Russia Matters, 1/17/25

1. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are expected to hold a phone call “in the coming days and weeks,” Trump’s nominee for national security advisor, Mike Waltz, said Jan. 12. However, Putin’s foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov, as cited by TASS, claimed on Jan. 17 that there have been no contacts “as of today” between Moscow and Trump’s team on the organization of his possible meeting with Putin. Ushakov also said Russia will be represented at Trump’s inauguration by its chargé d’affaires in the U.S. only if the Russian diplomat is invited to attend the ceremony.
2. Ukraine and Russia are holding limited talks in Qatar about rules to shield nuclear facilities from being targeted, a person familiar with the Kremlin’s preparations told Bloomberg. A spokesman for the Kremlin declined to comment on Bloomberg’s report, but if accurate, the report raises the question of whether the rules would protect substations connecting nuclear facilities to the grid, which Russia has been targeting even as it was reportedly refraining from direct attacks on the three Ukrainian energy-generating nuclear plants. Ukraine has become dependent on these three plants for two–thirds of the country’s electricity generation, so the destruction of the substations that connect these three NPPs to the grid could cause significant pain, not only for the economy—including military-related production—but also for the population. In 2024, electricity outages in Ukraine lasted almost 1,951 hours (so 5.5 hours a day), according to Ukraine’s Dixi Group. Electricity outages lasted 226 hours in the period of Dec. 1–Dec. 13, according to this group.*
3. In the past month, Russian forces made a net gain of 172 square miles in Ukraine (the rough equivalent of 7 1/2 Manhattan islands), according to the Jan. 15, 2025, issue of the Russia-Ukraine War Report Card that is based on data provided for that period by the Institute for the Study of War. As of Jan. 16, 2025, 18.55% of Ukraine’s territory was under Russian occupation, according to Ukraine’s DeepState OSINT group’s interactive map. 
4. The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook anticipates Russia’s economic growth will slow from 3.8% in 2024 to 1.4% in 2025 and 1.2% in 2026. In comparison, world output grew by 3.2% in 2024 and is expected to grow by 3.3% in 2025 and then another 3.3% in 2026. As the table below shows, Russia’s rate of growth will be lower in 2025–2026 than that of China, India, the U.S., advanced economies as a whole and developing economies as a whole. 
5. Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian signed a treaty on “comprehensive strategic partnership” between their countries on Jan. 17. The new treaty, which runs for 20 years, aims to strengthen Tehran and Moscow’s “military-political and trade-economic” relations, the Kremlin said, according to RFE/RL. The signing of the Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Between the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran has been expected by officials in Moscow and Teheran, as well as by watchers of the relationship between the two countries, since at least last fall. But when Vladimir Putin and Masoud Pezeshkian inked the deal in the Kremlin on Jan. 17, it came as an anti-climax of a sorts for those in Russia and Iran that expected a significant strengthening of the two countries’ geopolitical alignment from the treaty. Even though last year saw Putin twice refer to Iran as Russia’s ally at one and the same event in October 2024, while Pezeshkian did the same in July 2024, the text of the treaty, as published by the Kremlin, contains no reference to Russia and Iran being allied. Nor does it have a clause for mutual military aid of the kind that can be found in the 2024 Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership bbetween the Russian Federation and the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea. The names of both treaties use the same words to describe the bilateral relationship, but the level of military relationship that the two accords provide for differs.  The 2024 Russian-DPRK agreement states: “In the event of an immediate threat of an act of armed aggression against one of the Parties, the Parties, at the request of one of the Parties, shall immediately engage bilateral channels to conduct consultations with the aim of coordinating their positions and agreeing on possible practical measures to assist each other in helping to eliminate the threat that has arisen.” In contrast, the 2025 Russian-Iranian treaty says: “In the event that one of the Parties is subjected to aggression, the other Contracting Party shall not provide any military or other assistance to the aggressor that would facilitate the continuation of aggression, and shall assist in ensuring that the differences that arise are settled on the basis of the Charter of the United Nations and other applicable norms of international law.” We have also gone through references to military and military-technical cooperation in the Russian-Iranian treaty and found none that would call for mutual military aid in the event of aggression. Neither does the treaty’s text refer to the signatories as allies or say they have allied relations, even though Iran is helping Russia’s aggression against Ukraine by supplying hundreds of drones. It should be noted that the 2024 Russian-North Korean treaty did not contain such “allied” references either, but overall, Moscow and Pyongyang are considerably closer to being military allies than Moscow is with Teheran, if only because thousands of DPRK soldiers are presently engaged in direct combat on the Russian side against the Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region, shedding blood on the frontline [this has been alleged but not proven – Natylie]. No other country does that for Russia, even though at least four countries have signed bilateral treaties or declarations that designate them as Russia’s allies.