Developments in Russia-Ukraine War
The US-Ukraine Minerals Deal:
The minerals deal finally signed between Ukraine and the United States has been a significant development which has widened the gulf between the US and Russia and heralded closer US-Ukraine relations. Its key provisions are as follows:
- The United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund is a 50-50 partnership managed equally by both nations. Contributions include 50% of revenues from future natural resource projects and future US military aid, which counts as a capital contribution. Ukraine will retain full ownership of its resources and infrastructure, determining extraction locations and method.
- The US will gain priority rights to invest in or purchase Ukrainian minerals on competitive terms, though not exclusive access. The deal covers 55+ critical minerals essential for clean energy, defense, and tech industries, aligning with US goals to reduce reliance on China, which dominates 69% of global rare earth production.
- Ukraine secured a major concession: no repayment for past US military aid. Earlier drafts demanded $ 500 billion in mineral revenues as compensation, which Kyiv rejected as exploitative.
- While explicit security guarantees (e.g., NATO membership) are absent, the deal emphasizes US commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and “long-term strategic alignment.”
While the fund aims to attract private investment for Ukraine’s reconstruction, returns may take 10–20 years due to wartime destruction and outdated Soviet-era geological data. Further, the deal may serve as an impetus to bring the war to a close, as Russia controls 63% of Ukraine’s coal and 50% of its manganese deposits in occupied regions, which the US would be keen to liberate.
The present deal reflects the Trump administration’s preference for prioritizing US economic gains over traditional alliances. Similar frameworks are being pursued with mineral-rich nations like the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Ukraine deal is expected to become a template for those as well.
Pahalgam Terror Attack
The calculated and targeted terror attack leading to the massacre of 26 tourists in Pahalgam in Kashmir has come at a time of great geopolitical importance. There are several facets to this attack:
The twin challenges:
First, India’s emergence and successful de-hyphenation from Pakistan: Under the Modi government, there has been a successful delinking between India and Pakistan. Despite the surgical strikes in Uri in 2016 and the airstrikes in Balakot in 2019, the distance between India and Pakistan has grown irreversibly. The revocation of Article 370 cemented this. That India could successfully mobilize international public opinion on its unilateral changes in Kashmir, with minimum resistance from China, further cemented Pakistan’s decline. Pakistan’s listing on the Financial Action Taskforce and the resultant loss of funds further compromised Pakistan’s financial capabilities. Coupled with the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the situation for Pakistan became much less favourable. It was no longer needed by America to fight the war on terror.
The fact that the world – and India, unlike in the past – had dismissed Pakistan, and the country became the subject of indifference from India and the international community, was worse than treating it as a perpetrator of terrorism. At least, being an aggressor was better than being treated with indifference. Thus, despite being a nuclear weapons state, Pakistan was facing a mounting identity crisis. Since its formation, terrorism against India, especially in Kashmir, had provided the oxygen with which Pakistan has sustained its national identity. This has been under threat for the last few years. Unlike the previous Congress government in India which treated terrorism from Pakistan as an insurmountable bogey, the Modi government had dismissed Pakistan from India’s security calculus in a way that was never done in the past, enabling India to rise beyond Pakistan. This has been an anathema to Pakistan.
Second, Pakistan’s increasing internal security challenges: These geopolitical shifts over the last few years have been accompanied by a marked rise in Pakistan’s internal security challenges.
First, the country found itself in dire economic straits, with rising inflation and damage caused by the increasing incidence of environmental disasters.
Second, Pakistan itself became besieged with massive and regular terrorist attacks inside the country. These became worse with the Afghan takeover by Taliban, which has become as much of an enemy of the Pakistani state as the previous democratic Afghan regimes of Ghani and Karzai before it. The rise of Taliban not only worsened the border issues at the Durand Line but also increased the power of Pakistan’s internal terrorists like Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Simultaneously, the sudden rise of Baloch revolutionary terrorism and the scale and effectiveness of their attacks went beyond what Pakistani security forces could handle.
Finally, the political situation in Pakistan – with the arrest of the highly popular former Prime Minister, Imran Khan – widely turned the public against the Pakistani state, leading to rising questions over the military’s capabilities. The widespread and violent protests in which Khan’s supporters sought to capture the government led to great uprising within Pakistan.
Thus, Pakistan was already at the rock-bottom when the Pahalgam attack took place.
Kashmir as India’s Achilles’ heel:
The way the Pahalgam attack was executed has successfully brought the Kashmir issue to the forefront of India-Pakistan dynamic. It would be a misinterpretation to assume that the Pahalgam attack was only about Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. It was also about challenging India in Kashmir. In the process, it has revived the long-dead relations between the two countries beyond mere formal contact at the military level and brought the Kashmir issue to the forefront, after many years. It has enabled Pakistan to emerge from the wilderness in which it was lost, providing it the much needed national identity revival and international relevance that it had lost.
The attack was the first terrorist attack of such scale that was perpetrated in Kashmir in the aftermath of the revocation of Article 370. The terrorists’ choice of the Baisaran meadow of Pahalgam – also regarded as a ‘mini-Switzerland’ – as their target area, shows that the pattern of normalcy and the rise of tourism in Kashmir in the aftermath of abrogation of Article 370 had to be challenged. The attack challenged the idea of a new Kashmir that had gained credence after 2019.
Further, segregating tourists and killing them based on their Hindu identity and killing only men, while sparing the women, drew directly from the Pakistan Army Chief, Asim Munir’s speech few days before the attack, in which he re-affirmed the religious basis of the two-nation theory that led to the creation of Pakistan, and applied this rationale to Kashmir by asserting that based on this irreconcilable religious distinction, Kashmir is Pakistan’s ‘jugular vein.’ This is important
Getting India’s House in Order:
While India was expected to give a hard military response to this terrorist attack, the security forces cannot evade the massive intelligence failure – albeit not as big as Kargil – that led to this attack in the first place. Something similar had happened on a larger scale when a group of Hamas terrorists brutally attacked and took hostage Israeli civilians at a tourist festival. Not only was Israel’s response belated due to the shock caused by the brutality and planning of the attack, but it was also touted as a major security lapse on the part of Israeli intelligence agencies. No amount of hard Israeli action against Hamas in the months following the attack could compensate for the security gaps that caused it in the first place.
The manner of deliberately targeting tourists has been repeated in the Kashmir attack as well. It also raises hard questions which the government needs to answer to itself and to the public to prepare for the future. Since Pahalgam – and especially Baisaran – is a well-known tourist destination and is also a gateway to the Amarnath shrine, it should have had greater security presence, better connectivity to quickly mobilize forces, and more alertness especially in the aftermath of Munir’s provocative speech. On all these counts, the failure was conspicuous. The security presence was lacking, and despite the popularity of Pahalgam and its importance as a transit route to the Amarnath, the connectivity is extremely poor, making it difficult for vehicles to easily reach there. That is why the security forces took some time to reach despite being immediately informed of the attack. By the time they reached the massacre had been complete and the terrorists had already escaped.
Furthermore, this intelligence failure and the corrective measured to be taken as a result should not stop at Pahalgam, it should lead to a review of how terrorism in the Valley has assumed new forms that have evaded the traditional methods deployed by the security forces. Here two aspects should be noted:
First, the emergence of hybrid terrorism since 2019 and the effective use of undetectable technology by terrorists have continued to pose a challenge to the security forces. It is notable that the Pahalgam terrorists were able to upload videos of the massacre in the public domain through encrypted, self-destructing communication devices which the security forces could not track. This use of technology and social media has added a new sensational dynamic to terrorism bringing it closer to people’s lives. Even in the case of Israel, the Hamas terrorists were able to evade Israel’s formidable technological infrastructure at the borders to carry out their attack and return.
Second, the attack raises questions on the terrorist outfit that has claimed responsibility – The Resistance Front (TRF). TRF is an amalgamation of several terrorist organizations – particularly the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) – under the aegis of al-Qaeda. This outfit has been growing in Kashmir since before 2019, but did not carry out any overt attack till now. It was on the radar of the security forces, but was not perceived, till a few years back, as a major threat. However, the Pahalgam attack will lead to a new look at TRF. What is of special concern is the fact that it has enhanced the operational capabilities of Pakistan-based terror outfits like LeT and JeM by bringing them under the larger infrastructure and capabilities offered by al-Qaeda. What should also concern the security forces is the role of al-Qaeda in Kashmir. Historically, al-Qaeda, being a Gulf terrorist organization, has waged jihad against the United States and the West in general. It has increasingly become more sophisticated and contributed to the decimation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. But it has never joined hands in the Kashmir cause. India needs to probe the politics behind this. If Pahalgam is a harbinger of the arrival of al-Qaeda in Kashmir, then India should anticipate a huge security challenge. Till now the al-Qaeda has not had an active presence in the Indian subcontinent. However, it has continued to operate through Pakistan-based terror outfits. TRF is a product of this new, transnational terrorist alliance.
