Five new countries – Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Ethiopia – joined BRICS on 1 January 2024. How has the enlargement of the association affected the concept of the Russian Chairmanship this year?

Rail and shipping to link European Russia to India via Iran

The last years have largely been about the proxification of conflicts, be it by employing irregular forces as “proxies” or by trying to do so with allied sovereign nations. Proxifying Europe itself would be a long shot, though - moreover, NATO’s article 5 is still binding.

The case shows very clearly how dangerous are the Belarussian expatriate terrorists trained and backed by NATO countries.

According to their own admission, Russian EW systems have effectively turned US drones into plastic junk. Worse yet for the Pentagon, the grossly overhyped HIMARS is often jammed, with its rockets and missiles rendered useless. The US and NATO are trying to figure out how Moscow is achieving this, so they could "one day use it against the Russian military directly", but what their planners have managed to gather so far is that Russia's EW edge is forcing the political West to revert to "the brutality of old-fashioned trench warfare, the results of which are rarely what Pentagon planners expect".

The Ukrainian military has suffered half a million personnel losses.