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Jamestown Foundation Posts Commentary: Nuclear Integration With Russia Eroding Belarusian Sovereignty
WASHINGTON, July 8 -- The Jamestown Foundation posted the following commentary on July 7, 2026, by Dmitry Bolkunets, co-organizer of the Belarus Democratic Forum, in the foundation's Eurasia Daily Monitor:
* * *
Nuclear Integration With Russia Eroding Belarusian Sovereignty
Executive Summary:
* Russia and Belarus conducted joint nuclear exercises in May involving Belarusian missile units and aircraft training to receive, handle, and prepare Russian tactical nuclear weapons, signaling deeper integration of Belarus into Moscow's nuclear command structure.
* Since Russia's full-scale invasion ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, July 8 -- The Jamestown Foundation posted the following commentary on July 7, 2026, by Dmitry Bolkunets, co-organizer of the Belarus Democratic Forum, in the foundation's Eurasia Daily Monitor: * * * Nuclear Integration With Russia Eroding Belarusian Sovereignty Executive Summary: * Russia and Belarus conducted joint nuclear exercises in May involving Belarusian missile units and aircraft training to receive, handle, and prepare Russian tactical nuclear weapons, signaling deeper integration of Belarus into Moscow's nuclear command structure. * Since Russia's full-scale invasionof Ukraine, Belarus has increasingly functioned as a Russian military and hybrid operations staging ground, shifting the line of strategic confrontation to NATO's eastern borders. Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka's dependence on Moscow after the 2020 protests has reduced Minsk's defense and foreign policy autonomy.
* Belarus's official abandonment of a non-nuclear status in 2022 and the deployment of Russian tactical nuclear warheads and advanced delivery systems on Belarusian territory in 2023 have dismantled the post-Soviet security architecture, establishing a permanent platform for Russian nuclear blackmail against NATO.
* Any future European security arrangements that fail to address Belarus's military status will leave a critical source of instability unresolved. Belarus' military sovereignty and demilitarization should be a central issue on the future diplomatic agendas.
-
Belarus served as one of the principal venues for a new phase of joint Russian-Belarusian nuclear exercises in May (see EDM, June 30). The drills involved Belarusian missile units and aircraft training with Russian tactical nuclear weapons, including procedures for receiving, handling, and preparing nuclear munitions for employment. The Russian and Belarusian leaders jointly oversaw the exercises, which Moscow described as the first integrated training of the two countries' strategic and tactical nuclear forces. These exercises, conducted on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) eastern frontier, demonstrated the growing integration of Belarus into Russia's nuclear command architecture and reinforced its role as a forward platform for Moscow's nuclear posturing toward the Alliance (TASS, May 19; President of Russia, May 21). Russia's use of Belarus as a military-strategic staging ground since 2022 is a radical shift in the architecture of European security. Over the past few years, Belarus has lost much of its autonomy in foreign policy and defense and has likely become a permanent platform for Russian force projection, extended directly to the borders of Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.
Belarus's current military relationship with Russia has undermined Minsk's adherence to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan agreed to the full withdrawal of Soviet strategic nuclear weapons from their territory under this memorandum. In exchange, nuclear powers, including Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, committed to respecting the independence, sovereignty, and existing borders of these states and to refrain from economic or military pressure (United Nations Treaty Collection, December 5, 1994). Since relying on Russia for economic and political support during and after large-scale pro-democracy protests in 2020 ahead of Belarus' presidential elections, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka has ceded much of his autonomy in defense and foreign policy to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Before the protests, Lukashenka often resisted Kremlin pressure and balanced competition between Russia and the West to ensure his autonomy. After relying on Putin to survive the 2020 protests and ongoing international sanctions, Lukashenka is dependent and increasingly responsive to Putin's demands.
The withdrawal of nuclear arsenals from Belarus was completed in November 1996, when the last "Topol" intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were sent to the Russian Federation. This step was positioned as a key contribution to international detente and the strengthening of the global non-proliferation regime. The Budapest Memorandum did not require parliamentary ratification and, as later became clear, was merely an agreement of intent without binding obligations (RBC, February 16, 2022). Russia's war against Ukraine and the subsequent political and military absorption of much of Belarus' sovereignty by Moscow have devalued the agreements of thirty years ago.
In December 2021, Russia publicly issued ultimatums to the United States and NATO regarding security guarantees. In draft treaties published at that time, Moscow officially proposed that the United States completely "exclude the deployment of nuclear weapons outside its national territory" (RBC, December 17, 2021). Having failed in its diplomatic pressure, the Kremlin moved to put tactical nuclear weapons in Belarusian territory. On February 27, 2022, just three days after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Belarus held a constitutional referendum. The updated text of the Basic Law entirely removed the article concerning the state's aspiration for a non-nuclear status and neutrality. This referendum opened the door for Moscow to officially deploy its nuclear forces on Belarusian territory (DW, March 1, 2022). By June 2023, the Kremlin had deployed tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, marking the first known peacetime deployment of Russian nuclear weapons outside Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (see EDM, May 9, 23, 2024, March 13, April 17, 2025).
Moscow has consistently worked to increase its operational and administrative control over the Armed Forces of Belarus. The creation of joint training and combat centers for Belarus' Air Force and Air Defense in Grodno and Baranovichi has cemented the presence of the Russian military on Belarusian soil (BelTA, March 16, 2021). Connections between the Belarusian and Russian railways have been modernized, allowing the end-to-end transfer of troops from the depths of Russia to the borders of NATO in a matter of days.
Belarus no longer serves as a buffer zone between NATO and Russia. It can be viewed as an integrated military district of the Russian Federation, diminishing NATO's strategic depth in the region. Belarus risks losing even the formal signs of military-political independence. If current integration dynamics continue, Moscow will be able to build Belarusian territory even more deeply into its own military planning, effectively shifting the line of strategic confrontation several hundred miles toward the borders of Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. In that case, Belarus would turn into an element of Russian defense infrastructure, complicating any future negotiations on European security.
Belarusian Su-25 attack aircraft have been modernized for the use of special aviation munitions, and Minsk has received Iskander-M operational-tactical missile systems from Russia with a range of up to 500 kilometers (311 miles) (see EDM, June 30). The construction and certification of positioning areas and storage facilities are carried out under the strict control of the Russian Ministry of Defense. The Belarusian side does not have independent access to the charges, which excludes Minsk from the decision-making chain but makes it a direct accomplice in nuclear blackmail.
The deployment of Russian nuclear-capable systems in Belarus has raised renewed concerns about the credibility of the global non-proliferation regime while reinforcing Moscow's strategy of nuclear coercion toward NATO (see Special Report, February 5; see EDM, March 26). The forward positioning of dual-capable missile systems shortens warning and response times for potential targets across Europe, increasing the psychological and strategic pressure on neighboring states. Moreover, repeated statements by Moscow and Minsk regarding the deployment of the intermediate-range Oreshnik missile system indicate that Belarus is becoming a long-term platform for Russian nuclear signaling rather than a temporary location for military deployments (see EDM, January 13, July 15).
Belarus forms a geographic pincer around the Baltic states. It is separated from Russia's Kaliningrad semi-exclave by the Suwalki Gap, a narrow 65-kilometer (40-mile) isthmus connecting Poland and Lithuania. The closure of the Suwalki Gap would sever the Baltic states' only land connection to the rest of NATO, significantly complicating reinforcement efforts and increasing the risk that Russia could isolate the region during a conflict (see EDM, June 3, 2025). In such a scenario, the corridor would be under threat from Russian anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities deployed in Belarus' Grodno and Brest oblasts.
NATO faces significant challenges in responding to potential Russian aggression against the Baltic states, particularly because of geographic constraints and Russia's proximity. Potential options include strengthening forward conventional deterrence, expanding missile defense systems, increasing NATO's long-range strike capabilities, and revising its nuclear deterrence policy.
Integration processes within the Union State have led to the liquidation of Minsk's military-political agency [1]. Belarus has completely lost its status as a regional buffer, turning into an advanced nuclear outpost and an operational base for the Russian Federation's hybrid warfare against NATO. In the event of a hypothetical clash between Russia and NATO, Belarusian military infrastructure, command posts, and supply depots could be viewed by alliance planners as combatants and legitimate targets from the first minutes of the conflict. For the West, deterring threats emanating from Belarusian territory has turned into a long-term strategic task requiring a permanent military presence and deep integration of air and missile defense systems along the entire line of contact.
The main escalation in Belarus' military integration with Russia is the institutional inclusion of Belarusian space into a unified Russian system of strategic planning. Belarus has become a seemingly permanent element of Russian military architecture, changing the geography of deterrence, the structure of risks, and NATO's long-term defense planning. In 2022, Russia used Belarusian territory as a staging ground to invade Ukraine. Consequently, a long-term European security system cannot view the Belarusian border as a secondary issue. Any future agreements on European security that do not affect the military status of Belarus will leave one of the key sources of instability unresolved. One of the key issues for future negotiations will be the status of Belarus, including guarantees of sovereignty, restrictions on foreign military presence, the presence of nuclear weapons, and the parameters of possible demilitarization. Without resolving these issues, the sustainability of any new European security architecture will remain limited.
* * *
Dmitry Bolkunets is engaged in analytical and political activities as a co-organizer of the Belarus Democratic Forum.
* * *
Original text here: https://jamestown.org/nuclear-integration-with-russia-eroding-belarusian-sovereignty/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Nuclear Integration With Russia Eroding Belarusian Sovereignty
Executive Summary:
* Russia and Belarus conducted joint nuclear exercises in May involving Belarusian missile units and aircraft training to receive, handle, and prepare Russian tactical nuclear weapons, signaling deeper integration of Belarus into Moscow's nuclear command structure.
* Since Russia's full-scale invasion ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, July 8 -- The Jamestown Foundation posted the following commentary on July 7, 2026, by Dmitry Bolkunets, co-organizer of the Belarus Democratic Forum, in the foundation's Eurasia Daily Monitor: * * * Nuclear Integration With Russia Eroding Belarusian Sovereignty Executive Summary: * Russia and Belarus conducted joint nuclear exercises in May involving Belarusian missile units and aircraft training to receive, handle, and prepare Russian tactical nuclear weapons, signaling deeper integration of Belarus into Moscow's nuclear command structure. * Since Russia's full-scale invasionof Ukraine, Belarus has increasingly functioned as a Russian military and hybrid operations staging ground, shifting the line of strategic confrontation to NATO's eastern borders. Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka's dependence on Moscow after the 2020 protests has reduced Minsk's defense and foreign policy autonomy.
* Belarus's official abandonment of a non-nuclear status in 2022 and the deployment of Russian tactical nuclear warheads and advanced delivery systems on Belarusian territory in 2023 have dismantled the post-Soviet security architecture, establishing a permanent platform for Russian nuclear blackmail against NATO.
* Any future European security arrangements that fail to address Belarus's military status will leave a critical source of instability unresolved. Belarus' military sovereignty and demilitarization should be a central issue on the future diplomatic agendas.
-
Belarus served as one of the principal venues for a new phase of joint Russian-Belarusian nuclear exercises in May (see EDM, June 30). The drills involved Belarusian missile units and aircraft training with Russian tactical nuclear weapons, including procedures for receiving, handling, and preparing nuclear munitions for employment. The Russian and Belarusian leaders jointly oversaw the exercises, which Moscow described as the first integrated training of the two countries' strategic and tactical nuclear forces. These exercises, conducted on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) eastern frontier, demonstrated the growing integration of Belarus into Russia's nuclear command architecture and reinforced its role as a forward platform for Moscow's nuclear posturing toward the Alliance (TASS, May 19; President of Russia, May 21). Russia's use of Belarus as a military-strategic staging ground since 2022 is a radical shift in the architecture of European security. Over the past few years, Belarus has lost much of its autonomy in foreign policy and defense and has likely become a permanent platform for Russian force projection, extended directly to the borders of Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.
Belarus's current military relationship with Russia has undermined Minsk's adherence to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan agreed to the full withdrawal of Soviet strategic nuclear weapons from their territory under this memorandum. In exchange, nuclear powers, including Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, committed to respecting the independence, sovereignty, and existing borders of these states and to refrain from economic or military pressure (United Nations Treaty Collection, December 5, 1994). Since relying on Russia for economic and political support during and after large-scale pro-democracy protests in 2020 ahead of Belarus' presidential elections, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka has ceded much of his autonomy in defense and foreign policy to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Before the protests, Lukashenka often resisted Kremlin pressure and balanced competition between Russia and the West to ensure his autonomy. After relying on Putin to survive the 2020 protests and ongoing international sanctions, Lukashenka is dependent and increasingly responsive to Putin's demands.
The withdrawal of nuclear arsenals from Belarus was completed in November 1996, when the last "Topol" intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were sent to the Russian Federation. This step was positioned as a key contribution to international detente and the strengthening of the global non-proliferation regime. The Budapest Memorandum did not require parliamentary ratification and, as later became clear, was merely an agreement of intent without binding obligations (RBC, February 16, 2022). Russia's war against Ukraine and the subsequent political and military absorption of much of Belarus' sovereignty by Moscow have devalued the agreements of thirty years ago.
In December 2021, Russia publicly issued ultimatums to the United States and NATO regarding security guarantees. In draft treaties published at that time, Moscow officially proposed that the United States completely "exclude the deployment of nuclear weapons outside its national territory" (RBC, December 17, 2021). Having failed in its diplomatic pressure, the Kremlin moved to put tactical nuclear weapons in Belarusian territory. On February 27, 2022, just three days after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Belarus held a constitutional referendum. The updated text of the Basic Law entirely removed the article concerning the state's aspiration for a non-nuclear status and neutrality. This referendum opened the door for Moscow to officially deploy its nuclear forces on Belarusian territory (DW, March 1, 2022). By June 2023, the Kremlin had deployed tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, marking the first known peacetime deployment of Russian nuclear weapons outside Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (see EDM, May 9, 23, 2024, March 13, April 17, 2025).
Moscow has consistently worked to increase its operational and administrative control over the Armed Forces of Belarus. The creation of joint training and combat centers for Belarus' Air Force and Air Defense in Grodno and Baranovichi has cemented the presence of the Russian military on Belarusian soil (BelTA, March 16, 2021). Connections between the Belarusian and Russian railways have been modernized, allowing the end-to-end transfer of troops from the depths of Russia to the borders of NATO in a matter of days.
Belarus no longer serves as a buffer zone between NATO and Russia. It can be viewed as an integrated military district of the Russian Federation, diminishing NATO's strategic depth in the region. Belarus risks losing even the formal signs of military-political independence. If current integration dynamics continue, Moscow will be able to build Belarusian territory even more deeply into its own military planning, effectively shifting the line of strategic confrontation several hundred miles toward the borders of Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. In that case, Belarus would turn into an element of Russian defense infrastructure, complicating any future negotiations on European security.
Belarusian Su-25 attack aircraft have been modernized for the use of special aviation munitions, and Minsk has received Iskander-M operational-tactical missile systems from Russia with a range of up to 500 kilometers (311 miles) (see EDM, June 30). The construction and certification of positioning areas and storage facilities are carried out under the strict control of the Russian Ministry of Defense. The Belarusian side does not have independent access to the charges, which excludes Minsk from the decision-making chain but makes it a direct accomplice in nuclear blackmail.
The deployment of Russian nuclear-capable systems in Belarus has raised renewed concerns about the credibility of the global non-proliferation regime while reinforcing Moscow's strategy of nuclear coercion toward NATO (see Special Report, February 5; see EDM, March 26). The forward positioning of dual-capable missile systems shortens warning and response times for potential targets across Europe, increasing the psychological and strategic pressure on neighboring states. Moreover, repeated statements by Moscow and Minsk regarding the deployment of the intermediate-range Oreshnik missile system indicate that Belarus is becoming a long-term platform for Russian nuclear signaling rather than a temporary location for military deployments (see EDM, January 13, July 15).
Belarus forms a geographic pincer around the Baltic states. It is separated from Russia's Kaliningrad semi-exclave by the Suwalki Gap, a narrow 65-kilometer (40-mile) isthmus connecting Poland and Lithuania. The closure of the Suwalki Gap would sever the Baltic states' only land connection to the rest of NATO, significantly complicating reinforcement efforts and increasing the risk that Russia could isolate the region during a conflict (see EDM, June 3, 2025). In such a scenario, the corridor would be under threat from Russian anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities deployed in Belarus' Grodno and Brest oblasts.
NATO faces significant challenges in responding to potential Russian aggression against the Baltic states, particularly because of geographic constraints and Russia's proximity. Potential options include strengthening forward conventional deterrence, expanding missile defense systems, increasing NATO's long-range strike capabilities, and revising its nuclear deterrence policy.
Integration processes within the Union State have led to the liquidation of Minsk's military-political agency [1]. Belarus has completely lost its status as a regional buffer, turning into an advanced nuclear outpost and an operational base for the Russian Federation's hybrid warfare against NATO. In the event of a hypothetical clash between Russia and NATO, Belarusian military infrastructure, command posts, and supply depots could be viewed by alliance planners as combatants and legitimate targets from the first minutes of the conflict. For the West, deterring threats emanating from Belarusian territory has turned into a long-term strategic task requiring a permanent military presence and deep integration of air and missile defense systems along the entire line of contact.
The main escalation in Belarus' military integration with Russia is the institutional inclusion of Belarusian space into a unified Russian system of strategic planning. Belarus has become a seemingly permanent element of Russian military architecture, changing the geography of deterrence, the structure of risks, and NATO's long-term defense planning. In 2022, Russia used Belarusian territory as a staging ground to invade Ukraine. Consequently, a long-term European security system cannot view the Belarusian border as a secondary issue. Any future agreements on European security that do not affect the military status of Belarus will leave one of the key sources of instability unresolved. One of the key issues for future negotiations will be the status of Belarus, including guarantees of sovereignty, restrictions on foreign military presence, the presence of nuclear weapons, and the parameters of possible demilitarization. Without resolving these issues, the sustainability of any new European security architecture will remain limited.
* * *
Dmitry Bolkunets is engaged in analytical and political activities as a co-organizer of the Belarus Democratic Forum.
* * *
Original text here: https://jamestown.org/nuclear-integration-with-russia-eroding-belarusian-sovereignty/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Center of the American Experiment Issues Commentary: Attorney General Ellison Pulls the Plug on His "Conviction Review Unit"
MINNETONKA, Minnesota, July 8 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary on July 7, 2026, by public safety policy fellow David Zimmer:
* * *
Attorney General Ellison pulls the plug on his "Conviction Review Unit"
Last week Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison advised the 16-person Conviction Review Advisory Board that he was suspending operation of his office's Conviction Review Unit (CRU). Ellison did not issue an official press release, though several media outlets reported ... Show Full Article MINNETONKA, Minnesota, July 8 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary on July 7, 2026, by public safety policy fellow David Zimmer: * * * Attorney General Ellison pulls the plug on his "Conviction Review Unit" Last week Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison advised the 16-person Conviction Review Advisory Board that he was suspending operation of his office's Conviction Review Unit (CRU). Ellison did not issue an official press release, though several media outlets reportedthe suspension.
In his responses to media inquiries Ellison cited budget constraints brought on after a federal grant that had supplemented the CRU's efforts was discontinued. Under the circumstances Ellison said that his office could no longer fund the CRU without compromising other core responsibilities of his office.
Previous reports described the CRU as operating with five full-time employees, including a director. The unit was funded by an undisclosed amount from the Attorney General's budget, reportedly for two full time employees. The remaining funding came from two federal grants totaling $800,000. We can safely estimate that the amount spent on this effort since its creation in 2021 approaches $2 million - an amount difficult to justify given the results it produced.
No Loss
I have written about my concerns with the CRU and other efforts like the Hennepin County Attorney's Conviction Integrity Unit. These extra-judicial efforts simply undermine faith in our justice system, and their demise is no loss to justice in Minnesota.
Here's an excerpt of an article I wrote for Thinking Minnesota in 2024 - it has aged well.
""Perhaps the most problematic reform mechanism is the attorney general's Conviction Review Unit (CRU). This extra-judicial mechanism offers convicted persons a new form of potential relief from the conviction they received in the court system."
"In August 2021, Atty. Gen. Keith Ellison announced the creation of the CRU within his office. The CRU is a full-time unit operating in partnership with the Great North Innocence Project. The endeavor has been heavily funded by federal grants in the initial stages. It is one of only four such units nationally to reside in a state AG's office. The number of conviction review units across the U.S. has expanded considerably in recent years, from approximately 30 in 2018 to around 100 today.
"The CRU's charter proudly states that it was modeled after a special directive from L.A. County District Attorney George Gascon, a national figure in the progressive prosecutor movement. This emulation of West Coast progressive policies is cause for concern.
"According to the Great North Innocence Project, "The purpose of the CRU is to prevent, identify, and remedy wrongful convictions."
"It is telling that the AG's own charter acknowledges the CRU is an "extrajudicial" process. Webster's Dictionary defines "extrajudicial" as 1) "not forming a valid part of regular legal proceedings," 2) "delivered without legal authority," and 3) "done in contravention of due process of law."
"In his report "Overstating America's Wrongful Conviction Rate?" Prof. Paul G. Cassell of Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah clearly established the national rate of innocent people being wrongly convicted at between .016 percent and .062 percent. Putting this figure into useful context, Cassell concluded that a U.S. citizen was 30,000 times more likely to become a victim of violent crime than to be wrongfully convicted and sent to prison for a violent crime he or she did not commit.
"Despite this extreme rarity, of which an appropriate judicial remedy of appeal already exists, Minnesota has decided to invest energy and resources in overturning convictions, commuting sentences, and reducing accountability for those found guilty by our judicial system.
"Throughout our state's history, we have invested in and valued a robust and credible court system. That system has allowed for appeals that have merit. Those appeals go through an appropriate adversarial process where each side is represented, and an impartial group of judges make decisions based on the law -- not emotion or public opinion.
"Expanding the number of groups that now "re-investigate" cases that have already been adjudicated only serves to undermine the legitimacy and authority we have rightly bestowed upon our court system. These efforts are often fueled by emotion and take advantage of the misguided notion that it is appropriate to apply today's morality and conventions to decisions made in the past.
"The emotional aspect of these "re-investigations" leaves the results vulnerable to subjective whim rather than an established process based on fact, as does the tendency to give more credibility to new information than information vetted contemporaneously with the events of the case. These tendencies make for good theater, but they make for poor public policy in determining whether justice was appropriately meted out decades earlier.""
"Accomplishments" of the CRU
Since becoming operational in 2021, the CRU has received over 1,100 requests from convicted offenders looking to have their convictions reinvestigated and vacated. According to the CRU, 850 cases (77%) were closed without offering relief after an unbiased initial screening.
Of the remaining 250 cases, the CRU officially completed just four formal reports. These cases had been prominently linked on the CRU's website prior to the unit being shuttered. A search for those links now results in an "error" message:
[View image in the link at bottom.]
Each of the four cases involves a 1st degree murder in which the defendant was found guilty and had exhausted the appeals process decades earlier. The cases were:
1. Thomas Rhodes, District Court File 34-K6-97-001529, convicted in 1998 in Kandiyohi County of killing his wife while boating at midnight, then reporting her death as an accident. The CRU's efforts focused on discrediting the medical examiner and other experts who testified in the trial nearly two and a half decades earlier. Ultimately, Rhodes ended up pleading guilty to an amended charge of 2nd degree manslaughter - culpable negligence, in exchange for his murder conviction being vacated and his release from prison.
2. Brian Pippitt, District Court File 01-K4-99-000325, convicted in 2001 in Aitken County of 1st degree murder involving the strangulation and beating death of an 80-year-old woman during the burglary. The CRU effort again focused on discrediting witness testimony from decades earlier.
In 2025, the Minnesota Parole Board consisting of Governor Walz, Attorney General Ellison, and Supreme Court Chief Justice Hudson, commuted Pippitt's sentence and he was freed from prison in January 2026. However, the Aitken County Attorney has not agreed with the movement to completely vacate Pippitt's conviction in court. The court has scheduled an evidentiary hearing for November 2026.
In June 2026, an independent consultant who had been hired by the Minnesota BCA to conduct an independent review of the conclusions drawn by the CRU filed an affidavit which amounts to a damning assessment of the credibility and accuracy of the CRU's work. The consultant, Neil Nelson, is a highly respected retired St. Paul Police homicide detective and would not jeopardize his credibility by issuing a faulty affidavit. An exerpt of Nelson's affidavit follows, and it should concern us all:
"During the course of the review of the CRU's report, the Independent Consultants found the CRU relied heavily on selective pieces of information and ignored other relevant information to reach overstated and unfounded conclusions that are not supported by all the facts. Moreover, there are alarming inaccuracies and misstatements made in the CRU Report and by Pippitt's representatives that call into question the overall accuracy and credibility of their findings and, therefore, the claim of innocence."
3. Edgar Barrientos, District Court File 27-cr-08-53942, convicted in 2009 of 1st degree murder for the drive by shooting of an 18-year-old innocent victim in South Minneapolis. The CRU's effort once again focused on discrediting witnesses and eyewitness identifications, and rehashing evidence that was considered and evaluated by the jury contemporaneous with the crime, not decades later by a unit biased by its own mission.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty bought into the CRU's claims and joined in their effort to overturn Barrientos's conviction. When the prosecutor takes this position, rather than maintaining their adversarial role, the fix is in and justice suffers. In November 2024 the court vacated Barrientos's conviction and Moriarty dismissed charges against him. Barrientos was freed from custody that day.
4. Phillip Vance, District Court File 19-K6-04-736, convicted in 2004 in Dakota County of 1st degree murder for the shooting death of a store clerk in South St. Paul. Vance exhausted all of his appeals, then applied to the CRU for reinvestigation. Vance's claims mirrored many of the common claims of coerced and faulty witnesses and alibis and alternative suspects that the police did not properly investigate.
After a reported four-year investigation, to its credit, the CRU issued a formal report stating it had uncovered no reliable evidence to support Philip Vance's claims of innocence and formally recommended against vacating his conviction.
Takeaway
Out of 1,100 claims of innocence the CRU issued just four (4) formal reports over nearly six years.
One (1) concluded there was no evidence to vacate the conviction; one (1) resulted in a change of plea from 1st degree murder to 2nd degree manslaughter; one (1) resulted in a vacated sentence that was uncontested by the Hennepin County Attorney's Office; and one (1) resulted in the Board of Pardons commuting a sentence, but the court and the Aitken County Attorney's Office not yet agreeing to exonerate, and an independent evaluator calling into serious question the credibility and accuracy of the CRU investigation.
Given the questionable results of nearly six years of work by the CRU, it makes sense that Attorney General Ellison determined the effort was not worth reprioritizing resources within the office to keep it afloat.
There's an old tongue-in-cheek saying that prisons are full of innocent people. $2 million and six years of effort by the CRU failed to support the statement in any definitive way. Many argue, as I do, that such efforts do far more to harm our sense of justice than to help it.
* * *
David Zimmer is a Public Safety Policy Fellow at Center of the American Experiment.
David.Zimmer@americanexperiment.org
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americanexperiment.org/attorney-general-ellison-pulls-the-plug-on-his-conviction-review-unit/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Attorney General Ellison pulls the plug on his "Conviction Review Unit"
Last week Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison advised the 16-person Conviction Review Advisory Board that he was suspending operation of his office's Conviction Review Unit (CRU). Ellison did not issue an official press release, though several media outlets reported ... Show Full Article MINNETONKA, Minnesota, July 8 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary on July 7, 2026, by public safety policy fellow David Zimmer: * * * Attorney General Ellison pulls the plug on his "Conviction Review Unit" Last week Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison advised the 16-person Conviction Review Advisory Board that he was suspending operation of his office's Conviction Review Unit (CRU). Ellison did not issue an official press release, though several media outlets reportedthe suspension.
In his responses to media inquiries Ellison cited budget constraints brought on after a federal grant that had supplemented the CRU's efforts was discontinued. Under the circumstances Ellison said that his office could no longer fund the CRU without compromising other core responsibilities of his office.
Previous reports described the CRU as operating with five full-time employees, including a director. The unit was funded by an undisclosed amount from the Attorney General's budget, reportedly for two full time employees. The remaining funding came from two federal grants totaling $800,000. We can safely estimate that the amount spent on this effort since its creation in 2021 approaches $2 million - an amount difficult to justify given the results it produced.
No Loss
I have written about my concerns with the CRU and other efforts like the Hennepin County Attorney's Conviction Integrity Unit. These extra-judicial efforts simply undermine faith in our justice system, and their demise is no loss to justice in Minnesota.
Here's an excerpt of an article I wrote for Thinking Minnesota in 2024 - it has aged well.
""Perhaps the most problematic reform mechanism is the attorney general's Conviction Review Unit (CRU). This extra-judicial mechanism offers convicted persons a new form of potential relief from the conviction they received in the court system."
"In August 2021, Atty. Gen. Keith Ellison announced the creation of the CRU within his office. The CRU is a full-time unit operating in partnership with the Great North Innocence Project. The endeavor has been heavily funded by federal grants in the initial stages. It is one of only four such units nationally to reside in a state AG's office. The number of conviction review units across the U.S. has expanded considerably in recent years, from approximately 30 in 2018 to around 100 today.
"The CRU's charter proudly states that it was modeled after a special directive from L.A. County District Attorney George Gascon, a national figure in the progressive prosecutor movement. This emulation of West Coast progressive policies is cause for concern.
"According to the Great North Innocence Project, "The purpose of the CRU is to prevent, identify, and remedy wrongful convictions."
"It is telling that the AG's own charter acknowledges the CRU is an "extrajudicial" process. Webster's Dictionary defines "extrajudicial" as 1) "not forming a valid part of regular legal proceedings," 2) "delivered without legal authority," and 3) "done in contravention of due process of law."
"In his report "Overstating America's Wrongful Conviction Rate?" Prof. Paul G. Cassell of Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah clearly established the national rate of innocent people being wrongly convicted at between .016 percent and .062 percent. Putting this figure into useful context, Cassell concluded that a U.S. citizen was 30,000 times more likely to become a victim of violent crime than to be wrongfully convicted and sent to prison for a violent crime he or she did not commit.
"Despite this extreme rarity, of which an appropriate judicial remedy of appeal already exists, Minnesota has decided to invest energy and resources in overturning convictions, commuting sentences, and reducing accountability for those found guilty by our judicial system.
"Throughout our state's history, we have invested in and valued a robust and credible court system. That system has allowed for appeals that have merit. Those appeals go through an appropriate adversarial process where each side is represented, and an impartial group of judges make decisions based on the law -- not emotion or public opinion.
"Expanding the number of groups that now "re-investigate" cases that have already been adjudicated only serves to undermine the legitimacy and authority we have rightly bestowed upon our court system. These efforts are often fueled by emotion and take advantage of the misguided notion that it is appropriate to apply today's morality and conventions to decisions made in the past.
"The emotional aspect of these "re-investigations" leaves the results vulnerable to subjective whim rather than an established process based on fact, as does the tendency to give more credibility to new information than information vetted contemporaneously with the events of the case. These tendencies make for good theater, but they make for poor public policy in determining whether justice was appropriately meted out decades earlier.""
"Accomplishments" of the CRU
Since becoming operational in 2021, the CRU has received over 1,100 requests from convicted offenders looking to have their convictions reinvestigated and vacated. According to the CRU, 850 cases (77%) were closed without offering relief after an unbiased initial screening.
Of the remaining 250 cases, the CRU officially completed just four formal reports. These cases had been prominently linked on the CRU's website prior to the unit being shuttered. A search for those links now results in an "error" message:
[View image in the link at bottom.]
Each of the four cases involves a 1st degree murder in which the defendant was found guilty and had exhausted the appeals process decades earlier. The cases were:
1. Thomas Rhodes, District Court File 34-K6-97-001529, convicted in 1998 in Kandiyohi County of killing his wife while boating at midnight, then reporting her death as an accident. The CRU's efforts focused on discrediting the medical examiner and other experts who testified in the trial nearly two and a half decades earlier. Ultimately, Rhodes ended up pleading guilty to an amended charge of 2nd degree manslaughter - culpable negligence, in exchange for his murder conviction being vacated and his release from prison.
2. Brian Pippitt, District Court File 01-K4-99-000325, convicted in 2001 in Aitken County of 1st degree murder involving the strangulation and beating death of an 80-year-old woman during the burglary. The CRU effort again focused on discrediting witness testimony from decades earlier.
In 2025, the Minnesota Parole Board consisting of Governor Walz, Attorney General Ellison, and Supreme Court Chief Justice Hudson, commuted Pippitt's sentence and he was freed from prison in January 2026. However, the Aitken County Attorney has not agreed with the movement to completely vacate Pippitt's conviction in court. The court has scheduled an evidentiary hearing for November 2026.
In June 2026, an independent consultant who had been hired by the Minnesota BCA to conduct an independent review of the conclusions drawn by the CRU filed an affidavit which amounts to a damning assessment of the credibility and accuracy of the CRU's work. The consultant, Neil Nelson, is a highly respected retired St. Paul Police homicide detective and would not jeopardize his credibility by issuing a faulty affidavit. An exerpt of Nelson's affidavit follows, and it should concern us all:
"During the course of the review of the CRU's report, the Independent Consultants found the CRU relied heavily on selective pieces of information and ignored other relevant information to reach overstated and unfounded conclusions that are not supported by all the facts. Moreover, there are alarming inaccuracies and misstatements made in the CRU Report and by Pippitt's representatives that call into question the overall accuracy and credibility of their findings and, therefore, the claim of innocence."
3. Edgar Barrientos, District Court File 27-cr-08-53942, convicted in 2009 of 1st degree murder for the drive by shooting of an 18-year-old innocent victim in South Minneapolis. The CRU's effort once again focused on discrediting witnesses and eyewitness identifications, and rehashing evidence that was considered and evaluated by the jury contemporaneous with the crime, not decades later by a unit biased by its own mission.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty bought into the CRU's claims and joined in their effort to overturn Barrientos's conviction. When the prosecutor takes this position, rather than maintaining their adversarial role, the fix is in and justice suffers. In November 2024 the court vacated Barrientos's conviction and Moriarty dismissed charges against him. Barrientos was freed from custody that day.
4. Phillip Vance, District Court File 19-K6-04-736, convicted in 2004 in Dakota County of 1st degree murder for the shooting death of a store clerk in South St. Paul. Vance exhausted all of his appeals, then applied to the CRU for reinvestigation. Vance's claims mirrored many of the common claims of coerced and faulty witnesses and alibis and alternative suspects that the police did not properly investigate.
After a reported four-year investigation, to its credit, the CRU issued a formal report stating it had uncovered no reliable evidence to support Philip Vance's claims of innocence and formally recommended against vacating his conviction.
Takeaway
Out of 1,100 claims of innocence the CRU issued just four (4) formal reports over nearly six years.
One (1) concluded there was no evidence to vacate the conviction; one (1) resulted in a change of plea from 1st degree murder to 2nd degree manslaughter; one (1) resulted in a vacated sentence that was uncontested by the Hennepin County Attorney's Office; and one (1) resulted in the Board of Pardons commuting a sentence, but the court and the Aitken County Attorney's Office not yet agreeing to exonerate, and an independent evaluator calling into serious question the credibility and accuracy of the CRU investigation.
Given the questionable results of nearly six years of work by the CRU, it makes sense that Attorney General Ellison determined the effort was not worth reprioritizing resources within the office to keep it afloat.
There's an old tongue-in-cheek saying that prisons are full of innocent people. $2 million and six years of effort by the CRU failed to support the statement in any definitive way. Many argue, as I do, that such efforts do far more to harm our sense of justice than to help it.
* * *
David Zimmer is a Public Safety Policy Fellow at Center of the American Experiment.
David.Zimmer@americanexperiment.org
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americanexperiment.org/attorney-general-ellison-pulls-the-plug-on-his-conviction-review-unit/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Center for American Progress: Trump Administration's OBBBA Cuts Free School Meals, Costing Families $2,000 Yearly
WASHINGTON, July 8 -- The Center for American Progress issued the following news release on July 7, 2026:
* * *
Trump Administration's OBBBA Cuts Free School Meals, Costing Families $2,000 Yearly
American children risk losing access to free school meals due to implementation of the Trump administration's One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), according to a comprehensive new analysis from the Center for American Progress. The sweeping federal legislation could force a typical family with two kids to spend $1,890 annually on school-offered meals, according to CAP data.
The OBBBA introduced historic ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, July 8 -- The Center for American Progress issued the following news release on July 7, 2026: * * * Trump Administration's OBBBA Cuts Free School Meals, Costing Families $2,000 Yearly American children risk losing access to free school meals due to implementation of the Trump administration's One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), according to a comprehensive new analysis from the Center for American Progress. The sweeping federal legislation could force a typical family with two kids to spend $1,890 annually on school-offered meals, according to CAP data. The OBBBA introduced historiccuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid, triggering a catastrophic ripple effect: As families lose health and food benefits, children may lose their automatic eligibility status for free school lunches and breakfasts. These losses scale up rapidly, threatening to strip entire schools or districts of their Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) status, which allows schools to offer free meals for all students and currently serves more than 25 million public schoolers.
Other key findings from CAP's analysis include:
* In the 2024-25 school year, around 33.9 million public school students were eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunch either through individual eligibility or school participation in CEP.
* If they lose access to free school meals, the typical American family with two kids can expect to spend nearly $1,900 per year for school-offered meals or more than $2,200 for packed meals.
* More than 4 million people have already lost their SNAP benefits. As more students lose their eligibility, entire school districts are at risk of losing eligibility for universal free meals under the CEP.
* More than 49,000 public schools participated in the CEP in the 2024-25 school year, reaching more than 25 million students.
The report includes a state-by-state breakdown of the financial burden that families will face if their kids lose access to school meal programs, along with policy recommendations for state lawmakers seeking to minimize fallout.
"Taking food away from hungry children in the middle of a national affordability crisis is both economically backward and cruel," said Paige Shoemaker DeMio, senior policy analyst for K-12 Education Policy at CAP and co-author of the report. "Yet while the current administration funnels billions of dollars into foreign conflicts, it's also actively defunding the health and academic success of American kids."
"When a family loses their SNAP benefits, it can also mean their kids lose access to free school meals," said Mimla Wardak, research associate for Economic Policy at CAP and co-author of the report. "And when a student has to skip meals at school, they face steeper barriers to learning. These cuts directly threaten American children's well-being and their futures."
Read the report: "Congressional Republicans' Big Beautiful Bill Threatens Access to Free School Meals" (https://www.americanprogress.org/article/congressional-republicans-big-beautiful-bill-threatens-access-to-free-school-meals/) by Paige Shoemaker DeMio, Mimla Wardak, and Evan Yi
For more information on this topic or to speak with an expert, contact Mishka Espey at eespey@americanprogress.org.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americanprogress.org/press/release-trump-administrations-obbba-cuts-free-school-meals-costing-families-2000-yearly/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Trump Administration's OBBBA Cuts Free School Meals, Costing Families $2,000 Yearly
American children risk losing access to free school meals due to implementation of the Trump administration's One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), according to a comprehensive new analysis from the Center for American Progress. The sweeping federal legislation could force a typical family with two kids to spend $1,890 annually on school-offered meals, according to CAP data.
The OBBBA introduced historic ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, July 8 -- The Center for American Progress issued the following news release on July 7, 2026: * * * Trump Administration's OBBBA Cuts Free School Meals, Costing Families $2,000 Yearly American children risk losing access to free school meals due to implementation of the Trump administration's One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), according to a comprehensive new analysis from the Center for American Progress. The sweeping federal legislation could force a typical family with two kids to spend $1,890 annually on school-offered meals, according to CAP data. The OBBBA introduced historiccuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid, triggering a catastrophic ripple effect: As families lose health and food benefits, children may lose their automatic eligibility status for free school lunches and breakfasts. These losses scale up rapidly, threatening to strip entire schools or districts of their Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) status, which allows schools to offer free meals for all students and currently serves more than 25 million public schoolers.
Other key findings from CAP's analysis include:
* In the 2024-25 school year, around 33.9 million public school students were eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunch either through individual eligibility or school participation in CEP.
* If they lose access to free school meals, the typical American family with two kids can expect to spend nearly $1,900 per year for school-offered meals or more than $2,200 for packed meals.
* More than 4 million people have already lost their SNAP benefits. As more students lose their eligibility, entire school districts are at risk of losing eligibility for universal free meals under the CEP.
* More than 49,000 public schools participated in the CEP in the 2024-25 school year, reaching more than 25 million students.
The report includes a state-by-state breakdown of the financial burden that families will face if their kids lose access to school meal programs, along with policy recommendations for state lawmakers seeking to minimize fallout.
"Taking food away from hungry children in the middle of a national affordability crisis is both economically backward and cruel," said Paige Shoemaker DeMio, senior policy analyst for K-12 Education Policy at CAP and co-author of the report. "Yet while the current administration funnels billions of dollars into foreign conflicts, it's also actively defunding the health and academic success of American kids."
"When a family loses their SNAP benefits, it can also mean their kids lose access to free school meals," said Mimla Wardak, research associate for Economic Policy at CAP and co-author of the report. "And when a student has to skip meals at school, they face steeper barriers to learning. These cuts directly threaten American children's well-being and their futures."
Read the report: "Congressional Republicans' Big Beautiful Bill Threatens Access to Free School Meals" (https://www.americanprogress.org/article/congressional-republicans-big-beautiful-bill-threatens-access-to-free-school-meals/) by Paige Shoemaker DeMio, Mimla Wardak, and Evan Yi
For more information on this topic or to speak with an expert, contact Mishka Espey at eespey@americanprogress.org.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americanprogress.org/press/release-trump-administrations-obbba-cuts-free-school-meals-costing-families-2000-yearly/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Capital Research Center Issues Commentary: Enemies of Energy - League of Conservation Voters
WASHINGTON, July 8 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following commentary on July 7, 2026, by Managing Editor and Director of Content Ken Braun:
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Enemies of Energy: League of Conservation Voters (LCV)
The LCV is the political enforcement arm of the anti-energy movement.
Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Enemies of Energy, a research report created for the Capital Research Center.
-
The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) is a national network of nonprofits and political committees that collectively behave as the political enforcement arm of the anti-energy movement.
An ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, July 8 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following commentary on July 7, 2026, by Managing Editor and Director of Content Ken Braun: * * * Enemies of Energy: League of Conservation Voters (LCV) The LCV is the political enforcement arm of the anti-energy movement. Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Enemies of Energy, a research report created for the Capital Research Center. - The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) is a national network of nonprofits and political committees that collectively behave as the political enforcement arm of the anti-energy movement. AnOpenSecrets "Environment Summary" credits LCV-affiliated political groups with contributing $50.2 million during the 2024 federal election cycle, all of it going to "liberal groups" or Democrats. The LCV was by far the biggest political spender on this list, dwarfing committees affiliated with other anti-energy movements such as the Environmental Defense Fund ($17.3 million), the Natural Resources Defense Council ($7.1 million), Tom Steyer's NextGen network ($5.2 million), Environment America ($4.4 million), Greenpeace ($1.5 million) and the Al Gore-founded Climate Reality Project ($892,537). In a similar ranking for the "Energy/Natural Resources Sector," OpenSecrets credited energy behemoth Koch Industries as the biggest spender for the 2024 election cycle, but with $47.8 million--or $2 million less than the LCV. [i] [ii]
Like the Sierra Club, the LCV's corporate mothership is a 501(c)(4) advocacy nonprofit (though it is affiliated with a 501(c)(3) educational, tax-exempt nonprofit--the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund). But while the subject tabs across the Sierra website's masthead are "About Us," "Explore Issues," "Get Involved," "Get Outside," and "Ways to Give," the LCV masthead has these options: "Advancing Policy," "Building Grassroots Power," "Congressional Scorecard," and ... most revealing ... "Winning Elections" [emphasis added]. [iii]
In March 2024, LCV announced it would spend $120 million influencing 2024 election outcomes. This is more than triple the total revenue for all projects reported by Greenpeace in 2024.[iv] [v]
In their 2024 IRS filing, the League of Conservation Voters reported revenue of $159.3 million and net assets of $29.7 million. This was LCV's most successful financial year ever. In fact, for the two previous years combined LCV reported a cumulative revenue total of just $136.4 million. And as recently as 2011 LCV reported annual revenue of only $11.6 million.[vi]
There are also 30 state-level affiliate LCV groups, many of them 501(c)(3) tax exempt educational nonprofits that are funded (at least in part) by the LCV and the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund (LCVEF). As an example, in its 2024 IRS filing the LCVEF reported a grant of more than $2.8 million to the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters Foundation. [vii] [viii]
Taken as a whole, LCV's dozens of political committees, nonprofits, and state affiliates are arguably America's largest anti-energy political movement. The website for the LCV Victory Fund (a political committee) claims the following results from the 2024 election: 147 federal candidates elected, 819 state and local candidates elected, 2.2 million phone calls made, 6 million mail pieces shipped out, and 3.6 million doors knocked. [ix]
"Climate change is the greatest challenge of our generation," claims the LCV website, without equivocation or mention of competing threats to human flourishing. The LCV agenda is so comprehensively opposed to hydrocarbon fuels that they list "job placements for displaced workers from the fossil fuel industry" as one of their policy objectives. [x]
Relatedly, with their "Clean Energy for All" program LCV promotes state-level ballot initiatives that impose weather-restricted power mandates and supports local candidates who agree. The NGO boasts that these efforts have led to 40 percent of the American population living under these anti-energy restrictions. [xi]
Finally, no opposition to energy would be complete without opposition to nuclear power, the only reliable, safe, clean, and limitlessly scalable source of emissions-free energy option we have. Not coincidentally, even after decades of taxpayer subsidies for the weather restricted energy options promoted by the LCV (wind and solar), nuclear power is still America's largest source of emissions-free electricity. [xii]
In November 2020, the LCV's legislative director co-signed a statement to the U.S. Senate opposing the American Nuclear Infrastructure Act of 2020. Signed by more than 100 other anti-energy activists, the letter disingenuously claimed that nuclear power "amplifies and expands the dangers of climate change" and creates "an immense environmental hazard for which there is no solution." [xiii]
That message has since been amplified by the LCV's state-level affiliates.
In April 2023 the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters denounced a proposal in the state legislature that would have permitted nuclear power to be added alongside solar and wind power as a source of "clean" energy within the state's carbon reduction goals. The statement characterized a "nuclear-powered future" as a "poisonous pipe dream." [xiv]
And in July 2024, the Michigan League of Conservation Voters criticized Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) for supporting a plan to revive the recently closed Palisades nuclear power station. Michigan LCV claimed the money spent reopening the plant should have been used to subsidize wind and solar energy. [xv]
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the Palisades nuclear facility alone provided more than 7 million megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity in 2021, the plant's final full year of operation. For comparison, every wind turbine and solar panel in Michigan combined produced 8.3 million MWh in 2021. [xvi] [xvii]
* * *
Endnotes
[i] Environment Summary: 2024. OpenSecrets. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus?cycle=2024&ind=Q11
[ii] Energy/Natural Resources Sector Summary: 2024. OpenSecrets. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus?cycle=2024&ind=E
[iii] League of Conservation Voters. Home page. Accessed February 16, 2026. https://www.lcv.org/
Sierra Club. Home page. Accessed February 16, 2026. https://www.sierraclub.org/
[iv] Frazin, Rachel. "Climate organization puts $120M into 2024 election." The Hill. March 19, 2024. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4542873-climate-org-puts-money-2024-election/
[v] Greenpeace Inc. (EIN: 52-1541501). 2024 IRS Form 990. Covering year ending December 2024. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/521541501/202543179349305154/full
[vi] League Of Conservation Voters Inc. (EIN: 52-1733698). ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer. Accessed February 16, 2026. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/521733698
[vii] League Of Conservation Voters Education Fund. (EIN: 52-1379661). 2024 IRS Form 990. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/521379661/202523149349300537/full
[viii] Conservation Voters Movement: Building Power In The States. League of Conservation Voters. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.lcv.org/building-power-in-the-states/
[ix] "Who We Are." LCV Victory Fund. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.lcvvictoryfund.org/our-impact/
[x] "Climate Change." League of Conservation Voters. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.lcv.org/issues/climate-change/
[xi] Clean Energy for All. League of Conservation Voters. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.lcv.org/programs/clean-energy-for-all/
[xii] "Electricity explained." Energy Information Administration | U.S. Department of Energy. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/
[xiii] "Dear Chairman Barrasso, Ranking Member Carper, and Members of the Committee." November 30, 2020. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://foe.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Sign-on_S4897_OPPOSE_119-orgs-3.pdf
[xiv] "A "Clean" Wolf in Sheep's Clothing." North Carolina League of Conservation Voters. April 24, 2023. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://nclcv.org/cib0424-2023-nuclear/
[xv] "Approved $150 Million in Additional Funding for Palisades Nuclear Plant - Weight 3." Michigan League of Conservation Voters. July 24, 2024. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.michiganlcv.org/decision/approved-150-million-in-additional-funding-for-palisades-nuclear-plant/
[xvi] Electricity Data Browser: Palisades, annual. U.S. Energy Information Administration | U.S. Department of Energy. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/1715/?freq=A&pin=
[xvii] Electricity Data Browser: Net generation for all sectors, annual | Michigan. U.S. Energy Information Administration | U.S. Department of Energy. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/0?agg=2,0,1&fuel=08c7&geo=00004&sec=g&linechart=ELEC.GEN.NUC-MI-99.A&columnchart=ELEC.GEN.NUC-MI-99.A&map=ELEC.GEN.NUC-MI-99.A&freq=A&ctype=linechart<ype=pin&rtype=s&pin=&rse=0&maptype=0
* * *
Ken Braun
As managing editor and director of content of CRC, Ken Braun edits Capital Research magazine. He also conducts investigative research and drafts profiles for InfluenceWatch.org.
* * *
REPORT: https://capitalresearch.org/app/uploads/FINAL-PDF_CRC_EnemiesofEnergy.pdf
* * *
Original text here: https://capitalresearch.org/article/enemies-of-energy-league-of-conservation-voters-lcv/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Enemies of Energy: League of Conservation Voters (LCV)
The LCV is the political enforcement arm of the anti-energy movement.
Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Enemies of Energy, a research report created for the Capital Research Center.
-
The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) is a national network of nonprofits and political committees that collectively behave as the political enforcement arm of the anti-energy movement.
An ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, July 8 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following commentary on July 7, 2026, by Managing Editor and Director of Content Ken Braun: * * * Enemies of Energy: League of Conservation Voters (LCV) The LCV is the political enforcement arm of the anti-energy movement. Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Enemies of Energy, a research report created for the Capital Research Center. - The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) is a national network of nonprofits and political committees that collectively behave as the political enforcement arm of the anti-energy movement. AnOpenSecrets "Environment Summary" credits LCV-affiliated political groups with contributing $50.2 million during the 2024 federal election cycle, all of it going to "liberal groups" or Democrats. The LCV was by far the biggest political spender on this list, dwarfing committees affiliated with other anti-energy movements such as the Environmental Defense Fund ($17.3 million), the Natural Resources Defense Council ($7.1 million), Tom Steyer's NextGen network ($5.2 million), Environment America ($4.4 million), Greenpeace ($1.5 million) and the Al Gore-founded Climate Reality Project ($892,537). In a similar ranking for the "Energy/Natural Resources Sector," OpenSecrets credited energy behemoth Koch Industries as the biggest spender for the 2024 election cycle, but with $47.8 million--or $2 million less than the LCV. [i] [ii]
Like the Sierra Club, the LCV's corporate mothership is a 501(c)(4) advocacy nonprofit (though it is affiliated with a 501(c)(3) educational, tax-exempt nonprofit--the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund). But while the subject tabs across the Sierra website's masthead are "About Us," "Explore Issues," "Get Involved," "Get Outside," and "Ways to Give," the LCV masthead has these options: "Advancing Policy," "Building Grassroots Power," "Congressional Scorecard," and ... most revealing ... "Winning Elections" [emphasis added]. [iii]
In March 2024, LCV announced it would spend $120 million influencing 2024 election outcomes. This is more than triple the total revenue for all projects reported by Greenpeace in 2024.[iv] [v]
In their 2024 IRS filing, the League of Conservation Voters reported revenue of $159.3 million and net assets of $29.7 million. This was LCV's most successful financial year ever. In fact, for the two previous years combined LCV reported a cumulative revenue total of just $136.4 million. And as recently as 2011 LCV reported annual revenue of only $11.6 million.[vi]
There are also 30 state-level affiliate LCV groups, many of them 501(c)(3) tax exempt educational nonprofits that are funded (at least in part) by the LCV and the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund (LCVEF). As an example, in its 2024 IRS filing the LCVEF reported a grant of more than $2.8 million to the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters Foundation. [vii] [viii]
Taken as a whole, LCV's dozens of political committees, nonprofits, and state affiliates are arguably America's largest anti-energy political movement. The website for the LCV Victory Fund (a political committee) claims the following results from the 2024 election: 147 federal candidates elected, 819 state and local candidates elected, 2.2 million phone calls made, 6 million mail pieces shipped out, and 3.6 million doors knocked. [ix]
"Climate change is the greatest challenge of our generation," claims the LCV website, without equivocation or mention of competing threats to human flourishing. The LCV agenda is so comprehensively opposed to hydrocarbon fuels that they list "job placements for displaced workers from the fossil fuel industry" as one of their policy objectives. [x]
Relatedly, with their "Clean Energy for All" program LCV promotes state-level ballot initiatives that impose weather-restricted power mandates and supports local candidates who agree. The NGO boasts that these efforts have led to 40 percent of the American population living under these anti-energy restrictions. [xi]
Finally, no opposition to energy would be complete without opposition to nuclear power, the only reliable, safe, clean, and limitlessly scalable source of emissions-free energy option we have. Not coincidentally, even after decades of taxpayer subsidies for the weather restricted energy options promoted by the LCV (wind and solar), nuclear power is still America's largest source of emissions-free electricity. [xii]
In November 2020, the LCV's legislative director co-signed a statement to the U.S. Senate opposing the American Nuclear Infrastructure Act of 2020. Signed by more than 100 other anti-energy activists, the letter disingenuously claimed that nuclear power "amplifies and expands the dangers of climate change" and creates "an immense environmental hazard for which there is no solution." [xiii]
That message has since been amplified by the LCV's state-level affiliates.
In April 2023 the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters denounced a proposal in the state legislature that would have permitted nuclear power to be added alongside solar and wind power as a source of "clean" energy within the state's carbon reduction goals. The statement characterized a "nuclear-powered future" as a "poisonous pipe dream." [xiv]
And in July 2024, the Michigan League of Conservation Voters criticized Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) for supporting a plan to revive the recently closed Palisades nuclear power station. Michigan LCV claimed the money spent reopening the plant should have been used to subsidize wind and solar energy. [xv]
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the Palisades nuclear facility alone provided more than 7 million megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity in 2021, the plant's final full year of operation. For comparison, every wind turbine and solar panel in Michigan combined produced 8.3 million MWh in 2021. [xvi] [xvii]
* * *
Endnotes
[i] Environment Summary: 2024. OpenSecrets. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus?cycle=2024&ind=Q11
[ii] Energy/Natural Resources Sector Summary: 2024. OpenSecrets. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus?cycle=2024&ind=E
[iii] League of Conservation Voters. Home page. Accessed February 16, 2026. https://www.lcv.org/
Sierra Club. Home page. Accessed February 16, 2026. https://www.sierraclub.org/
[iv] Frazin, Rachel. "Climate organization puts $120M into 2024 election." The Hill. March 19, 2024. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4542873-climate-org-puts-money-2024-election/
[v] Greenpeace Inc. (EIN: 52-1541501). 2024 IRS Form 990. Covering year ending December 2024. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/521541501/202543179349305154/full
[vi] League Of Conservation Voters Inc. (EIN: 52-1733698). ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer. Accessed February 16, 2026. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/521733698
[vii] League Of Conservation Voters Education Fund. (EIN: 52-1379661). 2024 IRS Form 990. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/521379661/202523149349300537/full
[viii] Conservation Voters Movement: Building Power In The States. League of Conservation Voters. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.lcv.org/building-power-in-the-states/
[ix] "Who We Are." LCV Victory Fund. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.lcvvictoryfund.org/our-impact/
[x] "Climate Change." League of Conservation Voters. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.lcv.org/issues/climate-change/
[xi] Clean Energy for All. League of Conservation Voters. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.lcv.org/programs/clean-energy-for-all/
[xii] "Electricity explained." Energy Information Administration | U.S. Department of Energy. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/
[xiii] "Dear Chairman Barrasso, Ranking Member Carper, and Members of the Committee." November 30, 2020. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://foe.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Sign-on_S4897_OPPOSE_119-orgs-3.pdf
[xiv] "A "Clean" Wolf in Sheep's Clothing." North Carolina League of Conservation Voters. April 24, 2023. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://nclcv.org/cib0424-2023-nuclear/
[xv] "Approved $150 Million in Additional Funding for Palisades Nuclear Plant - Weight 3." Michigan League of Conservation Voters. July 24, 2024. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.michiganlcv.org/decision/approved-150-million-in-additional-funding-for-palisades-nuclear-plant/
[xvi] Electricity Data Browser: Palisades, annual. U.S. Energy Information Administration | U.S. Department of Energy. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/1715/?freq=A&pin=
[xvii] Electricity Data Browser: Net generation for all sectors, annual | Michigan. U.S. Energy Information Administration | U.S. Department of Energy. Accessed February 17, 2026. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/0?agg=2,0,1&fuel=08c7&geo=00004&sec=g&linechart=ELEC.GEN.NUC-MI-99.A&columnchart=ELEC.GEN.NUC-MI-99.A&map=ELEC.GEN.NUC-MI-99.A&freq=A&ctype=linechart<ype=pin&rtype=s&pin=&rse=0&maptype=0
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Ken Braun
As managing editor and director of content of CRC, Ken Braun edits Capital Research magazine. He also conducts investigative research and drafts profiles for InfluenceWatch.org.
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REPORT: https://capitalresearch.org/app/uploads/FINAL-PDF_CRC_EnemiesofEnergy.pdf
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Original text here: https://capitalresearch.org/article/enemies-of-energy-league-of-conservation-voters-lcv/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Capital Research Center Issues Commentary: Enemies of Energy - GRID Alternatives
WASHINGTON, July 8 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following commentary:
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Enemies of Energy: GRID Alternatives
Rather than spend $2.3 billion giving solar panels to low-income communities, the LIDAC money could have been used to purchase a $230,000 home for 10,000 of America's most impoverished families.
Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Enemies of Energy, a research report created for the Capital Research Center.
-
GRID Alternatives claims to be "the nation's largest nonprofit installer of clean energy technologies." What this means in practice can be understood ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, July 8 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following commentary: * * * Enemies of Energy: GRID Alternatives Rather than spend $2.3 billion giving solar panels to low-income communities, the LIDAC money could have been used to purchase a $230,000 home for 10,000 of America's most impoverished families. Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Enemies of Energy, a research report created for the Capital Research Center. - GRID Alternatives claims to be "the nation's largest nonprofit installer of clean energy technologies." What this means in practice can be understoodfrom a pair of grants totaling $312.3 million approved for GRID in May of 2024 by the Biden administration's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The federal funding was meant to be used to provide solar panels for Americans living in LIDACs--bureaucratic babble speak that means "low-income and disadvantaged communities." In total, at least $2.3 billion was approved for LIDAC solar panel grants by the EPA in 2024, and--true to their boast--GRID Alternatives was approved for the biggest chunk of this funding.[i] [ii] [iii]
Alternative uses of the taxpayer's wealth are a good way to assess program worthiness. Rather than spend $2.3 billion giving solar panels to low-income communities, the LIDAC money could have been used to purchase a $230,000 home for 10,000 of America's most impoverished families.
But the LIDAC solar grants were funded through the Inflation Reduction Act, which was mostly repealed by the Trump administration and the Republican Congress. As of March 2026, USASpending.gov shows GRID Alternatives receiving just $4.5 million of the approved $312.3 million in LIDAC loot. [iv]
Still, USASpending shows that even the $4.5 million is almost $2 million more than the combined total of all federal grants sent to GRID Alternatives from all federal departments between 2008 and 2023. One example of a prior grant was $381,000 approved in 2021 by the Denali Commission so GRID Alternatives could work on "solar projects" for two remote villages in . . . Alaska. Perhaps not surprisingly, GRID managed to spend just $25,000, or 6.5 percent of what the Denali Commission had approved. [v] [vi]
Two years earlier in January 2019 GRID co-signed a group letter to the U.S. House of Representatives endorsing the Green New Deal, an eco-socialist plot for the American economy so radical that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) derided it as "the green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is." In addition to the predictable denunciations of hydrocarbon fuels, the Green New Deal petition also denounced nuclear power as "dirty energy." [vii]
A 501(c)(3) tax exempt nonprofit, GRID Alternatives reported total revenue of $46.9 million for 2024, and net assets of $34.9 million. [viii]
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[i] Grid Alternatives. (EIN: 26-0043353) ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/260043353
[ii] Project Grant #84085701 (Environmental Protection Agency). USASpending. Start Date: May 1, 2024. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_84085701_6800/
Project Grant #84085801 (Environmental Protection Agency). USASpending. Start Date: May 1, 2024. Accessed March 13, 2024. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_84085801_6800/
[iii] Braun, Ken. "Low-Quality Energy for the LIDACs and $21.8 Billion in Waste from the EPA." Capital Research Center. January 16, 2025. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://capitalresearch.org/article/low-quality-energy-for-the-lidacs-and-21-8-billion-in-waste-from-the-epa/
[iv] Project Grant #84085701 (Environmental Protection Agency). USASpending. Start Date: May 1, 2024. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_84085701_6800/
Project Grant #84085801 (Environmental Protection Agency). USASpending. Start Date: May 1, 2024. Accessed March 13, 2024. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_84085801_6800/
[v] Federal grants for GRID Alternatives, all years, all sources. USASpending.gov. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://www.usaspending.gov/search?hash=9337d929df273fd3478684de64a65328
[vi] Cooperative Agreement #01643-00 (Denali Commission). USA Spending. Start Date March 1, 2021. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_01643-00_513
[vii] "Group letter to Congress urging Green New Deal passage." Earthworks. January 10, 2019. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://earthworks.org/resources/group-letter-to-congress-urging-green-new-deal-passage/
[viii] Grid Alternatives. (EIN: 26-0043353) ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/260043353
* * *
Ken Braun
As managing editor and director of content of CRC, Ken Braun edits Capital Research magazine. He also conducts investigative research and drafts profiles for InfluenceWatch.org.
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REPORT: https://capitalresearch.org/app/uploads/FINAL-PDF_CRC_EnemiesofEnergy.pdf
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Original text here: https://capitalresearch.org/article/enemies-of-energy-grid-alternatives/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Enemies of Energy: GRID Alternatives
Rather than spend $2.3 billion giving solar panels to low-income communities, the LIDAC money could have been used to purchase a $230,000 home for 10,000 of America's most impoverished families.
Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Enemies of Energy, a research report created for the Capital Research Center.
-
GRID Alternatives claims to be "the nation's largest nonprofit installer of clean energy technologies." What this means in practice can be understood ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, July 8 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following commentary: * * * Enemies of Energy: GRID Alternatives Rather than spend $2.3 billion giving solar panels to low-income communities, the LIDAC money could have been used to purchase a $230,000 home for 10,000 of America's most impoverished families. Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Enemies of Energy, a research report created for the Capital Research Center. - GRID Alternatives claims to be "the nation's largest nonprofit installer of clean energy technologies." What this means in practice can be understoodfrom a pair of grants totaling $312.3 million approved for GRID in May of 2024 by the Biden administration's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The federal funding was meant to be used to provide solar panels for Americans living in LIDACs--bureaucratic babble speak that means "low-income and disadvantaged communities." In total, at least $2.3 billion was approved for LIDAC solar panel grants by the EPA in 2024, and--true to their boast--GRID Alternatives was approved for the biggest chunk of this funding.[i] [ii] [iii]
Alternative uses of the taxpayer's wealth are a good way to assess program worthiness. Rather than spend $2.3 billion giving solar panels to low-income communities, the LIDAC money could have been used to purchase a $230,000 home for 10,000 of America's most impoverished families.
But the LIDAC solar grants were funded through the Inflation Reduction Act, which was mostly repealed by the Trump administration and the Republican Congress. As of March 2026, USASpending.gov shows GRID Alternatives receiving just $4.5 million of the approved $312.3 million in LIDAC loot. [iv]
Still, USASpending shows that even the $4.5 million is almost $2 million more than the combined total of all federal grants sent to GRID Alternatives from all federal departments between 2008 and 2023. One example of a prior grant was $381,000 approved in 2021 by the Denali Commission so GRID Alternatives could work on "solar projects" for two remote villages in . . . Alaska. Perhaps not surprisingly, GRID managed to spend just $25,000, or 6.5 percent of what the Denali Commission had approved. [v] [vi]
Two years earlier in January 2019 GRID co-signed a group letter to the U.S. House of Representatives endorsing the Green New Deal, an eco-socialist plot for the American economy so radical that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) derided it as "the green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is." In addition to the predictable denunciations of hydrocarbon fuels, the Green New Deal petition also denounced nuclear power as "dirty energy." [vii]
A 501(c)(3) tax exempt nonprofit, GRID Alternatives reported total revenue of $46.9 million for 2024, and net assets of $34.9 million. [viii]
* * *
[i] Grid Alternatives. (EIN: 26-0043353) ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/260043353
[ii] Project Grant #84085701 (Environmental Protection Agency). USASpending. Start Date: May 1, 2024. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_84085701_6800/
Project Grant #84085801 (Environmental Protection Agency). USASpending. Start Date: May 1, 2024. Accessed March 13, 2024. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_84085801_6800/
[iii] Braun, Ken. "Low-Quality Energy for the LIDACs and $21.8 Billion in Waste from the EPA." Capital Research Center. January 16, 2025. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://capitalresearch.org/article/low-quality-energy-for-the-lidacs-and-21-8-billion-in-waste-from-the-epa/
[iv] Project Grant #84085701 (Environmental Protection Agency). USASpending. Start Date: May 1, 2024. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_84085701_6800/
Project Grant #84085801 (Environmental Protection Agency). USASpending. Start Date: May 1, 2024. Accessed March 13, 2024. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_84085801_6800/
[v] Federal grants for GRID Alternatives, all years, all sources. USASpending.gov. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://www.usaspending.gov/search?hash=9337d929df273fd3478684de64a65328
[vi] Cooperative Agreement #01643-00 (Denali Commission). USA Spending. Start Date March 1, 2021. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_01643-00_513
[vii] "Group letter to Congress urging Green New Deal passage." Earthworks. January 10, 2019. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://earthworks.org/resources/group-letter-to-congress-urging-green-new-deal-passage/
[viii] Grid Alternatives. (EIN: 26-0043353) ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/260043353
* * *
Ken Braun
As managing editor and director of content of CRC, Ken Braun edits Capital Research magazine. He also conducts investigative research and drafts profiles for InfluenceWatch.org.
* * *
REPORT: https://capitalresearch.org/app/uploads/FINAL-PDF_CRC_EnemiesofEnergy.pdf
* * *
Original text here: https://capitalresearch.org/article/enemies-of-energy-grid-alternatives/
[Category: ThinkTank]
CSIS Issues Commentary: Russian Attitudes Are Shifting as the War's Effects Come Home
WASHINGTON, July 8 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary on July 7, 2026, by senior fellow Maria Snegovaya and senior associate (non-resident) Jade McGlynn, both of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program:
* * *
Russian Attitudes Are Shifting as the War's Effects Come Home
Since 2022, the Kremlin has sought to "normalize" its war against Ukraine and insulate ordinary Russians from its costs. In recent months, however, Ukraine has increasingly brought the war to Russia through a set of attacks on refineries, other energy infrastructure, and transport ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, July 8 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary on July 7, 2026, by senior fellow Maria Snegovaya and senior associate (non-resident) Jade McGlynn, both of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program: * * * Russian Attitudes Are Shifting as the War's Effects Come Home Since 2022, the Kremlin has sought to "normalize" its war against Ukraine and insulate ordinary Russians from its costs. In recent months, however, Ukraine has increasingly brought the war to Russia through a set of attacks on refineries, other energy infrastructure, and transporthubs that have caused flight delays, airport closures, and, more recently, worsening fuel shortages. If this shift radically alters Russians' attitudes toward the war, it could mark a key turning point. To that end, this analysis examines how Russians have responded to major shocks over the past four years.
Divisions within the pro-war camp complicate the picture. There are broadly two pro-Kremlin groups: "hawks" and "loyalists." Hawks, which constitute about 15 percent, are more ideologically driven, want more decisive military action, and think Russian President Vladimir Putin is too cautious in foreign policy. They are more likely to rally around the flag in response to military shocks. The other group, the loyalists--at around 35-40 percent--mainly aspire to be left alone, are less ideological, and less interested in politics than other groups. They are foreign policy moderates, and are more likely to withdraw their support for the war in response to such shocks, especially those that affect them personally. These divisions produce more heterogeneous responses to the war, with the reactions of the two groups often moving in opposite directions.
Russian Opinion Polls: Imperfect but Informative
While some analysts question the reliability of public opinion polling in Russia's tightening autocratic context, multiple methodological studies conducted since 2022 have found no major distortions in independent polling data with respect to sample composition, response rates, or respondents' willingness to participate. Studies examining preference falsification (or "hidden" opposition to the war) have generally found little, if any, evidence that support is systematically overstated: To the extent such bias exists, it is unlikely to exceed several percentage points. Taken together, while Russian polling should be interpreted with appropriate caution, it is a broadly reliable indicator of public opinion trends.
The available evidence suggests a gradual increase in public support for ending the war over the last few years, even if the Kremlin's stated military objectives remain unmet. Moreover, those objectives have shifted repeatedly over the past 4.5 years, and public understandings of what constitutes success are highly diverse. ExtremeScan's surveys between 2024 and 2026 indicate roughly two thirds of respondents consistently favor a ceasefire through mutual concessions. Support for freezing the conflict along the current line has consistently exceeded support for continuing the war to achieve full control over the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. However, this preference for ending the fighting has not translated into support for territorial concessions: Only about 18 percent of respondents support returning occupied Ukrainian territory, while most Russians continued to favor retaining the territories Russia already occupies.
Since the outset of the full-scale invasion and until recently, four events stood out as particularly significant shocks to the Russian public opinion: (1) the imposition of sanctions at the outset of the war, (2) the partial mobilization in September 2022, (3) Yevgeny Prigozhin's mutiny of June 2023, and (4) Ukraine's incursion into Kursk Oblast beginning in early August 2024. In each case, Russian public opinion responded similarly: rising anxiety, a decline in Putin's approval and support for the war, and greater support for peace negotiations.
Military Shocks Matter Less
Short-term military shocks often produce a limited rally-around-the-flag effect. For instance, according to Levada Center, a recent wave of intensified Ukrainian drone strikes in April-May 2026 appears to have initially increased war support, although Putin's approval ratings did not rise. Evidence from Russia's frontline regions, Kursk Oblast and Belgorod Oblast, also suggests that greater exposure to the war did not immediately undermine support for the Kremlin. Instead, residents largely adapted to recurring attacks that created a "new normal," some rallied around the flag, and overall support for the war in the border regions has remained consistently above the national average. Over time, however, surveys have pointed to growing war fatigue and emotional exhaustion.
ExtremeScan's polling in the border regions loosely aligns with the loyalist-hawk division. About half of respondents were ready to fight back, broadly in line with the hawkish pattern. Another roughly 40-50 percent were either reluctant to answer sensitive questions or unwilling to support or take part in the war. Crucially, those who had personally borne war-related costs (e.g., curfews, movement restrictions, or shortages of medicines and food) were about 1.5 times more likely to support troop withdrawal and negotiations. This personal-cost sensitivity is a loyalist signature. The group is not uniform, however: It blends genuinely disengaged loyalists with outright war sceptics. Reticence under the heavier repression of the border regions, may also conceal more opposition than national estimates would suggest. Loyalist disaffection tends to express itself as withdrawal, cynicism, private grumbling, and exit.
Economic Decline Matters More
Economic conditions appear to matter more than military developments in shaping support for the war, especially among loyalists. Surveys in Russia since 2022 have repeatedly shown that perceptions of current wellbeing and economic expectations positively correlate with war support; and economically better-off Russians have generally been more supportive of the war than poorer respondents. During the first years of the conflict, higher levels of war approval coincided with rapid real wage growth at a scale unseen since the mid-2000s, which was fueled by increased wartime government spending.
Now, as Russia's economic outlook has deteriorated and growth has stagnated since early 2026, public attitudes appear to be shifting. According to ExtremeScan polls, between January 2024 and March 2026 the share of respondents reporting an improvement in their financial situation fell from 20 percent to 13 percent in March 2026, while respondents reporting a deterioration doubled (from 20 percent to 41 percent) over the same period. According to a recent Gallup survey, Russian perceptions on the economy have turned negative. For the first time since 2006, a majority of respondents surveyed (a record 60 percent) between March and May said local economic conditions are getting worse. Also for the first time in two decades, a majority (56 percent) report that their standard of living is deteriorating. According to the June 2026 Levada survey, only 52 percent of respondents said Russia is moving in the right direction--the lowest level recorded since February 2022.
Economic concerns are affecting attitudes toward the conflict: According to a recent Institute of Conflictology and Analysis of Russia (IKAR) poll, respondents rank ending the war and improving their financial well-being as Russia's two highest priorities, well ahead of other options, with each cited by 58 percent of respondents. Moreover, a record 81 percent of respondents say they would support ending the war tomorrow--the highest level recorded in IKAR's polling since the start of the full-scale invasion.
These trends coincide with an erosion of confidence in state institutions: Confidence in the military fell by 13 points to 66 percent, the sharpest decline on record and a direct index of the war's costs registering at home; trust in the national fell government 14 points to 53 percent, and in the honesty of elections 16 points to 40 percent--all record one-year drops--while perceptions of media freedom plunged 25 points to a new low of 34 percent. Putin himself has not been immune to this trend. Levada recorded a decline in Putin's approval from 87 percent in August 2025 to 79 percent in April 2026. Even the Kremlin-linked VCIOM pollster showed Putin's approval rating declining from 78 percent at the end of December 2025 to 67 percent by late April. VCIOM subsequently revised its methodology, likely to curtail the decline in Putin's ratings, and also stopped publishing altogether another "open-ended" trust rating, which has shown even steeper decline in Putin's support. While such declines are not unprecedented over the quarter century of Putin's rule, the downward trend is unmistakable.
Attacks on Refineries Combine Both Effects
Ukraine's ongoing long-range drone strikes on Russian oil refineries combine both aforementioned mechanisms: They are military attacks imposing tangible economic costs. Ukraine's self-described "long-range sanctions" campaign against Russia therefore has greater potential to erode public support for the war than military strikes alone. They are, however, likely to produce divergent effects among loyalists and hawks. While hawks, at least initially, may tend to rally and push for tougher military responses, loyalists are more likely to respond to the mounting costs by withdrawing war support.
As illustrated by long lines to gas stations from Moscow to Irkutsk in Siberia, the economic and social impact of this campaign is already visible despite being only weeks old. The Ukrainian strikes were the most frequently cited as the most notable event of May and June, mentioned by 16 percent and 24 percent of respondents respectively. The effects will spread to other sectors, as diesel shortages are likely to disrupt agricultural machinery and supply trucks, potentially threatening Russia's crucial mid-summer harvest and fuel deliveries to remote regions. They also add upward pressure on inflation, one of the Russian public's core economic concerns, as the government struggles to contain price growth amid high wartime spending. These factors are likely to further erode support for the authorities and increase public preference for ending the war.
While a cross-border incursion is externally caused and clearly framed as enemy aggression, a fuel queue is different: a banal, recurring inconvenience that is experienced as one of the domestic costs of a war Russia chose and continues to wage. Casualties can be hidden, renamed, and ritualized, and after four years, the Kremlin is well practiced in doing so. The regime can mobilize people against an attacker. It is far harder to mobilize them against a shortage.
Russia's increasingly restricted information environment and intensifying repressions have limited the nationwide diffusion of such developments. For instance, some Muscovites expressed disbelief after reports of the explosion at the Moscow Oil Refinery, illustrating the extent of compartmentalization of the wartime disruptions. However, fuel shortages appear to bypass some of the information controls that normally mediate the war, as evidenced by the popularity of the services "("Where's the Gas?") and ("There's gas"). These crowdsourced, real-time maps of Russian filling stations show fuel availability and queues, based on markers left by drivers themselves rather than official sources.
Similar patterns emerged during the four shocks discussed previously. Readership of independent, largely exiled media tended to rise, a pattern documented after the September 2022 partial mobilization, during Prigozhin's mutiny in June 2023, and following the Kursk incursion in August 2024. At the invasion's onset, the blocking of Facebook and Instagram in March 2022 sent VPN installations up by more than 11,000 percent in a single day and overall VPN demand up by roughly 2,000 percent in a week. Russians know where to find independent information and actively seek it out at moments they perceive as touching their own safety, even though such outlets reach only a small minority of the population in ordinary times. The fuel crisis is precisely the kind of personally felt daily disruption that could prompt people to look past the official account.
In addition, unlike internet outages or many other wartime disruptions, fuel shortages produce visible queues that allow Russians to perceive that the problem is widespread rather than limited to their own experience. As such, they partially offset the atomization typical of the Russian society by making a shared problem widely visible. The Kremlin's media toolkit is aimed at narrative, or the mediated layer--for example, banning photographs of queues--but it is far less effective against a self-organizing ledger of physical fact, reported by drivers themselves. Queues carry symbolic weight in Russia, recalling the shortages of the late Soviet period and the early 1990s, associated with a weakening state's inability to provide basic goods.
The reported disbelief among some Muscovites at the Kapotnya strike proves that propaganda can still shape perceptions, but is limited once the consequences become physical, local, and personal. For many Russians, this is the first experience of the war to arrive unmediated. That said, limited media access and the threat of repression still cap how far word travels. IKAR's monitoring of media reactions to the fuel crisis finds the state treating perception as a separate domain of crisis management: bans on photographing fuel tankers and station queues, the labeling of shortage reporting as fakes or disinformation, and discussion of tighter VPN restrictions. In parallel, pro-government military bloggers and commentators have recast the disruptions as a product of Ukrainian "terrorist" strikes rather than the decision to continue the war, reaching for besieged-fortress and retaliation narratives that fold everyday hardship into a case for further escalation.
The impact of this campaign is therefore likely to remain localized rather than produce a reversal in public opinion. However, frustration that cannot be aimed at the regime rarely dissipates; under repression it is displaced onto weaker, safer targets and can erupt unexpectedly. In May 1915, wartime shortages and anger that could not touch the autocracy erupted instead into the anti-German riots that gutted Moscow. Patriotic feeling again curdled into violence in October 2023, when a mob stormed an airport in Makhachkala hunting Jewish passengers off a flight from Tel Aviv. The danger for the Kremlin, then, is less organized protest against the war--for which it is well equipped--than displacement: pressure that finds release in an unexpected, and not necessarily political, direction.
How the West Can Respond
Ultimately, the shift in public opinion alone is unlikely to compel the Kremlin to end the war. More important is that fuel shortages increase the Kremlin's political costs by making public frustration increasingly costly to manage. Shrinking fiscal resources, fewer funds for the military-industrial complex, fuel shortages, and intensifying competition among regions and sectors for increasingly scarce resources all gradually erode the state's ability to sustain the war over time. This would also be the moment for the West to simultaneously intensify sanctions pressure in Russia, reinforcing the economic cost of sustaining the war.
Ukraine's attacks on Russia's energy infrastructure also manufacture a rare moment when the causal chain, from the war's outset to fuel shortages to the Kremlin's choice to keep fighting, is more legible to ordinary Russians. Whether that legibility translates into attribution to the regime or dissipates into blame aimed elsewhere is not fixed. It is a contest over meaning, and it is a lever that Ukrainian and Western information efforts can pull. Sanctions raise the material costs; information efforts help determine whether Russians connect these costs to the war. The two belong in one strategy rather than in sequence.
* * *
Maria Snegovaya, Senior Fellow, Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program
Jade McGlynn, Senior Associate (Non-resident), Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program
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Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/russian-attitudes-are-shifting-wars-effects-come-home
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Russian Attitudes Are Shifting as the War's Effects Come Home
Since 2022, the Kremlin has sought to "normalize" its war against Ukraine and insulate ordinary Russians from its costs. In recent months, however, Ukraine has increasingly brought the war to Russia through a set of attacks on refineries, other energy infrastructure, and transport ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, July 8 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary on July 7, 2026, by senior fellow Maria Snegovaya and senior associate (non-resident) Jade McGlynn, both of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program: * * * Russian Attitudes Are Shifting as the War's Effects Come Home Since 2022, the Kremlin has sought to "normalize" its war against Ukraine and insulate ordinary Russians from its costs. In recent months, however, Ukraine has increasingly brought the war to Russia through a set of attacks on refineries, other energy infrastructure, and transporthubs that have caused flight delays, airport closures, and, more recently, worsening fuel shortages. If this shift radically alters Russians' attitudes toward the war, it could mark a key turning point. To that end, this analysis examines how Russians have responded to major shocks over the past four years.
Divisions within the pro-war camp complicate the picture. There are broadly two pro-Kremlin groups: "hawks" and "loyalists." Hawks, which constitute about 15 percent, are more ideologically driven, want more decisive military action, and think Russian President Vladimir Putin is too cautious in foreign policy. They are more likely to rally around the flag in response to military shocks. The other group, the loyalists--at around 35-40 percent--mainly aspire to be left alone, are less ideological, and less interested in politics than other groups. They are foreign policy moderates, and are more likely to withdraw their support for the war in response to such shocks, especially those that affect them personally. These divisions produce more heterogeneous responses to the war, with the reactions of the two groups often moving in opposite directions.
Russian Opinion Polls: Imperfect but Informative
While some analysts question the reliability of public opinion polling in Russia's tightening autocratic context, multiple methodological studies conducted since 2022 have found no major distortions in independent polling data with respect to sample composition, response rates, or respondents' willingness to participate. Studies examining preference falsification (or "hidden" opposition to the war) have generally found little, if any, evidence that support is systematically overstated: To the extent such bias exists, it is unlikely to exceed several percentage points. Taken together, while Russian polling should be interpreted with appropriate caution, it is a broadly reliable indicator of public opinion trends.
The available evidence suggests a gradual increase in public support for ending the war over the last few years, even if the Kremlin's stated military objectives remain unmet. Moreover, those objectives have shifted repeatedly over the past 4.5 years, and public understandings of what constitutes success are highly diverse. ExtremeScan's surveys between 2024 and 2026 indicate roughly two thirds of respondents consistently favor a ceasefire through mutual concessions. Support for freezing the conflict along the current line has consistently exceeded support for continuing the war to achieve full control over the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. However, this preference for ending the fighting has not translated into support for territorial concessions: Only about 18 percent of respondents support returning occupied Ukrainian territory, while most Russians continued to favor retaining the territories Russia already occupies.
Since the outset of the full-scale invasion and until recently, four events stood out as particularly significant shocks to the Russian public opinion: (1) the imposition of sanctions at the outset of the war, (2) the partial mobilization in September 2022, (3) Yevgeny Prigozhin's mutiny of June 2023, and (4) Ukraine's incursion into Kursk Oblast beginning in early August 2024. In each case, Russian public opinion responded similarly: rising anxiety, a decline in Putin's approval and support for the war, and greater support for peace negotiations.
Military Shocks Matter Less
Short-term military shocks often produce a limited rally-around-the-flag effect. For instance, according to Levada Center, a recent wave of intensified Ukrainian drone strikes in April-May 2026 appears to have initially increased war support, although Putin's approval ratings did not rise. Evidence from Russia's frontline regions, Kursk Oblast and Belgorod Oblast, also suggests that greater exposure to the war did not immediately undermine support for the Kremlin. Instead, residents largely adapted to recurring attacks that created a "new normal," some rallied around the flag, and overall support for the war in the border regions has remained consistently above the national average. Over time, however, surveys have pointed to growing war fatigue and emotional exhaustion.
ExtremeScan's polling in the border regions loosely aligns with the loyalist-hawk division. About half of respondents were ready to fight back, broadly in line with the hawkish pattern. Another roughly 40-50 percent were either reluctant to answer sensitive questions or unwilling to support or take part in the war. Crucially, those who had personally borne war-related costs (e.g., curfews, movement restrictions, or shortages of medicines and food) were about 1.5 times more likely to support troop withdrawal and negotiations. This personal-cost sensitivity is a loyalist signature. The group is not uniform, however: It blends genuinely disengaged loyalists with outright war sceptics. Reticence under the heavier repression of the border regions, may also conceal more opposition than national estimates would suggest. Loyalist disaffection tends to express itself as withdrawal, cynicism, private grumbling, and exit.
Economic Decline Matters More
Economic conditions appear to matter more than military developments in shaping support for the war, especially among loyalists. Surveys in Russia since 2022 have repeatedly shown that perceptions of current wellbeing and economic expectations positively correlate with war support; and economically better-off Russians have generally been more supportive of the war than poorer respondents. During the first years of the conflict, higher levels of war approval coincided with rapid real wage growth at a scale unseen since the mid-2000s, which was fueled by increased wartime government spending.
Now, as Russia's economic outlook has deteriorated and growth has stagnated since early 2026, public attitudes appear to be shifting. According to ExtremeScan polls, between January 2024 and March 2026 the share of respondents reporting an improvement in their financial situation fell from 20 percent to 13 percent in March 2026, while respondents reporting a deterioration doubled (from 20 percent to 41 percent) over the same period. According to a recent Gallup survey, Russian perceptions on the economy have turned negative. For the first time since 2006, a majority of respondents surveyed (a record 60 percent) between March and May said local economic conditions are getting worse. Also for the first time in two decades, a majority (56 percent) report that their standard of living is deteriorating. According to the June 2026 Levada survey, only 52 percent of respondents said Russia is moving in the right direction--the lowest level recorded since February 2022.
Economic concerns are affecting attitudes toward the conflict: According to a recent Institute of Conflictology and Analysis of Russia (IKAR) poll, respondents rank ending the war and improving their financial well-being as Russia's two highest priorities, well ahead of other options, with each cited by 58 percent of respondents. Moreover, a record 81 percent of respondents say they would support ending the war tomorrow--the highest level recorded in IKAR's polling since the start of the full-scale invasion.
These trends coincide with an erosion of confidence in state institutions: Confidence in the military fell by 13 points to 66 percent, the sharpest decline on record and a direct index of the war's costs registering at home; trust in the national fell government 14 points to 53 percent, and in the honesty of elections 16 points to 40 percent--all record one-year drops--while perceptions of media freedom plunged 25 points to a new low of 34 percent. Putin himself has not been immune to this trend. Levada recorded a decline in Putin's approval from 87 percent in August 2025 to 79 percent in April 2026. Even the Kremlin-linked VCIOM pollster showed Putin's approval rating declining from 78 percent at the end of December 2025 to 67 percent by late April. VCIOM subsequently revised its methodology, likely to curtail the decline in Putin's ratings, and also stopped publishing altogether another "open-ended" trust rating, which has shown even steeper decline in Putin's support. While such declines are not unprecedented over the quarter century of Putin's rule, the downward trend is unmistakable.
Attacks on Refineries Combine Both Effects
Ukraine's ongoing long-range drone strikes on Russian oil refineries combine both aforementioned mechanisms: They are military attacks imposing tangible economic costs. Ukraine's self-described "long-range sanctions" campaign against Russia therefore has greater potential to erode public support for the war than military strikes alone. They are, however, likely to produce divergent effects among loyalists and hawks. While hawks, at least initially, may tend to rally and push for tougher military responses, loyalists are more likely to respond to the mounting costs by withdrawing war support.
As illustrated by long lines to gas stations from Moscow to Irkutsk in Siberia, the economic and social impact of this campaign is already visible despite being only weeks old. The Ukrainian strikes were the most frequently cited as the most notable event of May and June, mentioned by 16 percent and 24 percent of respondents respectively. The effects will spread to other sectors, as diesel shortages are likely to disrupt agricultural machinery and supply trucks, potentially threatening Russia's crucial mid-summer harvest and fuel deliveries to remote regions. They also add upward pressure on inflation, one of the Russian public's core economic concerns, as the government struggles to contain price growth amid high wartime spending. These factors are likely to further erode support for the authorities and increase public preference for ending the war.
While a cross-border incursion is externally caused and clearly framed as enemy aggression, a fuel queue is different: a banal, recurring inconvenience that is experienced as one of the domestic costs of a war Russia chose and continues to wage. Casualties can be hidden, renamed, and ritualized, and after four years, the Kremlin is well practiced in doing so. The regime can mobilize people against an attacker. It is far harder to mobilize them against a shortage.
Russia's increasingly restricted information environment and intensifying repressions have limited the nationwide diffusion of such developments. For instance, some Muscovites expressed disbelief after reports of the explosion at the Moscow Oil Refinery, illustrating the extent of compartmentalization of the wartime disruptions. However, fuel shortages appear to bypass some of the information controls that normally mediate the war, as evidenced by the popularity of the services "("Where's the Gas?") and ("There's gas"). These crowdsourced, real-time maps of Russian filling stations show fuel availability and queues, based on markers left by drivers themselves rather than official sources.
Similar patterns emerged during the four shocks discussed previously. Readership of independent, largely exiled media tended to rise, a pattern documented after the September 2022 partial mobilization, during Prigozhin's mutiny in June 2023, and following the Kursk incursion in August 2024. At the invasion's onset, the blocking of Facebook and Instagram in March 2022 sent VPN installations up by more than 11,000 percent in a single day and overall VPN demand up by roughly 2,000 percent in a week. Russians know where to find independent information and actively seek it out at moments they perceive as touching their own safety, even though such outlets reach only a small minority of the population in ordinary times. The fuel crisis is precisely the kind of personally felt daily disruption that could prompt people to look past the official account.
In addition, unlike internet outages or many other wartime disruptions, fuel shortages produce visible queues that allow Russians to perceive that the problem is widespread rather than limited to their own experience. As such, they partially offset the atomization typical of the Russian society by making a shared problem widely visible. The Kremlin's media toolkit is aimed at narrative, or the mediated layer--for example, banning photographs of queues--but it is far less effective against a self-organizing ledger of physical fact, reported by drivers themselves. Queues carry symbolic weight in Russia, recalling the shortages of the late Soviet period and the early 1990s, associated with a weakening state's inability to provide basic goods.
The reported disbelief among some Muscovites at the Kapotnya strike proves that propaganda can still shape perceptions, but is limited once the consequences become physical, local, and personal. For many Russians, this is the first experience of the war to arrive unmediated. That said, limited media access and the threat of repression still cap how far word travels. IKAR's monitoring of media reactions to the fuel crisis finds the state treating perception as a separate domain of crisis management: bans on photographing fuel tankers and station queues, the labeling of shortage reporting as fakes or disinformation, and discussion of tighter VPN restrictions. In parallel, pro-government military bloggers and commentators have recast the disruptions as a product of Ukrainian "terrorist" strikes rather than the decision to continue the war, reaching for besieged-fortress and retaliation narratives that fold everyday hardship into a case for further escalation.
The impact of this campaign is therefore likely to remain localized rather than produce a reversal in public opinion. However, frustration that cannot be aimed at the regime rarely dissipates; under repression it is displaced onto weaker, safer targets and can erupt unexpectedly. In May 1915, wartime shortages and anger that could not touch the autocracy erupted instead into the anti-German riots that gutted Moscow. Patriotic feeling again curdled into violence in October 2023, when a mob stormed an airport in Makhachkala hunting Jewish passengers off a flight from Tel Aviv. The danger for the Kremlin, then, is less organized protest against the war--for which it is well equipped--than displacement: pressure that finds release in an unexpected, and not necessarily political, direction.
How the West Can Respond
Ultimately, the shift in public opinion alone is unlikely to compel the Kremlin to end the war. More important is that fuel shortages increase the Kremlin's political costs by making public frustration increasingly costly to manage. Shrinking fiscal resources, fewer funds for the military-industrial complex, fuel shortages, and intensifying competition among regions and sectors for increasingly scarce resources all gradually erode the state's ability to sustain the war over time. This would also be the moment for the West to simultaneously intensify sanctions pressure in Russia, reinforcing the economic cost of sustaining the war.
Ukraine's attacks on Russia's energy infrastructure also manufacture a rare moment when the causal chain, from the war's outset to fuel shortages to the Kremlin's choice to keep fighting, is more legible to ordinary Russians. Whether that legibility translates into attribution to the regime or dissipates into blame aimed elsewhere is not fixed. It is a contest over meaning, and it is a lever that Ukrainian and Western information efforts can pull. Sanctions raise the material costs; information efforts help determine whether Russians connect these costs to the war. The two belong in one strategy rather than in sequence.
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Maria Snegovaya, Senior Fellow, Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program
Jade McGlynn, Senior Associate (Non-resident), Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program
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Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/russian-attitudes-are-shifting-wars-effects-come-home
[Category: ThinkTank]
CSIS Issues Commentary: China's SLBM Test Underscores the Importance of a Ballistic Missile Launch Notification Agreement
WASHINGTON, July 8 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary on July 7, 2026, by Joseph Rodgers, deputy director and fellow with the Project on Nuclear Issues in the International Security Program, Director Joseph Rodgers and research associate Leon Li, both of the China Power Project:
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China's SLBM Test Underscores the Importance of a Ballistic Missile Launch Notification Agreement
China tested a JL2 or JL3 submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) into the open water from the South China Sea (SCS) to the Pacific on July 6, ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, July 8 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary on July 7, 2026, by Joseph Rodgers, deputy director and fellow with the Project on Nuclear Issues in the International Security Program, Director Joseph Rodgers and research associate Leon Li, both of the China Power Project: * * * China's SLBM Test Underscores the Importance of a Ballistic Missile Launch Notification Agreement China tested a JL2 or JL3 submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) into the open water from the South China Sea (SCS) to the Pacific on July 6,2026, at 4:01 AM UTC. The missile carried a simulated training warhead across a flight path of roughly 7,300 kilometers and likely overflew parts of the Philippines, landing in the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone. Navigation warning information suggests that it is possible that China considered two missile tests on July 6, one originating from the Bohai Sea and flying over Japan toward the Pacific and a second taking off from the SCS and probably flying over the Philippines. It is unclear why only the latter option occurred. A People's Liberation Army (PLA) statement reported by Xinhua News Agency claimed "the missile test was a routine part of China's annual military training program, and relevant countries had been notified in advance." The test coincided with the kickoff of the Joint Sea 2026 naval exercise in Qingdao, an exercise involving Chinese and Russian navies held every year since 2012, but there is no confirmation that Russia was involved in the test. China has portrayed the test as its own military activity.
* * *
Figure 1: PLA SLBM Launch and Debris Landing Locations Based on Navigational Warnings
* * *
This 2026 test is the first time that China has ever launched a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) into international open waters and is the first time that Beijing has publicly demonstrated in the Indo-Pacific that China has a strategic nuclear strike capability launched from a nuclear-powered submarine. This is Beijing's second launch of a ballistic missile in international waters since 1980. On September 25, 2024, China conducted a similar test launch of what was likely a land-based DF-31 ICBM into the Pacific Ocean. It is very difficult to determine whether this week's test was a JL2 or JL3 missile with the photos that the PLA released. The only notable difference between the missiles is their dimensions and maximum range. Both missiles have the same number of stages and the same shape. The images that the PLA released are over open waters and do not provide any reference points against which to measure dimensions. This test covered 7,300 kilometers, which both the JL2 and the JL3 could reach. If this was a JL2, then this missile was tested to nearly full range, whereas the JL3 can travel over 10,000 kilometers.
Drivers of China's SLBM Test
However, the timing and structure of this test indicate that it was anything but routine. There are likely several different political drivers for this particular test, as well as China's desire to validate the capability of its military hardware.
First, China likely sought to use the missile test to showcase resolve and frustration at U.S. allies and partners. This Chinese missile test occurred the same day as Australia's signing of a defense treaty with Fiji. Chinese media characterized this defense treaty as Australia seeking to shore up its influence in the South Pacific while also constraining Chinese power. Shortly after China launched its missile test, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs cautioned Australia and Fiji against using the defense treaty to target third parties (or China) or harm the interests of third parties. Australia's defense pact with Fiji also comes on the heels of other Australian agreements, including with Vanuatu last week, to check Chinese military and economic activity in the region.
Second, China has demonstrated a repeated pattern of engaging in military exercises to counter U.S. or U.S.-led military activities around the same time. It is possible that China could be flexing its muscles against either the recently wrapped up Australian army exercise in 2026--Exercise Southern Jackaroo, which involved U.S. and Japanese forces--or the concurrent U.S.-led Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) naval exercises involving Australia, the Philippines, Japan, and over two dozen other U.S. allies and partners. Of note, the Philippine Coast Guard set a record this year by being the first foreign coast guard to participate in RIMPAC, which might be one of the reasons China's missile test overflew parts of the Philippines.
Third, China has increasingly teamed up with Russia to engage in joint military exercises to counter U.S.-led military activities. Part of this is to signal that China also has its own friends and potential allies in a military contingency. The timing of the launch of the 13th China-Russia Joint Sea 2026 exercise to coincide with the SLBM launch is broadly consistent with China's desire to portray Sino-Russian strategic alignment through coordinated military activities. Last month, for example, China and Russia engaged in a joint bomber patrol over the waters of the Sea of Japan, the East China Sea, and the western Pacific Ocean likely in response to the concurrent U.S.-led Exercise Valiant Shield. But what is curious this time is that China had two launch options for the missile--one from the Bohai Sea and another from the SCS--and launching from the SCS created more geographic distance from its military operations with Russia than if the missile test occurred from Bohai (Qingdao, the location of the China-Russia Joint Sea exercise is located in China's Shandong province and very close to the Bohai Sea).
Finally, and technically, Beijing also seeks to use this SLBM launch to test the performance of its equipment. Chinese commentators, for example, speculate that the missile used was the JL-3, a new capability that China unveiled last year during its September 2025 military parade. It has undergone multiple different trials, and some argue that the JL-3 now needs to undergo a near-full flight trajectory to validate its performance and reliability. Regardless of whether China tested a JL-2 or a JL-3, the test will provide valuable data for China to improve its sea-based strategic nuclear strike capability.
The Need for a Ballistic Missile Launch Notification Agreement
China's public messaging around this missile test indicates an effort by China to routinize testing in international waters. In the 2024 and 2026 launches, China notified the United States and some regional partners, but these notifications did not follow standard international procedures set forth in the Hague Code of Conduct against Ballistic Missile Proliferation (HCOC), which China has not ratified. In this week's test, China provided mere hours of advance notice to the United States and Japan. It also provided about 23 hours of advanced notice to Australia and possibly other countries near the landing zone. In 2024, China provided less than 24-hour notice to the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and France. After that test, all five countries expressed disapproval over how the notifications were handled and publicly condemned China for not following the proper code of conduct.
China is the only major space-faring nation with ballistic missiles that remains entirely outside of the HCOC. If China claims that these tests are routine, then it is time that it undertakes responsible actions and follows the internationally established protocols for ballistic missile launch notifications. States that subscribe to the HCOC agree to exchange pre-launch notifications no less than 24 hours prior to launch to all 140 member states, including information about the launch area, direction of launch, and the general class of missile that is being tested.
For years, the international community has pressed Beijing to align with the HCOC. Since 2009, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom have consistently used the P5 process--the primary multilateral forum for nuclear-weapon states recognized by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons--to lobby for China's integration into the HCOC alongside broader strategic risk-reduction initiatives.
Diplomatically, Beijing has demonstrated great pride over its advance warnings and has attempted to leverage these notifications to garner diplomatic support. For example, during the 2026 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, Chinese diplomats pointed to their 2024 advance notice as evidence of transparency and China's commitment to strategic risk reduction in the national report and statements. In the 2026 test, the PLA claimed to have notified "relevant countries" in advance. Yet China's ad-hoc and discretionary notification approach circumvents international procedures and has already drawn significant condemnation and criticism.
* * *
Table 1: China's Notifications Vs Hague Code of Conduct Obligations
* * *
This lack of transparency is a feature, not a bug, of China's nuclear forces. China is undergoing the largest qualitative and quantitative expansion of its nuclear arsenal ever, tripling the size of its nuclear arsenal from 200 weapons to over 600 in the last six years. China is constructing vast ICBM silos and expanding its missile inventory. Despite this massive buildup, China's leadership has provided no formal notifications detailing how many weapons it plans to build. This structural opacity is a key aspect of China's nuclear strategy, but it undermines international stability and contributes to nuclear arms racing dynamics. The global community thrives on transparency, consistency, and proactive confidence-building measures.
Testing ballistic missiles in international waters without following the proper protocols poses risks to the international community. This week's missile launch, which came from the SCS, a protected bastion for Chinese ballistic missile submarines, mirrored a real missile attack in several ways. The test missile and dummy warhead flew in a realistic trajectory over thousands of kilometers and possibly crossed over Philippine territory. Tests such as these increase the chance of miscalculation. As a permeant member of the UN Security Council, China's refusal to follow the HCOC also provides cover for other states--such as North Korea and Iran--to continue unrestrained testing without providing prelaunch notifications.
The HCOC has standardized ballistic missile launch notifications for over 24 years. Based on Chinese statements, the PLA intends to make open-ocean missile testing a routine component of its nuclear posture. There are no downsides to providing proper notice prior to future Chinese tests. Failing to adopt proper protocols risks an unintended global crisis.
* * *
Joseph Rodgers is deputy director and fellow with the Project on Nuclear Issues in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Bonny Lin is director of the China Power Project and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Leon Li is a research associate with the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-slbm-test-underscores-importance-ballistic-missile-launch-notification-agreement
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
China's SLBM Test Underscores the Importance of a Ballistic Missile Launch Notification Agreement
China tested a JL2 or JL3 submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) into the open water from the South China Sea (SCS) to the Pacific on July 6, ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, July 8 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary on July 7, 2026, by Joseph Rodgers, deputy director and fellow with the Project on Nuclear Issues in the International Security Program, Director Joseph Rodgers and research associate Leon Li, both of the China Power Project: * * * China's SLBM Test Underscores the Importance of a Ballistic Missile Launch Notification Agreement China tested a JL2 or JL3 submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) into the open water from the South China Sea (SCS) to the Pacific on July 6,2026, at 4:01 AM UTC. The missile carried a simulated training warhead across a flight path of roughly 7,300 kilometers and likely overflew parts of the Philippines, landing in the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone. Navigation warning information suggests that it is possible that China considered two missile tests on July 6, one originating from the Bohai Sea and flying over Japan toward the Pacific and a second taking off from the SCS and probably flying over the Philippines. It is unclear why only the latter option occurred. A People's Liberation Army (PLA) statement reported by Xinhua News Agency claimed "the missile test was a routine part of China's annual military training program, and relevant countries had been notified in advance." The test coincided with the kickoff of the Joint Sea 2026 naval exercise in Qingdao, an exercise involving Chinese and Russian navies held every year since 2012, but there is no confirmation that Russia was involved in the test. China has portrayed the test as its own military activity.
* * *
Figure 1: PLA SLBM Launch and Debris Landing Locations Based on Navigational Warnings
* * *
This 2026 test is the first time that China has ever launched a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) into international open waters and is the first time that Beijing has publicly demonstrated in the Indo-Pacific that China has a strategic nuclear strike capability launched from a nuclear-powered submarine. This is Beijing's second launch of a ballistic missile in international waters since 1980. On September 25, 2024, China conducted a similar test launch of what was likely a land-based DF-31 ICBM into the Pacific Ocean. It is very difficult to determine whether this week's test was a JL2 or JL3 missile with the photos that the PLA released. The only notable difference between the missiles is their dimensions and maximum range. Both missiles have the same number of stages and the same shape. The images that the PLA released are over open waters and do not provide any reference points against which to measure dimensions. This test covered 7,300 kilometers, which both the JL2 and the JL3 could reach. If this was a JL2, then this missile was tested to nearly full range, whereas the JL3 can travel over 10,000 kilometers.
Drivers of China's SLBM Test
However, the timing and structure of this test indicate that it was anything but routine. There are likely several different political drivers for this particular test, as well as China's desire to validate the capability of its military hardware.
First, China likely sought to use the missile test to showcase resolve and frustration at U.S. allies and partners. This Chinese missile test occurred the same day as Australia's signing of a defense treaty with Fiji. Chinese media characterized this defense treaty as Australia seeking to shore up its influence in the South Pacific while also constraining Chinese power. Shortly after China launched its missile test, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs cautioned Australia and Fiji against using the defense treaty to target third parties (or China) or harm the interests of third parties. Australia's defense pact with Fiji also comes on the heels of other Australian agreements, including with Vanuatu last week, to check Chinese military and economic activity in the region.
Second, China has demonstrated a repeated pattern of engaging in military exercises to counter U.S. or U.S.-led military activities around the same time. It is possible that China could be flexing its muscles against either the recently wrapped up Australian army exercise in 2026--Exercise Southern Jackaroo, which involved U.S. and Japanese forces--or the concurrent U.S.-led Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) naval exercises involving Australia, the Philippines, Japan, and over two dozen other U.S. allies and partners. Of note, the Philippine Coast Guard set a record this year by being the first foreign coast guard to participate in RIMPAC, which might be one of the reasons China's missile test overflew parts of the Philippines.
Third, China has increasingly teamed up with Russia to engage in joint military exercises to counter U.S.-led military activities. Part of this is to signal that China also has its own friends and potential allies in a military contingency. The timing of the launch of the 13th China-Russia Joint Sea 2026 exercise to coincide with the SLBM launch is broadly consistent with China's desire to portray Sino-Russian strategic alignment through coordinated military activities. Last month, for example, China and Russia engaged in a joint bomber patrol over the waters of the Sea of Japan, the East China Sea, and the western Pacific Ocean likely in response to the concurrent U.S.-led Exercise Valiant Shield. But what is curious this time is that China had two launch options for the missile--one from the Bohai Sea and another from the SCS--and launching from the SCS created more geographic distance from its military operations with Russia than if the missile test occurred from Bohai (Qingdao, the location of the China-Russia Joint Sea exercise is located in China's Shandong province and very close to the Bohai Sea).
Finally, and technically, Beijing also seeks to use this SLBM launch to test the performance of its equipment. Chinese commentators, for example, speculate that the missile used was the JL-3, a new capability that China unveiled last year during its September 2025 military parade. It has undergone multiple different trials, and some argue that the JL-3 now needs to undergo a near-full flight trajectory to validate its performance and reliability. Regardless of whether China tested a JL-2 or a JL-3, the test will provide valuable data for China to improve its sea-based strategic nuclear strike capability.
The Need for a Ballistic Missile Launch Notification Agreement
China's public messaging around this missile test indicates an effort by China to routinize testing in international waters. In the 2024 and 2026 launches, China notified the United States and some regional partners, but these notifications did not follow standard international procedures set forth in the Hague Code of Conduct against Ballistic Missile Proliferation (HCOC), which China has not ratified. In this week's test, China provided mere hours of advance notice to the United States and Japan. It also provided about 23 hours of advanced notice to Australia and possibly other countries near the landing zone. In 2024, China provided less than 24-hour notice to the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and France. After that test, all five countries expressed disapproval over how the notifications were handled and publicly condemned China for not following the proper code of conduct.
China is the only major space-faring nation with ballistic missiles that remains entirely outside of the HCOC. If China claims that these tests are routine, then it is time that it undertakes responsible actions and follows the internationally established protocols for ballistic missile launch notifications. States that subscribe to the HCOC agree to exchange pre-launch notifications no less than 24 hours prior to launch to all 140 member states, including information about the launch area, direction of launch, and the general class of missile that is being tested.
For years, the international community has pressed Beijing to align with the HCOC. Since 2009, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom have consistently used the P5 process--the primary multilateral forum for nuclear-weapon states recognized by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons--to lobby for China's integration into the HCOC alongside broader strategic risk-reduction initiatives.
Diplomatically, Beijing has demonstrated great pride over its advance warnings and has attempted to leverage these notifications to garner diplomatic support. For example, during the 2026 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, Chinese diplomats pointed to their 2024 advance notice as evidence of transparency and China's commitment to strategic risk reduction in the national report and statements. In the 2026 test, the PLA claimed to have notified "relevant countries" in advance. Yet China's ad-hoc and discretionary notification approach circumvents international procedures and has already drawn significant condemnation and criticism.
* * *
Table 1: China's Notifications Vs Hague Code of Conduct Obligations
* * *
This lack of transparency is a feature, not a bug, of China's nuclear forces. China is undergoing the largest qualitative and quantitative expansion of its nuclear arsenal ever, tripling the size of its nuclear arsenal from 200 weapons to over 600 in the last six years. China is constructing vast ICBM silos and expanding its missile inventory. Despite this massive buildup, China's leadership has provided no formal notifications detailing how many weapons it plans to build. This structural opacity is a key aspect of China's nuclear strategy, but it undermines international stability and contributes to nuclear arms racing dynamics. The global community thrives on transparency, consistency, and proactive confidence-building measures.
Testing ballistic missiles in international waters without following the proper protocols poses risks to the international community. This week's missile launch, which came from the SCS, a protected bastion for Chinese ballistic missile submarines, mirrored a real missile attack in several ways. The test missile and dummy warhead flew in a realistic trajectory over thousands of kilometers and possibly crossed over Philippine territory. Tests such as these increase the chance of miscalculation. As a permeant member of the UN Security Council, China's refusal to follow the HCOC also provides cover for other states--such as North Korea and Iran--to continue unrestrained testing without providing prelaunch notifications.
The HCOC has standardized ballistic missile launch notifications for over 24 years. Based on Chinese statements, the PLA intends to make open-ocean missile testing a routine component of its nuclear posture. There are no downsides to providing proper notice prior to future Chinese tests. Failing to adopt proper protocols risks an unintended global crisis.
* * *
Joseph Rodgers is deputy director and fellow with the Project on Nuclear Issues in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Bonny Lin is director of the China Power Project and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Leon Li is a research associate with the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-slbm-test-underscores-importance-ballistic-missile-launch-notification-agreement
[Category: ThinkTank]