Russian stock market PLUMMETS: is Putin running out of options in Ukraine?

[00:00:00] Mark Urban: He has no choice now, because of the budgetary crisis and the shortage of people, but to declare mobilisation, to call it a war, to invoke the spirit of Mother Russia. [00:00:10] Nina Khrushcheva: No autocrat, especially autocrat like Putin, can show weakness because he thinks that the party unite and take him out. [00:00:18] Matt Fry: So if it's a choice between escalation and suing for peace, it's escalation. [00:00:23] Nina Khrushcheva: He would go until, from my point of view, until the very end. He's the Putin of absolute victory or death. [00:00:29] Matt Fry: In a worst-case scenario, we are sliding into something far more serious here. Hello and welcome to the Forecast Indicators. I'm Matt Fry. [00:00:40] Mark Urban: And I'm Mark Urban. And this is the podcast where we look at the signals that analysts watch out most closely for, that suggest significant change is imminent. And we separate the signal from the noise and the wheat from the chaff. [00:00:53] Matt Fry: Well, today we're looking at the war in Ukraine and the stark decisions facing Vladimir Putin as his three-day special military operation has now lasted longer than the First World War. Are the costs of the war becoming unbearable for Russia? How is Ukraine finding new ways to fight back? And if Putin believes time is no longer on his side, will he escalate? Well, we are delighted now to be joined by Nina Khrushcheva, Professor of International Affairs at the New School in New York. Nina, what is your first indicator? [00:01:22] Nina Khrushcheva: My first indicator that Putin is under pressure. When Donald Trump became president in 2025, there was kind of societal, political, and even Putin elite expectation that the war is likely going to end soon. The economy was sort of the Moscow stock market was going great. Then at the beginning of, as you remember in 2025, so there's great kind of, great, but certain advancements on the battlefield. So Putin felt like he really had the upper hand. It all started changing in April this year when suddenly economies started cracking because the military-industrial complex that is run by the capitalist formulas really cannot really gel anymore. And I think in your introduction, you did say the war that was supposed to last three days, three weeks, is lasting four and a half years. And so it cannot be called special military operation. It has to be called the war. So Putin needs to decide on all these matters whether he's going to fight more, it's going to be mobilization, or he's going to go less. My fear, he's going to go more. [00:02:35] Mark Urban: When you talk about the military industries and the strain they're under, one of the things that's really tricky trying to read, certainly from my perspective, is where do the elites, now they might be the bosses of the defense industries, I guess they might be the bosses in the oil industry, traditionally. Where do you think they sit with this, or are they divided? Because you get these people like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oil baron who was imprisoned by Putin, who more or less seem to hold this view that there's a kind of war party in Moscow that won't give Putin the option of scaling back or seeking some kind of ceasefire. And then now we see some differing analyses that suggest that these guys, especially when Putin keeps shaking them down for money because he can't balance the state budget, and saying to these oligarchs that they've got to dig deeper into their pockets, that they're going to get fed up with this. Where do you sit on this, Nina? [00:03:34] Nina Khrushcheva: Well, I was never a believer that there was an elite war party in Moscow. I didn't believe that it did exist, and I continue to think that there was no war party. Putin started the war. The system of Russian government has been the imperial system before the Soviets and the Soviet system. Then Putin slightly changed it. It sort of had professionals more functioning than in previous times. But generally, it was his decision, and sort of everybody had to agree with it. By the way, it doesn't mean that it would have gone differently, potentially, but in no small matter, because sanctions then were, because there was sort of this collective responsibility of all the Russians, so the oligarchs were cut out from the Western world, essentially. So instead of making them allies within Putin's government, sort of the Trojan force, they were immediately made enemies. That actually helped Putin quite a bit. But there was no war party ever. I mean, there was really, say, 20% really wanted, because they think, yes, we would want to fight more. The West is not treating us fairly. But not to fight for longer than the First World War ever. [00:04:47] Mark Urban: No, but not that, sorry to jump in, Nina, but not these people like Shoigu, the former defence minister, who's said to have made a fortune on the back of these contracts, you know, to clothe the army and all the rest of it. Even those people directly making money out of the war, you wouldn't say, were... [00:05:03] Nina Khrushcheva: But now they're in prison. I mean, it's actually Putin didn't expect them to make money on the war. The problem is that, because the environment that was created is that, well, Russia may win, but it may not win. And if it doesn't win, you'd better take whatever it is. I mean, that's what the whole Russian corruption for centuries has been based on. You don't know what tomorrow brings. So you try to take as much as you can. So, yes, there was corruption, but Putin actually never wanted that corruption. And now we see these people going to go into prison. So loyalty doesn't really hide this anymore. So, as I said, I don't believe there was ever a war party, but there's a lot of fear that, say, the party A around Putin would be more powerful than the party B. And therefore, they support the center, that is Putin, not that they want the war, but his existence and his needs allow them to continue to be the party of power. And I think that's what drives Putin's regime much more than the fact that they want the war. They want to make money in regular capitalist way. But if the war happened, I guess they have to do something about it. So, yes, they were military bloggers. There's all this sort of crazy people who think that Russia is the spiritual holder of the universe, but there are not that many of them. And so if Putin changes his mind, everybody would be saying, oh, my God, what a wonderful thing. But he cannot because his type of power is that if he said that he's going to take Donbass, that region that everybody now is fighting for, he's going to take it. Otherwise, he shows weakness. No autocrat, especially autocrat like Putin, can show weakness because he thinks that the party A and the party B and the party C around him then unite and take him out. That is about him staying in power for the rest of his life. [00:06:57] Matt Fry: But Nina, one of the reasons why he's been successful so far at staying in power is also that the economy has been really rather well run, hasn't it? I mean, there's been a team around him for 20 years or so that have made sure that the debt wasn't going to mushroom to an extraordinary level. There was a sovereign wealth fund, I think they call it the National Welfare Fund, that was very well stocked. But all these numbers are now heading in the wrong direction. And the debt ceiling has been blasted away. And I wonder whether the real pressure here on Putin that we're not seeing in the headlines every day is this economic pressure. And in particular, this detail, which I can't quite get my head around. [00:07:35] Mark Urban: This is your indicator for this week. [00:07:37] Matt Fry: This is one of my indicators. So the thing, the detail that really caught me out, and it was raised in this article in the Financial Times yesterday, was the amount of money that each dead Russian soldier costs. So the payout for a dead Russian soldier is apparently 14 million rubles, which I think is about 140,000 quid. That's a lot of money. If we're dealing with an estimate of 350,000 dead soldiers, and even injured soldiers get, the families get 4 million rubles. So if you take those numbers together, the war in terms of lives lost that you have to pay for may have cost as much as 80 billion pounds. That's a huge amount of money. I mean, how much is that weighing on not just the economy, but also on the ability of Putin to carry on with his special military operation? [00:08:26] Nina Khrushcheva: This guy is such an Anglo-Saxon way of looking at things that you are having the indicators, and you're looking at statistics, and you're looking at numbers. Putin doesn't look at it this way. Russia has never looked at this. I mean, there were periods when it was rational, but most of the time, it is ideological, it's spiritual, it is we are not going to get defeated, we're going to be recognized as the great nation, we're 11 time zones, how dare you treat us this way? Putin has been in power for 25 years, and you're not recognizing it. So one of the very major songs of World War Two was they had a line in it, which said, "We are not going to count the costs." [00:09:07] Matt Fry: So mysticism is more important than money? [00:09:11] Nina Khrushcheva: Absolutely. You are not going to count the costs. I mean, even if we get away from military for a second, for example, Russia is now trying, or the Kremlin is now trying to ban VPN, the internet, the mobile access, Facebook, Telegram, WhatsApp, everything else. They spend billions on buying their own VPN, their own systems, so they can actually squeal on and follow who is doing what. So you are spending incredible amount of money to ban something so people wouldn't have access to this, and then you spend more money to make sure that you can control whatever people cannot get off. And so this is something that I'm always trying to explain to the rational minds of the West, that Russia doesn't think this way, Putin doesn't think this way. He's the man of greatness. He would not allow little numbers to stay in the way of his greatness. [00:10:16] Matt Fry: Well, speaking as a very pathetic little bean counter, I mean, the question is that if that's the case, if mysticism is more important than money, why did he bother paying the bereaved families as much as £140,000 per dead soldier? I mean, that's a lot of money. [00:10:31] Mark Urban: To get more to volunteer. [00:10:33] Matt Fry: But then some money does matter, doesn't it? I mean, and if you're running out of the money to bribe people to enter the channel house of Donbas, you've got a problem. [00:10:42] Nina Khrushcheva: Well, of course, and it did because, I mean, that's why you call it special military operation. It wasn't supposed to last long. He was supposed to win quickly. It was supposed, the West is not all going to run on Russia and actually fight with Ukraine, the war. So now he says we're fighting against the whole Western world. So it was supposed to be brief. It didn't get brief. Putin is a man of tradition in many ways. He's also an older man now. I mean, he was, he has been in power for 25 years. I mean, that changes things. I mean, that changes your mind, that changes how you look at things. He's been incredibly lucky with this careful, sort of careful steps that he had because he always thought, he always thought that the other guy would blink first. And it happened very often. The other guy would blink first. So this time, he's much more kind of inertia moving because it worked for him before. So the war now is four and a half years and they were paying because they were supposed to win quickly. It was not supposed to be what Afghanistan was and when the Soviet Union withdrew in 1989. And if it doesn't stop, if it's not over, which I don't believe it will be, I think these families are not going to see this money anymore. There would be some explanation, there would be delays, there would be logistics, they would say, well, you know what? Unfortunately, we're fighting against the whole West for our survival. You really have to tighten your belt and you have to be a good patriot. So, yes, it did matter. There was a sort of this double game. You said that the Putin professionals, the economy was driving. And Elvira Nabiulina, the central bank woman, I mean, she's a genius of keeping it alive. But there is always a battle now because it is a war economy. It has to be a war economy. It is the war. It's not a special military operation anymore. And yet it's run in many ways by the civilian government. And so they have to decide which one it is they're doing. And if it's not a civilian government, all this payouts to the soldiers are not going to happen anymore because in the war, you defend the motherland. You're not going to get money for it. [00:12:46] Mark Urban: But although you hint there at a possible fork in the road for Putin in terms of moving away from civilian patent government, at least notional, to some more full kind of martial law of mobilization, which a lot of people say is the decision point he's now going to face. But one last question, Nina, before you go, I think you've got to leave us. But just indulge us on one other indicator we've talked about over the last couple of months, the oil price. Now, surely for Putin, however you choose to see this, whether you view it through a kind of nationalism and a more mystical frame of reference than the old Soviet one, that's got to be important, hasn't it? The oil price is absolutely tumbling now that the Strait of Hormuz is getting back into action. [00:13:36] Nina Khrushcheva: Yes, absolutely. But at the same time, economists and even Russian economists, actually, people in Russian economy sort of more clearly thinking they were saying, yes, it's a nice boost for it for a moment. Putin himself said, well, it is a nice boost. It's not going to take care of the whole budget problem. So yes, he does have, he's a fork on the road. Normally, when Russia goes, very rarely, it goes to the right way, it goes to the wrong way, because that's the way they think is evidence of strong power. They go into parliament elections in September this year. And so now actually there's a big story who from the party of government, United Russia Party, who is going to be the first ticket? Is it going to be Dmitry Medvedev, the crazy blogger who used to be prime minister and president, but now just went completely, completely nuts and wearing Joseph Stalin's outfits at all times? Or it's going to be, is going to be Sabanin, Sergei Sabanin, the mayor of Moscow, who actually tries to keep Moscow, at least until recently tried to keep Moscow less affected by the war. So we'll see what goes, but my, it's not a prediction, but my analysis, the way Putin is, it would be more mobilization, more stress, money is important. But once again, if you fight a war, if you fight a real war, you're not going to be paid for your fighting. Money is irrelevant because you're going to do it for free for patriotic reasons. And I think that that's where Russia is going. I hope I'm right. I hope I'm wrong. Wouldn't know that for a few months, but that's the way Russia has gone in the last four and a half years. [00:15:19] Matt Fry: So if it's a choice between escalation, whatever form that may take militarily and suing for peace, it's escalation as far as you're concerned. [00:15:28] Nina Khrushcheva: For me, the way it has gone, Putin had many times to stop and he could have been an absolute victor of that war. He could have argued victory and he hasn't. So I don't see how at this point, because that would mean once again that the Group A, the Group B, Group C, that, okay, he's now weak and we actually can bite him, can take care of it. So he would go until, from my point of view, until the very end. On the other hand, before he was not without rational thinking. So maybe there is still a moment when the KGB major, as he is, still has some president remained in him. The president he was for 20 years before 2020, 2022. And that decision may be made, but I personally think that Putin already has crossed that line. And he's the Putin of absolute victory or death. [00:16:24] Matt Fry: Wow. Well, on that extraordinary note, it's time to say thank you and goodbye, Nina Krusevich. Thank you, Nina. Thank you very much. That was really interesting. [00:16:32] Speaker ?: Thank you. [00:16:33] Matt Fry: Well, Mark, what a note to end on, you know, but very clear from her. Yeah. Very clear. And I would have, I mean, I don't know, I mean, do you see it the same way? I mean, or is there some grey fuzziness there? [00:16:49] Mark Urban: I think what I see is, for a whole host of reasons, and they come together on the financial, but exactly the connection you made with the loss of soldiers, that, you know, the larger that figure gets. And, you know, a couple of weeks ago, we had head of GCHQ saying it was over 500,000 dead. But anyway, big financial implications. The increasing effectiveness of the deep strike drone offensive by the Ukrainians, also by destroying all those oil storage depots and all those other bits of national infrastructure, also financial implications, as well as harming the prestige of Russia, that Petersburg and Moscow can be hit in this very public way. And then, of course, the lowering of the oil price and the problems with the state budgets. So all those things come together. Now, does he, as Nina was suggesting, escape the jam he's in by either declaring some sort of marshal, or finally abandoning the pretense that it's a special military operation, saying we have to mobilize the whole of Russia's society? Which may not work. [00:17:55] Matt Fry: I mean, you know, the reason why he hasn't done that yet is because he thought he could get away with it cheaply, because he's thinking like a KGB officer. You know, it's not full-scale war, it's surreptitious, you know, it's done through the back door. And I just want, I mean, but the thing that... [00:18:08] Mark Urban: And there was a special mobilization a few months into the war. Yes, there was. Well, the first autumn of the war. Yeah, 300,000. Which, yeah, which I think caused a lot of bad feedback, I think. But it was also in the outer provinces, wasn't it? [00:18:21] Matt Fry: So I remember in Pakistan they were upset because, and suddenly people started heading for the border because young men up to a certain age thought they were going to be called up. But I also wonder, and this is something that, you know, she referred to there, the mystical side of Putin's brain, the mystical nature of this war. And the thing that always struck me when I was in Ukraine, as the war was breaking out, was, you know, all this religious stuff. And there he was, you know, being filmed, praying by himself in his own little socially distant chapel. Remember, it was just after COVID. And, of course, he spent COVID and lockdown rummaging through the archives of the Kremlin, then writing this extraordinary 6,000 word thesis on the Russian world and the importance of Kyiv and Ukraine to it. And so part of me thinks that for him, this is still, you know, Kyiv is the Temple Mount. This is where he has to get back to. So he's not, you know, lost sight of the kind of bigger, mystical, historical prize for him. On the other hand, he also understands numbers. You know, he's got a, he used to have a functioning brain. He's an intelligence guy in the sense that he must be schooled in the art and craft of weighing things up against each other. You know, return on investment, et cetera, et cetera. And it's just not working out for him. So which side of that Putin brain prevails? [00:19:38] Mark Urban: Yes. [00:19:39] Matt Fry: She thinks the mystical side. [00:19:40] Mark Urban: It's getting dramatically worse. Yeah. I mean, the other thing we haven't spoken about yet, and I think it would be sort of my indicator in this context of his decision making, is Crimea. Yeah. Which is a big one. Yeah. When he seized it in 2014, there was a big fillet for him in terms of national popularity. All the polls suggested the Russians loved him. [00:20:01] Matt Fry: Even Alexei Navalny. Even the late Navalny. You know, opposition. Congratulated him for it. [00:20:05] Mark Urban: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So there was a big Russian patriotic cause and a big win for Putin. Now we have this situation where literally in the last few weeks, the Ukrainians have really leveraged some advantages. Now, this includes this business that they've got the Russians shut out of Starlink, the satellite system, which the Russians were using to help guide their drones. But now the Ukrainians have got the exclusive use of it. [00:20:31] Matt Fry: How do they manage to do that, by the way? [00:20:33] Mark Urban: They asked, the Ukrainians asked Musk and the company agreed. That shows you how much they're standing. [00:20:40] Matt Fry: Yeah. [00:20:41] Mark Urban: That's so interesting. Well, the Russians apparently were kind of spoofing their way on and were using fake Ukrainian credentials and stuff. Oh, really? Okay. They reinforced the crypto on the system. But anyway, the fact is that this is thought to be particularly significant in what's called the 50 to 200 kilometer strike range ban. Lots of reasons for that. We don't go into all the details. But when you look at what's being done in and around Crimea and the campaign of what the military people would call interdiction, hitting those bridges that connect the railways and the roads in from the top. And of course, you've got the famous bridge that was built by Putin. The Kerch Bridge. The Kerch Bridge. Now, if you go back. Which has been rendered unusable anyway. Well, no, the Kerch Bridge is still just about there. But along with the northern routes in being really hammered over the last couple of weeks, three special ferries have been hit and heavily damaged or destroyed. Now, these ferries are used to load sort of entire trains on or things like that. They can be used for heavy cargoes. They're used a lot by the military to take ammunition across. Stuff like that. They've been knocked out. Fuel rationing has been introduced by the governor of Crimea. There are ordinary goods. You know, household goods are running out in the stores. There's a real sense of worry there now in Crimea. Now, to what extent does Putin remain in a bubble where people are afraid to give him the bad news? Or to what extent does he really understand that that cornerstone of his own prestige is now looking wobbly? [00:22:15] Matt Fry: But then again, if everything is channeled through sacrifice, the anvil of sacrifice. This is about Mother Russia. This is about this is the great patriotic war all over again. I mean, if that's the case, he's going to have to call it what it is, which is a war. And forget about all this special military operation nonsense. But here's another tiny little indicator that's just occurred to me, which kind of feeds into this argument. So because the Ukrainians have been using drones quite effectively against infrastructure businesses, all refineries in Russia proper, most famously during the St. Petersburg Economic Summit, which turned the sky over St. Petersburg black. Those refineries are now trying to protect themselves against drones by stringing metal cables across their facilities. Now, it's quite an expensive thing to do, apparently. Not in the cable business, but I'm told it is. And it's not particularly effective. But these businesses who are having to do this themselves, because it's not being done by the Russian state, are asking if they can offset the cost of the protection against their taxes. And the answer has been, "Niet, you cannot do this." And that has really upset them. Yep. Right. So again, if it was a war, you could probably do it. But because it's a one off, that's what the authorities are saying, and it's a special operation, you can't. [00:23:31] Mark Urban: No, absolutely. But that's where the rhetoric has failed to match the reality. And he is at this, I think, inflection point. And, you know, those companies like the oil refiners, they are even now investing in their own methods of defense active. So, you know, private security guards with heavy machine guns trying to shoot down the drones, because, as you say, the Russian state is effectively saying to them, well, you need to up your own protection here and you need to increase your game. So, I mean, there must be tensions there between the people running those industries. Exactly. [00:24:08] Matt Fry: And whenever Russia or the Soviet Union has lost a war, there have been consequences. And the consequences were felt right at the top. Most famously, 1917, the Russian Revolution, you know, or famously, Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, you know, the grandfather, the woman we just interviewed, you know, he lost his job after that as well. So, you know, what will happen to Vladimir Putin down the road? I mean, he seems to be in charge. People are afraid. We have really no idea what's going on inside Russia. Is there an oppositional movement amongst the generals, amongst the, you know, the extremist nationalist nutters? You know, I don't know. I have no idea. But I can't imagine this will carry on without consequences for him. [00:24:46] Mark Urban: No. Well, I guess it's one of those situations where things appear to be extremely gradual and then sudden. If bad things are going to happen. But let's go back to Nina's paradigm, which is that he has no choice now because of the budgetary crisis and the other things that are building and the shortage of people. But to declare mobilization, to call it a war, to invoke the spirit of Mother Russia, all of those things. I think that almost has to be accompanied in Putin's terms by a blame of NATO, blaming NATO for the fact that Russia has been put in this situation and characterizing the, you know, explosions going off in Russian cities and all the rest of it as being NATO's work. Now, that's dangerous. That's very dangerous. Very dangerous. In lots of ways, if he chooses to do that. [00:25:40] Matt Fry: Because, of course, it's already been done since the beginning of the war by some of the more outspoken voices on the internet, you know, on Russian television. You know, the, you know, you hear them all the time. I mean, these are table thumpers who say, we're already at war with NATO. They're already fighting us through the back door. And apparently that's quite a prevalent, Vox Populi belief on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. [00:26:00] Mark Urban: Don't forget, Matt, that there's been a couple of moments where Putin has done his nuclear saber rattling. Yes. One of those was when the whole debate was going on about, would America allow Ukraine to use those French and British supplied storm shadow missiles? Because they relied on some American guidance to get them to their target, American data. And Putin did come out there of the Kremlin and say something along the lines of, well, if NATO uses its weapons to do deep strikes. We can do the same. Exactly. We'll draw the appropriate conclusions. Now, this week, a key factory for making microprocessors and circuits for all of those missiles and things that Russia wants to launch at Ukraine in the city of Voronezh, which is 580 kilometers south of Moscow, was hit, we believe, by storm shadow missiles. So that is another thing. Yeah. We might always be talking about drones. But this would have been aircraft with pilots in them, Ukrainian ones, launching those British or French supplied missiles at that key plant in Voronezh, which some people are saying bigger impact on the Russian war effort than the amazingly spectacular hits on the refinery in Moscow or Petersburg that turned the sky black. Now, so Putin there has got his, his. Casus bella. Exactly. If he wants it. [00:27:23] Matt Fry: Yeah. Let's be honest. The one thing that has always freaked out governments in Berlin or Paris, to lesser extent here, has been this danger of a, you know, of a real escalation in Europe. And perhaps beyond that from a desperate Bloody Mayor Putin with his back up against the wall. Yeah. That's always the thing that has prevented the Germans from sending Taurus missiles to the Ukrainians. This is too far. You're, you're, you're baiting the bear. Let's not do that. You know, you would give, we'll give them enough to not sink, but we won't give them enough to destroy Russia. Have we got to a point where this, this has become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Well, that's, that's the question that haunts me. Yeah. On a hot day. [00:28:00] Mark Urban: Yeah. Let's go back to September of 22, when the Ukrainians had their big military success in the Kharkiv region and swept aside the Russian army. Now people talk about, oh, you know, the Russians brandished the nuclear option or whatever. Now here we can get into what the actual military intelligence analysts call indicators. Why did they think that? Why did the Americans and the others think that? Because the nuclear warheads were taken out of the specialist storage sites where they were being kept and issued to the missile units that would have used them. And obviously all sorts of lights started blinking as it were on the Pentagon's intelligence dashboard going, oh my Lord, they're handing the nukes out. Now, was that some kind of signaling at the time? But I think in the subsequent months, the shadow of that moment, as you say, cast it or had its effect on decisions like the German one about will we send the Taurus missile? You know, should we send them fighter jets? I mean, go back that far. Yeah. Even that was a very active subject of discussion that has now been resolved in Ukraine's favor. But, you know, do we come to another moment like that? A lot of people pointing to recent incidents, for example, in the airspace of Baltic countries where they think the Russians have either been spoofing Ukrainian drones. In other words, messing with their guidance system to get them to stray into Baltic airspace or deliberately aiming their own ones into, you know, provocation. [00:29:41] Matt Fry: So if you take it all together, you've got a born again Orthodox Christian in the Kremlin. Putin believes that he's, you know, God's man on Earth to rebuild the Russian world. You've got, you've got them running out of money and it looks as if they're losing some aspects of this war. At the same time, you have a frayed Western alliance because Trump has done his own thing. And although he may be flirting less with Putin than he was, he's still fundamentally not, you know, taking him to task. You've got Witkoff, the witless Witkoff, you know, negotiator who's never been to Kyiv once. And you have, you know, the Russians trying to test the envelope, prod the envelope, you know, in the Baltic Republic. And Poland, yeah. And Poland. And we're responding, you know, as we discussed a few weeks ago here in the UK. Well, there's a war going on. It may come to our doorsteps. We're going to spend a little bit more money on this and a little bit more money on that. But not really. You take all this together. And to me, in a worst case scenario, we are sliding into something far more serious here than what we've been used to. It's a combination of complacency, you know, mysticism, a lack of preparedness. And this could end up in a really bad place. [00:30:58] Mark Urban: I don't disagree. Yeah, I don't disagree. And I think, I mean, you know, I'd even turn the dial another couple of notches because I think that Trump's experience in the Gulf with Iran has been so chastening that in terms of political will to, you know, set your face against some new Russian aggression or provocation would be very limited. And of course, the American military has run stocks down of key munitions during this Iranian conflict as well. So there's not much military will either. So, yeah, it's a dangerous period, I think, we're entering. Matt, I don't want to leave people too downcast. So let's cheer me up. Well, look, I don't want to do that typical thing that news journalists often do, which is only to report bad things. So for weeks when we started indicators, of course, we came back to the question of how many ships were going through the Strait of Hormuz. And at the low point, it was about three a day compared to the normal 120. Then a few weeks ago, when things started looking a bit better and the Americans were sneaking some out, we go, oh, it's up to 15. I can now tell you that earlier this week, 60 went through on one particular day. So there is meaningful change there. How fragile it is? And before the war, it was 125. [00:32:17] Matt Fry: So we're 50% to where we were. Yeah. Price of oil has actually gone down to pre-war levels. So that's good. Based on, I guess, future projections of where it will be. [00:32:25] Mark Urban: I mean, we're into that tricky spell now where there isn't stuff underway. But I mean, I've seen figures for how much Iranian oil has been let out of the Gulf in the last week under the sanctioned waiver that the Americans. It's a lot. It's like 30 million barrels. So, yes, in terms of the global economy, that looks like it's all calming down. [00:32:50] Matt Fry: And if you then combine the fact that the oil is flowing, the Iranians are making money out of the oil, quite regardless of whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, that the regime that was supposed to be removed is now not just alive with the pulse, but also making money. But remember what Trump, you know, there was always the Lebanon factor. Could the Israelis have enough power or Hezbollah for that matter to torpedo the memorandum of understanding, which everyone in Israel seems to hate? Well, I think when Trump said the other day, you know, a ceasefire in the Middle East just means less shooting, which, by the way, is quite an accurate description. Maybe he thinks, OK, I've said my piece on Israel. I've blown him out of the water. I've let J.D. Vance loose on Netanyahu. You know, and now let's just carry on with this other thing. Let's just try and ignore this as much as possible. And as long as they don't bomb the center of Beirut. Yes. [00:33:39] Mark Urban: You know, we're going to be fine. And I think there is an implied consensus, actually, between America and Iran that the war can continue within certain well-defined limits in the south of Lebanon. Because actually Hezbollah quite wants to continue killing Israeli soldiers and looking like. Which they did just again today, I think this morning. Looking like a kind of national liberation. The war party. Yeah, absolutely. [00:34:01] Matt Fry: I think that's it, isn't it? [00:34:02] Mark Urban: Yep. I think we've indicated our way to the end of this episode. [00:34:07] Matt Fry: I think the best thing about indicators today, and I think we've never been able to say that before, about any of our indicators, is that it's about 18 degrees in this air-conditioned studio. Until next week. [00:34:18] Mark Urban: Until next week. [00:34:19] Matt Fry: Bye-bye. That's it. Thank you very much. Hope you enjoyed it.