Rusia

Corruption is endemic in Russia and is pervasive within its defence industrial sector and armed forces. Evidence from Ukraine suggests that it is costing Russian lives.

International security is inherently a secretive business. Governments and militaries like to hide their capabilities and plans from their rivals. Yet in the post-Cold War years, states began to become more transparent about their military postures, aiming to create a new sense of international cooperation and openness. This process has now gone into reverse, with post-Cold War transparency arrangements in sharp decline.

Ukraine’s foreign minister said Friday that his country is willing to engage in diplomatic talks with Russia to unblock grain supplies and to achieve a political solution to the war in Ukraine but won’t accept ultimatums from Moscow.

Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the Ukrainian government had received “no positive feedback” from Russia, which he alleged “prefers wars to talks.”

The holder of the highest seat in the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, said that the West is partly to blame for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, the Pope said “that barking of NATO at the door of Russia” has pushed Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, which was not a part of the alliance.

The bottom line

While Russia has made slight progress in the Donbas, the line of control has hardly budged and the Kremlin’s campaign has largely stalled.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive near Kharkiv remains strong, with Russian forces being pushed back toward the Russian border.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin confronts a series of humiliating battlefield setbacks since his February 24 invasion of Ukraine, and amid an increased flow of Western arms into the country, the risk of escalation remains all too real.

If NATO blood would in fact be spilt should Russia invade Poland or the Baltic states, why have we utterly rejected the prospect of spilling it to help protect Ukraine from Putin’s mass killings, torture, rape and destruction? Ukraine is not a NATO member and NATO states have no treaty obligation to come to its defence as they do to each other. But that is surely just a technicality, a few lines on a page. There is no practical or moral difference between protecting a friend who is a member of the alliance and one who is not.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has reaffirmed Russia’s strategic interest to make coordinated efforts aim at building logistics hub along the coastline of the Republic of Eritrea during diplomatic talks attended by Foreign Minister of the State of Eritrea Osman Saleh who, on April 27, paid a working visit to Moscow.

Ahead of the diplomatic talks, there was the speculation that Russia would use Eritrea that voted against the United Nations resolution on March 2. Late February, Russia started “special military operations” directed at demilitarizing and denazifying in the post-Soviet republic of Ukraine.

Moscow may be drawing most of its conscripts for the war in Ukraine from ethnic minority regions such as Buryatia and Dagestan (see EDM, May 4), but there appears to be a wartime division of labor amongst the voluntarist Cossack movement as well. In particular, one can observe a distinction between “fighters” and “cheerleaders”—that is, those Cossacks actually engaged in combat in a war zone versus those tasked with maintaining morale back on the home front. Evidence of this seeming division of labor requires a close reading of the local media sources linked to the Cossack movement, such as the website of the All-Russian Cossack Society (Vsko.ru). As of early May, this site published a total of 70 articles related to Cossack involvement in the war effort, of which 21 named a specific host in the title. Fully one-third of those articles (7) concerned the Kuban Cossacks, with most reporting on that group’s combat role.