5 Ideas to Explore

1. Despite newly-approved U.S. aid on the way to Ukraine, Russia retains the advantage on the battlefield. The delay due to political battles in Congress along with Europe’s failure to deliver ammunition has led to “serious consequences on the battlefield,” NATO’s Jens Stoltenberg said. FT’s Chris Miller argues Russia “has the initiative and advantage on the battlefield now. It will still have the advantage in terms of manpower. And Ukraine will still be outgunned.” Some analysts and officials agree that 2024 will be “primarily a defensive year for Ukraine,” according to WP. “Ukrainians for the next 12 months will be able to have a monthly fire rate of maybe roughly 75,000 to 85,000 [shells] per month, which boils down to something like 2,400 to 2,500 rounds per day,” Franz-Stefan Gady was quoted as saying by FP. “That doesn’t leave any room for offensive operations this year.” However, some Western officials believe Russia’s advantage is narrowing. FT reports one Western official said “while Russia might make some tactical breakthroughs at the frontline, it remained an ineffective army characterized by old equipment and poorly trained soldiers and would not ‘overrun’ Ukraine.”
2. “The situation at the front has worsened,” Ukraine’s top commander Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi said in a statement April 28, announcing the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from two villages west of Avdiivka, where Ukraine is facing the “most difficult situation,” NYT reports. Among their goals, Russian troops have their sights set on Chasiv Yar, a small town in eastern Ukraine. “Russian forces currently have opportunities to achieve operationally significant gains near Chasiv Yar,” ISW said in its April 28 report. Capturing the town would give Russia strategic high ground and put Russian troops within 10 miles of Kostiantynivka, “the main supply point for Ukrainian forces along much of the eastern front,” NYT reports. Chasiv Yar is the “key” that “will open the gate for exhaustive and long-lasting battles,” said military analyst and former Ukrainian colonel Serhiy Hrabsky in NYT.
3. U.S. intelligence has confirmed that Russia remains in compliance with New START caps as of the end of 2023, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Mallory Stewart said in an interview with the Arms Control Association. “We understand that we can’t force them [Russians] into an arms control discussion, but what we can do is try to work with the rest of the multilateral and international community to make the case for pursuing risk reduction measures and building an increased appreciation for why it is in Russia’s interest to engage in arms control conversations,” Stewart said.
4. Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive offers three important lessons, writes CEIP’s Eugene Rumer. First, “successful offensive operations require significant advantages in manpower and materiel on the order of three-to-one or even higher.” Second, Russia’s military “has defied expectations by adopting new tactics and deploying new equipment.” Third, the U.S. and its allies have repeatedly discovered that sanctions have not prohibited Russia from accessing "key inputs for its military-industrial complex.’”
5. A new U.S. bill on foreign aid will likely be necessary in early 2025, warns WP’s Max Boot, as the newly-approved $61 billion will run out by the end of 2024. “The U.S. presidential election could determine Ukraine’s fate—and Trump could easily win that election. Even if he doesn’t, aid to Ukraine will still be in jeopardy if Republicans control either house of Congress," Boot argues.

I. U.S. and Russian priorities for the bilateral agenda

Nuclear security and safety:

• No significant developments.

North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs:

• No significant developments.

Iran and its nuclear program:

“Russia-Iran Military Alliance Gives Israel Cause for Concern,” Henry Meyer, Bloomberg, 04.26.24.

• An operation believed to have been carried out by Israel on the Iranian city of Isfahan…took out part of an air-defense system supplied by Moscow.
  • Later, an official Iranian news agency trumpeted the imminent arrival of new fighter jets from Russia, withdrawing the news without explanation.
• The suggestion that Iran is sourcing weapons from Russia has raised concerns in Israel about the implications of expanding Moscow-Tehran defense ties — especially at a time when Israel and Iran appear closer than ever to all-out war.
  • Russia looks set to supply Iran with Sukhoi Su-35 fighter planes to modernize its decades-old air force as well as the sophisticated S-400 air defense system.
• Reflecting the wider strategic shift, North Korea, another country that’s providing Russia with weapons to fight Ukraine, sent a delegation to Tehran.
  • The Kremlin’s partnership with Iran is part of a broader push to counter the US and its allies in the Middle East, where Russia is seeking to step up its military presence.
• Iran received the first delivery of Yak-130 combat trainer aircraft from Russia in September [2023]. They can be used to train pilots for the Su-35, and two months later the deputy Iranian defense minister said the arrangements for delivery of those fighter planes had been finalized. 
  • Iran is also seeking the S-400 system, which can hit targets as far as 400 kilometers (240 miles) away and have some ability to counter stealth jets such as the US-made F-35 in Israel’s airforce.

Humanitarian impact of the Ukraine conflict:

“Russia Is Committing Cultural Genocide in Ukraine,” Jade McGlynn, FP, 04.23.24.

• Anyone who wants to understand Russian history should ignore Russian President Vladimir Putin. But anyone who wants to understand Putin’s strategic aims should pay close attention to his reading of history. The Russian president’s long lectures and essays on Kyivan Rus and World War II are not random tangents but rather the centerpieces driving his regime’s aggression against Ukraine. The Kremlin’s efforts to impose its reading of history on Ukrainians living under occupation reveal the driving motives of this war, as well as its continued objectives. … [I]f we fail to grasp the broader grammar of Russia’s war against Ukraine, then we will also fail to recognize the broader ambition of Russia’s war efforts: the deliberate annihilation of Ukrainian identity.
• Russia’s strategic deployment of historical propaganda in occupied Ukraine involves a comprehensive effort to “Russify” the local populace, leveraging educational, cultural, and military instruments to erase narratives of Ukrainian history and culture. … From the very beginning, as Putin made clear in a June 2021 essay titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” Russia’s full-scale invasion was intended as a genocidal war.
  • Genocide aims at the annihilation of the identity and existence of a specific group—in this case, Ukrainians. The crucial aspect of identifying genocide is the intent behind these actions, which distinguishes it from other forms of violence. Evidence of the Kremlin’s destructive intent is overwhelming. And it is overwhelmingly delivered in the language of history.
• Russian propaganda distributed in the occupied territories positions the Kremlin as a protector of historical truth, using this stance to propagate narratives conducive to its political and ideological ends. It paints Western and Ukrainian histories as distortions that were deliberately aimed at destroying Russian identity—which the Kremlin argues is the true identity of Ukrainians.
  • Russian academics have created an Orwellian 98-page glossary of new correct cultural, historical and social terminology to be enforced in Ukrainian schools on the occupied territories. In the Donbas, organizations such as the Russian Center have produced pseudo-historical doctrines to justify Russia’s occupation. 
• Russian forces are actively reinstalling Soviet-era monuments which were previously removed in Ukraine’s decommunization efforts, especially statues of Lenin. In so doing, the Kremlin is trying to restore a (mis)imagined past of Soviet-Russian greatness and ownership over Ukraine. It is a past that … will have grave consequences for Russia and Ukraine’s future, given that the indoctrination efforts are most targeted at children.
• Despite Moscow’s extensive indoctrination efforts, there has been resistance. Officials from the temporarily occupied Luhansk region have reported recruitment difficulties to the Kremlin, noting a significant shortage of teachers in Russian language, literature, and history. As Ukrainian teachers refuse to teach these subjects, educators are brought in from Russia, often housed in apartments confiscated from local residents. … Still, in the face of penalties and home raids, a notable segment of the population steadfastly refuses to enroll their children in Russian-administered schools, instead opting for home-schooling.
• The Kremlin’s Russification, historical falsification, youth indoctrination, militarization and cultural manipulation reveal Russia’s true agenda. In keeping with Putin’s rhetoric since 2022, it is clear that Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine is aimed not only at territorial control, but also at the eradication of Ukrainian national identity.

Military aspects of the Ukraine conflict and their impacts:

“Ukraine Is Still Outgunned by Russia: Even with the approval of new U.S. aid, most of the artillery Ukraine needs won’t get to the front until next year,” Jack Detsch, FP, 04.23.24.

• Ukraine is still likely to be outgunned by Russian artillery for much of the rest of 2024 despite Congress nearing the passage of a $60 billion military aid bill for Kyiv, officials and analysts told Foreign Policy, as both the United States and Europe ramp up production of NATO-standard rounds and restock their own arsenals.
• “The problem is there is a huge shortage—worldwide—of artillery shells,” said Oleksandra Ustinova, a Ukrainian lawmaker. “The Europeans said they would provide us a million shells—they provided only 30 percent of those. The Americans have dried out their stocks, and they’re also delivering to Israel. And they are only ramping up the production line.”
• [Following the passage of the foreign aid package, the] Biden administration can begin to replenish the U.S. Defense Department’s stockpiles of ammunition that the United States might need to fight a war of its own someday, thereby allowing the White House enough leeway to begin sending artillery to the Ukrainians from storehouses in Europe without harming U.S. military readiness. … But the expectation is that the administration will spend much of the year rebuilding U.S. stockpiles to prewar levels as the U.S. Army aims to level up artillery production to 100,000 rounds per month by the end of 2025. Across the Atlantic Ocean, Europe’s stockpiles are empty.
• “I think it’s fair to assume that the Ukrainians for the next 12 months will be able to have a monthly fire rate of maybe roughly 75,000 to 85,000 [shells] per month, which boils down to something like 2,400 to 2,500 rounds per day,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, an associate fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London who conducted a study recently examining Ukraine’s rate of artillery fire. … “That doesn’t leave any room for offensive operations this year,” Gady added. 
• In the meantime, Russia is on track to produce 3.5 million rounds in 2024 and might be able to surge to produce 4.5 million rounds by the end of the year. But there are questions as to whether Russia is starting to max out its industrial capacity. … European officials expect that Russia will have to build more factories to produce the shells that it needs. Russia is also getting artillery shells from North Korea and Iran, but some of them are so old that they’re misfiring.
• “Ukraine is developing fortifications. They are building a defense depth,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia program who last traveled to Ukraine in November. “But the problem is when you have this manpower problem and ammunition problem at same time, it creates issues.”

“Transcript: US aid package offers fresh hope to Ukraine,” Gideon Rachman and Christopher Miller, FT, 04.25.24.

• [Christopher Miller] Russia will still have the advantage [despite the newly passed aid bill]. It has the initiative and advantage on the battlefield now. It will still have the advantage in terms of manpower. And Ukraine will still be outgunned. Some of this military assistance is packaged and ready to go.
  • Attack drones do not fill the gap left by this artillery. So, what it’s going to hopefully do is stop the Russian advance on the ground. It’s probably not going to be enough to beat them back to where they were six months ago.
• [CM] Russia does have the ability to mobilize more soldiers for its fight. It is currently mobilizing roughly 30,000 each month or enough to replenish its losses on the battlefield.
  • It’s no longer making the mistakes that it did in the first days, weeks, months of this war when Ukraine had a lot of success.
  • Russia’s officers, which have seen some casualties, are still very skilled. Their soldiers are very skilled. And the one thing that I heard was that they see a lot of Russian soldiers that are well-armed and well-dressed and they have good protection.
• [CM] Ukraine’s experienced soldiers have been exhausted. Many of them have been cut down in battle, wounded or killed. Zelenskyy has said at least 31,000 were killed. We know the true number is much higher than that and he has admitted to that because there are tens of thousands that are technically missing in action. 
  • The new commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrsky, who came into his position earlier this year, has said that it’s not necessary to mobilize that many people. He’s not really put a number on it, but it is clear that tens of thousands of new soldiers will be needed if Ukraine wants to continue this fight.
  • There are some people saying [President] Volodymyr Zelenskyy really needs to use his power to lower this conscription age even further, so that we can draw from the ranks of younger, physically able men.
• [CM] Zelenskyy has lost some popularity if you look at the polling…that was done in 2022. This wave of personnel changes, particularly the former commander-in-chief, who is very popular, even more popular in Ukraine than Zelenskyy himself, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi.

“Military briefing: Russia’s narrowing advantage in Ukraine,” Max Seddon, Christopher Miller and John Paul Rathbone, FT, 04.26.24.

• More than at any point since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine two years ago, Russia’s president appears “very self-assured and happy.” 
  • While Ukraine was running out of Western aid and struggled to rotate its exhausted troops, Russia took advantage of its superior firepower and manpower and made incremental advances across the front line.
• With US aid finally on the way, Ukraine could expose the flaws inherent in Russia’s attempts to overwhelm it with low-quality munitions and a large but poorly trained army.
  • One Western official said that while Russia might make some tactical breakthroughs at the frontline, it remained an ineffective army characterized by old equipment and poorly trained soldiers and would not “overrun” Ukraine, they added.
• Boosted by a record Rbs10.8tn ($118.5bn) in spending on defense this year — six percent of gross domestic product — Russia’s arms industry has built up production several times over, with factories working around the clock, according to officials.
  • Despite Moscow’s larger arsenal, its army “doesn’t have a radical advantage over Ukraine in artillery and munitions…At least, the people fighting on the Russian side don’t see it,” [said Ruslan Pukhov, head of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies].
  • Instead, the Kremlin is deploying more low-tech weaponry, such as highly destructive glide bombs and refurbished Soviet weaponry, while deploying troops using motorcycles and off-road vehicles.
• Russia would need to produce 3.6mn shells a year to sustain the current rate of fire, according to a report published this week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
  • The defense ministry has admitted, however, it can only produce at most half of the 4mn 152mm-calibre shells and 1.6mn 122mm-calibre shells.
• Christopher Cavoli, NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe, told lawmakers in a Senate armed services committee hearing in April [2024] that Russia is recruiting 30,000 soldiers per month, taking its frontline troops from 360,000 a year ago to 470,000.

“With U.S. aid resumed, Ukraine will try to dig itself out of trouble,” Missy Ryan and Siobhán O'Grady, WP, 04.27.24.

• A long-awaited influx of U.S. weapons will help Ukraine to blunt Russia’s advance in the coming months, Biden administration officials said after Congress passed a major aid package, but an acute troop shortage and Moscow’s firepower advantage mean that Kyiv won’t likely regain major offensive momentum until 2025 at the earliest. … President Volodymyr Zelensky characterized the long-delayed American aid as a lifeline, but stressed that the promised resupply must arrive quickly. 
• More than two years after President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion, Ukrainian forces have lost their early battlefield momentum and most U.S. officials interviewed for this report believe Zelensky faces no clear military course to regaining the 20 percent of his country that Russia now occupies. 
• Biden administration officials … frame 2024 as primarily a defensive year for Ukraine, but also cite the promise of new capabilities the West is supplying, including long-range ATACMS missiles provided by the United States in recent weeks, that will allow Ukraine to strike more effectively into Crimea, an important Russian staging ground. Western nations are also expected to begin delivering a limited number of F-16 fighter jets later this year.
• Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday announced the administration’s intent to contract $6 billion in arms for Ukraine, including Patriot air-defense missiles and counter-drone systems — a tranche of vitally needed arms, he said, but one that could take months if not years to produce. The administration has employed a two-tiered approach to helping Ukraine: one entails the immediate drawdown and transfer of existing U.S. military stockpiles; the other is aimed at long-term sustainment through purchase orders for weapons and ammunition.
• Austin, speaking to reporters Friday, said Ukraine’s path would be “dependent upon whether or not Ukraine can effectively employ these systems and sustain those systems, and whether or not Ukraine can mobilize an adequate number of troops to replenish its ranks. “The manpower situation is the growing problem,” said Rob Lee, a former U.S. Marine now at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who has closely followed the Ukraine conflict. “And if that’s not fixed, then this aid package is not going to solve all Ukraine’s issues.”
• A Ukrainian lawmaker who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid said they believed Zelensky’s announcement in February that 31,000 soldiers had been killed since 2022 vastly downplayed the war’s true toll.
• Crucial to regaining momentum, Lee said, is for Ukraine to get more recruits in uniform soon, because they must be trained individually and in groups if Kyiv hopes to avoid the problems it encountered during last year’s failed offensive. “All that requires time, and that’s why the longer it goes without fixing the manpower and mobilization situation, the less likely a large-scale 2025 offensive becomes,” Lee said.
• “The good news is that Russia, years in this war, has not found a way to substantially take advantage of Ukrainian weaknesses,” the U.S. official said.
• While the Biden administration has already ruled out issuing an invitation for Ukraine to join NATO during the summit, two of Ukraine’s leading advocates in Congress are urging the president to approach the event with the idea that “Ukraine should be offered a realistic path to NATO membership” once it has met the alliance’s conditions and requirements.

“Ukraine Retreats From Villages on Eastern Front as It Awaits U.S. Aid,” Constant Méheut, NYT, 04.29.24.

• Russian troops have captured or entered around a half-dozen villages on Ukraine’s eastern front over the past week, highlighting the deteriorating situation in the region for outgunned and outnumbered Ukrainian forces as they wait for long-needed American military aid. “The situation at the front has worsened,” Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s top commander, said in a statement on Sunday in which he announced that his troops had retreated from two villages west of Avdiivka
• “In an attempt to seize the strategic initiative and break through the front line, the enemy has focused its main efforts on several areas, creating a significant advantage in forces and means,” General Syrsky said on Sunday. 
• General Syrsky said the “most difficult situation” at the moment was around the villages west of Avdiivka, which Russia captured in February after months of fierce battles. He said Russia had deployed up to four brigades in the area with the goal of advancing toward Ukrainian military logistical hubs, such as the eastern city of Pokrovsk.
• The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said on Sunday that Russia’s gains in Ocheretyne presented the Russian command with a choice: continue to push west toward Pokrovsk, or push north toward Chasiv Yar, a town that has suffered relentless Russian attacks in recent weeks. As many as 25,000 Russian troops are involved in an offensive on Chasiv Yar, according to Ukrainian officials. Chasiv Yar, about seven miles west of Bakhmut, lies on strategic high ground. Its capture would put the town of Kostiantynivka, some 10 miles to the southwest, in Moscow’s direct line of fire. The town is the main supply point for Ukrainian forces along much of the eastern front. 
  • “Russian forces currently have opportunities to achieve operationally significant gains near Chasiv Yar,” the Institute for the Study of War said in its report on Sunday.
• During a visit to Kyiv on Monday, Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, said the many months it took Congress to approve new military assistance to Ukraine and Europe’s failure to deliver ammunition on time had led to “serious consequences on the battlefield.” “It’s about life and death,” Mr. Stoltenberg said during a news conference. “When we are not delivering as we should, then Ukrainians are paying the price.”

“Why This Small Ukrainian Hilltop Town Is Russia’s Next Big Target,” Marc Santora, NYT, 04.25.24.

• Russian forces have set their sight on Chasiv Yar, a hilltop fortress town in eastern Ukraine. The campaign is part of an intense effort by Russia to achieve what could be its most operationally significant advance since the first summer of the war in 2022.
• Chasiv Yar covers only about five square miles, but if the Russians can seize it they will control commanding heights that will allow them to directly target the main agglomeration of cities still under Kyiv’s control in the Donetsk region. That includes the headquarters of the Ukrainian eastern command in Kramatorsk. It would also put Russian troops within around 10 miles of Kostiantynivka, the main supply juncture for Ukrainian forces across much of the eastern front.
• Chasiv Yar is the “key” that “will open the gate for exhaustive and long-lasting battles,” said Serhiy Hrabsky, a military analyst who is a former colonel in the Ukrainian Army.

“Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 28, 2024,” Riley Bailey, Angelica Evans, Nicole Wolkov, Grace Mappes and Frederick W. Kagan, ISW, 04.28.24.

• Recent Russian gains northwest of Avdiivka have prompted Ukrainian forces to withdraw from other limited tactical positions along the frontline west of Avdiivka, although these withdrawals have yet to facilitate rapid Russian tactical gains. Russian forces remain unlikely to achieve a deeper operationally significant penetration in the area in the near term.
• The continued Russian stabilization of their salient northwest of Avdiivka presents the Russian command with a choice of continuing to push west towards its reported operational objective in Pokrovsk or trying to drive northwards to conduct possible complementary offensive operations with the Russian effort around Chasiv Yar.
• Syrskyi also noted that the threat of a possible future Russian offensive operation against Kharkiv City is causing Ukraine to allocate additional forces and equipment to defending the city, although ISW continues to assess that the Russian military lacks the forces necessary to seize the city.
• The Ukrainian 47th Mechanized Brigade denied a recent report that Ukrainian forces had pulled US-provided M1A1 Abrams tanks from the frontline.

“The U.S. Aid Package for Ukraine Is a Breakthrough but No Silver Bullet,” Eugene Rumer, Carnegie Endowment, 04.25.24.

• Despite its obvious disappointments, the Ukrainian [2023] counteroffensive offers several important lessons. First, size matters. Military planners have long believed that successful offensive operations require significant advantages in manpower and materiel on the order of three-to-one or even higher, especially when the defender is prepared and dug in, as was the case in the summer of 2023.
• Second, the Russian military has defied expectations by adopting new tactics and deploying new equipment. 
  • While the United States and its allies may be dismayed by traditional Russian disregard for battlefield losses, they need to acknowledge that Moscow is now using better tactics and fielding some of its hardware more effectively. Russia pulled ahead of Ukraine in crucial areas such as drones and electronic warfare.
• The Russian defense industry is also performing rather impressively despite a reputation for technological obsolescence. 
  • It has far overtaken Western production of critical items such as ammunition for artillery, benefited from well-timed help from friends in Iran and North Korea, and found ways to modernize and repurpose old weapons to new uses.
• Third, time and time again, the United States and its allies discovered that sanctions did not “[choke] off Russia’s access to key inputs for its military-industrial complex and [undermine] the Kremlin’s ability to wage its unprovoked war” in the words of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
• Ukraine is waging a war against an enemy that shows no inclination to stop its aggression and negotiate in earnest. Instead of arguing about Ukraine’s path to NATO membership, the allies should put in place a series of concrete commitments, including more and better capabilities to defend and push back against the Russian onslaught and long-range precision strike weapons to continue and expand strikes deep inside Russia.

“Ukraine Bets on Long-Range Drones, Raising Costs of War for Russia,” Isabel Coles, WSJ, 04.29.24.

• Facing setbacks on the battlefield, Ukraine is using long-range drones to reach far behind the front line with Russian forces, hitting oil refineries, airfields and logistics. The strikes aim to squeeze fuel supplies to the Russian military and deprive Moscow of export revenues to fund the war. By bringing the war home to Russia, Kyiv could also compel Moscow to redeploy air-defense systems away from the front lines.
• Cheaper and more available than cruise missiles, domestically produced drones enable Kyiv to get around political constraints on using weapons supplied by Western allies in attacks on Russian territory. Startup drone makers have cropped up to meet demand with products ranging from the sleek UJ-25 Skyline to an unnamed model with a fuselage made from a length of plumbing pipe.
• Russia’s Defense Ministry said its air-defense systems shot down 50 drones on a single day last weekend, including over the Moscow region. Falling debris ignited fires at energy infrastructure facilities in two regions, officials said. Earlier this month, drones struck an oil refinery and drone factory in Russia’s Tatarstan region some 930 miles from the border with Ukraine, demonstrating the growing range of Ukraine’s capabilities.
• The strikes are a bright spot for Ukraine at a time when its battlefield prospects have darkened. The campaign, however, has emerged as a fault line between Kyiv and the Biden administration, which is concerned about the impact on energy prices.
• The drones typically carry a warhead of 44 pounds, according to Sutton, who has identified 19 different models used in attacks on Russian territory, including a balloon that drops mortar bombs from a high altitude. Made largely of wood, the AQ-400 Scythe has an advertised range of 750 km (465 miles) and a 43-kg (95-pound) warhead. Bober, or Beaver, drones can fly up to 620 miles with a payload of about 20 kg (44 pounds). The deepest strike yet was carried out by a light A22 aircraft that had been automated and rigged with explosives. 
• Costs range from about $30,000 to 10 times that much, according to one drone manufacturer. Even at the top of the range, it is still considerably less than cruise missiles that Western countries have provided to Ukraine on condition they only be used in Russian-occupied territory.
• “What Ukraine needs to do is streamline production and select those drones that can be manufactured on a mass scale,” said Samuel Bendett, an expert on unmanned aerial vehicles at the Center for Naval Analyses.

“Who is supplying Russia’s arms industry?” The Economist, 04.29.24.

• Despite western sanctions, Russia’s arms industry is booming. Its production of crucial weapons for its war effort in Ukraine has dramatically increased since the start of the fighting. By the start of this year the monthly capacity for long-range missiles, for example, was thought to have more than doubled. The growth is made possible by new international suppliers, who provide parts, electronics and tools.
• Piecing together this supply chain is difficult; the goods are often traded via a complex network of shell companies. But a study of trade data by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (csis), a think-tank in Washington, dc, suggests that many of the imports lead back to one country (see charts 1 and 2).
• Firms in China have provided Russia with semiconductors that are crucial for making various weapon systems. They have also provided navigation equipment, parts for jets, and more generic products such as ball bearings, used in artillery pieces and other equipment. 
• Transaction records suggest that Russia’s imports of precision manufacturing equipment used for critical hardware (known as computer numerical controlled—or cnc—tools) largely come from China, too (see chart 3).
• China has maintained that it is neutral in the war, and does not provide weapons. But the export of these smaller items confirms that it is contributing much else to the Kremlin’s war machine. Antony Blinken, America’s secretary of state, has already rebuked China for being the “primary contributor” to Russia’s “defence industrial base”.
• Despite extensive export controls, Russia still received many Western-made components in 2023. Goods from France, Germany and Japan, for example, made their way to Russia through third countries, such as Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, who have not signed up to Western sanctions.
• Another complication is that Ukraine also depends partly on Chinese manufacturers for some machine parts (though these shipments are much smaller than those China supplies to Russia). Anyone designing and enforcing Western sanctions has to consider whether imposing further restrictions on some Chinese firms may also impede Ukraine’s military procurement.

“How Might the Kremlin Respond to Aid Package for Ukraine?” Alexandra Prokopenko, Carnegie Politika, 04.29.24.

• Following the long-awaited release of the U.S. aid package for Ukraine, the best-case scenario for Kyiv in 2024 appears to entail minimizing Russia’s gains to incremental advancements, particularly at the height of its defense spending. But what if Russia’s military expenditure has not yet peaked?
• Russia’s economy is currently experiencing an upswing propelled by a fiscal impulse (the impact of government expenditure and tax policies on the budget balance) of 10 percent of GDP in 2022–2023 and import substitution.
  • The IMF predicts a growth rate of 3.2 percent, indicating continued overheating.
  • Optimistic business outlooks notwithstanding, there is a shortage of capacity to increase supply, which is unable to keep pace with demand driven by state spending.
  • The budget is further supported by a widening current account surplus, which surged by 43 percent year-on-year to $22 billion in the first quarter.
• The current economic climate enables the Kremlin to allocate budgetary resources for the war effort while simultaneously earmarking funds for future military expenditure. But a significant structural obstacle is looming: the scarcity of available manpower in the economy.
  • Rising prices, including for industrial products and a shortage of labor are the main problems facing the Russian military-industrial complex today. 
  • The current favorable budgetary situation and Russia’s adeptness at circumventing sanctions have…postponed [President Vladimir] Putin’s need to make tough decisions, namely whether to persist in increasing military spending, making lavish payments to the public and maintaining macroeconomic stability through manageable inflation.

For more on this subject, see:

• “Many Ukrainian Prisoners of War Show Signs of Trauma and Sexual Violence,” Carlotta Gall and Oleksandr Chubko, NYT, 04.28.24.

Military aid to Ukraine:

“Why U.S. aid to Ukraine is still in jeopardy,” Max Boot, WP, 04.29.24.

• The passage of the $61 billion Ukraine aid bill in both the House and Senate by large margins should serve to soothe frayed nerves among U.S. allies — and not only in Europe. South Korea, Taiwan and Japan have also made clear that they are very concerned about the precedent that would be set if Russia were allowed to get away with unprovoked aggression.
• But is America back for good or only for now? There is no way to answer that question with any degree of confidence. And that, in turn, should give U.S. allies pause about whether they can still count on the United States.
• Agonizing as it was to get Ukraine aid through Congress, the $61 billion is likely to run out by the end of the year. That means another bill will be necessary in early 2025. If Trump wins in November, it is extremely unlikely that he will support such legislation. He keeps saying he would end the war in 24 hours, which is widely assumed to imply that he will cut off Ukraine to force it to accept a lopsided deal that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has no intention of honoring. The U.S. presidential election could determine Ukraine’s fate — and Trump could easily win that election. Even if he doesn’t, aid to Ukraine will still be in jeopardy if Republicans control either house of Congress.

“Eighty percent of Ukraine-Israel bill will be spent in U.S. or by U.S. military,” Glenn Kessler, WP, 04.25.24.

• As the House on Saturday approved long-stalled aid packages for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, one of the top contenders to be secretary of state in a second Trump administration [Richard Grenell] posted that lawmakers had voted to “send $100 billion to foreign countries.” His jab was a common talking point among opponents of the bill.
• The implication is that foreign aid is just a no-strings-attached gift. It isn’t. About two-thirds of foreign assistance is spent via U.S.-based entities, according to the Congressional Research Service.
• Since these bills — for Ukraine, for Israel and the Pacific region — are mostly about military aid, that means they are really jobs programs in the United States, which in turn bolsters the U.S. economy.
• The full package was estimated to cost $95.25 billion. But information provided by the White House budget office and a detailed review of the bill shows that nearly 80 percent went either to weapons manufacturers in the United States to replenish stocks or supply weapons or to fund Defense Department operations in the United States and overseas (including the training of Ukrainian soldiers).
• Nearly $57 billion — about 60 percent — is never leaving the United States. Instead, these funds are being invested with weapons manufacturers located in dozens of states. (So far, according to the Pentagon, manufacturers in all but 11 states have received Ukraine-related weapons contracts.)
• The bill has nearly $18 billion for defense spending to help the Pentagon and intelligence services fund the cost of managing the fallout from a war in Ukraine and the war between Israel and Gaza.
• An underappreciated aspect of the Russian war in Ukraine is how NATO allies have also spent significant funds buying advanced U.S. weapons to replace materiel they have given to Ukraine. Finland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Poland have flooded U.S. manufacturers with orders since the war started. For instance, Poland gave 250 older tanks to Ukraine and then signed more than $6 billion in deals to buy nearly 370 Abrams tanks (made in Ohio). Warsaw also gave Ukraine Soviet-made attack helicopters and in turn signed a $12 billion deal to replace them with Apache helicopters (made in Arizona).

“What new aid really means for Ukraine — and for Putin,” Lawrence Freedman, FT, 04.27.24.

• The intelligence assessments had to be dire to persuade Mike Johnson to risk his position as Speaker of the House and…push through a bill providing essential support to Ukraine.
• The aim is to leave Russia with as little time as possible to make the most of its current superiority before it starts to face more resistance.
  • Manpower problems, which remain chronic, should be eased as new recruits don’t face the prospect of being sent to fight with insufficient ammunition.
  • An impetus will be given to European countries to press on with their donations to the war.
  • This is more likely to slow down than reverse Russia’s current offensive.
• It will take time to recover from the difficult first months of this year and then more before Ukraine starts to benefit fully from new supplies of equipment.
• For now, Ukraine’s best way of keeping up the fight against Russia is to carry on the attacks [against Russian oil infrastructure deep inside the country].
• Even if [former President Donald] Trump wins the presidential election… that does not guarantee Putin a satisfactory outcome. 
  • Trump will want to push his peace plan but, from what has been reported, [President Vladimir] Putin will find the details as unacceptable as will [President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy. Having publicly boasted for the past six months that Russia had seized the initiative in the war, Putin must now contemplate the possibility that it might yet again swing towards Ukraine. 

For more on this subject, see:

• “Why Does the U.S. Arm Ukraine With Fanfare and Israel in Secret?”, Nicholas Kristof, graphics by Taylor Maggiacomo, NYT, 04.27.24.
• “America’s latest aid will give Ukraine only a temporary reprieve,” The Economist, 04.24.24.

Punitive measures related to Russia’s war against Ukraine and their impact globally:

“REPO Act Lets Biden Boost Ukraine,” Robert B. Zoellick, WSJ, 04.25.24.

• Now that Congress has approved assistance for Ukraine, the Biden administration should forge a long-term economic and military plan that will sustain that country in its war of attrition. If the U.S. continues to dribble out support, it would be making a huge mistake. American public support is likely to wane, and the Europeans are absorbed with internal debates. The nature of the war has changed—militarily, technologically and economically—over more than two years. President Biden’s reactive approach reflects his senatorial style: He waits for events, issues statements and fails to seize the initiative. Congress is giving him one last chance to be a wartime leader.
• The aid package’s hidden gem is the Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity for Ukrainians Act, or REPO. It encourages Mr. Biden to transfer frozen Russian reserves to a trust fund for Ukraine. Members of Congress from both parties recognize that taxpayers want Mr. Biden to use an estimated $300 billion of Russian money to sustain Ukraine economically before asking Americans to pay more. The administration has hesitated to take this step but must do so now.
• With the REPO Act, Congress told the Biden administration not to let Russia escape justice by parking dollars in Europe. REPO requires U.S. financial institutions to report any Russian state assets in their accounts that are subject to sanctions. To transfer offshore dollars, a financial institution must work through a U.S. correspondent bank account. This enables the U.S. to exert authority over overseas assets.
• Mr. Biden also should use Congress’s aid package to transform military and intelligence support for Ukraine. In addition to supplying ammunition, the U.S. must build a pipeline backed by industrial capacity that can outlast the pooled resources of Russia, Iran and China. Ukraine will need investments in critical capabilities at home. Kyiv needs arms that can destroy Russia’s logistical networks and at least establish equivalence in the sky and cyberspace.

Ukraine-related negotiations: 

• No significant developments.

Great Power rivalry/new Cold War/NATO-Russia relations:

“NATO Puts on a Show of Force in the Shadow of Russia’s War,” Helene Cooper, NYT, 04.24.24.

• About 90,000 NATO troops have been training in Europe this spring for the Great Power war that most hope will never come: a clash between Russia and the West with potentially catastrophic consequences. … All are part of what is supposed to be a tremendous show of force by NATO, its largest since the start of the Cold War, that is meant to send a sharp message to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that his ambitions must not venture beyond Ukraine.
• But it is also a preview of what the opening beats of a modern Great Power conflict could look like. If NATO and Russia went to war, American and allied troops would initially rush to the Baltic countries Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — NATO’s “Eastern Flank”— to try to block penetration by a Russian force.
• Russia’s war in Ukraine infuses almost every movement of the exercises, which began in January and will continue through May.
• The Suwalki Gap is a 65-mile, sparsely populated stretch of land straddling Lithuania, Poland, Belarus and the Russian exclave Kaliningrad. After Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, the Estonian president at the time, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, came up with the name “Suwalki Gap” to highlight for NATO officials the area’s vulnerability. His move worked: Western military officials quickly adopted the phrase. Western military officials believe the Suwalki Gap is likely to be the first territory that Moscow would try to take. Russian forces in Kaliningrad, assisted by Russia’s ally Belarus, could move in, isolating the Baltic countries if successful.
• The road march is supposed to test how quickly NATO can get troops to the Suwalki Gap.
• NATO’S ability to “bring together these seemingly disparate units from different nations to conduct something so complex is what sets us apart,” said Col. Martin O’Donnell, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Europe and Africa. It was, he said, a demonstration of “combined arms” maneuvering.
• General Williams, the NATO land forces commander, said that in the past, such exercises did not name the enemy — there was just a fictitious opponent. Not so this year. For the first time, “we now, in this year, are actually fighting an exercise against the Russians,” he said. “We fight against our potential adversary.”

“Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan Aid: Four Historic Votes for Action,” Walter Russell Mead, WSJ, 04.23.24. 

• Last weekend’s House votes on aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan and a set of hawkish foreign-policy measures were dramatic and decisive. They may even prove historic. In a time of bitter polarization, the two parties managed to get four consequential foreign-policy bills over the finish line in a closely divided chamber. Friends and foes who thought America was paralyzed by internal dissension are taking another look. 
• Should Americans prioritize Russia, China, the Middle East, Taiwan or the border in our quest for security? Does supporting Ukraine send a message to Xi Jinping about American will, or does it divert badly needed resources from the Indo-Pacific to the secondary European theater of the emerging global conflict? Should we respond to China’s abuse of the world trading system by imposing protectionist measures across the board that hurt our allies and neutral powers? Will pressuring our allies over human rights weaken our fragile coalition at a critical moment, or is it vital to remain committed to our core values no matter the cost? What’s the right level of defense spending, and how do we reconcile that with other national priorities at a time when the bond markets look restless? 
• President Biden must answer these questions.

“U.S. Allies Relieved After Senate Passes Long-Delayed Aid Bill,” Robbie Gramer and Rishi Iyengar, FP, 04.29.24.

• The victory lap in Washington may be short-lived … as the six-month saga [of political battles over foreign aid] cast doubt on the United States’ commitments to its allies and partnerships in the long term, according to interviews with eight national security officials from the United States, Europe and East Asia. 
• “There is a quote attributed to Churchill that America always does the right thing after exhausting all other options,” said one senior Eastern European official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak with candor. “Well, it seems like the politics of ‘exhausting all other options’ is starting to win out. This won’t be the last tough vote, and there’s doubt over how much longer we can rely on America after future elections.” “We have faith in our American allies and support them to the hilt, but it’s becoming harder to keep our faith each year,” they added.
• Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, in a speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday, made clear that he still harbored lingering anger toward the factions of his party that delayed the House vote. “So much of the hesitation and shortsightedness that has delayed this moment is premised on sheer fiction. And I take no pleasure in rebutting misguided fantasies,” he said. “Make no mistake: Delay in providing Ukraine the weapons to defend itself has strained the prospects of defeating Russian aggression. Dithering and hesitation have compounded the challenges we face.”

“Britain Does Its Part in Ukraine and on Defense Spending,” Rishi Sunak, WSJ, 04.26.24.

• Britons understand and appreciate the vital role the U.S. plays in the world. We are proud to be Washington’s closest ally and welcome the supplemental support for Ukraine that Congress passed and President Biden signed Wednesday. … China and Iran are closely watching what happens in Ukraine. A victory for authoritarianism and aggression would make us all less secure. For those who recognize the need for Europe to do more for its own security, America’s aid package is an inspiration and an incentive to do so.
• Since Russia’s invasion, the U.K. has been at the forefront of the coalition supporting Ukraine. We were proud to have been the first European country to mobilize lethal aid, from tanks to long-range weapons.
• We will provide more for Ukraine—with a package that brings total U.K. military support to nearly $15 billion. Overall European support is now $180 billion. The U.K. was the first country to make a long-term security guarantee with Ukraine, which I signed on my visit to Kyiv in January. We will now commit to sustain our support for Ukraine at least at the same levels until the end of the decade.
• America should be assured that more European countries are stepping up. Our friends and neighbors are listening to our argument that we can’t expect America to pay any price and bear any burden if we on this side of the Atlantic aren’t prepared to invest in our own security.
• The challenges to global security are growing. Members of an axis of authoritarian states—Russia, Iran, North Korea and China—are determined to challenge the post-Cold War order that has provided unprecedented prosperity. We must act to deter our enemies, defend our values and secure our interests. Our decision to increase our defense budget proves that—as it always has—the U.K. stands ready to play its role.

“The U.S. Military Is Getting Kicked Out of Niger: Although it’s the military’s largest presence in the Sahel, the loss is more symbolic than substantive,” Amy Mackinnon, FP, 04.26.24.

• The withdrawal at the request of the country’s ruling military junta, which seized power in a coup last July, comes despite significant diplomatic efforts by Biden administration officials to maintain the two U.S. bases in the country and to nudge Niger back toward civilian rule.
• Dozens of Russian military instructors arrived in Niger this month, echoing a pattern seen earlier in Mali and Burkina Faso, where operatives from the Wagner mercenary group entered both countries shortly after a French withdrawal. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the small contingent of U.S. Special Forces in neighboring Chad would also be withdrawn.
• The U.S. withdrawal from Niger has been seen as part of a broader trend playing out across the region, where military regimes have ousted Western troops while welcoming in Russian forces that analysts fear will fuel spiraling insecurity in the region. 
• “My concern is that if the Russians come in … they continue to make the terrorism problem worse, not better, and then when they’re done extracting what they want to extract, they’re going to pack up and go home, and this place is going to look like a nightmare,” said Colin P. Clarke, the director of research at the Soufan Group, a global intelligence and security consultancy. 
• Although Biden administration officials have repeatedly said they do not want to make African leaders choose among competing powers, the move underscores how the plurality of players vying for influence in Africa, where both Russia and China are seeking to make inroads, complicates U.S. security assistance efforts.
• “There’s a practical impact, and there’s a symbolic impact,” said Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow in the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who previously held various positions in the U.S. government working on Africa. … “I think the bigger impact here is on Washington’s reputation—it’s on its relationships, on the optics of being displaced by Russia,” Hudson said. “That, much more than any kind of practical impact, is really what is costing Washington.”

China-Russia: Allied or aligned?

“The Delusion of Peak China. America Can’t Wish Away Its Toughest Challenger,” Evan S. Medeiros, FA, May/June 2024. 

• With the second-largest economy in the world in terms of GDP and deep ties to countries all over the world, Xi may make meaningful progress in shaping global rules and norms and undermining U.S. influence even as China’s economy slows. Chinese narratives about history and contemporary geopolitics resonate in the developing world, and Beijing is only getting better at promoting them. In short, either China is not peaking—or the idea of peak China doesn’t explain much about the challenges posed by China in the twenty-first century.
• Instead of projecting the West’s fears and hopes onto China, Western officials must try to understand how China’s leaders perceive their country and their own ambitions. The idea of peak China only confuses the debate in the United States. It leads some to argue that China’s weaknesses are the problem and others to suggest that China’s strengths pose the biggest risks. Each side crafts convoluted policy proposals based on these assumptions. But seeing China through this simple lens ignores the fact that even a stagnant China can cause serious problems for Washington, economically and strategically.
• Such a confused debate distracts from the efforts needed to allocate resources to what is a much more complex competition with China. U.S. policymakers still need to determine where and how to compete with China and, equally important, what risks they are willing to take and what costs they are willing to pay. Today, these foundational questions remain unanswered, and they could become far more dire for U.S. leaders if mishandled now. If the war in Ukraine has reminded us of anything about U.S. strategy, it is that both clarity of purpose and political consensus are needed. On China, the biggest risk today is not that China’s rise will fade away (and Washington will have overreacted). Instead, it is the possibility that the United States will fail to build and sustain support for a long-term competition across all dimensions of power.

“Blinken-Xi Talks Highlight Continued Areas of Disagreement,” Alexandra Sharp, FP, 04.26.24. 

• U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Friday after three days of talks between Blinken and top Chinese officials and business leaders, including a 5 1/2-hour meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. … [Blinken] threatened to place new sanctions on China—adding to the more than 100 sanctions that already exist on Chinese individuals and entities—if Beijing does not curb its support for Russia in its war against Ukraine. In April, a senior Biden administration official said China has provided Moscow with semiconductors, drones and other materials that fill critical gaps in Russian supply chains. “Russia would struggle to sustain its assault on Ukraine without China’s support,” Blinken said on Friday.
• China has denied providing weapons to Russia and maintains its neutrality in the war. However, soon after Blinken arrived in Beijing on Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he will visit China in May.

“The China-Russia trade friendship may not be quite what you think,” Agathe Demarais, FT, 04.23.24.

• On paper, commercial ties between Russia and China look huge: in 2023, trade turnover between both countries reached $240bn, surging 26.3 percent in just one year.
  • But what is more interesting is whether Chinese firms have established ties with their Russian counterparts that are anything out of the ordinary.
• Russia’s nominal gross domestic product sits between those of Brazil and Australia. As it turns out, the trade turnovers with China of Russia, Brazil and Australia are all broadly equivalent.
• China’s imports from Russia grew 12.7 percent in 2023. Yet, such high growth rates are far from unusual in Chinese trade statistics. In 2022, for example, Chinese imports from Canada rose 39 percent, but few observers would suggest that Beijing is forging a special bond with Ottawa. 
• Russia remains a small supplier for Chinese businesses. At $129bn [in 2023], Chinese imports from Russian firms account for only 5 percent of the total. In addition, increased exports to China may well be a double-edged sword: Russian commodity firms are growing increasingly reliant on China as an export market, giving Beijing leverage over Moscow. 
• Rather than booming, trade ties between Russia and China may well be catching up from an abnormally low base. Trade between the two countries was under-developed until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
  • That Chinese financial institutions appear increasingly wary of doing business with Russian companies highlights rising concerns in China about the risk of falling foul of US secondary sanctions.

Missile defense:

• No significant developments.

Nuclear arms:

“Engaging China and Russia on Arms Control: An Interview With Assistant Secretary of State Mallory Stewart,” ACA, May 2024. 

• We understand that we can’t force them [Russians] into an arms control discussion, but what we can do is try to work with the rest of the multilateral and international community to make the case for pursuing risk reduction measures and building an increased appreciation for why it is in Russia’s interest to engage in arms control conversations. We’ve been trying to take a twofold approach in that endeavor.
  •  First, we are working to combat the disinformation that Russia persists in purveying and, unfortunately, that some countries agree with, that somehow the invasion of Ukraine by Russia was justified. 
  • Second, the plan going forward is to continue to work with the multilateral community in order to enhance transparency, demonstrate responsible behaviors, reduce the chance of misunderstanding and miscalculations, and prevent unintentional escalation. 
• Our intelligence community was able to confirm its belief that Russia did not, as of the end of last year, exceed the caps set by New START. ... [T]he concern, come 2026, is that we will have no guardrails in place, thus risking misunderstanding and miscalculation. Quite frankly, the biggest risk is an unbridled, unconstrained nuclear arms race, which no one wants, no one needs, and the international community should be outraged that we’re now stumbling toward that eventuality. 
• We have to engage and strive toward risk reduction. Russia may not be inclined to agree with us on that, but we will keep trying because in those P5 conversations, we explain why it’s in their interest to prevent misunderstanding and miscalculation and why risk reduction, which they fundamentally have understood since the Cold War as in their interest, is still in their interest and is something that the P5 owes the international community. We should demonstrate that we can all be responsible actors.  Hopefully, we also can make some progress toward sharing nuclear policies to at least correct misunderstandings.
• Even if Russia is denying the weapon’s existence, it does make sense to go forward in the multilateral arena and reconfirm commitments to the Outer Space Treaty. ... U.S. position is, Why not start from developing a general understanding of the things that we agree are harmful to international security, such as direct-ascent destructive ASAT testing, and build from that? 
• We support the conversation in the UN group of governmental experts going forward on lethal autonomous weapons.. We look forward to making progress in understanding how we can ensure that AI operators actually have some ability to understand context, understand risk, and implement training at a knowledge level that prevents those risks. 
• Automation bias is an example of a situation that we would hope countries can take steps to prevent in their use of AI. I cannot speak specifically to reports regarding the Lavender system, but from what we’ve discussed already and the principles in the political declaration, we should be able to understand the appropriate usage of AI and the risks that AI brings in and take steps to prevent those risks. 

Counterterrorism:

• No significant developments.

Conflict in Syria:

• No significant developments.

Cyber security/AI: 

“In Ukraine, New American Technology Won the Day. Until It Was Overwhelmed,” David E. Sanger, NYT, 04.23.24. 

• Six years ago, [Google] signed a small, $9 million contract to put the skills of a few of its most innovative developers to the task of building an artificial intelligence tool that would help the military detect potential targets on the battlefield using drone footage. Engineers and other Google employees argued that the company should have nothing to do with Project Maven, even if it was designed to help the military discern between civilians and militants. The uproar forced the company to back out, but Project Maven didn’t die — it just moved to other contractors. Now, it has grown into an ambitious experiment being tested on the front lines in Ukraine, forming a key component of the U.S. military’s effort to funnel timely information to the soldiers fighting Russian invaders.
• So far the results are mixed: Generals and commanders have a new way to put a full picture of Russia’s movements and communications into one big, user-friendly picture, employing algorithms to predict where troops are moving and where attacks might happen..... the question remains whether the new technology will be enough to help turn the tide of the war at a moment when the Russians appear to have regained momentum.
  • “At the end of the day this became our laboratory,” said Lt. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, commander of the 18th Airborne Division, who is known as “the last man in Afghanistan” because he ran the evacuation of the airport in Kabul in August 2021, before resuming his work infusing the military with new technology.
• But if Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine has been a testing ground for the Pentagon’s drive to embrace advanced technology, it has also been a bracing reminder of the limits of technology to turn the war. ... The first two years of the conflict have also shown that Russia is adapting, much more quickly than anticipated, to the technology that gave Ukraine an initial edge.
  • In the first year of the war, Russia barely used its electronic warfare capabilities. Today it has made full use of them, confusing the waves of drones the United States has helped provide. 
  • Even the fearsome HIMARS missiles that President Biden agonized over giving to Kyiv, which were supposed to make a huge difference on the battlefield, have been misdirected at times as the Russians learned how to interfere with guidance systems.
• More than a thousand miles west of Ukraine, deep inside an American base in the heart of Europe, is the intelligence-gathering center that has become the focal point of the effort to bring the allies and the new technology together to target Russian forces. Visitors are discouraged in “the Pit,” as the center is known. ... The technology in use there evolved from Project Maven. But a version provided to Ukraine was designed in a way that does not rely on the input of the most sensitive American intelligence or advanced systems.
• The Americans point the Ukrainians in the right direction but stop short of giving them precise targeting data. The Ukrainians quickly improved, and they built a sort of shadow Project Maven, using commercial satellite firms like Maxar and Planet Labs and data scraped from Twitter and Telegram channels. ....This flow of information helped Ukraine target Russia’s artillery. But the initial hope that the picture of the battlefield would flow to soldiers in the trenches, connected to phones or tablets, has never been realized, field commanders say.
• Eric Schmidt, who spent 16 years as Google’s chief executive and is now drawing on lessons from Ukraine to develop a new generation of autonomous drones that could revolutionize warfare... came to a harsh conclusion: This new version of warfare would likely be awful. “Ground troops, with drones circling overhead, know they’re constantly under the watchful eyes of unseen pilots a few kilometers away,” Mr. Schmidt wrote last year. “And those pilots know they are potentially in opposing cross hairs watching back. … This feeling of exposure and lethal voyeurism is everywhere in Ukraine.”

For more analysis on this subject, see:

• “AI deepfakes threaten to upend global elections. No one can stop them,” Pranshu Verma and Cat Zakrzewski, WP, 04.23.24. 

Energy exports from CIS:

• No significant developments.

Climate change:

• No significant developments.

U.S.-Russian economic ties:

• No significant developments.

U.S.-Russian relations in general:

• No significant developments.

II. Russia’s domestic policies 

Domestic politics, economy and energy:

“Putin’s Brittle Regime,” Maksim Samorukov, FA, 04.25.24.

• [Russia] has rebounded from early military defeats in Ukraine and the initial shock of Western sanctions.
  • [President Vladimir] Putin has crushed what remains of political opposition on both the right and left, having eliminated the mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose rebellion against Moscow.
  • Meanwhile, Russian society, buoyed by a 16 percent hike in public spending, has adapted to Moscow’s self-styled “existential confrontation” with the West.
• But Putin’s Russia is vulnerable. The Kremlin makes decisions in a personalized and arbitrary way that lacks even basic quality controls.
  • Although the comparison may at first seem unlikely, Putin’s situation today resembles in some ways that faced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the final years of the Soviet Union.
  • Russia’s state bureaucracy devotes more and more resources to anticipating and fulfilling the president’s wishes.
• The Russian security services spent decades fighting Islamist extremism both at home in the North Caucasus and abroad in Syria. But Putin’s war in Ukraine has made the institutional knowledge of the security forces obsolete, and they now dismiss information shared by Western intelligence agencies.
  • Russian ministries in charge of the economy have ceased to coordinate with one another. Instead, they concentrate on producing figures that will please Putin.
• Putin’s indecisiveness tends to be just as destructive as the actual decisions he makes.
  • Having started an all-consuming war, Putin rarely bothers to explain to state and quasi-state actors how to adapt to the new reality. In the absence of instructions, they either fall into a stupor or take matters into their own hands, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
• Putin’s inflexibility and obduracy have been strengthened by his many years spent surrounded by toadies and yes men. Shielded from negative feedback and objective counsel, he is susceptible to tunnel vision, muddled priorities and emotional outbursts, all of which are channeled into his decisions.
• A collapse may take years to materialize. Or it could happen in a matter of weeks. The West should be aware that at any given moment the events in Russia may spiral out of the Kremlin’s control, triggering the swift demise of its seemingly imperishable regime.

“Putin’s War Will Soon Reach Russians’ Tax Bills,” Paul Sonne, NYT, 04.27.24.

• President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia appears on track to institute a rare tax increase on corporations and high earners, a move that reflects both the burgeoning costs of his war in Ukraine and the firm control he has over the Russian elite as he embarks on a fifth term in office.
• The proposed tax increase underscores Mr. Putin’s rising confidence about his political control over the Russian elite and his country’s economic resilience at home, showing that he is willing to risk alienating parts of society to fund the war. It would represent the first major tax overhaul in over a decade.
• “I think that this is a real sign of how comfortable he is,” said Richard Connolly, an expert on the Russian economy at Oxford Analytica, a strategic analysis firm. “The fact that they are doing it — they are looking to repair the house whilst the weather is good, or at least reinforce the walls from a fiscal point of view.”
• A tax that largely spares lower-income earners could also help mute discontent over the war among poorer Russians, who are providing much of the manpower for the army and bearing the brunt of the casualties. Mr. Putin has signaled that the tax overhaul will include special incentives for certain groups, which could include Russians directly involved in the war effort or families with three or more children.
• In internal discussions, Russian officials have considered raising the personal income tax for earnings over a million rubles ($10,860) a year to 15 percent from 13 percent, and increasing the rate for earnings above five million rubles a year ($54,300) to 20 percent from 15 percent, according to a report by the independent Russian investigative outlet Important Stories, which cited unnamed government officials and was confirmed by Bloomberg News.
• The government is also considering raising the tax on corporate profits to 25 percent from 20 percent, Important Stories, an independent news outlet, reported.

“The Arrest of Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Has Broken a Taboo,” Andrey Pertsev, Carnegie Politika, 04.26.22.

• The arrest of Russia’s deputy defense minister, Timur Ivanov, at the height of the country’s war against Ukraine is a conspicuous sign of divisions within the Russian government.
  • Influential groups vying for power are now attacking each other even more aggressively than before the war and it’s no longer just lone players or minor representatives of the various clans who are at risk but central figures, too.
• These unusual optics suggest that the deputy minister’s arrest was planned in haste. Further indirect evidence of that is the silence of Ivanov’s immediate boss [Defense Minister Sergei] Shoigu, who appeared blindsided by the arrest of his deputy.
• No less important is that [former Minister of Economic Development Alexey] Ulyukaev was a lone figure within the state apparatus, while Ivanov is a prominent representative of an influential clan.
• Shoigu’s nemesis is considered to be Viktor Zolotov, the head of Russia’s National Guard (Rosgvardiya)… who has long sought to gain control of the Defense Ministry.
• The case against Ivanov should, at the very least, stop the expansion of the Shoigu clan. Now the minister will be forced to divert some of his attention to making sure the post of his deputy in charge of infrastructure does not go to an outsider.
  • In securing the arrest of Ivanov, Shoigu’s enemies resorted to a move previously considered taboo in Russia’s interclan squabbles.
• Another factor is that the Russian elites rely less and less on presidential arbitration. As a result, the clans around [President Vladimir] Putin are coming to the conclusion that in these internecine battles, actions speak louder than words—even the words of Putin himself.

“Mystery Death of Texan Who Fought for Moscow Sparks Outrage in Russia,” Yaroslav Trofimov, WSJ, 04.25.24.

• Russell Bentley, a self-described “Donbas Cowboy,” joined Russian forces soon after they created a proxy state in eastern Ukraine in 2014. He quickly became one of Russian propaganda’s favorite Americans, receiving a Russian passport and a gig with state-run Sputnik TV. On April 8, the 64-year-old Austin native better known under his call sign “Texas” was detained by Russian soldiers in the city of Donetsk, occupied by Russia for the past decade, according to his wife. Eleven days later, he turned up dead.
• He is the latest in a string of figures involved in Russia’s 2014 takeover of parts of eastern Ukraine—dubbed the “Russian Spring”—who are now in their graves or behind bars. The circumstances behind Bentley’s disappearance are murky. But the incident has already caused outrage in Russian nationalist circles, with popular bloggers and commentators calling for an investigation and decrying what they called an official coverup.
• Russian ultranationalists, particularly those involved in the original fighting of 2014 and 2015 … criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin for not doing even more to win the war in Ukraine. They have blasted the military establishment for its execution of the full-scale invasion. The Russian state, which initially focused on the liberal opposition, has increasingly turned the screws on the hypernationalist figures associated with the “Russian Spring” after the failed putsch by the Wagner paramilitary group of warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, who pilloried Russia’s top generals as incompetent. 
• It isn’t clear whether Bentley’s death is part of that crackdown by security services, or an accidental result of the anti-American spy-mania fanned by the Russian state and the overall lawlessness reigning in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine.

Defense and aerospace:

•  See section Military aspects of the Ukraine conflict and their impacts above.

Security, law-enforcement and justice:

• No significant developments.

III. Russia’s relations with other countries

Russia’s general foreign policy and relations with “far abroad” countries:

• No significant developments.

Ukraine:

• No significant developments.

Russia's other post-Soviet neighbors:

“If Ukraine falls to Russia, Moldova knows it’s next,” Josh Rogin, WP, 04.25.24.

• In Moldova, wedged between an embattled Ukraine and Romania, Russia’s interference is only increasing. And without more Western help, its foreign minister told me this week, this small European country could fall under Moscow’s control.
• Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor two years ago, the 3 million residents of Moldova have faced unprecedented instability and anxiety. Putin is threatening Moldova’s security, squeezing its economy and undermining its democracy, efforts that are all aimed at replacing its pro-Western leadership with a new government bought and paid for by the Kremlin.
• The only thing standing between Moldova (which has fewer than 10,000 personnel in its armed forces) and a Russian attack is the Ukrainian army.
• For now, Russia is waging hybrid warfare in Moldova, whereby the Kremlin is using all available means of leverage and interference to impose its will — short of bombing the country. Moscow has tried to orchestrate a coup, trained fake anti-government protesters, flooded the country with disinformation and funneled illicit cash to pro-Russian opposition parties.
• Russia has about 1,500 “peacekeeper” troops in the autonomous region of Transnistria, a strip of land along Ukraine’s western border, that it could activate as troublemakers at any time. And last year, Moscow scored a success in its political incursions into Moldova when its heavily supported candidate for governor of the autonomous region of Gagauzia won, despite being virtually unknown before her candidacy.
• President Biden should show solidarity by inviting Sandu to the White House. Moldova needs more foreign investment in its infrastructure so it can become a hub for the future reconstruction of Ukraine. It also needs help dealing with Russia’s advances in technology, such as deepfakes and other tools powered by artificial intelligence, which are amplifying the Kremlin’s disinformation campaigns.

“Why Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day is different this year,” Stephan Pechdimaldji, BG, 04.23.24. 

• April 24 will mark the 109th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, when more than 1.5 million Armenians were systematically exterminated by the Ottoman Turks, an event that Turkey denies to this day. For the more than 400,000 Armenian Americans like me, it is also a stark reminder that history is repeating itself. We saw that history rear its ugly head in fall 2020 when Azerbaijan launched an illegal and unprovoked war against ethnic Armenians living in their ancestral homeland of Nagorno-Karabakh, which was followed by a nearly 10-month blockade of the only road linking Armenians living in the region to the outside world.
• Azerbaijan's destructive campaign culminated in September when more than 120,000 Armenians moved from Nagorno-Karabakh rather than live under Azerbaijan's rule, making it the largest displacement of Armenians since the Armenian Genocide. Luis Moreno Ocampo, the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, called it a genocide; it created one of the world's largest refugee and humanitarian crises.
• Armenian Americans see these latest acts of aggression by Azerbaijan as a continuation of the Armenian Genocide and a threat to our very existence. We see what is happening today in Nagorno-Karabakh through the lens of our painful history. It is why recognition of the Armenian Genocide by Azerbaijan and the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh are not mutually exclusive events.
• In many ways, these hate crimes [against Armenian Americans in the U.S.] appear to be an extension of Azerbaijan's ongoing campaign to wipe Armenia off the map and show that it continues to be a threat to Armenians' existence anywhere in the world. But while many of these hateful acts remain unsolved or unreported, Armenian Americans believe that we have an opportunity to show the world that we won't be intimidated.

The cutoff for reports summarized in this product was 11:00 am Eastern time on the day this digest was distributed. Unless otherwise indicated, all summaries above are direct quotations. 

Here and elsewhere, the italicized text indicates comments by RM staff and associates. These comments do not constitute a RM editorial policy.

Slider photo by Presidential Office of Ukraine shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.