By Uriel Araujo, InfoBrics, 3/30/26

With the prospect of war involving Iran, Western analysts have rediscovered the South Caucasus, now rebranded as a “strategic bridge” linking Europe to Asia. The narrative is simple enough: as instability engulfs the Middle East and relations with Russia remain frozen, Europe can bypass both by investing in a so-called Middle Corridor through Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia.

This vision, however, is arguably less a strategy than a projection of necessity: what is presented as a corridor is, in fact, a geopolitical fault line of sorts.

To begin with, this Middle Corridor rests on quite fragile foundations: the South Caucasus is notably a region marked by unresolved tensions and shifting alignments. The shadow of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict still haunts the region, even after Azerbaijan’s military victory and the mass displacement that followed. Peace processes, occasionally encouraged by NATO and the EU, remain highly uncertain.

And yet, European policymakers increasingly treat it as a given. The logic is easy to spot: as ties with Russia deteriorate, alternative routes for energy and trade become a strategic priority. Azerbaijani gas, transported via the Southern Gas Corridor, has thus been elevated to near-mythical status in Brussels. Europe Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen has described it as a “backbone” of EU energy security. But this pivot is structurally insufficient, for a number of reasons: for one thing, Azerbaijan’s production capacity is limited, and its export infrastructure cannot realistically replace Russian volumes. As a matter of fact, Europe’s “diversification” has largely meant swapping relatively cheap pipeline gas for more expensive LNG — often sourced from the United States, with all the strategic dependencies that implies.

No wonder, that murmurs about re-engagement with Moscow persist. As I have argued elsewhere, energy remains the most obvious entry point for a recalibration. Reports of quiet contacts over the possible reactivation of pipelines such as Nord Stream suggest that, despite political taboos (and technical challenges), economic realities are harder to ignore: politics, like pipelines, can indeed be repaired when incentives change.

It is precisely this contradiction that lies at the heart of Europe’s approach to the South Caucasus. The continent basically seeks to bypass Russia while still implicitly relying on the stability that Russian power historically provided. For decades, Moscow functioned as the ultimate security guarantor in the region, freezing conflicts and deterring escalation. Even its limited peacekeeping role after the 2020 ceasefire helped prevent a wider war.

Today, however, that stabilizing presence has decreased, not least due to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War. The result is not a newfound opportunity but heightened volatility instead. In this context, Europe’s attempt to instrumentalize the South Caucasus as a substitute corridor risks exacerbating the very instability it seeks to circumvent.

The situation becomes even more precarious when viewed through the prism of the current war with Iran. Far from enhancing the region’s role as a neutral transit hub, such a conflict should likely militarize it. The South Caucasus would transform into a frontline buffer zone, with increased intelligence activity, military deployments, and geopolitical competition. Regional actors such as Turkey — a NATO member with its own ambitions — and Russia would inevitably feel pressured to assert themselves, while Western involvement would deepen under the guise of “security support”.

Under these conditions, the notion of a “stable corridor” becomes untenable, to put it mildly. Infrastructure always requires political order. And order, in the South Caucasus, has always been contingent on a delicate balance among larger powers, including Iran itself. To imagine that this balance can be bypassed or engineered away is to misunderstand the region’s very nature.

Armenia’s recent trajectory offers a telling case in point. Disillusioned with Moscow after the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh, Yerevan has explored closer ties with the West, including NATO and the EU. Yet, as I have previously argued, this pivot risks undermining Armenia’s strategic position rather than enhancing it. The Caucasus has never rewarded rigid alignments, and a small, landlocked country cannot afford to alienate both Russia and Iran while betting on uncertain Western guarantees.

Indeed, even Azerbaijan has avoided such a one-sided approach, maintaining a multi-vector foreign policy that tries to balance relations with Moscow, Ankara, and Western capitals. This pragmatic strategy has so far allowed Baku to maximize its leverage — something Europe’s “corridor” narrative tends to overlook.

The broader picture is therefore one of systemic transition. The rise of BRICS and the gradual reorientation of Eurasian trade flows — through initiatives such as the International North-South Transport Corridor — point toward a multipolar order in which Western Europe is no longer the central node. In this emerging landscape, the South Caucasus matters less as a bridge to Europe than as a component of wider Eurasian integration processes.

Paradoxically, then, the region’s growing “importance” is not really a sign of opportunity but a symptom of a crisis. It reflects Europe’s failed attempt to decouple from Russia, its exposure to Middle Eastern instability, and its uncertain position within a shifting global order. The more Brussels insists on bypassing Moscow, the more it is forced to rely on precarious alternatives — thereby increasing pressure on a fragile enough region.

In the end, the South Caucasus is not becoming more stable or more central in any straightforward sense. It is potentially becoming more contested, more militarized, and more unpredictable. The safe corridor that Western strategists envision exists largely on paper. On the ground, what we see instead is a fault line of sorts — one that runs through the heart of Eurasia and reflects the deeper fractures of our time.

By Filipp Lebedev, Gleb Stolyarov, Ryan McNeill, Mari Saito and Anastasiia Malenko, Reuters, 3/26/26

Blazing trains, burning tracks, black smoke.

Footage posted online by Ukrainian fighters documents their repeated sabotage attacks on a vast railroad system being built by Russia across the occupied territories of Ukraine. But their efforts are not nearly enough to hold back the tide of Moscow’s rapid industrial expansion.

The attacks on Russia’s supply chains have made scant impact, and tightening Russian control is snuffing out opposition efforts, said one Ukrainian fighter, Orest, using his military call-sign for security reasons as he operates behind enemy lines in the Donetsk region. “The railroad is hundreds of kilometres long,” he told Reuters. “We’re not all-powerful, unfortunately.”

According to the Kremlin, these occupied regions represent “Novorossiya”: New Russia. And it’s buzzing with activity.

Even as Moscow pursues a devastating war against Ukrainian forces to the west, it’s pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into an aggressive, years-long buildout of transport and trade infrastructure in the areas it has captured in the east and south, a Reuters investigation has found.

The spending spree, which dwarfs the development funds allocated to other Russian regions, facilitates the transport of troops and military equipment, as well as grain and mineral resources, the reporting shows. The construction projects also serve a longer-term goal of Moscow: weaving the seized territories into Russia, including the Donbas area whose fate lies at the heart of U.S.-backed talks to end the war.

A large-scale program of socio-economic development has been launched, essentially a program of reviving our ancestral, historical Russian lands.

Reuters reporting provides the first detailed picture of the transformation of Russian-held Ukraine taking place under the occupation. This examination draws on an analysis of thousands of satellite images, official Russian tender documents, public statements, export and freight data, as well as interviews with more than three dozen Ukrainian officials and former residents of the occupied areas.

When asked about Russia’s infrastructure buildup in the occupied territories, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy used Crimea as an example, saying Russian investments there are a “facade” that don’t benefit residents of the Ukrainian peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014. “It doesn’t look like some modern resort,” he said in an interview. “It’s all militarized.” Zelenskiy’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment on the full findings of the Reuters investigation.

A White House official said U.S. President Donald Trump is working very hard to end the war and wants to end the senseless killing.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Reuters the four territories are an integral part of the Russian Federation and “subjects of Russia”, adding: “It is written in the constitution of the country.”

Work is well underway on the so-called Novorossiya Railways system, which includes a planned 525 km (326-mile) line started in 2023, the year after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The route is to span the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, which comprise the Donbas, and Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

The Novorossiya Highway is, meanwhile, carving its way across those seized territories as part of a 1,400 km “Azov Ring” superhighway loop that will hook the regions up with Russia and strategically important Crimea.

Occupied Ukrainian ports that were largely inactive in the first years of the war have been revamped and reopened under Russia’s flag on the inland Sea of Azov, which connects to the Black Sea. Satellite images taken last August of the city of Mariupol in Donetsk show a new silver-domed facility about the length of a football pitch has sprung up on the docks during the Russian occupation. Also visible nearby is a mountain of what looks like coal being readied for export.

The satellite analysis, conducted by Reuters, used a machine-learning model to crawl through thousands of optical and radar images to identify major construction. It found that more than 2,500 km of railroads, highways and roads have been newly built, repaired or upgraded between 2022 and 2025 across the four occupied territories and the nearby Russian areas they have been connected up to.

The scale of investment and long-term nature of the infrastructure projects shows the Kremlin has no intention of returning the territories to Ukraine as part of any future peace settlement, according to Karolina Hird, a national security fellow at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.

“The way Russia’s investing very heavily in industry and the economy in occupied Ukraine, so it can reap profits off of the occupation, also financially entangles Ukraine into Russia,” she said.

That’s bleak news for Ukraine and its European allies. They have insisted that Moscow return the captured land and have roundly rejected U.S. calls for Kyiv to cede control of the whole of the Donbas as part of any deal to end the four-year-old conflict.

Moscow has also put dozens of prized commodity assets in the occupied areas up for sale, Russian state auction documents show. These include mines and agricultural land – such as the rights to develop one of Ukraine’s biggest gold deposits, which were snapped up by a Russian mining company in April 2025.

The Russian transport ministry and Novorossiya Railways, a Russian state enterprise created in 2023 to oversee rail construction and maintenance in the occupied territories, didn’t respond to queries about the progress of the infrastructure projects.

Moscow makes no secret of what it views as its historical claim to eastern and southeastern Ukraine or its ambitions to recombine the regions with what it deems the motherland. And President Vladimir Putin has grand plans for “Novorossiya” – a term from Russia’s tsarist imperial past that modern nationalists use to describe the territories.

Russia has allocated about $11.8 billion of federal cash to develop the four occupied territories in Ukraine between 2024 and 2026 as part of a program for priority national development projects, according to a Reuters analysis of government data published online. That is almost three times as much as the combined money allocated to about 20 other federal regions targeted for such projects, the data shows.

Putin outlined his vision for the territories in a public address on September 30 to celebrate the third anniversary of their “reunification” with Russia. The regions had suffered from the ravages of war and decades of neglect, the president said, and Russia had laid 6,350 km of roads there over the last three years.

“A large-scale program of socio-economic development has been launched, essentially a program of reviving our ancestral, historical Russian lands,” Putin declared.

Moscow currently controls about a fifth of Ukraine, including the bulk of four regions: Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. And it has formally claimed, opens new tab the entirety of all four as part of Russia.

Russia’s move to annex the territories has been condemned by Ukraine and its Western allies as an illegal land grab.

The new road and rail connections being built already allow vehicles and trains moving people and goods in and out of Ukraine to circumvent the Crimean Bridge, according to local and Moscow authorities. The bridge had previously been Russia’s only road and rail link to Crimea, enabling the transport of troops, fuel and equipment to Ukraine via the peninsula. It has proved a chokepoint for Russian military and trade flows, with repeated Ukrainian strikes causing delays and disruption.

Vadym Skibitskyi, deputy chief of Ukraine’s HUR military intelligence agency, which has been monitoring the enemy activity, said the Russian focus was on building out supply chains to support their war effort.

“The most critical consideration for the Russians is infrastructure. It is the transport infrastructure,” he added.

SATELLITE IMAGERY REVEALS NEW RAILWAY

Since 2023, Russia has spent about $425 million on the construction and maintenance of the railway network in the occupied territories, according to statements posted online by Novorossiya Railways and the Russian rail watchdog in August last year.

The centrepiece project is the main line to connect southern Russia to Crimea via the occupied territories, according to the official media outlet of the Russian government. It didn’t specify the planned full cost.

Satellite imagery taken between July 2023 and November 2025 shows the gradual process of a section of the line being newly laid, a 60-km connection between the towns of Novoselivka and Kolosky in Donetsk region, north of Mariupol.

A Ukrainian intelligence official who monitors Russian activity said this connection is an example of how Russia is building new rail links further from the front line, at a safer distance from possible Ukrainian strikes, to safely deliver ammunition and military vehicles to its troops. Reuters couldn’t determine if the line is in operation.

The Russian roads program is also soaking up hundreds of millions of dollars, led by the Novorossiya Highway project, state tender documents show.

A total of 20 tenders related to the building of the highway, worth more than $214 million, have been awarded to contractors, according to Russia’s state procurement website. The projects range in scope from engineering surveys to bridge maintenance. The Russian transport ministry said late last year that an extra $123 million would be spent on the road in 2026.

UKRAINE OFFICIAL: IT’S LIKE CRIMEA BUT FASTER

The route is a mix of new and upgraded roads to connect stretches of existing highway. It will run for 630 km once finished, according to Russia’s federal road agency and transport ministry. They haven’t given a planned completion date.

The construction and repair of bridges and interchanges, the widening of roads, and even the clearing of brush along roads are visible from satellite imagery.

Road crews have completed most of a 100 km section between Taganrog in southwestern Russia and near Manhush in occupied Donetsk, according to the Reuters analysis. Russia is also constructing a major new bypass road around Mariupol, which was largely levelled by fighting early in the war, the analysis shows.

The Novorossiya Highway forms the occupied territories’ leg of the giant Azov Ring. Russian officials say they plan to complete that highway in 2030, linking Russia’s Rostov-on-Don to Mariupol in Donetsk and cities in Zaporizhzhia and Crimea.

Olha Kuryshko is Ukraine’s presidential representative for Crimea, tasked with monitoring the rights of Ukrainians living there. Kuryshko said Russia’s drive to roll out economic infrastructure in eastern and southern Ukraine was similar to what it did in annexed Crimea – except this time it’s happening much faster.

After Moscow seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, it embarked on a series of ambitious projects there including the Crimean Bridge, a monumental 19-km road and rail span, as well as a new highway and two power stations to provide stable electricity to the peninsula after the annexation, when the region was cut off from Ukraine’s energy supply.

“The Russians have accomplished as much in three years of occupation of the new territories as they have in 10 years in Crimea, according to our analysis,” said Kuryshko. “They’ve carried it out so rapidly, spent so much money, taken everything up a notch from what they did in Crimea,” she added. “Crimea was their training ground.”

KREMLIN COMMANDEERS UKRAINE’S PORTS

Russia has also moved to harness Ukraine’s occupied ports on the Sea of Azov, a shallow inland sea bounded by Russia and Ukraine that connects to the Black Sea via the Kerch Strait. The Sea of Azov has been a major trade route for centuries.

In August, Moscow added Mariupol and Berdiansk on the Azov sea to a public list of Russian ports open to international vessels, a move denounced by Kyiv. Both hubs are being dredged and the canals leading to them deepened and widened to allow larger ships to navigate them once again. Those projects are among construction tenders for the two ports worth more than $13 million that have been posted on the Russian state procurement website since 2023.

Two veteran dock workers at Mariupol, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the port has become significantly busier in recent months. Vessels are coming and going loaded with grain and coal, they said, while adding that activity remains below pre-war levels.

Between July and November last year, 18 cargo vessels operated by Russian and foreign companies have been recorded departing from Mariupol and Berdiansk ports, with most bound for ports in Turkey, according to an analysis of LSEG vessel-tracking data. Reuters couldn’t determine what was transported by the vessels. Turkish authorities did not respond to a request for comment on the journeys.

In 2024, no vessels entered or exited the two ports, according to LSEG data.

The Russians are extracting valuable natural resources from the occupied territories.

Russian customs data, provided by a commercial trade data provider, shows that between March 2022 and March 2025, at least 508,500 metric tons of coal, coke and anthracite worth $13.2 million were exported from the occupied regions. The main buyers of Ukrainian coal during that period were trading companies from Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, according to the data. The commodity was also shipped to companies in India, Indonesia, Egypt and Algeria.

Indonesia’s foreign ministry said the country’s trade relations are conducted through transparent mechanisms and that it imports coal from several countries, including Russia, Australia and China. None of the other destination countries responded to requests for comment.

GOLD MINE IN EASTERN UKRAINE

Moscow has also been expanding Russian control over the seized Ukrainian territories’ natural resources via state auctions.

Dozens of assets, ranging from mines to quarries and farm land, are being placed on the block in online state auctions, according to public auction documents reviewed by Reuters. Among assets sold so far are the rights to extract sandstone, crushed stone, granite and chalk from four mines in the Luhansk region.

One of the biggest sales to date has been the rights to develop the Bobrykivske gold mine in Luhansk. It was snapped up for $9.7 million by Alchevskpromgroup, which is controlled by Russian mining company Polyanka, according to documents of the sale. Polyanka mostly develops mines in the far east of Russia.

Bobrykivske’s reserves contain about 1.64 tons of gold, which would be worth almost $260 million based on current spot prices, according to the auction documents.

Australian mining company Korab Resources had previously been developing the site. But Korab halted its work in 2014 when the area was seized by Russian-backed separatists, making it impossible for the company to access the region, which came under Western sanctions, and it wrote off the value of the project, according to Executive Chairman Andrej Karpinski and publicly available Ukrainian corporate records.

A satellite image taken of the deposit in September showed what appeared to be tire tracks all around the site. When asked by Reuters to compare the image with shots taken in June 2024, Karpinski told Reuters that work had already begun at the site. He pointed out what appeared to be an excavator in the main pit and shipping containers set up at the foot of a stockpile of rocks extracted from the mine.

UKRAINE-CRISIS/RUSSIAN-INFRASTRUCTURE

Alchevskpromgroup, Polyanka and the Russian mineral resources ministry didn’t respond to questions related to Bobrykivske’s sale and whether work had started on the site.

Hird, at the Institute for the Study of War, said there are significant costs to occupying such a large amount of territory. Russia’s ability to harness the natural and industrial resources of the regions could prove important for its finances, which have been severely strained by the war effort and international sanctions, she added.

“That can start tipping the scale to the point where the occupation actually becomes profitable to Russia,” Hird said.

By Craig Murray, Substack, 3/21/26

What if Trump’s apparently chaotic thought processes and intuitive decision making are all a blind, a charade? What if we are really witnessing, in the Middle East and more widely, a carefully constructed plan with very definite objectives? Has Trump in fact “planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway”, while flinging the chaff of apparent chaos? I realise that this is not intuitive, but bear with me…

What kicked off my thinking was the revelation by Lockheed Martin that they had been instructed by Trump, months in advance of the attack on Iran, to massively increase production of interceptor missiles, with a short term goal of quadrupling capacity of THAAD. In January, before the start of the current conflict, Fox News was already reporting on various deals, including a trebling of PAC3 MSE interceptor deliveries, having been finalised between Lockheed and the Department of War.

While obviously there are supply chain and production line constraints on the ability to ramp up production within months, the urgency of this activity—almost entirely focused on interceptor missiles—that started in 2025 is in hindsight a clear indication that early war with Iran was expected. It is plain evidence of premeditation.

The second thing that triggered my thought that this is all carefully planned, is the nature of the breakdown of the nuclear deal talks. It appears there was a broad consensus that Iran offered concessions which made a deal very practical, in particular giving up its stocks of enriched uranium into trust (a proposal Iran had historically rejected when Putin offered to hold the material). Both the hosts, Oman and the British thought a deal was there.

The failure of the talks is being spun as due to the incompetence and lack of technical knowledge of Witkoff and Kushner. But I just don’t buy this. The sending of unqualified negotiators was part of a ploy to use the negotiations as cover for an attack—the second time in a year that the United States had pulled the same trick.

They didn’t need competent negotiators, because they had never intended a good faith negotiation.

The attack on Iran was always planned by Trump. He was not “bounced into it” by Israel. It had been in gestation for months. That fact had been held within a very tight circle to avoid both political opposition and institutional opposition from the US military and intelligence community.

January’s protests in Iran found ordinary people genuinely ready to protest, motivated by economic hardship caused by sanctions. But they were guided and abused by Mossad and CIA agents among the Iranian people, who committed and encouraged violence and initiated pro-Shah chanting.

There was never the slightest possibility the protests would bring regime change, but that was not the intention. The purpose was to incite an over-reaction by the Iranian government that could “justify” the planned attack on Iran. The dead protestors have been great martyrs for Trump’s—and Israel’s—wider cause.

The planting by Western state-sponsored individuals and organisations of ludicrous claims throughout Western state and corporate media of thirty to forty thousand killed, was a deliberate and considered plan to reduce domestic opposition in the West to the forthcoming war against Iran.

Now factor in another apparently random act by Trump—the astonishing kidnapping of President Maduro of Venezuela on 3 January, a month before the attack on Iran.

Trump’s naval blockade of Venezuela’s oil has secured a US monopoly of its sale and distribution. As with Iraq, only US-approved contractors can buy the oil and payments are made to a Trump-controlled account in Qatar, from which revenue is given to the Venezuelan government entirely at Trump’s discretion.

This audacious imperialist grab of the world’s largest oil reserve further insulated the USA against the effects of the forthcoming closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Again, the narrative is being spun that Trump did not foresee the closure of the Strait by Iran. That is plainly a nonsense—every commentary on a potential Iran war for half a century has focused on the Strait of Hormuz. The only possible explanation is that Trump does not mind the closure.

While, as Trump says, the United States does not need the oil that comes through the Strait, the apparent weakness in his case is that higher oil prices are universal and hit Trump’s support, particularly as Americans fill their Gas tanks. But to concentrate on this is to make the fundamental error of imagining that Trump cares about what is good for the American people. He does not. He cares about what is good for Donald J. Trump and his immediate circle.

Here is the Chevron share price over the last month:

And here is Lockheed Martin. Note that the start of the 40% leap in share price coincides with those instructions last year on massively ramping up interceptor production.

Not to mention, of course, that the really big fortunes will have been made in oil and derivative commodity futures by those who knew this war was coming (acting through proxies).

The $200 billion Trump is requesting from Congress to continue the war is going to make an awful lot of well-connected people even richer.

So the plan is the making of fortunes, the strengthening of the military-industrial complex and the ratcheting up under cover of national cohesion in war of the authoritarianism that has reduced freedom of speech and outlawed dissent against Israel across the Western world.

To benefit Israel is the other predominant motive.

Trump’s thrashing about to articulate objectives for the war in Iran is performative, a blind to cover his true and steadfast objective—simply the annihilation of Iran as a functioning state, the infliction of the maximum amount of death and infrastructural damage, the reduction of Iran to the condition of Libya.

It goes without saying that the seizure of control of Iran’s hydrocarbons by the US is the ultimate endgame of this destruction, exactly as in Libya and in Iraq. But a linked and crucial objective is the elimination of the source of the only physical resistance to the expansion of Israel. Iran and its allies in Yemen and Lebanon have been the sole support of the Palestinians for years.

The colonial settler state of Israel is central to the projection of imperialist power in the Middle East. Its expansion is an essential part of the plan.

Destruction of Iran on the scale envisaged will take years of hard pounding. Again, it is planned—you don’t ask Congress for an instalment of $200 billion for a war you plan to wrap up in a month. Again, Trump’s taunts about having already won, objectives being achieved and about possibly finishing soon, are all just smoke and mirrors. The scale and horror of what is planned for Iran has to be obfuscated to limit a public revulsion that would be echoed in parts of the state apparatus.

Netanyahu yesterday revealed an interesting part of the endgame—construction of an oil pipeline that brings Iran’s oil out to be shipped from a Mediterranean terminal in Israel. That is a breathtakingly audacious plan, but absolutely aligns with Netanyahu’s and Trump’s actions.

Which brings us to the Greater Israel side of the project. Israel is not going to put any of its ships or soldiers in harm’s way in Iran—that is the American contribution. But while the world is primarily watching Iran, Israel is starting a large-scale invasion of Lebanon with the aim of annexing all of Southern Lebanon permanently, even beyond the Litani River and including the cities of Tyre and Nabatieh, both currently under Israeli evacuation orders.

This land of course adjoins the annexed Golan Heights and the much larger area of Southern Syria that Israel has annexed in the past year with the acquiescence of Zionist puppet “President” al Jolani.

It is essential not to lose sight of the bipartisan nature of the United States’ long term plan. In a very real sense Trump is continuing—if greatly accelerating—the policy under Biden, who protected and enabled the Genocide in Gaza. The success of this US policy is phenomenal. Just consider that only 18 months ago the Zionist “Presidents” al-Jolani of Syria and Aoun of Lebanon were not in power. Both were brought to power as a result of US-aligned military action, by Israel against Hezbollah and by the CIA- and MI6-sponsored HTS forces. Put in place by Biden, they are now central to Trump’s strategy.

Aoun and al-Jolani are now united in threatening Hezbollah in the rear as it fights a desperate action against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Meanwhile Israel officially occupies over 60% of the Gaza Strip—under cover of Trump’s “Board of Peace”, and continues to murder, blockade and starve the inhabitants of the remnant, while the de facto expansion of Israel into the West Bank and the levels of settler violence are escalating to levels of the utmost barbarity.

Iranian resistance is noble and Iran’s resilience has surprised many. It will be able to make any ground invasion, or even limited incursion, extremely costly for the United States. But as in Gaza or Lebanon, if the US and Israel are content simply to pound from the air for years with devastating force, and with no concern whatsoever for civilian casualties, ultimately all Iran can do is hang on and try to survive.

Given another year of destruction at the current levels of intensity, I do not believe that Iran would effectively be sending many missiles and drones back in self-defence. In a week or two we will hit the period of maximum Iranian effectiveness, where depletion of US-supplied interceptor missiles coincides with Iran retaining significant strike power. Israel’s fragile civilian morale will then be tested severely for a few weeks.

Iran’s capacity to defend against massive, years-sustained aerial bombardment is limited. We should not blind ourselves to that fact out of current joy at the Americans and Israelis getting a bloody nose.

It is comforting to see Trump as a buffoon, to accept the facade he presents of a blustering and ill-educated ignoramus, who swings wildly between policy options, and who does not understand the world of geopolitics.

But that is nonsense.

I have no hesitation in characterising Trump’s genius as evil, focused on personal gain and willing to inflict any amount of death, maiming and deprivation on innocent civilians to attain his goals. But he is indeed attaining his goals on the world stage.

Trump has forced the Security Council to underwrite his Board of Peace. This was a quite astonishing diplomatic triumph over a helpless Russia and China, both of which decided that other negotiations with Trump were more important. Trump has presided over Israel expanding on the ground by the day. Trump has taken Venezuela’s oil, the largest reserves in the world. Trump is currently killing people of Iran and destroying their infrastructure, while feigning indecision.

You should hate Trump: but he is no clown.

---

By Alexandra Prokopenko, Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, 3/24/26

Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s frequent statements that victory in Iran is close, there is no end in sight to the hostilities in the Persian Gulf. On the contrary, new approaches to limited traffic through the Strait of Hormuz are gradually being implemented. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has started issuing paid transit permits to vessels unaligned with the United States or Israel, and a growing number of countries want to discuss “safe passage of their vessels.”

The consequences of restricted transit for the oil market are already clear and well known. Not as much attention is being paid to the impact on the global fertilizer market. The changes there will be more gradual, but irreversible. Food prices will take six to nine months to react to the supply shock in the fertilizer market resulting from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, Russia might enjoy more lasting benefits than temporarily lining its pockets with petrodollars.

The Strait of Hormuz is the most important transit route not just for oil but also for fertilizers. Persian Gulf countries account for about 46 percent of global seaborne urea transit and around 30 percent of ammonia transit. These nitrogen compounds are integral for efficient cultivation of almost every food crop. However, their shipping from the Persian Gulf is almost completely paralyzed.

Disruptions to maritime transit through the strait have already triggered a sharp surge in nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer prices. According to Platts, as of March 19, the free on board (FOB) price for Middle East granular urea rose to $604–710 per ton, up from $436–494 before the start of the war. The Southeast Asia granular urea was at $750 per ton on March 19, up from $490–498 in late February. While these prices are still below the 2022 record highs, they continue to grow.

Furthermore, unlike with oil, there are no strategic reserves of urea, no alternate pipelines for ammonia, and no military escort programs. Saudi Arabia has created infrastructure to export oil bypassing the Strait of Hormuz, but no such solutions exist for fertilizers.

The lag between disruptions in fertilizer supply and rising food prices is measured in seasons rather than days. A farmer who doesn’t have access to urea at the start of the planting season might use less fertilizer, switch to a different crop, or forgo planting altogether. This decision affects the harvest in three to six months, and takes longer still to impact supermarket prices. Today we are at the very beginning of this cycle.

The UN World Food Program estimates that the number of people experiencing acute food insecurity could rise by 45 million to a record-high 363 million if the war in Iran doesn’t end by mid-2026, and oil prices remain above $100 a barrel.

The geographic distribution of this increase is predictable and politically significant: an additional 17.7 million people in East and Southern Africa, 10.4 million in West and Central Africa, and 9.1 million in Asia. Many in these regions will be happy to buy not just Russian fertilizers, but also the Kremlin’s narrative that Moscow is the best guarantor of food security for the Global South.

Similar dynamics played out in 2022, when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine had also hit the fertilizer market hard. However, back then, the disruptions in Black Sea shipping had simultaneously driven up grain prices, which partially offset the rising cost of fertilizers for farmers.

Today, the grain prices are only growing a little, because Iran is not a major agricultural producer. Thus, higher expenses for farmers at the start of the planting season aren’t being compensated with higher crop values, and the consequences for the food market will emerge later and last longer.

As with the oil market, Russia is one of the main beneficiaries of the turmoil in the fertilizer market. Russia accounts for about 23 percent of global ammonia exports, 14 percent of global urea exports, and—together with Belarus—40 percent of global potash exports. Furthermore, its export infrastructure is completely independent of the Strait of Hormuz. Moscow doesn’t need a ceasefire, a military escort, or a diplomatic breakthrough to ramp up its deliveries. All it needs is orders, and it is getting more and more of these.

Importers in Nigeria and Ghana are already pre-purchasing Russian fertilizers for the third quarter of 2026. This is a rational market response to the disappearance of competing supply, and once established, these connections will solidify into a dependency that could outlast any ceasefire.

Moscow has already employed this tactic. In 2022–2023, the Kremlin used the Black Sea Grain Initiative as diplomatic leverage in Africa and the Middle East, pushing importer countries for friendlier positions and corresponding votes in the UN as an unofficial precondition for resuming deliveries.

Fertilizers are even more convenient as leverage. They receive less media attention in the West than wheat, and they are more critical for the agricultural sector. The bureaucrats responsible for fertilizer procurement in Ethiopia and Bangladesh don’t think about the Ukraine conflict when they need urea before the monsoon season arrives. They call the Kremlin, and the Kremlin answers.

Moscow is well aware of these new opportunities. In a March 18 interview with Kommersant, presidential aide Nikolai Patrushev said that the U.S. war with Iran is not a temporary crisis, but a structural realignment that should be leveraged. According to Patrushev, the U.S.-Israeli operation is a “catalyst for the redistribution of the global energy market and the disruption of maritime logistics” and has “unpredictable humanitarian and economic consequences.”

Patrushev made no mention of Ukraine in the interview. However, he did propose providing naval convoys to protect merchant ships. In August 2024, Patrushev was appointed chairman of the newly established Russian Maritime Board. Meanwhile, his son Dmitry Patrushev is a deputy prime minister for agriculture and fertilizer production.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz triggers a chain reaction of three consecutive shocks in the agricultural sector. The first—a surge in fertilizer prices—is already under way. Even farmers in developed nations are feeling it, albeit less acutely due to existing stockpiles and access to financing.

The second—reduced crop yields as a result of high fertilizer prices—will come in the fall. Its impact will be uneven: agricultural producers in the United States and the EU will find it easier to diversify their suppliers than those in many countries of Africa and Asia.

The third—food inflation—will follow in 2027. Food is a commodity with a very low price elasticity of demand, particularly in poorer nations. A supply shock translates almost entirely into higher prices rather than lower consumption, and lower consumption is itself a catastrophe: in poorer nations, lower consumption means famine and not just changes in the composition of the consumer basket.

For Russia, each of these three shocks is important in its own way. Moscow imposed export quotas on fertilizers back in 2025 in order to stabilize the domestic market. A rapid increase in exports would require corresponding government decisions and could run up against infrastructure constraints at the ports.

Historically, Russia was the world’s largest exporter of anhydrous ammonia; however, the Togliatti–Odesa ammonia pipeline is not currently operating due to the war in Ukraine. A new terminal on the Taman Peninsula was supposed to partially resolve this issue, but the details on its full capacity remain unclear. Nevertheless, the Kremlin has already declared that “Russia is one of the few countries that can ensure a growing market supply.”

In the long run, the Kremlin will enjoy geopolitical gains from the turmoil in the Persian Gulf and not just financial benefits. Additional oil revenues are likely, but could run out. Meanwhile, higher prices on fertilizers and food are a victory of a different magnitude. Russia won’t just profit from rising prices; it will have the opportunity to convert its market power into political influence and acquire leverage over countries whose neutrality is vital for the West.

The war in Iran will probably end before most people see its connection with the rise in food prices in 2027. By that point, Russia will be able to position itself as an indispensable supplier that saved the world from starvation. The Kremlin did not sow this harvest, but it will most likely reap it.

A joint survey by the FOM polling group and the Higher School of Economics in Russia

According to a study by the Public Opinion Foundation and the Higher School of Economics (HSE), “Small Business Longitudinal Study,” reviewed by Vedomosti, approximately 31% of entrepreneurs in Russia are considering closing or selling their businesses. This figure represents an 8 percentage point increase compared to the first quarter of last year.

The survey has been conducted since 2021 among the same group of respondents—more than 700 sole proprietors and small business owners. The most recent wave of interviews took place from January 20 to February 19, 2026.

According to the study, entrepreneurs’ expectations for the first quarter of 2026 are the worst ever recorded. More than half of respondents (52%) believe their business’s situation will worsen, while only 12% expect an improvement.

For comparison, in the first quarter of 2022, against the backdrop of the widespread introduction of anti-Russian sanctions, the share of pessimistic assessments was 38%, while optimistic ones were at least 20%.

At the same time, the share of companies operating in survival mode is growing. At the end of the fourth quarter of last year, it reached 39%, the highest level in the last five years. However, only 8% of entrepreneurs expect an increase in these indicators.

Small businesses’ financial performance is also deteriorating. Thirty-nine percent of respondents reported a decrease in revenue compared to the previous quarter, and 29% reported insufficient revenue to cover direct expenses.