Guranda

Can Putin Afford Ukraine?

By most accounts, the Russian economy has survived President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. Despite a US-led effort to punish Russia’s state finances and national economy with sanctions, Russian GDP is expected by some economists to grow this year. “Key sectors of Russia’s economy are adapting and in some cases completely rebounding from unprecedented international sanctions imposed over the war in Ukraine,” Bloomberg reported in November. Russia’s financial technocrats have received plaudits for successfully navigating rough waters.

But not all is well, Alexandra Prokopenko argues in a Foreign Affairs essay, writing that strong economic indicators are “symptomatic of overheating.” Prokopenko identifies economic problems in Russia that suggest “Putin is facing an impossible trilemma. … (H)e must fund his ongoing war against Ukraine, maintain his populace’s living standards, and safeguard macroeconomic stability.”

War spending has artificially propped up Russian output, Prokopenko writes. Inflation in Russia currently sits at 7%; interest rates, at 16%; and continued borrowing at that rate suggests Russians expect inflation to continue. Putin may “splash” even more government spending into the economy before the spring election, feeding the sugar high even further. Prokopenko’s broader point: “With the war unlikely to end soon, the financial and economic costs will mount and are likely to bite Russia several years from now. This process could be speeded by a major global recession or a slowdown of the Chinese economy, which would hit Russia hard because of its heavy dependence on revenues from commodities exports. The specter of a bitter economic hangover looms large unless a new and sustainable Russian economic model emerges.”

Ukraine’s Race to Rearm

“(T)he war may not be won outright this year,” The New Yorker’s Joshua Yaffa writes of the fierce conflict between Russia and Ukraine, “but the conditions for victory may well be set in motion.”

The battlefield is stalemated, as top Ukrainian commander Gen. Valery Zaluzhny told The Economist in a widely publicized fall interview, but Yaffa and others see Ukraine and Russia now entering a critical race to rearm themselves. As the Global Briefing noted recently, Royal United Services Institute military expert Jack Watling made a similar argument in Foreign Affairs—pointing to flagging Western support for Kyiv, as additional US aid is mired in partisan congressional politics and as the European Union is set to miss its targeted sum of artillery-shell and missile deliveries to Ukraine by March; to Russia’s acquisition of shells from North Korea; and to Russia’s rates of artillery fire that now far surpass Ukraine’s.

“This year is likely to be marked by exchanges of missile and rocket fire rather than dramatic, large-scale maneuver warfare,” writes The New Yorker’s Yaffa, quoting Watling and other experts along the way. “But the most decisive fight may also be the least immediately visible: Russia and Ukraine will spend the next twelve months in a race to determine which side can better reconstitute and resupply its forces, in terms of not only personnel but also shells, rockets, and drones.”

Western weapons supplies loom as a limiting factor in Ukraine’s war effort and could determine the war’s ultimate outcome, analysts have said throughout the conflict. That fits well within Russian President Vladimir Putin’s apparent viewpoint, Yaffa writes: “(A)s Putin has always seen it, his real interlocutor is not the government in Kyiv but its Western backers, the U.S. most of all.” In that vein, talk of a negotiated settlement seems poised to percolate in Western capitals, as Putin signaled in late December that he might be ready to make a deal. In a Moscow Times op-ed, Oleksa Drachewych writes that even under a ceasefire, Moscow likely wouldn’t stop trying to dominate Ukraine.

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A ‘New Suez Crisis’ Percolates

Is the war in Gaza spilling across the Middle East, as analysts have feared since Oct. 7?

Signs are troubling. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for a bombing in Iran. Israel has killed a deputy Hamas leader in Lebanon. Late last month, it killed a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards member in Syria. The US on Thursday struck in Baghdad at Iran-backed Iraqi militias, as Le Monde’s Hélène Sallon writes, apparently to send a message to Iran about proxy attacks on US forces in the region. Questions linger as to whether the Iran-backed terrorist group and dominant Lebanese political party Hezbollah will involve itself in Israel’s war on Hamas.

Debatably, the most concerning developments have happened in the Red Sea, where Iran-backed Houthi militants—engaged in a long and violent civil war for control of Yemen—have begun attacking international cargo ships, saying they will target all international ships heading for Israeli ports if Gaza does not receive needed shipments of food and medicine. The US—along with allies Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Singapore, and the United Kingdom—has warned the Houthis of “consequences.”

The Economist calls this a “new Suez crisis,” hearkening back to the 1956 British–French–Egyptian standoff over the Sinai Peninsula. Noting major significance to global trade, the magazine writes: “Bab al-Mandab is a narrow strait between Africa and the Arabian peninsula through which an estimated 12% of global trade by volume normally flows, and perhaps 30% of global container traffic. It has become a no-go zone as the Houthis, based in Yemen, attack shipping, ostensibly in support of the Palestinians in Gaza.”

At The World Politics Review, Alexander Clarkson marvels at what’s happening: “That the Houthi movement would eventually acquire the military power to paralyze a sea route crucial to the globalized economy would have seemed improbable when it was founded in 1992. … (O)utside observers were caught off-guard by the speed with which the movement opted for confrontation with global powers in response to events in Gaza. … With every major shipping firm diverting its vessels away from the Red Sea and insurance rates skyrocketing for the few commercial vessels still willing to dock at (the Yemeni port of) Hodeidah, the specter of confrontation with the U.S., Europeans and perhaps even India has led to further deterioration of conditions for those living under Houthi rule.”

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