Ukraine, Russia: Unhappy anniversary
Also: Moldova, the Sahel, Ethiopia, Somalia, and the Financial Action Task Force.
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UKRAINE. RUSSIA. Unhappy anniversary
Two years in, neither side can claim victory.
Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday 31,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed since Russia invaded two years ago. Zelensky warned Russia planned a new offensive in May. A Kyiv official said Russia could be invited to a future peace summit.
INTELLIGENCE. Kyiv’s first official death toll in a year may be an underestimate. The Pentagon believes at least 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died. Likewise, warnings of an offensive after the spring Rasputitsa season seem optimistic. After the fall of Avdiivka, Russian troops are closing in on Kramatorsk, Donetsk’s de facto capital. And attacks have increased in Sumy, where Russia has allegedly begun evacuating civilians on its side of the contact line.
FOR BUSINESS. Momentum is in Moscow’s favour, but with an estimated 100,000 Russians killed, this hardly seems a triumph. Russia is also suffering high inflation and equipment shortages, though, in some respects, its economy has improved since 2022. Europe is in recession and US prestige has been battered. The only real winners are those who have played both sides: Turkey, the UAE, and India. That said, new US sanctions could start to limit their gains.
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MOLDOVA. RUSSIA. Transnistrian twist
Europe may be on the verge of another war.
Officials in Transnistria, a breakaway part of Moldova, said they will request Russian annexation at a special summit on Wednesday. Ukraine, whose territory separates Russia from Transnistria, said it doubted these claims Sunday.
INTELLIGENCE. The so-called Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic may ask to join the Russian Federation (which would not exactly represent new policy), but what Moscow does in response is entirely different. Unless Russian forces were to occupy Odesa first, it would be hard to seize Transnistria via Ukraine. But Russian ‘peacekeepers’ in the territory, combined with local militias, outnumber Moldova’s army, which is still bound by constitutional neutrality.
FOR BUSINESS. A Russian hybrid war in Moldova has been on the rise for months. The latest move has been a viral video where US celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan and Dolph Lundgren, have seemingly been duped into repeating Kremlin propaganda. This doesn’t portend a kinetic conflict, but one can’t be ruled out. Moldova has undertaken military exercises. Neighbouring Romania, a NATO member with close ethnic ties, has warned of a potential invasion.
THE SAHEL. RUSSIA. Freezing over
Western allies scramble to retain influence in Africa’s coup belt.
ECOWAS eased sanctions on Guinea and Mali Sunday, a day after doing the same on Niger. Mauritania took over the African Union’s rotating presidency last week. The EU this month promised Nouakchott €210 million in migration funds.
INTELLIGENCE. West Africa’s ECOWAS bloc has eased pressure on its erstwhile Sahel members as the Kremlin seeks to fill a void left by France. The West has meanwhile made overtures to Mauritania and Chad, but offers of support to Sudan, where Russia also has rising sway, will be harder to make as all sides of its civil war commit atrocities. Still, that hasn’t stopped Kyiv providing recent military assistance to Sudanese forces battling Moscow-backed rebels.
FOR BUSINESS. Though rich in minerals, the Sahel is economically negligible, leaving many in the West to ignore its conflicts. Yet a dislocated and Russian-dominated region poses serious threats to Europe and could complicate African connectivity. Sudan poses the biggest dilemma. Until recently, its brutal civil war favoured the rebel Rapid Support Forces, but Sudan’s army has made recent gains, helped by Ukraine, Egypt, and (awkwardly for Russia) Iran.
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ETHIOPIA. SOMALIA. Red Sea, red sky
A near miss and an airstrike.
Civilians reported an airstrike in Ethiopia's Amhara region last week, killing at least 15. A Qatar Airways jet almost collided with an Ethiopian Airlines flight over Somaliland Sunday when rival control centres sent conflicting instructions.
INTELLIGENCE. A crash was averted when the two jets' collision avoidance systems kicked into gear. Traffic controllers in Mogadishu (Somalia cooperates with Qatar) and Hargeisa (Somaliland cooperates with Ethiopia), don't speak to each other and had otherwise placed the flights on the same trajectories at the same altitude. Despite the risks of a Somali-Ethiopian conflict and the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, Somaliland hosts several air traffic routes.
FOR BUSINESS. Services from hubs like Doha, Dubai, and Nairobi traverse Somaliland daily, including to avoid other trouble spots. And unlike ships, which can take lengthy voyages around whole continents, few airlines can afford to stray far from geodesic flight paths. One of the exceptions is El Al, but even the Israeli carrier found itself temporarily ‘cyber-hijacked’ on 17 February when it passed over Somaliland on return from Phuket. Houthis were initially blamed.
ANTI-MONEY LAUNDERING. FATF chances
Gibraltar and the UAE are taken off a financial watchlist.
The Financial Action Task Force, a G7-led body designed to counter money laundering and terrorist financing, removed Barbados, Gibraltar, the United Arab Emirates and Uganda from its ‘grey list’. Kenya and Namibia were added.
INTELLIGENCE. A once-obscure bit of financial plumbing, the FATF has come to recent prominence by placing major financial hubs on its list, which increases compliance costs with global banks. While investment in the UAE has hardly been dissuaded, for smaller jurisdictions, grey-listing matters. Only Iran, Myanmar and North Korea are on FATF's more stringent blacklist. Ukraine has called for Russia to also be placed on the blacklist. It’s currently on neither.
FOR BUSINESS.Being listed under FATF’s monitoring regime is supposed to be a purely technical decision, though politics invariably creeps in. And while Western sanctions and US Treasury restrictions can coexist with FATF white-listing (and vice versa), there’s an increasing overlap with the designations, considering politically rogue regimes tend to also turn a blind eye to money laundering, terrorist financing, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.