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Russia's President Vladimir Putin and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un arrive for a gala concert in Pyongyang, North Korea June 19, 2024.
Putin and Kim sign mutual defense deal
Russian President Vladimir Putinarrived in Pyongyang early Wednesday for his first official visit to North Korea in 24 years. He met with Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un and signed a deal to provide “mutual assistance in the event of aggression against one of the parties to this agreement.”
Putin called it a “breakthrough” document, but “aggression” is a vague term that leaves plenty of room for interpretation.
The real news. Russia, which has been isolated by the international community over its invasion of Ukraine, desperately needs more munitions to continue the war — that’s what this visit is really about. Moscow is deepening ties with Pyongyang to ensure it keeps the ammunition train rolling.
North Korea has sent roughly 10,000 shipping containers to Russia that could contain as many as 4.8 million artillery shells, according to recent comments from South Korea’s defense minister. Russia and North Korea have denied such arms transfers are taking place.
During Putin’s visit, North Korea notably declared “full support” for Russia’s war in Ukraine.
What does North Korea get? The expanding partnership between the two countries could see Russia provide North Korea with everything from food to military technology.
Like Russia over its war in Ukraine, the rogue state faces crippling sanctions over its nuclear program. Putin is also calling for increased cooperation between the two in fighting these sanctions, decrying such economic penalties as an effort by the West to maintain its hegemony.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, and Chief of the Russian Land Forces Oleg Salyukov attend a military parade on Victory Day, in Moscow, on May 9, 2024.
How high school explains Putin’s reshuffle
One way to look at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to replace long-serving Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu with career economist Andrey Belousov is this: Since the invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s nerds have performed better than his jocks.
The jocks: Right from the start, Russia’s generals and spies – poorly prepared, badly informed, and deeply corrupt – screwed up what was meant to be a short victorious war. Two years later, the locker room bully clique continues to grind, slowly and destructively, across Ukraine, but that’s largely because Russia’s manpower is virtually unlimited while the West’s support for Ukraine is not. Despite Secretary of State Antony Blinken’ssurprise visit to Kyiv today to tell President Volodymyr Zelensky military aid is "now on its way,” there's no doubt the recent slowdown in US support, thanks to months of congressional infighting, has exacerbated Ukraine’s challenges on the battlefield.
The nerds: The stars of math class, meanwhile – led by Central Bank Chief Elvira Nabiullina and Finance Minister Anton Siluanov – have done the seemingly impossible: They kept the Russian economy afloat despite crippling Western financial sanctions. They held the line as the “War Machine” became central to the economy.
Now Putin, settling in for a forever war against the West, wants to ensure it’s economically sustainable. His spokesman even warned of the danger of a “1980s” situation, when overspending on the quagmire in Afghanistan and the arms race with Washington helped to bring down the USSR.
To avoid a similar fate, Putin is now banking on a little nerd power at the barracks.
Russian Deputy Defence Minister Timur Ivanov inspects the construction of apartment blocks in Mariupol, Russian-controlled Ukraine, in this October 2022 image.
Shocked! Russian deputy defense minister jailed for graft
Russian authorities this week detained a prominent deputy defense minister on corruption charges. Timur Ivanov, a long-standing close ally of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, oversaw a wide variety of construction and logistics projects for the Russian armed forces, including in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.
Anti-corruption activists, including the outfit of late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, had long focused on Ivanov’s lavish lifestyle. This is the highest-profile corruption takedown since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Now, if you are shocked – shocked! – that there’s corruption in Russian military contracting, we’ve got news for you: Corruption is rife in the Russian government. Getting busted is usually less about a sudden universal respect for transparency, and more about turf battles within the Russian elite.
Is Shoigu in trouble? Not yet, but note two things. One, he’s heard lots of criticism from pro-war hawks who accuse him of corruption and incompetence in his military strategy. The most prominent of them, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is no longer among the living, but the grumblings continue. Second, in just a few weeks, Vladimir Putin will be reinaugurated and will have to name a new cabinet. If Shoigu really is in any trouble, that’s when it will become clear.
British Foreign Secretary David Cameron holds a joint press conference with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the State Department in Washington, US, April 9, 2024.
Ukraine and Russia war over energy
UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron visited Washington on Tuesday to lobby for greater material US support for Ukraine, and Congress is likely to provide a package that includes help for Ukraine by the end of the month, according to analysis from Eurasia Group, our parent company.
The war, meanwhile, has settled into a grim exchange of attacks that are unlikely to speed an end to the fighting, but which target energy supplies. Russia continues to launch missiles against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, and it has reportedly begun to prioritize targets like hydroelectric and thermal power stations outside Kyiv and other major cities that are less well-defended.
In response to the Russian barrage, the EU has announced that help is on the way. Austria, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands have offered 157 power generators as part of the EU Civil Protection Mechanism, and the EU itself has deployed 10 large-capacity power generators from its own stockpiles.
For its part, Ukrainian drones have repeatedly struck oil refineries deep inside Russian territory since the beginning of the year, and Russian air defenses haven’t yet found a way to defend against them.
Does Europe face a resurging terrorist threat after the Moscow attack?
Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden, shares his perspective on European politics from Stockholm.
Is the terrorist threat to Europe back after what happened in Moscow?Well, the bad news is, yes, it's there. There's no question about it. It's still coming out. Central Asia, Afghanistan. We have a very disturbing situation in part of Africa with ISIS gaining ground in different ways, so not directly threatening Europe so far. And we should not forget that we have a situation in the Middle East with Gaza and all of the emotions that that is leading to, that is bound to be a recruitment possibility for these particular groups. The good news, if there is any, is of course that evidently the Americans were able to pick up advance warning of this particular terrorist attack. And that shows that we have intelligence capabilities combined with different countries that could give us somewhat more security than perhaps we had in the past. The bad news in this particular situation is, of course, the Russian authorities didn't listen and very many innocent Russians had to pay a very heavy price for that.
We have to learn all of these particular lessons as we move ahead.
Russian President Vladimir Putin listens to a question at a press conference in the Kazakh capital of Astana, September 16, 2004.
NATO added seven former Soviet bloc countries 20 years ago
Twenty years ago this week, then-President George W. Bush welcomed seven former communist countries into NATO: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
This marked the largest expansion of NATO to date and it pushed the alliance further eastward to Russia’s doorstep, laying the rhetorical groundwork for one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s many justifications for invading Ukraine in 2022.
In the lead up to the invasion, Putin said Russia was “swindled” by the alliance, claiming Moscow was "given promises not to move NATO infrastructure to the East, not a single inch." Contrary to Putin’s claims, there was never a formal agreement to this effect and experts say the Russian leader has distorted history with such assertions.
But this hasn’t stopped Putin from repeatedly accusing NATO of betrayal over the years. And NATO expansion has been at the heart of Putin’s aggressive behavior toward Russia’s neighbors. Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia came just months after NATO welcomed Georgia and Ukraine’s aspirations of joining the alliance. Before it launched a full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia sought guarantees that Ukraine and Georgia would never be accepted into NATO — a demand the alliance rejected.
But Ukraine and Georgia joining the alliance’s ranks remains an unlikely prospect as long as the Russia-Ukraine war continues. Still, with NATO on the verge of celebrating its 75th anniversary next week, the alliance is the strongest it’s been in years. NATO in the past year added two new members — Finland and Sweden — thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Putin hoped to deter NATO expansion by invading Ukraine, but achieved the exact opposite.
Putin using Moscow attack as excuse to intensify war on Ukraine
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
A Quick Take to kick off your week. Lots we could be talking about. But I want to go to Russia, where we have had a major terrorist attack with over 130 Russian citizens gunned down, killed by terrorists.
The United States has warned the Russians both publicly so that American citizens would know about the concern, but also with actionable intelligence privately over the past couple of weeks that ISIS was planning an attack on an area with major crowds in Moscow. Putin publicly dismissing that, kind of wish he hadn't, but that we are where we are. And Putin has now spoken to the nation. There have been a number of gunmen that have been rounded up and arrested four, that we know of, Tajik citizens and Putin did not mention that ISIS has taken credit for this terrorist attack, nor that they then released videos of some of the attackers as they were engaging in terrorism inside the rock concert venue.
Instead, he spoke implausibly about links to Ukraine that don't actually exist. Why would ISIS-K do this? I mean, the main reason is because one of their two home bases, Syria and Iraq, in Syria, destroyed by Bashar al-Assad with the direct help from Putin and the Russian military. Nobody else doing that with Assad on the ground. And there have been many terrorist attempts against Russians as a consequence in that regard, but none with spectacular success for them like we've just witnessed.
Why wouldn't Ukraine be responsible? Well, first of all, because they haven't actually been targeting civilians at all. In fact, the one time that they engaged in terrorism and it was terrorism was an attempt to kill an individual, high level Russian extremist, but who was not a political figure. He had been informally an inspiration to the Kremlin and been calling for pogroms against Ukraine, which he said shouldn't exist as a nation. And they didn't get him. Instead, they got his daughter and the United States and other NATO allies were quite angry about the fact that Ukrainians were engaged in that. But aside from that, it's been attacks on critical infrastructure. That's another thing. And certainly, if you want to talk about the Nord Stream pipeline, highly unlikely the Russians would have blown up their pipeline. Much more likely the Ukrainians either by themselves with support would have been responsible for that. The investigations have been inconclusive. That strikes me as not enormously plausible.
Also, Ukraine has been hitting a lot of refineries, Russian refineries, and that's a pretty big deal. About 5% of Russian exports are now offline. Oil exports. That could go up a lot. It could be more than half easily in coming weeks to months of over 3 million barrels a day that the Russians export. If Ukraine starts hitting Black Sea facilities, which they're certainly capable of doing. So global economic impact of this war continues to be very significant. Ability and willingness of the Ukrainians to hit targets inside Russia as well as occupied Crimea, Ukrainian territory, but the Russians annexed it back in 2014 illegally, all of that is certainly par for the course. But the idea that the Ukrainians would be involved in large scale terrorism or support it is not only implausible on the basis of the evidence, but also implausible in terms of what they've been doing historically. But of course, that doesn't matter to Putin, who now intends to use this to drive more military efforts against Ukraine, more civilian casualties.
And that's what we saw in the initial 48 hours after the attack. Unprecedented levels of missiles being sent against the capital, Kyiv, with lots of civilian targets as well as west Ukraine, Lviv in particular. We are seeing that Putin is indifferent to civilian deaths, those of the Ukrainians and, of course, those of his own people. And we probably do now see a much more mobilization from Russia, especially now that the election, the so-called election, is over and more Russian weapons that are going to be used against the Ukrainian people.
The most concerning piece of all of this, I mean, leaving aside the fact that Russia now has a second front they need to fight on, they have, you know, a concern with radical Islamic terrorism that has grown in terms of the capabilities and whether or not Putin says he's going to fight it, he's going to need to fight it. And that's going to take away scarce resources for him and it's going to put more Russian civilians at risk. But the bigger concern, the global concern, of course, is the potential for this war to expand. And there are a couple of incidents that should raise those warning bells. First, the fact that just over this weekend, of all of the missiles that were launched by Russia against Ukraine, one went through Polish airspace for less than a minute, something like 40 seconds, but nonetheless, a Russian missile that actually went through the airspace of a NATO ally. Clearly wasn't targeting that NATO ally.
But Polish and other NATO allied aircraft scrambled. And that is not something we have seen so far since the war started a couple of years ago. Also, the fact that there were a missile explosion targeting Odessa just a couple of weeks ago when President Zelensky was there, in addition to Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. And it was literally only a few hundred yards away that this missile exploded while those two men, those two leaders were on the ground and exposed very clearly. I don't believe that Mitsotakis was targeted, but the fact that he could have been hit as an NATO leader would have also put us in unprecedented danger in terms of the geopolitical order.
Certainly since anything we'd seen since 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis. What's behind that? Well, I mean, I think the most likely thing behind is that Putin doesn't have complete and operational control over everything that's going on on the ground. His military is badly trained and organized. And this was probably a mistake. Woops. But, you know, the fact is that when you have lots of people go into Ukraine and borders, look, you know, they look very defined on a map, but they're very porous in real life. And the potential for mistakes to lead to extraordinary escalation, pretty high. And certainly the willingness to allow for those mistakes to be made is higher than you would like it to be. The checks and balances there don't seem to be all that concerning for the Kremlin or for Vladimir Putin. Of course, a worse explanation would be that Putin actually is prepared to take those risks to brush NATO back. And that, of course, would lead to much more likelihood that we would have escalation that would bring a NATO ally into the war, something that clearly nobody out there wants to see.
But it's worth talking about in the context of all of this, it's much more likely the Ukrainians are now going to get their 60 billion of support. That would be the largest piece of military support so far from the United States, approved likely in mid to late April. They're seeing more ammunition, more economic, more military support from the Europeans, even though the lion share of the military support is from the US and the war continues to be dangerous, continues to be unstable and continues to be no end in sight.
So that's where we are after some very unfortunate headlines and events over the last couple of days. And I'll talk to you all real soon.
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Moscow terror attack: What happens next?
Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden, shares his perspective on European politics from Stockholm.
What's going to happen after the horrible terrorist attack in Moscow?
Well, obviously, the Russian authorities have great difficulties with it. The US gave advance warning that something could happen in Moscow. It was repeated by several other embassies. That was publicly dismissed by Putin. And, of course, Putin is saying that all of the danger that is there is Ukraine and the West. Nothing else. He has everything under control. And then suddenly, well over 100 people dead. And evidently the security authorities responding fairly slowly. So he has now to adjust his narrative.
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