I think that he is still very much
involved in what's going on with the prosecution of the war.
And now the general staff in the military is going to be the one that's
really driving the strategy. And there have been reports in the past
over the last two years that occasionally Putin has stepped in and
micromanaged to a degree, but is going to be the military that's going to have
sort of day to day functioning on their mind of of what's going on.
The new minister of defense, I think, is going to be more of a manager of defense
procurement of the defense budget, trying to clean up some of the
mismanagement that's going to be that that the outgoing minister is going to
be blamed for. The new defense minister, to me, almost
harking back to the appointment of Robert McNamara for JFK, where you go,
heaven forbid it's not somebody with a military background, okay?
It's somebody who's an economist or McKinsey type, you name it, or that it's
how unusual is it for them to have almost a U.S.
model of a nonmilitary type running defense?
Well, civilian defense ministers have been in that position in the past in
Russia. So that's been changing over time.
And I think it's I think it's probably going to be more common going forward,
especially because I think for for running the Ministry of Defense, a lot
of this is going to be about defense procurement.
How do you get the tanks and the armor, the other things that Russian forces are
required to have for conducting these offensives?
And there are problems in some of these areas.
And so I think the new Minister Diallo's job, that's going to be a big part of
his of his overall job in this role. Hey, Alex, can you give us a sense here
of how strong the position of Mr. Putin is within Russia, given that
we're, you know, into this war for a prolonged period of time?
It's probably not anything that he or his leadership group signed up for
initially. How is his support within Russia?
Is that even a debate point anymore? At the moment, it's not really.
I think, you know, I think coming out of this election what Putin wanted to show
with the number of the 87%, number of his victory, you know, whether that was
real or not or what the signals that he would send to the Russian public is that
status quo going forward. This is the way in which the war is
going to be prosecuted. He's not making substantial changes.
So even as we're seeing some of these cabinet shuffles with some new people
sort of being transferred around, I think the message there is kind of
similar that the overarching sort of structure of Putin's government, the
overarching policies, are going to be very similar.
It's more about trying to fine tune things.
You have someone coming into the Defense Ministry with his economic policy
background. The economic team has been very
important to Putin in being able to prosecute this war over the last two
years in the face of the sanctions that the US and the EU and others have been
imposing. So I think we're looking at sort of
technocratic fixes going on here. I think a Robin Brooks but there's many
others out on Twitter saying the sanctions are baloney, that they've been
experts at avoiding the sanctions, going around them, doing different paths,
whether it's who is back on the stand or the other stance.
How effective have the sanctions been? Alex Prideaux.
I think that they've been very mixed in terms of their overall results.
Some of the states, I think, are not going to be felt for years.
Things that are designed to try and curb Russian revenues from oil and gas and
LNG production, those are going to play out over a much longer timeframe.
But what they have not been able to do is completely blind his ability to put
forces in the field and to take additional territory as we've been
seeing just over this past weekend. I think the US and the EU are going to
focus still aggressively on trying to limit that sanctions evasion that the
Russians are conducting. And so I think you see a lot of outreach
and a lot of tension between the US and China over this issue, and I think
that's probably going to continue where there's going to be pressure coming from
Washington, whether we're talking about China, Kazakhstan, countries in the
South Caucasus to to limit what the Russians are able to do to evade the
sanctions regime.
