] is totally a thing. Rasputitsa ground the German army to a halt in 1941 in October. It was not equipped for invading a country that had practically no paved roads.

By contrast, the Soviets, and now the Russians, they understand what the road and ground conditions are like. The Russian military, because it operates Soviet-design equipment primarily, is extremely well-equipped in terms of highly mobile vehicles with wide tracks that give them low ground pressure with high power-to-weight ratios. They have an understanding of how to operate in that terrain.

But mud is totally a thing. Getting a vehicle stuck is totally a thing; that’s why we have recovery vehicles. I don’t want to overstate the effect on the campaign. But it absolutely is a problem, has been a problem in this region. Some of the areas that they might be crossing in, from Belarus into Ukraine, are from marshes. They will definitely be a lot more passable if the ground is frozen than if not.

But if Ukraine can’t do anything to stop them without relocating and being struck by aircraft when they move around in the open, then there’s only so much the mud will help.

Jen Kirby

What are you looking for next? We’ve now heard about February 20, because that’s the end of the Olympics and the end of these exercises in Belarus. But, if not necessarily date-wise, what are you looking for in the next few days? Or weeks, if we have them?

Scott Boston

I think we’re at the “any day now.” It’s difficult to predict what will happen next. It’s not clear to me how many of [their next steps] will be visible on social media, or clear according to commercial satellite imagery.

Again, it’s difficult to imagine this thing deescalating peacefully, which is really unfortunate. But Russia is the one that chooses the time and place of military action here.

There’s a lot that they can hide, and they’re actually quite good at it. We may have been lulled into a false sense of security by how we saw all these things happening before. But once they really get into it, there will probably be a lot of things that we don’t see.

The Colorado hiker is an extreme, if relatable, example. But unwanted robocalls and texts are more than just a pervasive annoyance or a reason why a man was lost for longer than he might have been. They cost me a little bit of time and patience, but they cost the millions of people who fall for robocall and text-related scams money — a lot of it. Truecaller, a call blocking app, estimates Americans lost nearly $30 billion to phone scams in 2021 (it’s difficult to know the real number, as most people don’t report being scammed).

How can this possibly be a problem, still, in this modern world of technological wonders? Our phones have become tiny computers that are more powerful than what NASA used to land people on the moon. Why can’t they stop an unsolicited phone call? How hard can it possibly be?

Pretty hard, it turns out. Those technological advances apply to phones, too. Robocalls and texts are one of the unintended consequences.

What made the robocall invasion possible

Calling and texting anyone anywhere in the world has become relatively cheap and easy. There was a time when you had to go through a switchboard to be connected to another person. Up until a few decades ago, there were only a few phone companies in the country, and they owned all the phone lines. And long-distance calls cost a lot. This made it difficult and prohibitively expensive to embark on mass-calling operations at the scale we see today.

Then the Telecommunications Act of 1996 came along.

“Congress passed a law that broke up all the monopolies,” Jim Dalton, CEO of robocall prevention software company TransNexus, told me.

“The good news is it allowed all these different companies to come in and create all kinds of innovation, which drove down the price to basically nothing,” Dalton said.

Innovations like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, which transmit calls over the internet rather than over wires. The bad news is, VoIP makes spoofing phone numbers — telling your phone’s caller ID that the call comes from a different number than it actually does — very simple, while autodialers that can call many people at the same time cost very little. It’s also a lot harder to track down and go after the people who do it, as is often the case with internet-based bad behavior. There are thousands of VoIP providers in this country alone, and some of them don’t care if their services are used by scammers.

That means there are lots of scammers using lots of services and technologies to make lots of calls and texts to run lots of scams on lots of us. Trying to stop them is a constant game of whack-a-mole; when one avenue of reaching us is shut down, another pops up. And when regulators tried to crack down on spoofed calls, scammers shifted to other means of reaching us. That’s why you’re getting more scam texts than you used to.

Or, as Dalton put it: “There is no integrity in the telephone network. It’s a free-for- all. You can do whatever the heck you want.”

To put that free-for-all in numbers: TNS says we got almost 80 billion in 2021; YouMail, a robocall blocking app, puts it at about 50 billion. Some truly unfortunate people get hundreds of calls a day. And if you think the amount of scam calls you get on your mobile phone is bad, it’s even worse for landlines. TNS says that nearly half of all calls to landlines are unsolicited, compared to a fifth to wireless numbers. And then there are the texts. Robokiller, which makes a robocall blocking app, estimates that we got 86 billion spam texts last year — 55 percent more than we got the year before.

It’s not like we haven’t tried to do something about it. Over the years, new laws have made unsolicited robocalls illegal, created a Do Not Call registry, and forbidden spoofing phone numbers for malicious purposes. Scammers and companies that facilitate scammers have been hit with restraining orders, fined, sued, arrested, and sent to prison. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Department of Justice, and attorneys general from every state have made efforts to stop robocalls.

Nevertheless, the robocalls persisted.

Help is on the way, maybe

So we’re trying again. The latest effort is 2019’s Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence, or TRACED, Act. Despite these times of deep political divides, the TRACED Act passed with overwhelming support in the House and Senate: only four members of Congress between both houses and both parties voted against it. Presumably, three of them are the only people in the country who don’t get robocalls. The fourth is Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).

TRACED gives the FCC the power to do several things, including mandating that service providers implement measures to authenticate their callers, better police their customers, and put their robocall mitigation efforts in the FCC’s new Robocall Mitigation Database. If they don’t enter their information in the database, they could be fined. Perhaps worse, other providers can block all of their calls — unsolicited or wanted, from spoofed numbers or legitimate. That’s a big problem for a provider because you don’t have much of a business if your customers’ calls don’t go through to anyone else’s networks.

So, how are these providers supposed to authenticate those callers? The FCC is requiring them to use STIR/SHAKEN, which stands for Secure Telephone Identity Revisited and Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs (yeah, it’s a bit of a stretch to get to SHAKEN from there, but they really wanted to make this James Bond-inspired acronym work). STIR is the set of standards to add digital signatures to calls, verifying that they’re coming from the number on the caller ID, while SHAKEN is the framework to implement those standards, telling voice providers how to handle that certificate as it travels across networks from the origin to the endpoint (you).

This isn’t meant to stop robocalls or spoofed numbers. For one thing, not all of them are illegal or unsolicited. A pharmacy might use robocalls to tell you that a prescription is ready, or a food delivery person might use a spoofed number to let you know your food is here without having to reveal their personal mobile number. Rather, it just tells you and your provider if the phone numbers the calls are coming from are spoofed in the first place. That makes it easier to screen or block them, and it makes it easier for law enforcement and regulators to trace them back to their origin.

Dalton called STIR/SHAKEN “a whole different level of accountability and liability,” but only if it’s implemented by every provider. Right now, it isn’t. The FCC’s deadline to implement STIR/SHAKEN was June 30, 2021, but only for large providers, like Verizon and AT&T. Companies with fewer than 100,000 subscribers have until June 30, 2023. STIR/SHAKEN also doesn’t yet work on calls that come from or pass through older networks (a.k.a. wires). Dalton described this as not a “loophole” but a “loopchasm,” perhaps even a “loopcanyon.”

And there’s still the problem of gateway providers, or the middlemen that scammers based in other countries route their calls through to get to the US. The FCC is working to make STIR/SHAKEN and other rules apply to US-based gateway providers, who may be looking the other way when scammers abuse their services or don’t have the resources to correctly police their own services.

“Until there is SHAKEN everywhere, it’s a joke,” Dalton said. “It’s a joke until the federal government gets serious and makes everybody implement SHAKEN.”

After Dalton and I spoke, the government did, in fact, “get serious.” The FCC decided to move the STIR/SHAKEN deadline up to June 30, 2022, for the types of providers that were found to be a major source of illegal robocalls. An FCC official told Recode that the agency expects we’ll see a significant decrease in bad calls after that.

Or the scammers will find new ways to get through to our phones. Like this: Jim Tyrrell, senior director of product marketing at TNS, says his company has found that scammers are increasingly buying up blocks of real phone numbers and making calls from them. Those aren’t spoofed, and they’re less likely to be flagged by your provider.

“They’ll make very few calls across hundreds of thousands of telephone numbers to try to avoid detection,” Tyrrell said. “It’s a constant battle. If I didn’t know better, I would think they have their own data science team trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t work.”

Guess what else STIR/SHAKEN doesn’t apply to? Texts. So scammers are turning to them, and the FCC is working on ways to stop them. Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said the agency is looking for ways that mobile carriers could identify and block texts before they reach consumers’ phones. In the meantime, be very careful about clicking on links in texts. Some of them can be pretty convincing.

I have taken matters into my own hands

Don’t give up on your phone just yet. Experts are optimistic about STIR/SHAKEN, and regulators and lawmakers are still working on the problem. In the meantime, there are things you can do to reduce the number of calls and texts you get.

Sens. John Thune and Ed Markey, who sponsored TRACED, recently introduced another robocall bill: the Robocall Traceback Enhancement Act. This bill would make it easier for members of the private industry group that TRACED set up to trace back scam calls, to share information about calls and callers. It would also let the group and the FCC publish a list of providers that don’t cooperate with anti-robocall efforts.

Thune told Recode that he thinks the new bill is “another important step toward holding these bad actors accountable,” and that he hopes his colleagues pass it “without delay.” Thune and Markey recently urged the FCC to get more data on which providers are recurring subjects of traceback orders.

One good thing about the rise of robotexts is that they might be easier to stop than calls, Alex Quilici, CEO of YouMail, told Recode. Because texts are, well, text, they’re easier for providers to identify and filter out than audio phone calls. That’s what email providers do with spam. You probably don’t get fewer spam emails than you did 20 years ago (some estimates say more spam emails are sent every day than Americans get robocalls per year), but you don’t see the vast majority of them because email providers have gotten better at identifying and filtering them out. If you don’t believe me, check your spam folder.

But Quilici expects the number of robotexts to increase for a while, as it takes time for mitigation measures to be put in place.

“During that time, the bad guys scale, “ he said, “and they learn what to do to get through — making it harder to shut them off.”

There are things you can do, too. Most mobile carriers now offer spam call identification services for free, which are activated by default (that’s why I get so many calls from “Scam Likely,” who is not, in fact, a real person but T-Mobile’s label for calls it believes to be from scammers). They also offer free spam-blocking apps that have paid “premium” tiers. I will note that these services aren’t foolproof, as scammers continuously evolve to counter them. I still get plenty of scam calls with no Scam Likely label, while a call I received from a source for this very story was falsely labeled Scam Likely.

Many landlines and VoIP providers also offer spam blockers or filters, and there are third-party services you can use. Again, some are free and some aren’t. Your Apple or Android device may also have onboard features that help you screen out scam calls. The FCC has a helpful list of services, as does the FTC. Both agencies also have ways to report scam calls, so you can add your voice to the millions of robocall complaints they get every year. You can also forward spam texts to 7726 (SPAM).

One thing the FTC, FCC, and pretty much everyone else says you shouldn’t do is respond to scam texts or answer robocalls, no matter how tempting it is to yell at them. That only tells them that your number is valid, and you’ll get a bunch more calls and texts.

This is worth repeating: Do not answer robocalls or respond to scam texts. In the interests of journalism, I decided to disregard this good advice to see what would happen if I pressed 1 on a car warranty call. Eventually, I was put through to a “specialist,” who gave me the name of the company she said she worked for. But I asked one too many questions and she hung up on me.

Turns out that the company she named does exist, and it does claim on its website to sell “aftermarket protection products” for cars. (Not all extended warranties are scams, but some very much are. Either way, it’s illegal for them to call me at all.) The website had a phone number, so I called it. A woman actually answered, but said the man I needed to talk to wasn’t there. When I tried again the next day, he was in a meeting. I felt bad; it’s so annoying when people disturb you with unexpected phone calls at inconvenient times.

I left my name and number for him to call back. As I hung up the phone, I realized that, for the first time ever, I wanted to get a call about my car’s extended warranty.

Now the world is watching and waiting to see what Putin will do next. An invasion isn’t a foregone conclusion. Moscow continues to deny that it has any plans to invade, even as it warns of a “military-technical response” to stagnating negotiations. But war, if it happened, could be devastating to Ukraine, with unpredictable fallout for the rest of Europe and the West. Which is why, imminent or not, the world is on edge.

The roots of the current crisis grew from the breakup of the Soviet Union

When the Soviet Union broke up in the early ’90s, Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, had the third largest atomic arsenal in the world. The United States and Russia worked with Ukraine to denuclearize the country, and in a series of diplomatic agreements, Kyiv gave its hundreds of nuclear warheads back to Russia in exchange for security assurances that protected it from a potential Russian attack.

Those assurances were put to the test in 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and backed a rebellion led by pro-Russia separatists in the eastern Donbas region. (The conflict in eastern Ukraine has killed more than 14,000 people to date.)

Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images

Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian-installed head of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, far right, attend a rally at Red Square in Moscow, Russia, on March 18, 2014, after Putin annexed Crimea from Ukraine.

Russia’s assault grew out of mass protests in Ukraine that toppled the country’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych (partially over his abandonment of a trade agreement with the European Union). US diplomats visited the demonstrations, in symbolic gestures that further agitated Putin.

President Barack Obama, hesitant to escalate tensions with Russia any further, was slow to mobilize a diplomatic response in Europe and did not immediately provide Ukrainians with offensive weapons.

“A lot of us were really appalled that not more was done for the violation of that [post-Soviet] agreement,” said Ian Kelly, a career diplomat who served as ambassador to Georgia from 2015 to 2018. “It just basically showed that if you have nuclear weapons” — as Russia does — “you’re inoculated against strong measures by the international community.”

But the very premise of a post-Soviet Europe is also helping to fuel today’s conflict. Putin has been fixated on reclaiming some semblance of empire, lost with the fall of the Soviet Union. Ukraine is central to this vision. Putin has said Ukrainians and Russians “were one people — a single whole,” or at least would be if not for the meddling from outside forces (as in, the West) that has created a “wall” between the two.

Ukraine isn’t joining NATO in the near future, and President Joe Biden has said as much. The core of the NATO treaty is Article 5, a commitment that an attack on any NATO country is treated as an attack on the entire alliance — meaning any Russian military engagement of a hypothetical NATO-member Ukraine would theoretically bring Moscow into conflict with the US, the UK, France, and the 27 other NATO members.

But the country is the fourth largest recipient of military funding from the US, and the intelligence cooperation between the two countries has deepened in response to threats from Russia.

“Putin and the Kremlin understand that Ukraine will not be a part of NATO,” Ruslan Bortnik, director of the Ukrainian Institute of Politics, said. “But Ukraine became an informal member of NATO without a formal decision.”

Which is why Putin finds Ukraine’s orientation toward the EU and NATO (despite Russian aggression having quite a lot to do with that) untenable to Russia’s national security. 

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Demonstrators with Ukrainian national flags and posters march in the center of Kharkiv, Ukraine, on February 5. Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second largest city, just 25 miles from some of the tens of thousands of Russian troops massed at the border.

The prospect of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO has antagonized Putin at least since President George W. Bush expressed support for the idea in 2008. “That was a real mistake,” said Steven Pifer, who from 1998 to 2000 was ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton. “It drove the Russians nuts. It created expectations in Ukraine and Georgia, which then were never met. And so that just made that whole issue of enlargement a complicated one.”

No country can join the alliance without the unanimous buy-in of all 30 member countries, and many have opposed Ukraine’s membership, in part because it doesn’t meet the conditions on democracy and rule of law.

All of this has put Ukraine in an impossible position: an applicant for an alliance that wasn’t going to accept it, while irritating a potential opponent next door, without having any degree of NATO protection.

Why Russia is threatening Ukraine now

The Russia-Ukraine crisis is a continuation of the one that began in 2014. But recent political developments within Ukraine, the US, Europe, and Russia help explain why Putin may feel now is the time to act.

Among those developments are the 2019 election of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian who played a president on TV and then became the actual president. In addition to the other thing you might remember Zelensky for, he promised during his campaign that he would “reboot” peace talks to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine, including dealing with Putin directly to resolve the conflict. Russia, too, likely thought it could get something out of this: It saw Zelensky, a political novice, as someone who might be more open to Russia’s point of view.

Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images
President-elect Volodymyr Zelensky claps during his inauguration in the Ukrainian parliament in Kyiv on May 20, 2019.

What Russia wants is for Zelensky to implement the 2014 and ’15 Minsk agreements, deals that would bring the pro-Russian regions back into Ukraine but would amount to, as one expert said, a “Trojan horse” for Moscow to wield influence and control. No Ukrainian president could accept those terms, and so Zelensky, under continued Russian pressure, has turned to the West for help, talking openly about wanting to join NATO.

Public opinion in Ukraine has also strongly swayed to support for ascension into Western bodies like the EU and NATO. That may have left Russia feeling as though it has exhausted all of its political and diplomatic tools to bring Ukraine back into the fold. “Moscow security elites feel that they have to act now because if they don’t, military cooperation between NATO and Ukraine will become even more intense and even more sophisticated,” Sarah Pagung, of the German Council on Foreign Relations, said.

Putin tested the West on Ukraine again in the spring of 2021, gathering forces and equipment near parts of the border. The troop buildup got the attention of the new Biden administration, which led to an announced summit between the two leaders. Days later, Russia began drawing down some of the troops on the border.

Putin’s perspective on the US has also shifted, experts said. To Putin, the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal (which Moscow would know something about) and the US’s domestic turmoil are signs of weakness.

Putin may also see the West divided on the US’s role in the world. Biden is still trying to put the transatlantic alliance back together after the distrust that built up during the Trump administration. Some of Biden’s diplomatic blunders have alienated European partners, specifically that aforementioned messy Afghanistan withdrawal and the nuclear submarine deal that Biden rolled out with the UK and Australia that caught France off guard.

Europe has its own internal fractures, too. The EU and the UK are still dealing with the fallout from Brexit. Everyone is grappling with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Germany has a new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, after 16 years of Angela Merkel, and the new coalition government is still trying to establish its foreign policy. Germany, along with other European countries, imports Russian natural gas, and energy prices are spiking right now. France has elections in April, and French President Emmanuel Macron is trying to carve out a spot for himself in these negotiations. 

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From left, French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin conduct a joint press conference after their talks on February 7, in Moscow.

Those divisions — which Washington is trying very hard to keep contained — may embolden Putin. Some experts noted Putin has his own domestic pressures to deal with, including the coronavirus and a struggling economy, and he may think such an adventure will boost his standing at home, just like it did in 2014.

Diplomacy hasn’t produced any breakthroughs so far

A few months into office, the Biden administration spoke about a “stable, predictable” relationship with Russia. That now seems out of the realm of possibility.

The White House is holding out the hope of a diplomatic resolution, even as it’s preparing for sanctions against Russia, sending money and weapons to Ukraine, and boosting America’s military presence in Eastern Europe. (Meanwhile, European heads of state have been meeting one-on-one with Putin in the last several weeks.)

Late last year, the White House started intensifying its diplomatic efforts with Russia. In December, Russia handed Washington its list of “legally binding security guarantees,” including those nonstarters like a ban on Ukrainian NATO membership, and demanded answers in writing. In January, US and Russian officials tried to negotiate a breakthrough in Geneva, with no success. The US directly responded to Russia’s ultimatums at the end of January.

In that response, the US and NATO rejected any deal on NATO membership, but leaked documents suggest the potential for new arms control agreements and increased transparency in terms of where NATO weapons and troops are stationed in Eastern Europe.

Russia wasn’t pleased. On February 17, Moscow issued its own response, saying the US ignored its key demands and escalating with new ones.

One thing Biden’s team has internalized — perhaps in response to the failures of the US response in 2014 — is that it needed European allies to check Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. The Biden administration has put a huge emphasis on working with NATO, the European Union, and individual European partners to counter Putin. “Europeans are utterly dependent on us for their security. They know it, they engage with us about it all the time, we have an alliance in which we’re at the epicenter,” said Max Bergmann of the Center for American Progress.

Omar Marques/Getty Images

US troops exit a transport aircraft in Rzeszow, Poland, on February 6, as tensions between the NATO alliance and Russia continue to intensify.

What happens if Russia invades?

In 2014, Putin deployed unconventional tactics against Ukraine that have come to be known as “hybrid” warfare, such as irregular militias, cyber hacks, and disinformation.

These tactics surprised the West, including those within the Obama administration. It also allowed Russia to deny its direct involvement. In 2014, in the Donbas region, military units of “little green men” — soldiers in uniform but without official insignia — moved in with equipment. Moscow has fueled unrest since, and has continued to destabilize and undermine Ukraine through cyberattacks on critical infrastructure and disinformation campaigns.

It is possible that Moscow will take aggressive steps in all sorts of ways that don’t involve moving Russian troops across the border. It could escalate its proxy war, and launch sweeping disinformation campaigns and hacking operations. (It will also probably do these things if it does move troops into Ukraine.)

But this route looks a lot like the one Russia has already taken, and it hasn’t gotten Moscow closer to its objectives. “How much more can you destabilize? It doesn’t seem to have had a massive damaging impact on Ukraine’s pursuit of democracy, or even its tilt toward the West,” said Margarita Konaev, associate director of analysis and research fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

And that might prompt Moscow to see more force as the solution.

There are plenty of possible scenarios for a Russian invasion, including sending more troops into the breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, seizing strategic regions and blockading Ukraine’s access to waterways, and even a full-on war, with Moscow marching on Kyiv in an attempt to retake the entire country. Any of it could be devastating, though the more expansive the operation, the more catastrophic.

Gavriil Grigorov/TASS via Getty Images
Russian and Belarusian forces conduct training exercises at a firing range in the Brest region of Belarus on Feburary 3.

A full-on invasion to seize all of Ukraine would be something Europe hasn’t seen in decades. It could involve urban warfare, including on the streets of Kyiv, and airstrikes on urban centers. It would cause astounding humanitarian consequences, including a refugee crisis. The US has estimated the civilian death toll could exceed 50,000, with somewhere between 1 million and 5 million refugees. Konaev noted that all urban warfare is harsh, but Russia’s fighting — witnessed in places like Syria — has been “particularly devastating, with very little regard for civilian protection.”

The colossal scale of such an offensive also makes it the least likely, experts say, and it would carry tremendous costs for Russia. “I think Putin himself knows that the stakes are really high,” Natia Seskuria, a fellow at the UK think tank Royal United Services Institute, said. “That’s why I think a full-scale invasion is a riskier option for Moscow in terms of potential political and economic causes — but also due to the number of casualties. Because if we compare Ukraine in 2014 to the Ukrainian army and its capabilities right now, they are much more capable.” (Western training and arms sales have something to do with those increased capabilities, to be sure.)

Such an invasion would force Russia to move into areas that are bitterly hostile toward it. That increases the likelihood of a prolonged resistance (possibly even one backed by the US) — and an invasion could turn into an occupation. “The sad reality is that Russia could take as much of Ukraine as it wants, but it can’t hold it,” said Melinda Haring, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

What happens now?

Ukraine has derailed the grand plans of the Biden administration — China, climate change, the pandemic — and become a top-level priority for the US, at least for the near term.

“One thing we’ve seen in common between the Obama administration and the Biden administration: They don’t view Russia as a geopolitical event-shaper, but we see Russia again and again shaping geopolitical events,” said Rachel Rizzo, a researcher at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center.

The United States has deployed 3,000 troops to Europe in a show of solidarity for NATO and will reportedly send another 3,000 to Poland, though the Biden administration has been firm that US soldiers will not fight in Ukraine if war breaks out. The United States, along with other allies including the United Kingdom, have been warning citizens to leave Ukraine immediately. The US shuttered its embassy in Kyiv this week, temporarily moving operations to western Ukraine.

The Biden administration, along with its European allies, is trying to come up with an aggressive plan to punish Russia, should it invade again. The so-called nuclear options — such as an oil and gas embargo, or cutting Russia off from SWIFT, the electronic messaging service that makes global financial transactions possible — seem unlikely, in part because of the ways it could hurt the global economy. Russia isn’t an Iran or North Korea; it is a major economy that does a lot of trade, especially in raw materials and gas and oil.

Peter Kovalev/TASS via Getty Images
A worker at a compressor station for the Nord Stream 2 offshore natural gas pipeline, in Ust-Luga, Russia, in July 2021. Once operational, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline will supply gas from Russia to Germany.

“Types of sanctions that hurt your target also hurt the sender. Ultimately, it comes down to the price the populations in the United States and Europe are prepared to pay,” said Richard Connolly, a lecturer in political economy at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham.

Right now, the toughest sanctions the Biden administration is reportedly considering are some level of financial sanctions on Russia’s biggest banks — a step the Obama administration didn’t take in 2014 — and an export ban on advanced technologies. Penalties on Russian oligarchs and others close to the regime are likely also on the table, as are some other forms of targeted sanctions. Nord Stream 2, the completed but not yet open gas pipeline between Germany and Russia, may also be killed if Russia escalates tensions.

Putin himself has to decide what he wants. “He has two options,” said Olga Lautman, senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. One is “to say, ‘Never mind, just kidding,’ which will show his weakness and shows that he was intimidated by US and Europe standing together — and that creates weakness for him at home and with countries he’s attempting to influence.”

“Or he goes full forward with an attack,” she said. “At this point, we don’t know where it’s going, but the prospects are very grim.”

This is the corner Putin has put himself in, which makes a walk-back from Russia seem difficult to fathom. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, and it doesn’t eliminate the possibility of some sort of diplomatic solution that gives Putin enough cover to declare victory without the West meeting all of his demands. It also doesn’t eliminate the possibility that Russia and the US will be stuck in this standoff for months longer, with Ukraine caught in the middle and under sustained threat from Russia.

But it also means the prospect of war remains. In Ukraine, though, that is everyday life.

“For many Ukrainians, we’re accustomed to war,” said Oleksiy Sorokin, the political editor and chief operating officer of the English-language Kyiv Independent publication.

“Having Russia on our tail,” he added, “having this constant threat of Russia going further — I think many Ukrainians are used to it.”

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