Recent news reports claim that Saudi Arabia persuaded Russia not to arm the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen with cruise missiles. If so, this “Saudi channel” may be an important means for restraining Russian behavior in the Middle East which Washington might be able to make use of on other occasions. But did Riyadh really succeed at this? Because if it did not, then hopes that may have developed in Washington about how Riyadh can moderate Moscow’s behavior on issues of vital interest to the U.S. and its allies may prove illusory.

Some of the reporting in the American media on the question of Saudi influence on Russia’s decision-making has relied heavily on unnamed U.S. government sources. And these sources gave differing accounts, thus leading to uncertainty as to whether it was primarily Saudi influence that dissuaded the Russians, or something else.

This can be seen by examining three recent news stories in the Western media about Saudi Arabia, Russia and the Houthis which the authors interviewed U.S. government officials for. (I rely on these three articles because my monitoring of Western media has led me to conclude that they have become the preferred sources for other articles written in the mainstream Western media on this question of Saudi influence.)

This analysis was originally posted on Mick Ryan's Substack and is reprinted here with the author's permission.

In a 1973 lecture, Sir Michael Howard described the impact of surprise, and the necessity of military institutions to prepare their people to absorb, and adapt around, surprises on the battlefield and beyond. He described how “this is an aspect of military science which needs to be studied above all others in the Armed Forces: the capacity to adapt oneself to the utterly unpredictable, the entirely unknown.”

Sir Lawrence Freedman, has written that, “a surprise attack, conceived with cunning, prepared with duplicity and executed with ruthlessness, provides international history with its most melodramatic moments.” Surprise is an important continuity in human competition and warfare. The desire to surprise an adversary is central to the Eastern and Western traditions of war.  

The aim is to shock an adversary and overwhelm them when they are their weakest or when they least expect it. That shock, and the break down in enemy cohesion and ability to effectively respond, can then be used to seize large amounts of ground and destroy significant enemy formations.

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of his country in February 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pleaded with Western countries to leave Russia. Hundreds of U.S. and EU-based companies heeded his call to “make sure that the Russians do not receive a single penny,” with Western politicians reportedly predicting that the exodus “would help strangle the Russian economy and undermine the Kremlin’s war effort,” while Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and his four co-authors declared that “business retreats and sanctions are catastrophically crippling the Russian economy.” Predictions of Russia’s economic meltdown continued into 2023, with the New Republic diagnosing Russia as “going broke fast” and Business Insider editors describing Russia’s economy as “spiraling.” The future has looked dim even to some of the lead players in the Russian economy. One of Putin’s own oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska, predicted in March 2023 that Russia may run out of money in 2024 and would need foreign investment to prevent that. 

Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the U.S. presidential race and support his VP Kamala Harris has Russian officials and scholars of U.S.-Russian relations divided on whether a Democrat can defeat the GOP’s Donald Trump in November. Boris Mezhuev, a Moscow-based political scientist, told pro-Kremlin conservative analytical portal Vzglyad in reference to Harris: “I think her prospects can be described as positive. The gap in ratings with Donald Trump is only a few percent.” According to Russian foreign policy veteran Sen. Alexey Pushkov, however, “in the battle for the presidency, Trump defeated Biden ahead of schedule.” Pushkov’s colleague, and deputy chairman of the Russian Senate Konstantin Kosachev, also believes Trump is more likely to win. Interestingly, Vladimir Pastukhov, a self-exiled opposition-minded Russian political scientist, concurs, predicting that Harris’s chances to defeat Trump are dim, while U.S.-based opposition-minded Russian scholar Konstantin Sonin is less pessimistic, putting her chances of Harris winning at 50/50.

The Levada Center has released the results of its monthly polling of Russians on Russia’s war in Ukraine and its broader stand-off with NATO. Some results, such as a record level of support for peace talks, may seem to be encouraging to doves, but the devil is in the details. More worrisome, the share of Russians who believe that an armed conflict between Russia and NATO could erupt has increased, as did the share of Russians who believe the use of nuclear weapons by their country in the context of “the current conflict in Ukraine” would be justified. In fact, every third Russian now shares this alarming belief, according to the poll’s findings, which I present and discuss in the order they have appeared in Levada’s latest poll on the conflict with Ukraine.

The shooting of Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania—which the ex-president survived and which the FBI is investigating as an assassination attempt—has elicited a roar of comments by Russian politicians, experts and journalists, both pro-Putin and anti-Putin. A number of commentators from both camps agreed that the incident boosts Trump’s electoral chances. As Russian self-exiled liberal expert Boris Pastukhov put it: “It was Trump that was being shot at, but it was Biden who got hit.” Experts on both sides of Russia’s political divide  noted that the attempt will contribute to the polarization of America, with one liberal Russian expert noting that the Kremlin will benefit from this trend. Commenting on Trump’s survival, some pro-Kremlin writers wondered if the heavens intervened to save him. Meanwhile, at least two of Russia’s major online retailers tried to profit from the incident.

The Russian defense ministry has just launched a multi-phase exercise near Ukraine meant to prepare its forces for using non-strategic nuclear weapons (NSNWs). In addition to the obvious purpose of preparing Russian troops to use tactical nuclear weapons in battle, the multi-stage exercise is also meant to signal to the West that it should refrain from escalating assistance to Ukraine, as well as to warn the U.S. and its allies that Russia may liberalize its conditions for using nuclear weapons. Finally, the exercise may be evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to retain Valery Gerasimov as head of the General Staff, at least for now.

That the Russian armed forces are planning a NSNW wargame became publicly known on May 6, when the country’s defense ministry (MoD) issued a statement disclosing that Putin—who is the commander-in-chief of the Russian armed forces—had ordered an exercise in the Southern Military District (SMD) to have MoD units practice using tactical nuclear weapons. The wargame is supposed to prepare these units for what the ministry described as “unconditionally ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Russian state in response to provocative statements and threats of individual Western officials against the Russian Federation,” according to the statement.¹ The defense agency’s rather curt announcement was followed by a longer statement from the country’s foreign ministry (MFA), which said that the planned wargame “should be considered in the context of recent bellicose statements by Western officials and sharply destabilizing actions taken by a number of NATO countries that are aimed at building forceful pressure on the Russian Federation and at creating additional threats to the security of our country in connection with the conflict in and around Ukraine.”  

Sworn in for yet another presidential term, Vladimir Putin is firmly on the path to becoming Russia’s longest ruler, surpassing even Josef Stalin, who governed Soviet Russia for almost 31 years. For many, a future Russia without Putin remains a black box. Some fear a civil war, perhaps triggered by a coup attempt and followed by chaos. Others believe there will be a more or less orderly changing of the guard. 

The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and its Russia Matters project have recently hosted a conversation to discuss these and other scenarios. Entitled “Post Putin Russia: What Comes Next?”, the discussion featured Anatol Lieven, director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Leon Aron, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. It was moderated by the Belfer Center’s Ambassador Paula Dobriansky.

"Is the Russia-China relationship truly an alliance?" This pivotal question framed a recent seminar hosted by the Belfer Center and Russia Matters, entitled "Russia-China: A Long-Term Alliance?" as part of the series "Russia's Past, Present, and Future." Moderated by Paula Dobriansky, a senior fellow with Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, the seminar featured insights from Harvard’s S.T. Lee Professor of U.S.-Asia Relations Rana Mitter and senior research scientist at the China and Indo-Pacific Studies Division at CNA, Dr. Elizabeth Wishnick. Both Wishnick and Mitter agreed that alignment defines the current Sino-Russian relationship, not alliance. Over the course of the ensuing discussion, the nuances of this alignment were explored in detail; Mitter and Wishnick delved into the essence of the Russia-China relationship, probing whether this partnership signifies a long-standing alliance, the potential role of China in a post-Putin Russia, the prospects for cooperation or discord and the broader implications of this relationship for the Indo-Pacific region.

In her opening remarks, Wishnick underlined that while she dislikes the term “marriage of convenience” to describe the Sino-Russian relationship, the relationship between the two countries, which have not entered any official military pacts with each other, falls short of an alliance. She then explained which features of this relationship make it an alignment. Among these, she pointed to deepening military and aerospace cooperation, mutual support in international venues and expanding trade. Wishnick also emphasized two distinct aligning factors in the relationship: a shared animosity for the United States and both countries’ search for regime security as authoritarian states. These factors are the prevailing glue that anchors their alignment rather than the “non-insignificant” personal relationship between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Wishnick also emphasized that while Russian public opinion vis-à-vis China has improved, Russians remain concerned about becoming an energy appendage of China. In addition, deeper integration faces challenges, including complicated border relations in Russia’s east and China’s northeast, as evidenced by agreements of cooperation between non-contiguous border regions. 

The share of Russians who would like to leave Russia for permanent residence in another country has reached a record low, according to the results of a national poll conducted by Russia’s Levada Center on March 21-27, 2024. 

This center has been measuring Russians’ attitudes toward emigration since 1990, registering peaks in the share of Russians who would like to leave for greener pastures in May 2011, May 2013 and May 2021. In all three instances, the share of Russians who answered “definitely yes” or “likely yes” when asked “Would you like to move abroad for permanent residence?” totaled 22% (see Figure 1). In comparison, Levada’s more recent measurements show that right after Vladimir Putin sent troops to re-invade Ukraine in February 2022, this share was 10% (March 2022), which then increased to 11% in February 2023, before declining again in March 2024 to an all-time record low of 9%. At the same time, in the period since Russia’s re-invasion of Ukraine, the share of those who would not want to move abroad increased from 79% to a record high of 90% (see Figure 1). These measurements by Levada, which is the most renowned of Russia’s independent pollsters in spite of increasing constraints on the activities of such pollsters, aligns with the findings of the state-owned Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM), which claims that its March 2024 poll revealed that the share of Russians who want to leave Russia for permanent residency abroad and the share of Russians who don’t reached a record low (5%) and a record high (93%), respectively, since 1991.