Russia’s Central Bank raised its key policy rate to 21 percent in late October as the Russian authorities struggle to manage a wartime economy that is in danger of overheating due to a combination of factors including rising inflation, sanctions pressure, and record defense sector spending. While Kremlin officials and many international analysts insist that
North Korea has sent troops to Russia, United States Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed on October 23. Austin is the latest senior Western official to raise the alarm over the deployment of North Korean soldiers to Russia amid fears that the Hermit Kingdom is poised to participate directly in Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian President
In Season 2, Episode 6 of the Guns for Hire podcast, host Alia Brahimi chats with defense researcher Jack Margolin about his new book on the Wagner Group. They focus on its operations in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the country’s central place within the Wagner subculture. They also discuss the ever-present profit motive
Ukraine is reportedly considering lifting restrictions on the export of drones as the country seeks to strengthen domestic drone production. The Ukrainian drone manufacturing industry has expanded rapidly since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion and is now operating at well below its potential capacity due to a lack of government funding. Supporters of the
Brussels is still recovering from former Prime Minister of Italy Mario Draghi’s European competitiveness report, which provided a dramatic assessment of industrial capacity in the European Union (EU) and an even more controversial set of recommendations to accompany it. Published on September 9, the report paints a dire picture of the EU’s economic landscape, citing
Original Source On September 30, Elliot Ackerman, non-resident senior fellow at Forward Defense, published a piece in the Atlantic with Karl Marlantes entitled “The Abandonment of Ukraine.” In this piece, Ackerman and Marlantes emphasize the pace of battlefield innovation since the beginning of the war in Ukraine and the inability of the West to both
The Russia-Ukraine War has become the proving ground for some of the latest innovations in military technology. This is most immediately apparent in the rapid evolution of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones. These range from reconnaissance and surveillance drones, which maintain an “eye in the sky” above the battle space, to combat UAVs that
As the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine approaches its third winter, the biggest topic of debate is the reluctance among Kyiv’s key partners to sanction long-range attacks inside Russia using Western weapons. According to skeptics in Washington DC and elsewhere, deep strikes would pose an unacceptable risk and could spark a far wider war. In
A Ukrainian company that creates AI solutions for drones recently secured funding from a consortium of four foreign investors worth almost $3 million. This deal is one of the largest individual investments in the Ukrainian defense tech industry since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion. It is part of a growing trend as investors increasingly
It is often said that armies always prepare to fight the previous war. This rings particularly true in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The sheer scale of the war unleashed by Vladimir Putin in February 2022 has exposed a lack of preparedness among the Western defense establishment, which has spent the past few
