Weapon-makers cashing in on Ukraine war

Rahul Bedi

Senior Journalist

RUSSIA’S continuing invasion of Ukraine is bizarrely analogous to a fantastical medieval gladiatorial contest, which the world has egregiously been watching keenly for nearly five months. In its gratuitous wantonness, this enduring spectacle has so far embodied thousands of dead soldiers and civilians, including women and children, military hardware worth billions of dollars destroyed and numerous Ukrainian towns and surrounding areas remorselessly levelled.

Sitting atop their secure perches in this gruesome virtual amphitheatre, scores of countries led by the US and its North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) partners and other allies like Australia, Japan and New Zealand, continue to helplessly record the minutiae of this uneven contest that is nowhere near closure. Unquestionably, this is at variance with their earlier collective bluster of containing and deterring hegemons like Russia, despite having meekly accepted Moscow’s blatant annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 in its irredentist bid to regain Soviet and, possibly even Tsarist, glory.

All these spectators had also collectively sanctioned Moscow and continued to supply Ukraine assorted materiel like artillery, anti-aircraft and anti-tank weaponry, infantry combat vehicles, reconnaissance and attack drones, helicopters, small arms, varied ammunition and diverse ordnance to prosecute its war with Russia. In short, from their respective roosts in this grisly pretend-colosseum, these various viewers remained ever willing to fight to the last Ukrainian to neutralise Russian President Vladimir Putin’s warmongering.

However, even in their military support, these vicarious onlookers continued to profit, despite their overall intrinsic powerlessness to influence the outcome of this war. For, as the adage goes, war is good for business; and the Ukraine conflict was no different. Expectedly, it had thrown a rewarding lifeline to the US, European and other weapon manufacturers worldwide. For, other than supplying Kyiv their multiple wares, these manufacturers were also re-arming several of NATO’s 30-member countries, many of which were refurbishing their militaries anew after the Cold War ended in the early 1990s.

Overseas and domestic security analysts concur that a frantic return to arms by all these states, fearful of the ponderous but determined Russian bear, would appreciably boost the fiscality of the world’s military-industrial complex in the years to come.

Recent news reports from the US reveal that Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, for instance — one of the world’s largest military equipment manufacturers that jointly produce the FGM-148 fire-and-forget Javelin anti-tank guided missiles which were being supplied in bulk to Kyiv — were openly telling their investors that the Ukraine conflict was good for business. Or, simply put, the audiences in the amphitheatre were delighted over their guaranteed revenue earnings from the ongoing conflict and damn the geopolitical consequences and outcome.

Besides, despite the much-hyped anti-Moscow sanctions, Ukraine’s devastation has continued and, if anything, it has been escalating steadily as the Russian army reverted to its age-old WW-2 attrition strategy of employing heavy artillery to pulverise the opposition in its ponderous, but devastating advance. In recent days, Russian forces had captured almost the entire Luhansk province in eastern Ukraine and were moving to capture the nearby Donetsk. The two together make up the Donbas region, which is strategically critical for Moscow as it linked up with Crimea. Additionally, by annexing Donbas, Russia would also control Ukraine’s formidable industrial heartland, robbing it of revenue.

Meanwhile, estimates of when the Ukraine conflict will end vary from a few months (as projected by some Western security agencies) to a few years (as anticipated recently by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg). Expectedly, any such estimates were wholly unreliable as Putin continued to hold the advantage in escalating the conflict unopposed. And, the longer the fighting persisted, the more likely was the reality of a unified western support for Ukraine diminishing.

Already, this earlier shared resolve, as the conflict extends itself, appears wobbly. Despite the sound and fury surrounding the lead in to the recent G7 meet in Germany, the world’s seven richest and militarily powerful nations were unable to agree on a fresh set of sanctions on Moscow and its continuing vast daily earnings from oil and gas exports to Europe.

This latter aspect, too, was another whacky phenomenon in this weird extravaganza, that despite its unprovoked aggression, Russia continued to supply nearly 20 European Union (EU) members the bulk of their oil and gas needs. The reliance of countries like Hungary, Latvia, Finland and Bulgaria in this regard varies between 92 and 110 per cent, spawning an even more extraordinary situation in which the Russian rouble last month emerged as the world’s best performing currency, after its value fell to less than a US penny in the early weeks of the conflict following sanctions.

Conversely, these sanctions were now beginning to adversely impinge on Europe, and to a lesser extent on the US, exacerbating their overall daily cost of living. In late May, Eurostat — the statistical office of the European Union in Luxembourg — revealed that 12-month inflation in the Eurozone, due to escalating fuel, food and fertiliser prices precipitated by the Ukraine war, was at 8.1 per cent, the highest ever recorded by it since its inception in 1953, swiftly pushing the continent to the brink of recession.

Eurostat further disclosed that this spiralling inflation, further blighted by many European countries recovering from the economic shock delivered by the Covid-19 pandemic, was ‘squeezing’ 83 per cent of households across the continent. These included 80 per cent of families in Spain, 76 per cent in Italy, 66 per cent in France, 65 per cent in Denmark and 62 per cent in Sweden. Populations in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa, too, were under tremendous financial pressure as a consequence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with all their population registering a steep price hike in their day-to-day existences.

The unending Ukraine war has induced a sense of helplessness or ennui among western onlookers. And history attests, as British military historian and theorist Liddell Hart appositely declared decades ago, that loss of hope, and not loss of lives, is what decides the issue of war.

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