Security

Warsaw: Poland, which shares borders with Ukraine and Russia, has received its first batch of U.S.-made HIMARS rocket launchers. Warsaw plans to deploy the long-range precision weapons with its military units in Olsztyn — 50 miles from Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave, Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak told reporters. He added that the new weapons would “strengthen” Polish forces defending the country’s eastern flank and the broader NATO alliance.

Washington: Documents obtained by The New York Times revealed that U.S. Special Operations forces aren’t required to check whether the foreign soldiers they arm and train have committed human rights violations in the past. The report raises concerns about the Pentagon’s decades-long use of proxy forces in countries like Niger and Somalia.

Pyongyang: North Korea has stolen $721 million in cryptocurrency assets from Japan — 30% of the total amount of cryptocurrency ever stolen worldwide — to fund its missile programs since 2017, Nikkei reports. Japan’s losses of stolen crypto are followed by: Vietnam ($540 million), the U.S. ($497 million), and Hong Kong ($281 million), according to new analysis by Elliptic, a financial compliance firm.

– Karina

The US hopes a new security pact with Papua New Guinea will give it an edge on China

THE NEWS

A World War II-era military base in the South Pacific is the latest focal point in Washington’s intensifying competition with China.

Since 2018, the U.S. and Australia have quietly been helping the government of Papua New Guinea restore a naval facility there known as Lombrum, which sits on a strategic waterway linking Australia to East Asia. American forces used the base to attack the Imperial Japanese Navy in the latter stages of World War II.

Lombrum will now tie into a set of formal security agreements that the Biden administration has been negotiating with Papua New Guinea, and which U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to sign next week in Port Moresby alongside his counterpart Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister James Marape.

The country’s outgoing foreign minister, Justin Tkachenko, told Reuters last week that, under the new pacts, the U.S. Coast Guard will help Papua New Guinea patrol its expansive surrounding waters — which are heavily fished by Chinese vessels — using American boats and satellite imagery.

“It will be a fantastic agreement protecting our natural resources from being illegally poached and stolen, especially our fishing,” Tkachenko said.

The Lombrum base will likely be a central cog in this effort and could eventually allow visiting U.S. and Australian naval vessels to survey the region.

JAY’S VIEW

Dusting off an obscure old naval base and promising to prowl for illegal fishing boats may not exactly seem like front page developments. But the Biden administration’s moves in Papua New Guinea are squarely aimed at checking China’s recent advances in a strategically critical region of the Pacific, where both countries are now trying to eek out an advantage by winning hearts and minds one island nation at a time.

Last year, Beijing announced a formal security agreement with the Solomon Islands, which sits around 1,000 miles to the east of the Lombrum facility, giving China a potential base to project its power into strategically important waterways. Beijing has also been discussing building ports and airfields in Pacific Island countries like Samoa, Vanuatu, and Kiribati.

In any conflict between the U.S. and China, both Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands could serve as key naval bases to control the flow of military and commercial traffic from Australia back into Asia — as they did during World War II. The Biden administration has flooded the wider Pacific region with military and diplomatic assets over the past two years, including opening new embassies in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Kiribati, and earlier this month, Tonga.

“We’ve seen an opportunistic move by Beijing in the Pacific islands to expand their presence. Of particular concern are China’s gaining access to facilities that might have dual use, or military capabilities,” Charles Edel, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Semafor. “There’s a real competition now for influence with these islands.”

Beyond signing the new agreements with Papua New Guinea, Biden also plans to meet with the leaders of dozens of other Pacific Island nations while in Port Moresby next week. In September, the president hosted a White House summit for may of the region’s top officials where they signed on to a partnership plan with the U.S.

STEP BACK

The Papua New Guinea deals are also just the latest in a slew of new initiatives Biden has recently kicked off with allies to strengthen the U.S.’s military, economic, and technological advantages in the Pacific.

Over the past month, the White House unveiled a new nuclear-defense agreement with South Korea that bolsters the countries’ ability to defend against North Korean and Chinese threats, along with a strengthened Mutual Defense Treaty with the Philippines. The latter includes four new basing agreements on islands strategically located near Taiwan.

The administration has also been working to grow an Asia-focused defense technologies coalition, known as AUKUS. It initially centers on building nuclear submarines with Australia and the U.K. but will advance to include hypersonic weapons, quantum computing technologies, and underwater vehicle production.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby declined on Monday to comment on the expected defense agreement with Papua New Guinea, but stressed the importance of Pacific island countries to stability in the region.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT 

Some liberal politicians abroad, including former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, have been critical of AUKUS and the rush to project more Western power into the Pacific. They believe it will further militarize the region, decades after the bloody battles of the Second World War that raged there. And they say such initiatives could make a conflict with China inevitable.

THE VIEW FROM BEIJING

Chinese state media has also voiced criticism of the U.S.’s and Australia’s moves in the region, particularly the efforts to revamp the Lombrum naval facility on Manus Island. “It is plain to any eye that Canberra is trying to turn the Pacific region into a springboard for the U.S. military adventurism, which would critically undermine the regional stability and economic development,” Global Times said in October.

NOTABLE

• In June of 2022, Edel of CSIS wrote on the strategic threat posed by Chinese dominance over the Pacific Islands.
• Papua New Guinea has a special place in Biden’s family. Two of his uncles were based there during World War II, including one who died. He spoke of them during a 2016 trip to Australia as vice president. “One brother, Ambrose Finnegan, was lost in Papua New Guinea,” he said. “They never found the body. And the other came home with malaria and was sick off and on for the better part of his life.”

Serhii Cherevaty is the spokesman for Ukraine’s Eastern Military Command.

It’s been an especially operatic few weeks for Yevgeny Prigozhin, the chief of Russia’s Wagner Group whose public fights with his country’s military establishment have reached new heights.

This month, in a graphic video posted on Telegram, the paramilitary leader declared in a rage that his mercenaries were “lacking 70% of needed ammunition” to take the contested city Bakhmut. Around him, dozens of dead soldiers were scattered on the ground — what Prigozhin claimed to be the number of Wagner troops to die in just a day of fighting. Calling out Russia’s defense minister and the chief of its armed forces by name, he accused them of sitting “like fat cats in your luxury offices.”

In a separate post later that day, he promised to withdraw Wagner’s troops from Bakhmut unless they received more guns and ammunition, repeating a threat from late April. Two days later, he backtracked, saying Russia’s brass had promised them the needed supplies.

Since then, however, Prigozhin has continued to criticize Russian military forces — taking to Telegram to say that the Wagner group controls over 95% of Bakhmut, but that Ukraine had “launched a number of successful counterattacks” on Russian troops. Moscow denied reports of Ukrainian soldiers breaking through the front lines, prompting Prigozhin to accuse officials of lying. “Flanks are crumbling, the front is failing, and the Defense Ministry’s attempts to smooth things over in the information field will lead to a global tragedy for Russia,” he said.

Amid the public quarrel, The Washington Post reported that Prighozin told contacts within Ukraine’s military that he was willing to divulge the locations of Kremlin forces near Bakhmut if Ukrainian troops withdrew around the city. Ukrainian official confirmed Prigozhin’s offer, according to the Post, adding it was rejected on multiple occasions, partly out of concerns that it wasn’t sincere.

Back on Telegram, Prigozhin fervently denied the Post’s findings, referring to them as “speculation.”

“But it’s fun to read: turns out, I fight for Russia, but President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy also takes orders from me directly. So that the left hand fights with the right,” he wrote.

– Karina

The minimum number of kamikaze drones Iran has transferred to Russia since August, according to U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby. Russia has already used most of the UAVs for attacks on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, he said.

– Jay

⋉ ADVANCE: British rockets. The U.K. has pledged to send hundreds of air defense missiles and armed drones to Ukraine, days after it also promised to supply Kyiv with Storm Shadow cruise missiles. Britain, along with France, have also agreed to start training Ukrainian pilots on their soil.

⋊ RETREAT: Russian jets. U.S. fighter jets intercepted six Russian aircraft operating in Alaskan airspace last week, during large-scale military drills held in the Arctic state. According to the North American Aerospace Defence Command, the intercept was routine and the jets were not seen as a national security threat.

— Karina

Rear Admiral Alireza Tangsiri, Commander of the IRGC Navy. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, led by Rear Admiral Alireza Tangsiri, has once again become a thorn in the Pentagon’s side after recently seizing a number of oil tankers. Those captures are stoking fears inside the Defense Department of a return to the “tanker wars” of the late 1980s — when the U.S. and Tehran squared off over ships transiting the Persian Gulf.

The U.S. Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East, is bolstering its presence in the region’s maritime chokepoints to guard against Admiral Tangsiri launching more attacks on ship traffic, according to U.S. officials.

Tangsiri, 61 years old, took command of the IRGC Navy in 2018 and was quickly targeted with U.S. sanctions after he threatened to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil moves. Since then, he’s vowed to give Tehran “complete control” of the Persian Gulf.  To back this up, he’s announced in recent weeks that IRGC warships are now equipped with long range cruise missiles with a range of 2,000 kilometers and that the Revolutionary Guard has commenced building an aircraft carrier.

“This carrier has both the ability to carry aircraft and the ability to carry a number of missile-launching boats inside it, which has no equivalent in the world,” Tangsiri told Iranian state media on May 5th.

Transiting the Persian Gulf is becoming increasingly fraught for commercial traffic. Tehran seized two internationally flagged tankers in recent weeks, in one case for what Iran says was a hostile action and in another for an unspecified legal reason.

A more likely reason is payback. The Financial Times reported late last month that the U.S. ordered the seizure of an Asian-based tanker, the Suez Rajan, for allegedly carrying sanctioned Iranian crude oil to China. Tangsiri’s navy has targeted U.K. and Greek ships in recent years after their governments took steps to crack down on Iranian oil shipments.

— Jay

Are you enjoying Semafor Security? The more people read us, the better we’ll get. So please share it with your family, friends and colleagues.

But we can’t deliver security news and insights from inside your spam folder. Be sure to add jsolomon@semafor.com to your contacts. In Gmail, drag this newsletter over to your ‘Primary’ tab. And, of course, you can always reach me with tips, ideas, praise and criticisms by replying to these emails.

Thanks for reading!

Want more Semafor?  Explore all our newsletters at semafor.com/newsletters.

— Jay