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Tehran is moving arms via the Caspian Sea, where Western naval ships can’t reach.͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌ 
 
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June 6, 2023
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Jay Solomon
Jay Solomon

Hello and welcome to Semafor Security, where we dive into the forces and personalities defending, defining, and destabilizing the world.

China’s rise and the war in Ukraine are driving a wedge between the West and East and creating a range of interesting fault lines. Today I write about two of them: The Caspian Sea and Moldova.

The Biden administration and NATO have grown alarmed in recent months about Iran’s growing shipments of drones and munitions to the Russian military. But Western efforts to block this pipeline are being sabotaged by simple geography: In this case, the landlocked Caspian Sea through which many of these arms are being sent from Tehran to Moscow. The Pentagon has no access to these waters and the former Soviet states that sit astride them have shown little interest in aiding the West.

The U.S. is also voicing alarm over what it claims is an accelerated effort by the Kremlin and its spy agencies to overthrow Moldova’s pro-Western government. But the leader of this operation isn’t sitting in Moscow or Chisinau, the U.S. claims. He’s in Israel.

Let me know what you think of this newsletter, and please send tips to jsolomon@semafor.com.

Sitrep

Singapore. Tensions between the U.S. and China overshadowed much of the conversation at the Shangri-La Dialogue — Asia’s premier security summit — after Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu rejected private talks with his U.S. counterpart, Lloyd Austin. In separate speeches, ministers from Indonesia, Japan, and Australia all cautioned that unresolved matters between Washington and Beijing could lead to further “catastrophe” — even “war” — in Asia. In brighter news, U.S. and Chinese diplomats held “candid and productive discussions” during a meeting in Beijing, according to the State Department.

New Delhi. Austin had more luck during his trip to India, meeting Minister of Defense Rajnath Singh in Delhi to sign a new 5-year pact aimed at strengthening military cooperation, bulking up India’s security role in Asia, and reducing its reliance on imports of Russian military hardware.

Sar-e-Pul. Nearly 80 Afghan schoolgirls from grades one to six were poisoned while attending school, an education official based in Sangcharak district in northern Afghanistan told the Associated Press. The poisonings are believed to be the first since the Taliban rose to power in August 2021, though similar incidents have taken place in neighboring Iran. Details of the girls’ injuries remain unknown, but initial inquiries suggest that the attacker acted on a “personal grudge.”

– Karina

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Jay Solomon

Iran is using the world’s largest lake to ship weapons to Russia

Aziz Karimov/Getty Images

THE NEWS

Western efforts to stop the flow of Iranian weapons into Russia for use in Ukraine are running into a 3,300-foot-deep problem: the Caspian Sea.

American officials told Semafor that Tehran has stepped up its movement of arms to Moscow via the landlocked body of water — often described as the world’s largest lake — which has prevented interdiction efforts by putting shipments beyond the reach of U.S. and NATO naval power. The U.S. has successfully intercepted seabound shipments of Iranian weapons to other war zones, such as Yemen.

The Central Asian countries that border the Caspian, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan, have been reluctant to join the West in enforcing sanctions on Russia over Ukraine, according to U.S. officials, let alone interdict arms shipments. Without those governments’ cooperation, American and NATO forces can’t legally police their territorial waters.

“In terms of international law, you’re not going to have anyone there on your side,” said Benham Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington. “In terms of political will to do something risk tolerant and using a local actor, we also are not going to have anyone there.”

KNOW MORE

In recent weeks, the Biden administration has called Tehran  “Russia’s top military backer” in Ukraine and said the U.S. is following ongoing shipments of kamikaze drones, artillery, and tank rounds from Iran to the Russian military. The Kremlin, in turn, has pledged to provide Iran with “unprecedented” military support in the form of Sukhoi fighter jets, Russian attack helicopters, and S-400 air defense systems.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Iranian counterpart, Ebrahim Raisi, also signed an agreement last month to build a North-South transportation corridor to better connect their countries and economies, and to grow trade with the other Caspian Sea nations. The corridor will buttress the maritime links between Russia and Iran through the construction of rail lines running adjacent to the Caspian, through Azerbaijan and other former Soviet states.

It’s part of the broader effort by Moscow and Tehran to circumvent the growing sanctions wall being constructed against them by the U.S. and European Union, said Iran and Russia analysts. The two countries have developed direct banking channels to operate outside the SWIFT payment system that governs global financial transactions. The Caspian Sea routes can shield their direct arms shipments.

JAY’S VIEW

The war in Ukraine is accelerating a splintering between Western and Eastern economies, with Russia increasingly shielding itself behind China, Iran, and the former Soviet states. But the Caspian Sea is the most physical manifestation of this global breakdown, and the Kremlin’s ability to hide.

The Biden administration said it first began detecting Iranian drone shipments to Russia last summer, including through air deliveries. But private companies, such as Lloyd’s List in London, said they also began picking up at this time an unusual trend in the Caspian Sea — trade involving Russian and Iranian ships was spiking while many of their deliveries were being made with their Automatic Identification System signals turned off. The United Nations requires most maritime traffic to use AIS transceivers to track their movements in international waters.

“There are several reasons for ships to switch off AIS, including transmission or safety issues, but it is commonly used as a tactic to obfuscate journey origins and destinations, as well as other illicit activity,” Lloyd’s List wrote in a report about this dynamic in the Caspian Sea. The most traveled routes involving these shipments were the Russian port of Astrakhan and Iran’s Amirabad port.

The Wall Street Journal reported in April that Russian ships had ferried 30,000 artillery shells and a million rounds of ammunition from Iran to Russia via the Caspian Sea during the previous six months, citing data from Middle Eastern governments.

The Biden administration has sought to break up the Russian-Iranian trade through a wave of sanctions targeting the companies, procurement networks and ships and airplanes engaged in this trade. In April, the Treasury Department sanctioned six entities supporting Iran’s drone production, including companies in China and Malaysia.

But the Caspian Sea is a blind spot in this counter-proliferation strategy — a place where the U.S. can’t patrol, and local governments are disinterested in helping.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

The Russian and Iranian governments didn’t respond to requests for comment from Semafor concerning their alleged use of the Caspian Sea to ship arms. But Russian and Iranian leaders have said in recent months that their development of the North-South Trade Corridor was solely focused on growing the region’s economies and creating an alternative trade route to the Suez Canal. “The unique North-South transport artery, of which the Rasht-Astara railway will become a part, will help to significantly diversify global traffic flows,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said on May 17.

NOTABLE

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One Good Email

Daryl Kimball is the executive director of the Arms Control Association and hosted U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan for a major speech on arms control last Friday.

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Intel

Robots and other intelligent and autonomous systems may soon be integrated into the U.S. Marine Corps as part of ambitious plans to modernize the force, according to an annual update on “Force Design 2030.” But the Corps has long struggled to recruit and retain troops and may encounter similar hiring problems when filling its tech gap.

– Karina

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Advance/Retreat
REUTERS

⋉ ADVANCE: Fighting back. Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said on Telegram that forces are taking “offensive actions” on the eastern front near Bakhmut, occupying the “dominant heights” near the city. The update is heightening speculation that Kyiv is on the precipice of its official counteroffensive. Russia, meanwhile, claimed to have killed hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and thwarted a major offensive in the Donetsk region.

⋊ RETREAT: Buying back. Russia is repurchasing tanks and missiles it previously sold to Myanmar and India, according to customer clearance data reviewed by journalists at Nikkei. The reimported equipment include over 6,000 sighting telescopes and 200 cameras that will be used to modernize Moscow’s old tanks.

– Karina

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Stat

The number of dams that sit along Ukraine’s Dnipro river, one of which has been destroyed. Moscow and Kyiv traded blame over who was responsible for the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant being struck, leading to huge volumes of water being unleashed on nearby areas. Social media images showed water flooding towards Kherson, in Ukrainian territory currently controlled by Russia.

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Person of Interest

Ilan Shor, President of Moldova’s Shor Party

DUMITRU DORU/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Ilan Shor lives in Israel. But this isn’t stopping the 36-year-old businessman and politician from remotely attempting to overthrow Moldova’s pro-European government, according to Washington.

The Biden administration on Monday accused Shor, president of the Shor Party, of working for months with Kremlin-backed politicians and agents to orchestrate mass protests against Moldovan President Maia Sandu. Shor’s operations have been funded, in part, by the hundreds of millions of dollars he was convicted this year of stealing from Moldovan banks, according to Sandu’s government. The U.S. Treasury Department said that Moldova’s ongoing protests are “an effort by Russia-connected malign influence actors to foment a manufactured insurrection against the Moldovan government.”

The U.S. believes Moldova is a microcosm for how Russia works to destabilize pro-Western governments globally. On Monday, the Treasury Department sanctioned seven alleged Kremlin agents in Moldova (Shor and his wife, a Russian pop singer, were blacklisted last October) for coordinating espionage and disinformation operations with the Kremlin. Tellingly, one of the other leaders allegedly involved, Mikhail Potepkin, is a propagandist who previously worked with Russia’s Wagner Group and its Internet Research Agency, which U.S. intelligence agencies believe was involved in Moscow’s 2016 attempt to interfere with the U.S. presidential elections and as well as a similar operation in Sudan.

Shor fled Moldova for Israel in 2019 to evade corruption charges related to the fleecing of around $1 billion from the Moldovan banking system. (The amount is equal to around one-eighth of the country’s total economic output.) But he has continued to lead his party from exile and vows to ignore his 15-year prison sentence until a new government is in place in Chisinau. “I am not going to comply with it, and I assure you that it will be annulled the day after the change of the current regime,” he said in a social media post this April.

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— Jay

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