According to Swillens we are on the eve of a ‘really very important phase’. “The next few weeks and months will be very important. Russia is unlikely to achieve its military goals within the next three months. We consider the complete conquest of Donbas unlikely at the moment.
“The next few weeks and months are going to be very important.”
The same goes for the Ukrainian side, according to Swillens. Furthermore, he does not think it likely that Ukraine will achieve its goals of expelling the Russians. “The most likely scenario at this point is a long-standing conflict.”
No large-scale offensive
In the field, Swillens sees that “the fighting takes place on a series of axes along the existing front at battalion and brigade levels.” According to the director, these are units of between 500 and 2,000-3,000 soldiers. This is an offensive, but not a large one. “A really large-scale offensive of more than 20,000 or 25,000 troops, that’s what you call a strategy-level offensive. For example towards Kiev, Izjum or Kharkiv, we don’t see it.’
“In smaller armies, we see attacks that have not resulted in significant territorial gains for the Russians in recent weeks.”
According to the head of the MIVD, his organization is unable to guarantee the digital sovereignty of the Netherlands: “We have too few options”. Swillens argues that the legal frameworks are too limited to adequately defend the Netherlands.
“We don’t have enough options”
‘What we often have to do now is indicate very precisely in advance how we will act in that digital domain, while often we don’t know exactly yet. We want more freedom of action at the front, on the other hand that a supervisor can directly monitor the implementation and intervene immediately.’
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According to Swillens, in this sense «it is not a question of reducing guarantees, this is completely out of the question. Privacy really is a great asset.’ Swillens therefore believes that the current provisional law is balanced, that ‘action is monitored’.
According to Swillens the comparison is often made with investigative work, but what the MIVD does is actually the opposite. Swillens likens it to a reverse Cluedo: MIVD tries to predict if and where murder will be committed instead of the service solving the crime. ‘We can’t help but start more broadly, other than in detective work. You never know what you don’t know.”
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