Extract from ABC News
Analysis
Russian President Vladimir Putin is betting that the West and Ukraine will run out of resources first. (Pool: Alexander Nemenov via Reuters)
The Board of Peace met in Washington this week and talked about money. US-brokered talks on ending the war in Ukraine this week ended without any advances. Iran held military drills with Russia this week as the Trump administration continued to signal a rumble towards war.
Donald Trump declared that "the war in Gaza is over", despite ongoing Israeli bombing that has killed hundreds of civilians since October. And he warned Tehran that it had a "maximum" 15 days to reach a deal with the US or "bad things will happen".
Trump declarations are a part of the international landscape which seems fairly unique to present times. What is certainly not unique is actual conflict.
It is unlikely that there has been any time in history when there wasn't a war going on somewhere in the world.
But the conflicts in the Middle East and in Ukraine have gone on so unrelentingly, and so much more directly in front of Western countries than appalling conflicts in places like Africa, that it is hard to imagine a time when, for example, the war in Ukraine will have ended.
Sometimes contemplating what will be left after the war can change your perception of how it is conducted.
Next week will mark four years since Russia invaded Ukraine in what was supposed to be a "special military operation". (Reuters: Serhii Korovainyi)
A four-year war
Next week will mark four years since Russia invaded Ukraine in what was supposed to be a "special military operation" which — somewhat like Germany's strategy in World War I — was supposed to quickly overcome the enemy in a matter of weeks but in fact resulted in effective stalemate for years.
There is understandable focus on what prospects there might be for the war to end. (They don't seem particularly promising at this point of time.)
There is an equally understandable focus on what incentives there might be to change those prospects. And on what the horrendous costs have been for both sides in these last four years.
Recent estimates suggest casualties on both sides are close to two million, most of which have been on the Russian side: nearly 1.2 million casualties, more losses than any major power in any war since World War II, according to a recent paper by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
Whoever wins the war, and/or however it ends, the ramifications for both societies and economies will of course be extraordinary.
Fiona Hill is a renowned expert on Russian affairs. She gained particular fame for her blunt rebuttal, in 2019 testimony before Congress, of the Trump camp claims that it was Ukraine, rather than Russia, that had meddled in the 2016 US elections in favour of the Democrats, and confirmed that Trump had tried to extort Ukraine for personal political advantage.
These days she serves as both Chancellor of Durham University and as a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
She spoke to the ABC about where Russia finds itself four years into the war. Just one of the fascinating pictures she painted was what a post-combat Russia might look like.
In the face of massive losses of troops to death and injury, Russian President Vladimir Putin has notably paid foreign fighters to come into the conflict and, before that, mercenary troops often recruited from prisons through the Wagner Group.
This has fundamentally changed the nature of the Russian military.
"The Wagner Group of paramilitary mercenaries was folded into the Russian military," Hill says, "and the Russian military started taking on all of these contract forces".
"And that has obviously changed it because this is now a highly paid fighting force."
All those fighting forces receive between three and ten times the amount of the average Russian workforce. So it is not going to be an easy economic adjustment to be demobbed for starters.
"There's also really the question of the size of the Russian military after the war," she says.
"I mean, if the war ends, certainly in the next few years, we look at this and ask what happens to the soldiers? How do they get jobs? What happens to people who are coming back from the front in terms of their expectations they will receive some compensation?
"There's already a great deal of concern in Russia about increasing violence, increasing crime, violent crime, because you have all of these people who went through this horrible war and who will come back wounded, not just physically but also mentally from this experience, and that there will be all kinds of problems of integrating them back into society."
The war's huge financial cost
Russia is not inexperienced with this. It did not just have to recover from World War II within the past 100 years but big deployments to Afghanistan and Chechnya.
The sheer scale of the deployments and national military commitment this time around is certainly the largest since 1945.
The realities of having over a million casualties on the Russian side, and many who are grievously wounded, "is going to have an overall impact on the workforce", Hill observes.
"I think it's actually going to be quite hard to get an idea of what that workforce is going to look like.
"Russia already had some labour shortages before the war and it is is going to have that again," she says.
Moscow hasn't just had to find fighters from other countries. Media reports in recent times have been of Moscow trying to replace departing migrant workers from Central Asia and the Caucasus with new ones from India to do a lot of the basic services work in Russia.
But this has caused considerable tension and attacks on Indian students.
Hill says it will also "take some time to move the economy from being a wartime economy into something that's more mixed".
"Nobody's really envisaging at this point that the military build-up, this replacement of weapons, will slow down.
"Russia may want to go back to being the kind of weapons exporting economy it was before. But there's going to be all of these questions really about how you would absorb or reabsorb the manpower that's gone off to the front; how you would compensate them; and do you run the risk of having a much more violent society, people with many grievances come back and start to kind of shift the societal perspective."
There has obviously also been a huge financial cost of the war.
Recent estimates suggest casualties on both sides are close to two million, most of which have been on the Russian side. (AP: Russian Defense Ministry Press Service)
Putin banks on money
Putin spent a lot of his first two decades in power amassing massive financial and material reserves, Hill notes: paying off Russian debts to outside parties; building up gold and financial reserves.
Now, she says, Russia is drawing down all of its financial and material reserves.
"All of those funds were put aside for rainy days. They are currently delving into them. They have not reached limits at this particular point. They continue to bring in revenue, particularly for oil and also from other commodities."
But they will at some stage.
Putin's bet is that the West and Ukraine will run out of resources first, she says.
"That's what he's banking on. He's banking on money. When he can't necessarily win on the battlefield, he is wanting to win politically, but also just by exhausting and grinding down Ukraine because Russia's critical infrastructure is not being bombarded.
"The Ukrainians are able to inflict some damage [on Russian infrastructure], but it is not being bombarded to the extent that Russia is capable of being able to destroy Ukrainian national infrastructure.
"Putin is betting that that is the element that tips it for him plus also the kind of political will of the West."
Things of course, are even more catastrophic for Ukraine, in terms of the loss of that infrastructure, the death and destruction, and the sheer number of people who have left the country.
Some estimates suggest that the pre-war population of 40 million might be down to 25-28 million after the war.
But as the aggressor, the question of just what capacities Russia has to fight on is worth sometimes thinking through.
Even if it was to achieve a victory for Putin's war aims, it still looks set to be a bigtime loser.
Laura Tingle is the ABC's Global Affairs Editor.
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