저자: KevinKopp?미상 · 외국인
요약 보기
미국이 우크라이나 무기 인도를 중단·전용하면서 방산주가 하락했다는 해석을 제시한다. 러시아의 우크라이나 공세 강화와 이란 분쟁 주의분산이 맞물려 있으며, 미국의 지원 축소는 러시아 세력을 강화하는 결과를 낳는다고 주장한다. 우크라이나는 스파이더웹 작전 등으로 저비용 성과를 냈지만 무기 부족이 핵심 제약이라고 본다. 이란 포르도 시설은 위성영상상 굴착이 이뤄져 피해가 과소평가됐을 수 있고 협상 레버리지가 약하지 않을 수 있다고 진단한다. 방산업체 백로그 구조가 방산주 등락 요인이라는 설명도 덧붙인다.
다듬은 글
People were wondering why defense stocks are down. It's because once again, we are reducing our weapon shipments to Ukraine, which is really interesting because Russia over the past few weeks has actually been ramping up their attacks on Ukraine, the more distracted the world has become with Iran. And the more Putin is visually trying to showcase himself as the mediator of hostilities around the world, like, "Hey, Trump, I'll help you with Iran.
It's all good." And and trying to play nice to reduce sanctions on Russia. Russia has been amplifying their attacks on Ukraine, not only with drone strikes or air strikes or more aggressive incursion into Ukrainian territory, but at the same time, the US is now quote halting key weapons for Ukraine in a new sign of weakening support for Kiev.
And frankly, Putin is jumping on this, withholding Patriot air defenses. What else do we have here? Let's see. Washington. The US has stopped the delivery of air defense interceptors and other weapons intended for Ukraine and is using them instead to beef up the Pentagon's stockpile. So, this could be either to build up an iron dome in America.
It could be to send them to Israel, which uh you know, Israel probably only had uh you know, at least what what we're hearing, maybe 8 days of munitions left to defend against Iranian missiles, which was why there was such a an anxiety to bomb as much of the Iranian launcher sites as possible. But the US move to withhold arms uh deliveries earmarked for Ukraine reflects the Trump administration's slackening commitment to Kiev in its defense against Russia.
Uh we've stressed the need for threats from China and more immediately the needs of the Middle East. Again, yes, supplying Israel. decision was made to put America's interest first, which I always think is an interesting thing to do or or to say because technically you have people who say America's interests are in weakening Russia.
And in doing so, the CIA provides targeting guidance and strike decisions for Ukraine with American weapons. So, it's American intel, American weaponry, Ukrainian bodies, basically, which sounds very insensitive to phrase it like that, but it's true. By the way, if you need life insurance, remember .
You just go to metaven.com/life. You sign up. It takes as little as 5 minutes. Lauren and I have it. It's great. But anyway, like I've always had excellent service for my life insurance. That said, uh the this this is a very common branding strategy of like, oh, why is the United States involved in all this foreign stuff like let Ukraine handle Ukraine or let Europe support Ukraine?
And Europe has been rallying around supporting Ukraine. And through this sort of strategy, you kind of got to give Trump credit. A lot of the NATO members are now talking about increasing their defense spending to 5% of GDP, which is awesome because I think what what do we spend of our GDP? I think we are ah we're actually less than that.
We're only about 3.6% of our uh GDP goes to defense and Trump's demanding 5% from NATO countries. So, you know, essentially other countries picking up the slack uh in in Europe, if you will. Uh meanwhile, you know, the the whole intention of weakening Russia is that it's supposedly a proxy war that's good for Americans in the long term because Russia is deemed to be a proxy or one of the axes of evil in coordination with North Korea, Iran, and China.
Obviously, Iran manufacturing drone weaponry for Russia, both in Iran and in Russia. shipments in Poland. Uh uh shipments were in Poland when they were being halted. Well, that's interesting. They were already in Poland, which is your conduit for getting into Ukraine. That's interesting. Uh the secretary didn't address uh secretary for policy at the Pentagon didn't address the decision as to why, but they they said that was with the goal of bringing this tragic war to an end.
Obviously, we know that this war has been a lot harder. Donald Trump says, "Oh, you know, both Zalinsky and Putin have been more stubborn in ending this war. Kev hasn't received official notice yet." Well, they're going to read the newspaper and see it. "Uh, they do want to have anti-missile missiles called Patriots, and we're going to see if we can make them available," Trump said in response.
"They're very hard to get." Well, the thing is the defense contractors have massive backlogs for these facil these units because the defense contractors on purpose don't hypermanufacture these because they know there are these massive up and down cycles of like, oh, now we're going to manufacture a lot of this weaponry.
Now we're going to manufacture very little. And so the defense contractors basically say, "Well, we'll just have a backlog and that way we could have steady manufacturing and we don't have vacant manufacturing lines, busy manufacturing lines, vacant manufacturing lines, right?" And this back and forth.
So in response to the question of why are defense stocks down, that's probably one of the reasons why. Now, Foreign Affairs has a piece on how Ukraine can still win. Uh, in my opinion, it's going to take a lot more Trump support than we're seeing right now, but we'll see. Uh, as a Ukraine's foreign defense minister noted in foreign affairs in late May, neither Russia nor Ukraine has much of an incentive to stop the fighting.
Ukraine refuses to surrender its sovereignty, and Russia will not accept anything less than capitulation. This is unfortunately what makes the war very challenging to end because Ukraine also doesn't want to just slice off a bunch of its territory and give it to Russia, especially since a lot of that energy rich territory is is towards the Russian side.
This conclusion, however, does not mean all is lost. Russia is much weaker economically than many analysts realize, and hard-hitting sanctions and export controls can still its war economy. Ukraine is fighting smartly and could turn the tide on the battlefield with more high-end drones, air defense systems, and long-range missiles and munitions.
Again, though, the problem with this is the balance somewhat swings towards the favor of Russia uh when when we weaken the support for Ukraine. Uh much of the premature optimism about a settlement earlier this year sprang from the prevailing belief that Ukraine was losing and would soon be forced to negotiate out of desperation.
Trump stoked this narrative by asserting that Zalinski had no cards left to play. JD Vance took it a step further, declaring that Ukraine and its foreign backers never had a pathway to victory. That was JD Vance's POV, citing Russia's superiority in manpower and weapons. Vance argued that if the US kept up its security assistance, it would only postpone the inevitable defeat of Ukraine.
So, you could see where the sort of like desire is in in the Trump administration to kind of like, all right, like we promised to end this war, like maybe if we just withhold some weapons, they'll end up getting defeated. But again, it's weird because our CIA is so heavily involved in actually fighting this.
Uh, the CIA, former CIA analyst describes Putin as allin and personally invested in keeping Ukraine from becoming a European democracy. makes sense, especially since a lot of people think that if this war settles, it would have to come with the settlement that Ukraine promises to never be a member of NATO, but people think it would become a deacto member of NATO, sort of like an unofficial member of NATO with the promise.
And because like if you give Ukraine security guarantees from Europeans, you're basically saying they're a member of NATO. So this is why Russia doesn't want Ukraine to have security guarantees even if they promise not to be a member of NATO because the whole point of being a member of NATO is to have security guarantees.
So you know an attack on one is attack on all right it's a security guarantee assumptions meanwhile rest on the narrow reading of battlefield dynamics and a limited understanding of the policy options available to Ukraine. Despite significant constraints on aid that Europe and the United States have offered, Ukraine has in achieved impressive victories, it repelled the initial push last year.
It's repelled pushes. Ukraine shocked the world by pulling off operation spiderweb just weeks ago. A surprise attack using cheap drones to inflict substantial damage on Russia's long range aviation. This is when they attacked the various different airfields deep inside of Russia by basically moving lorries or semi-truckss deep inside of Russia and launching uh the here we should look at some pictures operation spiderweb uh launching drones from uh you know various different lorries autonomously and then destroying a substantial portion of the Russian fleet uh airfleet.
So, if you look around a little bit, it was a covert drone attack carried out by the Security Service of Ukraine, the SBU, deep inside of Russia on June 1st, so a month ago. The coordinated strikes targeted the Russian Air Force's assets at five different bases using drones concealed in and launched from trucks inside of Russian territory, employing 117 drones.
According to Ukrainians, about 20 aircraft were hit, 10 of which were destroyed. This is basically a cheap operation for Ukrainians. A very expensive loss for the Russians. And this is kind of how this is the roof of a truck. It's a little hard to see, but this is the roof of a truck. And they put these metal barricades on this to limit like thermal imaging from satellites or UK or Russian drones to sort of reflect imaging imaging into what was in the trucks.
And then the the roof would slide back and these drones could autonomously launch or like locally launch from, you know, spec ops or whatever and then go hit their targets. Really an impressive poll here. Uh, so what's consistently hindered Ukraine's war effort was not Kiev's lack of manpower, but rather an insufficient supply of military capabilities.
So in other words, Ukraine fights really well. The problem is they don't have as many weapons and that's why this halting of weapons here uh from the US, it just hurts Ukraine more. Again, a lot of Americans are like, "Good. We should be out of this." But again, we're literally the ones guiding a lot of this with our US intel on purpose to weaken the axis.
So, it's sort of like an interesting play like position. Like, okay, what's the right answer? That's what makes makes foreign policy so hard. When some of the systems did finally arrive, Ukraine was prohibited from using them on strikes inside of Russian targets until the United States relaxed the rules in mid 2024.
basically because the CIA can sort of gate, you know, where you're able to to target these weapons. When it comes to punitive economic measures against Russia, international response has been somewhat halfbaked. United States and the G7 crafted sanctions and EP export controls that were thought to pack a powerful punch, but in fact had so many mitigations built in that they were robbed of their full impact.
Basically, Russia's been able to export uh their oil, their fertilizer uh continuously and and they've been able to keep a wartime economy going. Okay, so we talk a little bit about the economy here. Ukraine's using every tool in their toolkit. I was looking into this a little bit yesterday, but I want to look at the China portion.
So, yet it is also important to recognize that China is no longer waging war alone. It has found steady backing from a coalition of autocratic states. backing that has allowed it to weather the bite of western sanctions. Yeah. Like exporting oil to China. As sanctions hold and component shortages mounted, Kremlin was the Kremlin was forced to ration weapons.
Oh, and North Korea, mind you. Uh by the fall of the year, however, Iran began supplying Russia with drones. By 2023, China emerged as a primary supplier of weapons and North Korea provided long range ballistic missiles and later troops. This makes sense because the axis of aggressors they call it want do not want to see Russia defeated because it keeps Russia strong with China and North Korea and Iran.
This is why this is so complicated. Turning the tide. Putin's ambitions to dominate Ukraine is unlikely ever to diminish even as Russian casualties approach a million. It's just crazy how this keeps going. This is why there's this desire to keep it as a forever war. Ukrainian allies have a choice. They can continue the current approach of of still born diplomacy while in the background sending weapons or you basically just give up on on Ukraine and they fail which strengthens the axis or you increase your efforts which does not seem popular with JD Vance or Trump right now because again there's the policy of America first.
So what happens potentially is a strengthening of Russia and the axis which is not great as well because you know now if we look at what's going on in Iran uh and the new satellite imagery that's coming out when you look at what the Wall Street Journal was talking about actually just yesterday you could say that for Iran their nuclear program uh where was it?
It was one of the stories we saw. We saw Iran suspense cooperation with the IAEA. That's old news. But there's also in one of these Wall Street Journal articles over just the last few days, we've been talking about how new data is showing cranes at the Ford facility potentially to unbear what's going on at Fordo.
Cranes at Fordo, Wall Street Journal. They were just talking about this yesterday. Anyway, there's satellite imagery of cranes at Fordo and basically the Iranians starting to excavate to assess how bad the damage was. And now the question is, what if it's not that bad? Is Iran going to want to are they going to be motivated to get back to work?
And were they only set back weeks? Again, strengthens the axis, right? Uh, so all of this not the easiest when it comes to figuring out what's going on geopolitically and with foreign affairs. But all of this really spawned by somebody's question over, "Hey Kevin, why are defense contractors falling?" Well, it's because we don't have this blank check anymore for Ukraine.
Here it is. Satellite images capture activity at Iran's Fordo sites after strikes. and the images released during the debate of the extent of damage of US air strikes followed days of strikes by Israelis. President Trump says that the sites were obliterated. An initial in assessment by the DIA suggests that maybe we only set them back a few months.
Now what we're finding is excavators and cranes are at the site. This is a zoomed-in picture of Fordo and vehicles basically buy the impact sites and tunnels and this is evidence that the Iranians want to understand what they have and that's potentially why we're seeing a delay in negotiations now because the Iranians are going to go unberry you know their facilities to see all right how much damage did you actually do because if you didn't do a lot of damage your leverage to negotiate maybe isn't as strong as you think it is so this Iranian problem while it feels over right now and the ceasefires is holding may not be over. And it really ties in to what's going on with Ukraine as well. It's craz.
Comments 0