By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 12/20/24

Russian arms exports have plummeted by 92% since 2021, according to defence policy expert Pavel Luzin, as the Kremlin redirects all its military production to supplying the conflict in Ukraine.

Industry analysts warn that the sector’s long-term health hinges on a swift conclusion of the war in Ukraine and is putting pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to start ceasefire talks with Kyiv.

Arms exports used to be the second biggest export product after oil, but revenue from the sale of Russian arms will plummet to under $1bn by the end of 2024, Luzin, a lecturer at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, speaking at the “Country and World: Russian Realities 2024” conference in Berlin said at the end of November. This marks a sharp fall from $14.6bn in 2021, $8bn in 2022, and $3bn in 2023.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported that Russia fell to third place in global arms exports in 2023, overtaken by the United States and France. This comes after a sustained decline in Russia’s defence exports, which halved between 2014 and 2018. By 2023, Russia was supplying weapons to only 12 countries, compared to 31 in 2019, illustrating its shrinking influence in the global arms trade.

The state-owned defence conglomerate Rostec CEO Sergei Chemezov recently confirmed that Russian arms sales were valued at $15bn in 2021 but fell to $7bn in 2022 and $6bn in 2023. Figures for 2024 have yet to be released, but industry forecasts predict an even steeper decline.

“We see that Russia as an arms exporter has generally failed,” Luzin said, attributing the drop to sanctions, disrupted logistics, and waning client confidence.

The falling exports undermine Russia’s relations with its partners in the Global South, which rely on cheap but sophisticated weapons in their own security arrangements. One of the topics on the agenda during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting with Putin in July was the delayed delivery of Russia’s advanced S-400 surface to air missile defence system that India ordered and wants to protect its northern borders with China and Pakistan.

Satellite photos posted online by Russian military bloggers (milbloggers) show that the stocks of Soviet-era tanks and APC, among other equipment, are nearly empty. The Kremlin has been forced to turn to allies like North Korea and Iran to top up its supplies of missiles, shells and drones.

Shortages make ceasefire talks more likely

Putin quickly put Russia’s economy on a war footing following invasion in February 2022 and output of arms and ammo soared. However, that has left little over to meeting Russia’s export obligations.

Despite heavy investment in the military industrial complex, the output has not been able to meet demand and Russia has been running down in its military stocks much faster than they can be replenished.

Ukraine is also desperately short of materiel and entirely dependent on Western allies for supplies. Ukraine does not have the resources to reclaim occupied Crimea and Donbas by military means, so it is counting on diplomacy – Zelenskiy said on December 18 in Brussels.

“The Russians now control these territories. We do not have the strength to reclaim them. We can only count on diplomatic pressure from the international community to force Putin to sit at the negotiating table.”

Both armies are running low and as the war enters its end game, with widespread speculation that the incoming President-elect Donald Trump will bring the fighting to an end, it is hoped that Putin will be forced to make some compromises and offer a “just peace.”

“Real negotiations for a lasting peace will begin only when the enemy no longer has the resources to continue the war,” head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Andriy Yermak told the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities in Lviv on December 19, as cited by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Russia intends to win the war in 2025

In lieu of a deal, the Kremlin is preparing for a protracted war and getting ready to rebuild its military might. In September, the Kremlin launched a long-term military reconstitution programme aimed at restoring the losses incurred during its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“It is clear that the military-industrial complex is counting on a halt, a freeze, an end to the war in order to return to fulfilling export contracts… because they provided a good inflow of hard currency,” Luzin said.

Putin has already increased the upper limit of men under arms to 1.5mn on September 16 from 1mn previously, but the biggest challenge will be to equip them and replace the materiel already used over the last two years of war – and pay for it.

Russia plans to continue the war until it fully occupies four annexed regions in 2025, Russian Defence Minister Andrei Belousov said on December 17 at a meeting with senior defence ministry officials. According to Belousov only 1% of the territory of Luhansk and 25-30% of the territory of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions remain under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU),

He said that Moscow intends to fully seize the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine in the new year and that Russia will achieve “the goals announced by President Putin in June,” adding: “In 2025, Moscow plans to win the war.”

Moscow is not satisfied with current proposals to freeze the war, so Russian troops will continue to fight if Ukraine does not agree to Putin’s conditions, Russia’s UN representative, Vasily Nebenzia, said at a Security Council meeting the same day.

At the defence ministry meeting Belousov also raised the possibility of a conflict between Russia and Nato breaking out for the first time that could happen sometime in the coming years.

Belousov said that the Kremlin is also against any Nato participation in ending the war, as talk of Nato peacekeepers in Ukraine goes from “unthinkable” to “discussed”.

On June 14, Putin said that Russia would agree to a ceasefire and peace talks only if Ukraine withdrew from four Ukrainian regions and formally abandoned its aspirations to join Nato. The demands also included recognition of Crimea and Sevastopol as part of Russia. More recently leaked comments from the Kremlin suggest there is some wiggle room in the proposed negotiations and the Kremlin is prepared to offer “limited” territorial concessions, Reuters reported in November.

Europe is as unprepared for a direct conflict with Russia, but, as bne IntelliNews reported, has a much more serious shortfall of arms and productive capacity after decades of underinvestment. With the leading EU members wracked by budget crises, it also has a lot less money to spend on rearming. Germany, in particular, which has the second largest army in Europe on paper, will not be able to return to pre-war levels of armament for decades.

YouTube link here.

This video was posted on 12/16/24.

By William Schryver, Substack, 12/11/24

A great many people in America and around the world are convinced that, come January 20, 2025, when Donald J. Trump is again inaugurated as President of the United States, he will (as he has already boldly asserted) call Vladimir Putin on the phone and say, in effect, “You must end this war immediately, or else we’re going to get real serious, and you will not like the consequences.”

Trump disciples genuinely believe he can impose his will on Putin to bring an end to the Ukraine War. At the very least, they are convinced Trump can “cut a deal” in the form of an offer Putin cannot refuse. They simply don’t realize that the only “deal” to be made at this juncture is the US/NATO agreeing to the terms Russia dictates.

That is what happens in the real world when you win a big war.

Naturally, Putin KNOWS the US will never accede to the long-established and often-repeated Russian stipulations regarding both Ukraine specifically and Russian security concerns in general — especially in the context of the opening days of Trump’s triumphant return to the White House.

Trump, consistent with his longstanding mantra to “Make America Great Again”, is going to come to the conversation with his OWN terms, which he will present with his awkwardly charming “take it or leave it” affectation.

And, of course, Putin will then bid Trump a polite прощай, and hang up.

You see, unless the fevered folklore of American “alien-derived military super-tech” is true, then the simple fact at this point in time is that the US has precious little credible bargaining power.

The people in the imperial realm, especially Americans, need to come to grips with the fact that they have, for years now, been fed a steaming pile of fantastical disinformation about Russia, Putin, and this war.

Russia is not a gas station with nukes. It is not weak, technologically backward, cripplingly corrupt, economically feeble, operationally inept, and certainly not strategically defeated.

And, most pertinently, Russia is NOT militarily inferior to the United States — at least not in the context of a war in its own neighborhood.

Even among the relative handful of people that have closely followed its developments, most are incorrectly interpreting the inherent nature and evolution of this war. We are witnessing generational revolutions in warfare — even as most western observers and so-called “military experts” look down their noses at what they inexplicably imagine to be barbarian Slavs bludgeoning each other to death with clubs.

Here is the cold hard truth: the United States military — in all its branches — is simply not prepared to deal with the dynamics of 21^st century warfare as it has now developed. The entire American force structure is anachronistic and, by all indications, impervious to expeditious reform.

The Russians now hold asymmetric military advantages in many decisive respects — most importantly integrated air defenses and effectively unstoppable offensive strike missiles. And, unlike the United States, Russia possesses an extremely potent and rapidly expanding industrial base — one which is able to produce many multiples of the anemic capacity of the entire NATO bloc.

Consider these two critical realities: the Russians are now able to routinely and consistently defeat 90%+ of the best western strike missiles, while simultaneously being able to routinely and consistently defeat the “few and far between” (and manifestly inferior) western missile defense systems.

Oh, sure, it is widely believed by both the general public and the flag officer punditry that American air defense systems are “best in class” and have had no trouble at all intercepting the best Russian missiles they have encountered in Ukraine. This myth is a primary tenet of what I have long called “The Imaginary War” — but it has no relationship to reality.

That said, the woefully misinformed and mostly imbecilic policy makers in the imperial halls of power are almost universally ignorant of this reality, and will resolutely refuse to accept it until it is indisputably proven on the battlefield. For this reason, Trump and his incoming administration, in the face of an explicit Russian rebuff of American demands, will almost certainly conclude that they must “teach the Russians a lesson they will not soon forget”.

Exactly what form this “lesson” will take remains uncertain, but given the pervasive perception that US air power is unquestionably preeminent, it can be confidently assumed that any American response to Russian impudence will consist of some species of conventional air campaign against high-value Russian targets.

And if that is the course the US pursues, I remain convinced it will result in a disastrous defeat that will shock not only the populace of the so-called “western democracies”, but most of the inhabitants of nations around the globe. (I treat upon this topic in what I believe to be one of my most cogent analyses of the current state of global military affairs: Staggering Towards the Abyss.)

Of course, historically speaking, all military advantages are notoriously fleeting. But at present, and at least until the end of this decade, the Russians will possess the most potent combination of comparative advantages they have had in a long, long time.

If Putin fails to exploit this opportunity to seize strategic depth — including AT LEAST everything east of the Dnieper, and all of Odessa — then I believe he could very well be deposed by the large and powerful component of the Russian leadership class that views such a course of action as a strategic imperative.

Ends of empire come around very seldom, and if you are not bold enough to strike while the iron is hot, someone else surely will.

Of course, many firmly believe that such a sequence of events will result in a massive nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia. I acknowledge that valid concern, but as I wrote in a January 24, 2024 essay on this question (To Nuke or Not to Nuke), I continue to believe:

Resorting to nuclear weapons is a “point-of-no-return” decision.

It’s a murder-suicide move.

And I strongly doubt any of the great nuclear powers are suicidal.

At least not yet.

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 12/12/24

The Iranian-led Resistance Axis has been defeated by Israel. Hamas’ terrorist attack on 7 October 2023 prompted Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza, which set into motion a series of conflicts that expanded to Lebanon and Syria. Israel has also bombed Yemen and Iran. Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s leaderships were destroyed, leading to a ceasefire in Lebanon, while the Assad government was just overthrown by a Turkish-backed terrorist blitz that severed Iran’s military logistics to Hezbollah.

These outcomes were already surprising enough for those who believed the late Nasrallah’s claim that “Israel is weaker than a spider web”, but many were shocked that they occurred without Russia lifting a finger to save the Resistance, with whom they thought that it had allied against Israel long ago. That second-mentioned false notion will go down in infamy as one of the most successful psy-ops ever conducted against the Alt-Media Community (AMC), and ironically enough, by its own top influencers.

It was explained in early October “Why False Perceptions About Russian Policy Towards Israel Continue To Proliferate”, which readers should review for more detail, but which can be summarized as top AMC influencers telling their audience what they thought they wanted to hear for self-interested reasons. These include generating clout, pushing their ideology, and/or soliciting donations from well-intentioned but naïve members of their audience depending on the personality involved.

The preceding analysis also lists five related ones about Russian policy towards Israel since the start of the West Asian Wars, including this one “Clarifying Lavrov’s Comparison Of The Latest Israeli-Hamas War To Russia’s Special Operation”, which itself links to several dozen others. All of them also reference this May 2018 report about “President Putin On Israel: Quotes From The Kremlin Website (2000-2018)”. All of these materials rely on official and authoritative Russian sources to arrive at their conclusions.

They prove that Putin is a proud lifelong philo-Semite who never shared the Resistance’s unifying anti-Zionist ideology, instead always expressing very deep respect for Jews and the State of Israel. Accordingly, as the final decisionmaker on Russian foreign policy, he tasked his diplomats with balancing between Israel and the Resistance. To that end, Russia never took either’s side and always remained neutral in their disputes, including the West Asian Wars.

The most that he ever personally did was condemn Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians, but always in the same breath as condemning Hamas’ infamous terrorist attack on 7 October 2023. As for Russia, the most that it ever did was repeat the same rhetoric and occasionally condemn Israel’s strikes against the IRGC and Hezbollah in Syria, which Russia never interfered with. Not once did it try to deter or intercept them, retaliate afterwards, or give Syria the capabilities and authorization to do so either.

This was due to the deconfliction mechanism that Putin and Bibi agreed to in late September 2015 shortly before the Syrian operation. It was never confirmed for obvious diplomatic reasons, but these actions (or rather lack thereof) suggested that Putin believed that Iran’s anti-Israeli activities Syria posed a legitimate threat to Israel. For that reason, Russia always stood aside whenever Israel bombed Iran there, but Russia still sometimes complained due to Israel’s attacks formally violating international law.

It’s an objectively existing and easily verifiable fact that Russia’s opposition to Israel’s regional activities, be they in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, or Iran, always remained strictly confined to the political realm of official statements. Not once did Russia ever threaten to unilaterally sanction Israel, let alone even remotely hint at military action against it as punishment. Russia won’t even symbolically designate Israel as an “unfriendly state”, though that’s because it doesn’t abide by US sanctions and won’t arm Ukraine.

Therein lies another fact that most in the AMC were either unaware of or in denial about and it’s that Israel isn’t the US’ puppet otherwise it would have already done those two things long ago. It’s beyond the scope of the present piece to explain this, as well as why the Biden Administration has tried to destabilize and overthrow Bibi, but this analysis here dives into the details and cites related articles. The point is that Russian-Israeli ties remain cordial and these two are far from the foes that some thought.

It therefore never made sense to imagine that Putin, who considers himself to be the consummate pragmatist, would burn the bridge that he personally invested nearly a quarter-century of his time building with Bibi between their two nations. After all, Putin boasted in 2019 that “Russians and Israelis have ties of family and friendship. This is a true common family; I can say this without exaggeration. Almost 2 million Russian speakers live in Israel. We consider Israel a Russian-speaking country.”

He was speaking before the Keren Heyesod Foundation, one of the world’s oldest Zionist lobbying organizations, during its annual conference in Moscow that year. Whenever members of the AMC were confronted with these “politically inconvenient” facts from official and authoritative sources such as the Kremlin’s own website, they spun a “5D chess master plan” conspiracy theory alleging that he was just “psyching out the Zionists”. Top influencers also aggressively “canceled” anyone who brought this up.

The end result was that these false perceptions of Russian-Israeli relations as well as Putin’s own views towards this subject continued to proliferate unchallenged through the AMC, thus leading to the impression that they were secretly allied with Iran due to their allegedly shared anti-Zionist ideals. This notion became a matter of dogma for many in the AMC and correspondingly turned into an axiom of International Relations for them. Anyone who claimed otherwise was smeared as a “Zionist”.

It’s now known after Russia didn’t lift a finger to save the Resistance that they were never actually allies. Some of those that still can’t accept that they’ve been lied to by trusted AMC influencers who duped them for self-interested reasons (clout, ideology, and/or soliciting donations) now speculate that Russia “betrayed” the Resistance and “sold out to the Zionists” even though Russia was never on either’s side. If they don’t soon shake off their cognitive dissonance, they’ll detach themselves further from reality.

In retrospect, Russia dodged a bullet by wisely choosing not to ally with the now-defeated Resistance Axis since it would have needlessly ruined its relations with Israel, the undisputable victor of the West Asian Wars. Putin made the right choice, which was always driven by his rational calculation of what was in Russia’s objective interests as a state, not due to “Zionist influence” like some in the AMC now ridiculously claim to defame him after being mad that he didn’t lift a finger to save the Resistance.

The takeaways from this are several: 1) Putin and his representatives don’t play “5D chess”, they always say what they truly mean; 2) Russia isn’t anti-Israel nor anti-Zionist, but it also isn’t anti-Iran nor anti-Resistance either; 3) the AMC is full of charlatans who, for self-interested reasons, tell their audience whatever they think they want to hear; 4) their audience should thus hold them to account for lying about Russian-Israeli and Russian-Resistance relations; 5) and the AMC requires urgent reform.

By Mark Episkopos, Responsible Statecraft, 12/13/24

Contemporary neoconservatism is, in its guiding precepts and policy manifestations, a profoundly ahistorical ideology. It is a millenarian project that not just eschews but explicitly rejects much of the inheritance of pre-1991 American statecraft and many generations of accumulated civilizational wisdom from Thucydides to Kissinger in its bid to remake the world.

It stands as one of the enduring ironies of the post-Cold War era that this revolutionary and decidedly presentist creed has to shore up its legitimacy by continually resorting to that venerable fixture of World War II historicism, the 1938 Munich analogy. The premise is simple, and, for that reason, widely resonant: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, in his “lust for peace,” made war inevitable by enabling Adolf Hitler’s irredentist ambitions until they could no longer be contained by any means short of direct confrontation between the great powers.

Professor Andrew Bacevich brilliantly distilled the Munich analogy’s two constituent parts: “The first truth is that evil is real. The second is that for evil to prevail requires only one thing: for those confronted by it to flinch from duty,” he wrote. “In the 1930s, with the callow governments of Great Britain and France bent on appeasing Hitler and with an isolationist America studiously refusing to exert itself, evil had its way.” This is the school playground theory of international relations: failure to stand up to a bully at the earliest possible opportunity only serves to embolden their malignant behavior, setting the stage for a larger and more painful fight down the line.

The Cold War years saw a feverish universalization of the Munich analogy whereby every foreign adversary is Adolf Hitler, every peace deal is Munich 1938, and every territorial dispute is the Sudetenland being torn away from Czechoslovakia as the free world looks on with shoulders shrugged. This was the anxiety animating the spurious domino theory that precipitated U.S. involvement in Korea and Vietnam, but appeasement fever was kept in check by the realities of a bipolar Cold War competition that imposed significant constraints on what the U.S. could do to counteract its powerful, nuclear-armed Soviet rival.

These constraints were lifted virtually overnight with the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet bloc. President George H.W. Bush proclaimed the end of the “Vietnam syndrome,” or Americans’ healthy skepticism of war stemming from the disastrous decades-long intervention in Vietnam, following U.S. forces’ crushing victory in the Gulf War. The George W. Bush administration gave itself infinite license to intervene anywhere against anyone, including preemptively against “imminent threats,” on the grounds that anything less is tantamount to appeasement. “In the 20th century, some chose to appease murderous dictators, whose threats were allowed to grow into genocide and global war,” Bush said in 2003. “In this century, when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth.”

Even as the threat landscape has shifted since 2003, neoconservatism’s epigoni have trotted out the Munich analogy to justify every subsequent military intervention in the Middle East. Where direct confrontation is too costly and risky, as with Russia and China, the historicists insist that anything short of a policy of total, unrelenting maximum pressure and isolation amounts to appeasement.

Thus we are subjected to the insistence, one which was always implausible but comes off as especially fantastical today, that any conclusion to the Ukraine war short of Russia’s total battlefield defeat is redolent of Chamberlain at Munich.

The Munich analogy is potent insofar as it has been used as a neoconservative cudgel to bash all dissenters as craven fools who would sell out their principles for an illusory promise of peace, but that doesn’t make it true. The reality of Munich, if it’s of any help to anyone, is that Hitler was both unappeasable and undeterrable in the context of mid-20th century European international politics. Nazi Germany was a uniquely dangerous adversary because it was a revisionist power with virtually unlimited, and therefore insatiable, territorial and political objectives. France and Britain could not give Hitler what he sought – to wit, destroying the international system and rebuilding it from the ground up with Germany as the global hegemon – even if they wanted to. Threats and shows of force would have shifted Hitler’s tactical calculations, but they would not have dissuaded him from the conclusion that his objectives could only be achieved through a general European war that he believed Germany could win. Paris and London were caught militarily and geopolitically flat-footed against a resurgent Germany as the U.S. continued to adhere to a policy of neutrality, a united anti-fascist front with Soviets was politically not in the cards, and ultranationalist governments were coming to power across the continent in a way that further tipped the scales against Europe’s remaining liberal powers.

Critics of “appeasement” distort the difficult policy landscape that confronted Britain and France, conjuring up opportunities for deterrence and preemption that simply did not exist in mid 1938. They distill these specious arguments into a historical analogy, the “lesson of Munich,” that doesn’t even work in its own original setting and impose it as a kind of sacred truth through which all U.S. policy decisions must be filtered.

The U.S. has never again faced an adversary like Nazi Germany. The USSR, for all its revolutionary aesthetics and rhetoric, was a status quo power that competed but also cooperated with the U.S. on the margins and never sought to challenge core Western security interests in the way that Nazi Germany did.

The contemporary strategic landscape is even less reminiscent of the 1930’s. China harbors regional ambitions in the Asia-Pacific that are situationally at odds with U.S. interests, and Russia seeks to prevent post-Soviet states from drifting into the Western camp in ways that pose a challenge to NATO. But neither adversary is pursuing objectives that can only be achieved through great power conflict, positioning itself as a global hegemon, or trying to overthrow the international system. As I explained along with my colleagues George Beebe and Anatol Lieven, Russia invaded Ukraine as part of a strategy of hybrid compellence to curtail the West’s influence in part of the post-Soviet sphere, not as a prelude to a larger planned program of continental conquest against NATO states.

The Munich analogy is deeply dangerous not because it is historically illiterate and utterly inapplicable to the challenges America faces today – though it certainly is both those things – but because, in its framing of adversaries as existential enemies that must be pressured, isolated, and confronted at every step, it precipitates the very catastrophe it is supposedly warning against. Managing these complex strategic relationships in a way that does not lead to war between the great powers will require a diverse, flexible policy toolkit that recognizes our limited resources and is able to balance deterrence and engagement, rather than committing to a policy of rollback that would have been appropriate against Nazi Germany but simply does not capture the contemporary threat environment.

The real “lesson of Munich” is how corrosive ideologically-driven historicism, completely untethered from actual history, can be to the foreign policy debate. It is long past time to lay the ghosts of 1938 to rest.