Rusia

Starting on May 31, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov embarked on a tour to Gulf Cooperation Council countries, where he visited Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, among others. Lavrov’s main objective of these visits is to strengthen ties between Russia and GCC nations amid a global race for geopolitical dominance.

The 2004 Orange Revolution, a wave of street protests that fueled the rise of a pro-Western government in Kiev, will likely be remembered by future historians as the very first modern episode in the drama that would eventually lead to the current Ukraine War. This turning point was enthusiastically supported by the West as a meaningful ideological victory for liberal democracy and ‒ above all ‒ as a geopolitical milestone in the Eastward march of both NATO and the EU. Needless to say, the shockwaves were powerfully felt in the Kremlin. Until then, Boris Yeltsin and his successor, Vladimir Putin, had been seeking some sort of accommodation with the West. Moscow offered flirtatious overtures to NATO, unilateral diplomatic concessions, and even support for the American military intervention in Afghanistan. Such gestures were seen in Washington and Brussels as a sign of weakness. After all, conventional wisdom dictated that, in the post-Cold War era, Russia was rapidly fading into irrelevance so disregarding what it had to say or what it wanted was an affordable luxury. Considering that Russia was a mere shadow of the impressive power once held by the Soviet Union, Moscow was not being taken seriously anymore.

The May report is mostly bad news. The jump in energy and food prices were expected, nonetheless it will hit consumers hard. It seems likely that the rise in interest rates and slower growth will reverse price increases in more areas soon, notably cars, but it has not happened yet. Soaring energy and food prices, largely due to the Ukraine war, will continue to be huge problems. A cease fire could make a big difference.

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its fourth month, Ukrainian officials are increasingly worried the West could soon suffer “war fatigue.”

They fear Russia could take advantage of that to pressure Ukraine into compromise, something Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has resisted, saying Ukraine would pursue its own terms for peace.

Moscow grossly underestimated the economic costs of launching its war in Ukraine. Lulled by the limited sanctions that greeted its invasions of Crimea and Donbas in 2014, and a false sense of security provided by its hundreds of billions of dollars in reserves, President Vladimir Putin appears to have believed that he could ride out any sanctions that a divided West could muster. He seems not to have understood the shock wave that a full invasion of a European state would produce in the West and the massive unity of the European Union’s economic response. He did not anticipate Germany’s about-face in its relations with Russia or the sudden attractiveness of NATO membership to Finland and Sweden. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine appears to be a catastrophic blunder by Putin, one that puts Russia and his regime in great peril.

Much has been said about Ukraine’s lethal set of western-donated anti-armor and anti-tank weapons that have been helping them take out Russian tanks left and right since the start of the war. However, there is another anti-tank weapon that the Ukrainian forces have used to bust Russian tanks up to smithereens, the German DM22 PARM2 mine.

The West Needs a Policy to Manage a War That Will Go On

With Russia’s war against Ukraine having passed the 100-day mark, calls for the conflict to be brought to an end are multiplying in the United States and Europe. Italy has put forward a detailed peace plan, French President Emmanuel Macron has emphasized the importance of giving Russia an off-ramp, and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has suggested that Ukraine ought to consider ceding territory to Russia in exchange for peace.

The bottom line

While the transfer of US high mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS) and British multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS) will help Ukraine, we assess that the amount of systems and ammunition planned for transfer in the first tranche will only have a minor impact in the fighting.