The Duran Podcast - Russia, Kazakhstan alliance and Reindustrialization. Putin in Rostov, confidence grows

Episode Date: November 12, 2023

Russia, Kazakhstan alliance and Reindustrialization. Putin in Rostov, confidence grows

Alexander, let's talk about Putin's recent visit to Kazakhstan, and maybe we can talk a little bit about his, I guess you could say, unexpected or surprise, not unexpected. For the media, for the media, it was a surprise stop at Rostov, on Don. I'm sure that's shoy going to Rostov, obviously. It was expected, but, you know, we didn't know that he was going to stop in Rostov

and talk about the military situation in, the conflict in Ukraine. But let's start off with the trip to Kazakhstan where a lot of business deals were signed. Indeed, this is primarily an economic trip. But it's very important to say that the Kazakh leadership led by Takayev went out of their way to say that Russia and Kazakhstan are allies and that the alliance, and by the way in this instance, there is no inhibitions about using that word. The alliance between Kazakhstan and Russia is inviolable. Now, there's been a lot of talk in, you know, a lot of media chatter. It's been going on for years, by the way, since before the events which brought Tokayev to power in early 2022.

You remember the protests in Astana and the power struggle with the previous president, Nazarbayev. Anyway, there's been chatter for years. that Kazakhstan was drifting away from Russia. On the contrary, the Kazakhs went out of their way to say that this is completely not the case, and that Kazakhstan and Russia are full-scale allies. And they talked about this repeatedly in every single meeting, and that the relations were completely friendly,

that there were no difficult issues, between them at all. And bear in mind, Kazakhstan economically is bigger than all of the other Central Asian states, you know, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan. It's bigger economically than all of the others combined. So, and it is the unofficial leader of the Central Asian states. So I think that's the first point to make. So this is a meeting between two self-declared allies. It was a very big meeting. But the key thing to understand about this meeting is that it was primarily, or so it seemed to me, intended to address that issue that we talked about in our recent program when we discussed the Russian economy.

Now, the Russian economy over the last couple of months has been growing extremely fast. It's It's now growing at an annualized rate of 5%, 5.1% over the rate that it had last year. And as we've discussed in our program, and as Nebulae, Elvira Nalbulin, the chair of the Russian Central Bank, has pointed out, this is now creating capacity issues given the longstanding labour shortages. Russia has full employment, so there's no great pool of reserve labour that can be called in. And that risks overheating. You cannot run economic growth at these levels when the economy is already running at full capacity without this giving rise to inflation. So the Russians now are very heavily in.

to a major re-industrialization program. I was reading recently, for example, about their program to increase production of microchips. There's been a lot of discussion about this, as we all know, but they've got a very big program to increase production of microchips. Interestingly enough, the company that is leading that project is Ross Atom, the company that runs Russia's nuclear industry, which I found interesting. And I was also reading about Russian plans to increase civil aircraft production,

new plants are being opened in Kazan to increase production of aircraft, Tupil F214s and other aircraft like that. And there is also very, very heavy investment in, increasing production of machine building, tool making, machine tools, all that kind of thing. Now, they are short of labour, and of course they also need raw materials. So as we discussed in our programme, they need to do one of two things, or perhaps they can do both of them at the same time. Either they import labour, and Central Asia would be an obvious place to do it, Or they build factories in places that they see as politically reliable,

and those factories then start producing goods, not just for use within those countries, but to export, to send to Russia as well, as part of the Eurasian Economic Union. And it was the last, really, that Putin was talking about when he went to Kazakhstan. So there's now going to be a factory in Kazakhstan to build Lada cars, for example. There's other factories to produce all kinds of things.

And a further steps to integrate the Kazakh economy, which is already very heavily integrated into the Russian economy. And Kayaev pointed out that, you know, for all the talk, about Chinese investment in Kazakhstan in Central Asia that we've been hearing, Russia remained by far the biggest investor in Kazakhstan, and those investments are now going to grow. In fact, they're going to grow exponentially. So you can see that the re-industrialization program

that the Russians are now engaged in is also having regional effects and is starting to pull in. other countries, other republics of the former Soviet Union, especially in Central Asia, and I suspect also before long in other places too. Yeah, they're doing exactly what we said in a video Russia would do with the labor shortage and the economy that is growing, but also overheating. So, you know, a few days later after we did that program, Putin goes to Kazakhstan,

and he makes these deals. And there are huge numbers of deals, by the way. I mean, I haven't gone through them all, but they are on an enormous scale. And again, all those people who were talking about Kazakhstan drifting away, I mean, it's been shown conclusively that that is now wrong. By the way, I fully expect that sometime over the next few weeks or months, there will be a Putin trip to Uzbek, the other big Central Asian state, which has a bigger pool of surplus labor than the Kazakhstan does,

and we'll be seeing the same sort of deal done there. And, of course, in the case of Uzbekistan, we might also get Uzbek guest workers going to Russia, and of course the other Central Asian states, it could very easily turn out to be the same. So these processes are underway, and it's not impossible that the Russians, could look further afield as well. There's rumors of a Putin trip to Iran being on the cards. And of course, Iran also has a very large pool of educated young people who are unemployed,

and they could conceivably come and work in Russia. And of course, it's also conceivable that the Russians might open factories there also. But I think that given that the people political relations between Iran and Russia aren't as close, obviously, as they are with the Central Asian states, which used to be part of the Soviet Union. That will be a much more complicated and protracted process, and, well, we'll see where it goes. Yeah, all the nonsense from the collective West media and the analysts talking about how Kazakhstan is drifting away from Russia. Just complete nonsense.

Yeah. it's obviously not happening. And speaking about not happening, let's talk about the conflict in Ukraine and the chances of a Ukraine victory, which is not happening. And even Peskov in an interview to journalists the other day, he sounded very confident.

And he said, you know, you're not going to defeat Russia on the battlefield. It's time for the West to realize that they are not going to defeat Russia on the battlefield. A pretty confident statement from Peskov. And Putin, after Kazakhstan, he was in Rostov, and he met with Shweku and Yerazimov to discuss the conflict in Ukraine.

So what is that all about? We have, maybe, maybe, Alexander, you just might want to touch very briefly on what's happening of Diffka. And I know there is a lot of talk from our community about what's going to going on in Hefson as well. So maybe you want to touch upon that real briefly as well. Yeah, I mean, in Avdevka, again, and by the way, in Kupyansk and in Bachman, there's been increasing Russian offensives and increasing Russian gains, especially now it seems in Avdewka.

Avdegovka, there were reports, a cascade of reports yesterday, that the Russians have made significant further advances in the Avdavka area. According to, I think it was the Ukrainian general staff, they talked about 40,000 Russian troops now operating around Avdavka. And they seem to be now operating well to the west of this railway, which was supposed to be one of the great defense lines that Ukraine had created. And I think anybody who takes an objective view of military developments in Avdyevka can see that sooner or later this town will be captured by the Russians. I think that this is now becoming increasingly clear. Now, there was the other one that you're talking about, which is Hurson. The Ukrainians have managed to establish themselves in this village

of Klinki. There's perhaps some say 300 Ukrainian soldiers there. The Russians also control this village, parts of this village. There's been a standoff now for several weeks. I think we've discussed it in previous programs. It's difficult for the Russians to clear the Ukrainians out from that particular village because the Ukrainians have artillery positioned on the west bank of the NEPA, which is higher than the East Bank. That means that they can overlook what the Russians are doing.

But I have to say this. I think anybody who's expecting some kind of breakthrough by Ukraine in this area, I mean, first of all, this has been going on now for some weeks, and there's no sign of a breakthrough. There aren't enough Ukrainian troops in the area anyway to conduct a breakthrough. I don't just mean it crinkie, but I mean on the country. the West Bank in Herson region. And the impression I'm getting is that trying to concentrate troops and assets on the West Bank of Herson region in order to support this isolated group

on the East Bank in Krenki is exposing Ukrainian troops in Herson region to very, very heavy air strikes and artillery strikes from the Russians. And what is actually doing is increasing Ukrainian losses. Now, there are, of course, Russian losses also in this area, but Russia can absorb losses. Ukraine can't. So this is actually, probably another case of attrition, and attrition works badly for Ukraine.

So that's my take about this Husson thing. I suspect that the new commander, Tplinsky, who was, by the way, participated in this meeting in Rostov, he will presumably have some kind of a plan, and we will see over the next couple of days or weeks what that plan is, but I'm pretty sure that the Russians ultimately will bring it under control, as they've been able to bring it under control every single offensive that the Ukrainians have launched over the course of this year. I don't see why this one should be any different. The big events, I mean, we're talking about 300 men in Krenki, we're talking about 40,000 Russian troops in Afdeafka.

That gives you an idea of the difference in scale. So, you know, just bear all that in mind. Now, why did Putin go to Rostov? That's a very good question, because obviously they're not going to tell us. But this is, I think, the third visit Putin has made. at the headquarters in Rostov over the last couple of weeks. I mean, he's now turning up there regularly. And we've had a photographic study in which we see him talking with Shoygu and Gerasimov.

And I assume that these people are briefing him on the progress of the offensive plans that are taking place now. So I suspect they're briefing Putin on their progress. in terms of the fighting in Avdeyevka and Kupyansk. We didn't mention Bachman, but the Russians are now, again, also advancing heavily in the Bachmert area. And I suspect also that for the moment at least, these are more shaping operations rather than a general offensive.

We're still not seeing the big Russian offensive gun. But I can't help but think that soon or later, that will indeed come. And Putin probably wants to be kept informed about progress in preparing that also. I should say, by the way, that the Kremlin readouts about these visits are very sparse, as you would expect,

as are the readouts that the Russian Defence Ministry provides. But the photographic studies, the pictures of the meetings, are very interesting. And the pictures that we saw this time show Putin with these military officials looking far more relaxed, not just Putin, but all of them, looking far more relaxed and confident

than they've been appearing to be in the past. So I get the sense that the Russians have a spring in their step. They sense that things are going very much their way. And as I said, even Gerasimov, who usually looks rather gloomy. I mean, he's one of these people who tends to look rather gloomy. He looks almost as if you could see a trace of a smile on his face sometimes.

Yeah, I was going to say the same exact thing to wrap the video up. We don't have that much as far as like information as to why Putin went or what was said, nor should we expect a lot of information about the details of the meeting. But obviously the Kremlin, they released the video of Putin arriving and he's almost running up the stairs as he's about to sit down with Shoygu and with with Yerazimov, something that Biden obviously cannot do. But yeah, they look very, very energetic and relaxed. And obviously the Kremlin, by releasing these images and these videos, they want everyone to see the dynamics of the visuals of the meeting. Yeah. All right. Yeah, we'll end it there.

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