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As the Ukraine war rages on, Russia is reportedly turning to North Korea to purchase missiles and artillery. While Moscow denies the reports, U.S. intelligence said the move is a sign of Vladimir Putin’s increased desperation for his country’s war effort.
Straight Arrow News contributor Peter Zeihan says there is more bad news for Russia. He points out that NATO members are transferring a significant number of arms to the Ukrainians at a crucial time in their fight against the Russians.
Excerpted from Peter’s Sept. 3 “Zeihan on Geopolitics” newsletter:
We are seeing a tremendous amount of arms and technology flowing into Ukraine from NATO members, Sweden and Finland. This amounts to one of the greatest transfers of tech and material since the collapse of the Cold War. But the arms purchases and transfers aren’t just happening from NATO to Ukraine, but amongst NATO members as well. This sort of large-scale purchasing and upgrading of Europe’s militaries is going to have a profound impact on the continent, well beyond Russia’s current conflict with Ukraine.
So for example, Slovakia has apparently given their entire air force to the Ukrainians and they’re relying upon their NATO allies in order to patrol their own skies, to keep their own defense agreements.
Now, this is kind of a defense kick-line that we have seen in NATO a couple of times before. Whenever there’s a significant change in the geopolitical environment like there is now or say when the Cold War ended, weapons move around. So the last time this happened at scale, it was 1992 to 2000. The Soviet system had collapsed; the new European countries were negotiating to accede to NATO, but there was still a lot going on. We saw the Germans and the French and the Italians go through a degree of disarmament because the Cold War was over and they had treaty limits for how many…weapons they could have. So they’d get under that level now that the war was over. They transferred a lot of those weapons to Turkey, which was well under its threshold. So we had some minor upgrading in Western Europe, and then this hand-me-down process going to Turkey and the Alliance got stronger as a result.
We’re seeing some version of that now with Ukraine.
So in the case of the Slovak example, they’ve transferred their entire air force over. They’re buying American and German-made aircraft to replace that. So they’re gonna get an upgrade and the older stuff goes on to Ukraine. Some version of this is happening with anti-aircraft… radar and with javelins and with tanks and with artillery. Everyone in the west is moving their older stuff east and then buying new stuff for what they anticipate will be a prolonged period of hostility.
Everyone wins of course, except for the Russians who have the ammo like thrown into the teeth of the war machine. But the best part of all of this of course, is that for the Ukrainians, this…these are weapon systems they already know how to use. This is exactly the same stuff that they had.
