The Hormuz Toll Could Break the World Economy

Introduction. Vladimir Putin is getting desperate—and it’s when Putin is desperate that he’s at his most dangerous. Right now, Russian high command is burning through its options to change the status quo in Ukraine, and no matter what they try, nothing seems to be working.

The Iran war was supposed to be a perfect opportunity to sell oil, but Russia’s ports in the Black Sea, and even the Baltic, have been blown up.

Russia’s Victory Day parade was supposed to inspire a new wave of devotion to the Fatherland—but instead, Putin’s parade went ahead after Ukraine issued him a permit, and then bombed Moscow a few days later, to show that they really were just being polite.

Even last weekend, when Russia deployed its fearsome, nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile, the response from Ukraine and the global West basically amounted to, '[SARCASM] "ooooh, scary…". Ukrainian forces are at zero risk of collapse.

Russian forward progress on the battlefield consists of the lies that front-line commanders convey to the Kremlin, as those commanders try to cover up their inability to produce results.

With the help of a growing list of insider reports, leaking out from the Kremlin and the Russian military, it’s become clear that Putin is searching for a way to turn the tables.

Depending on their school of thought, outside experts have suggested that he’ll start destroying symbolic targets across Kyiv, or try and pull Belarus into the conflict, or, as Ukrainian strategic advisor Illya Sekirin told WarFronts in a recent interview, Putin might even try and fracture the NATO alliance with an attack on Latvia.

But there’s one other possibility, however insane it might sound, that we have to seriously consider: that Putin might choose to take another state on Russia’s doorstep, and make an example out of it.

He wouldn’t target a relatively large, populous, or powerful state, like the NATO nation of Finland, or the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan. Instead, he’d be going after one of the little guys, a country that he could hypothetically invade in a few days, or maybe even a few hours. Conquest, vassal statehood, annexation—those would all be an afterthought.

The real message, would be that Russia is still a major military power that deserves to be respected—so Ukraine had better hand over the Donbas, agree never to join NATO, and kiss Vladimir Putin’s ring before he stops playing nice.

Russia, Restrained.

At the outset of today's episode, we have to point out that it's really rather ridiculous to claim that in Ukraine, Russia is somehow holding back.

After all, this is a conflict where Russia has made numerous attempts to decapitate the Ukrainian leadership, where Russian soldiers routinely carry out extrajudicial executions and torture of Ukrainian POWs and even civilians, and where, in its attempt to assimilate Ukraine to Russian culture, Moscow has abducted and forcibly transferred nearly twenty

Thousand Ukrainian children to be adopted into Russian families against their or their family's will.

But as laughable as the idea of Russian restraint might be, for both our WarFronts team and the vast majority of our audience, we also happen to be lucky enough to live outside of the Russian information bubble.

For Russian citizens living in their home country, and for media consumers around the world who prefer to drink their Kremlin propaganda straight from the faucet, the idea that Russia is taking it easy on Ukraine is actually a very common theme.

That isn't accidental; instead, it's the direct result of a coordinated campaign by the Kremlin, trying to promote the idea along several lines simultaneously.

For one thing, the Kremlin argues, this is still a special military operation instead of a full-scale war—meaning that Russia is still holding back some of its power.

For another, although Russia consistently strikes verified civilian targets across Ukraine, the Kremlin strongly denies that it ever targets civilians, and instead claims that it's avoiding civilians and infrastructure because it fights in a more benevolent, more restrained way than the US or NATO ever would.

Speaking of the US and NATO, Russia often claims that it's trying not to pull those larger powers into the war, and thus, it's holding back in certain ways to avoid escalation.

Those ideas are so pervasive that even when Russia's own supporters offer criticism of the war effort—as they've started to do with increasing regularity—they often fall back on the idea that Russia is ineffective, because it's holding back too much.

Just take some of the reactions from Russia's milbloggers, in the wake of Russia's attempt to gin up hardliner support and stoke nuclear fears by using an Oreshnik missile against Ukraine last weekend. Quoting the milblogger 'Thirteenth', “What's the point of firing a blank slug without a warhead and calling it ‘Oreshnik’?

Did it kill anyone there? [...] Why hasn't any of Ukraine's leadership been killed? Why is Zelenskyy still alive?” Or, quoting 'Shadow of Rus', “’Oreshnik’ is supposed to work as a news hook: to frighten, to convince, to pressure.

But it doesn’t work.” Or finally, the milblogger 'Larkin': “Oreshnik is like Novichok – no one has ever died from it. [Shrug emoji] This time, it doesn’t even explode; it’s just a fireworks show for the Ukrainians. A humiliating circus, a clown dance on the bones of Russians.”

In so many ways, the invasion of Ukraine still looks very different for consumers of Russian media, than it does for practically anyone else. As Russian setbacks and Ukrainian long-range attacks both become more common, and public opinion begins to shift, Russian hardliners are quite clearly expressing what they want to see.

They're waiting for a show of force: something big enough, bold enough, and destructive enough to prove that Russia is still as powerful as it claims. Of course, the trouble is that Russia doesn't seem to be able to provide a show of force right now; the best it can do is to bombard Ukrainian cities every few days and score hits on symbolic targets.

Western intelligence estimates and independent conflict trackers suggest that Russia is losing soldiers faster than it can recruit them, and any spare capacity that Russia does have, isn't enough to produce change anywhere across the front lines.

Even the Institute for the Study of War, one of the most diligent conflict-trackers out there, recently announced that it will no longer project an estimate on when Russia could conquer the rest of Donetsk Oblast, because it's no longer clear that Russia can capture Donetsk at all.

Quote: “Russia's exaggerated territorial ambitions and aggressive territorial demands run completely counter to battlefield reality.”

But according to insider sources, Putin remains convinced that Russia can seize all of Donetsk and Luhansk by this autumn, based on the assurances of top advisors that seem to completely control the flow of information Putin receives.

In reality, Russian soldiers just aren't able to make it happen—but for Putin's advisors to admit defeat, or worse, to acknowledge the scale of their deception against their own leader, would be an exceptionally bad idea. Instead, there's the growing consensus we already mentioned, that Russia may pursue a lateral expansion of the conflict.

But, of all the ways that Russia could try and turn the tables, there may be no option more enticing than the start of another invasion, using forces that are too small to make a difference on the front line, but that could be used in a quick smash-and-grab to attack a vulnerable third country.

Maybe, that invasion targets a NATO country, to see whether Russia can throw NATO into crisis, force an internal rupture among its members, and undermine the entire Western support architecture that NATO depends on.

Or, maybe, Russia will search for conquest, without the risk of major-power escalation—and in that case, there are two countries in particular that need to be very, very worried: the tiny Caucasus nation of Georgia, and the even smaller nation of Armenia.

The Case for Armenia.

As we’re going to explain in greater detail, Armenia and Georgia are especially juicy targets for Russia, because of a few problems they share in common: their small geographical size, their regional proximity, their underpowered militaries, and their internal social divides, where strong pro-Russian elements already wield substantial power.

But if there’s any place where Armenia and Georgia are substantively different targets, it’s in the way that Vladimir Putin probably feels about each of them. In 2026, Georgia is a country that Russia practically owns—but Armenia is a nation that’s been very successful in pissing Putin off.

The story here traces back to 2022, when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and then watched helplessly as that invasion went sideways. Back then, Armenia was still locked into a frozen conflict with Azerbaijan, over the exclave territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Both countries laid claim to the region, but most of it was governed by ethnic Armenians, who made up a local majority. After a six-week war over the territory in 2020, Armenia was given assurances from Russia that its control of Nagorno-Karabakh would be preserved, with the help of Russian peacekeepers.

But in September 2023, after it became clear just how deep Russia’s problems in Ukraine had become, Azerbaijan’s leader Ilham Aliyev decided to attack Nagorno-Karabakh anyway, betting that Russia wouldn’t dare intervene.

Aliyev turned out to be exactly right; Nagorno-Karabakh was overrun, its Armenian population was expelled, its government was dissolved, and its territory was incorporated into Azerbaijan. That moment was a brutal wake-up call for Armenia, a former Soviet Socialist Republic that had long thought of itself as a part of modern Russia’s regional orbit.

As it turned out, Russia’s security guarantees weren’t worth the paper they were printed on, and Armenia hasn’t exactly stuck around waiting for Russia to see the light of day. Instead, the country is pursuing deeper ties with the global West, and especially Europe.

In 2025, Armenia passed a law mandating the national government to pursue European integration, including eventual EU membership. In the meantime, Armenia has gone to great lengths to engage with European trade networks and energy infrastructure.

In early May 2026, European leaders made the journey to the Armenian capital city of Yerevan for the first-ever EU-Armenia summit, as well as another summit aimed at signalling the EU’s willingness to work with partners outside of Europe—specifically, Canada.

Already, that was a clear signal to Russia around Armenia’s shifting loyalties, but the signal was made undeniable, by a certain name on the guest list: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Meanwhile, Armenia has chosen to work with American brokers to establish a more permanent peace with Azerbaijan, accepting a peace plan with very few concessions to Armenia, seemingly because America is at least willing to pay a bit of attention.

Naturally, Russia hasn’t been thrilled to see what Armenia’s been up to, and Moscow has not hesitated to voice its displeasure.

Relations between the two countries had been slowly breaking down since before the capture of Nagorno-Karabakh, and really started getting worse in 2018, when Armenia’s current leader, Nikol Pashinyan, came to power amidst a wave of anti-corruption protests called the Velvet Revolution.

Since then, Pashinyan has been trashing Moscow and Moscow has been trashing Pashinyan. Granted, their relationship remains quite complicated; Armenia still hosts Russian military bases, it’s still a part of Russia’s Collective Security Treaty Organization, and it still participates in the Eurasian Economic Union.

Russian corporate interests are quite powerful there, and Russia wields immense social influence through the Armenian Apostolic Church. But Armenian and international experts have been sounding the alarm, claiming that Russia is working to control or even destabilize Armenia outright.

In 2025, an Armenian-Russian billionaire and two apostolic archbishops were arrested in a very high-profile scandal, on allegations that they had been plotting a coup against Pashinyan.

In January of this year, prominent Russian television propagandist Vladimir Solovyov called for direct military action against Yerevan, when he suggested that Armenia could be targeted in a special military operation similar to the one directed toward Ukraine.

This June, Armenia will hold critical parliamentary elections, in which Russia already faces allegations of interference through the church, disinformation operations, and influence campaigns.

A recent trove of leaked documents suggested that a prominent Kremlin official, Sergei Kiriyenko, is supporting efforts to influence the vote, following his work on similar operations in Georgia and occupied Ukraine.

After Russia's actions in the nation of Georgia, both in 2008 and in the 2020s, as well as its actions against Ukraine since 2014, it should be no surprise that Armenia could be in danger. But if you'd like just a bit more proof, we'll leave it to Vladimir Putin himself, in comments that came just a few weeks ago, as of the time of writing.

Quote: “We all see what's happening with Ukraine now. But where did it all start? With Ukraine's attempt to join the EU.” During those remarks, Putin suggested that Armenia should hold a referendum on the decision to join the EU, but the nation's upcoming parliamentary vote introduces an even more important pressure point.

If Russia's alleged influence campaign should fail, then that may give Putin the pretext he needs to take more direct action. Those elections, by the way, will take place in less than two weeks, on Sunday, the seventh of June.

Even for Russia's overstretched military, an attack on Armenia may not be particularly difficult. The country's military consists of just forty-five thousand people in total, equipped with a small number of functioning main battle tanks, mostly outdated ex-Soviet artillery, and fewer than twenty combat aircraft.

Even worse, they've got only limited air defences, mostly of Soviet origin, and the country's troops simply aren't prepared to fight a drone-integrated war like Russia's been doing in Ukraine. Russia stations some four to five thousand troops on Armenian territory already, equipped with substantial firepower.

With that said, there's reason to believe that an Armenian invasion could be tougher than it sounds. The nation doesn't share a land border with Russia, and it's landlocked, meaning that Russian troops would have to be flown in, or roll through another country.

Although Georgia's leadership would most likely open its airspace to Russia—and Azerbaijan might consider it, given that Armenia could be permanently defeated—those are both tricky propositions, especially since Russia's ability to drop paratrooper units is quite limited right now.

It's not likely that Georgia would allow Russian troop convoys to roll through, while Azerbaijan and Turkey certainly wouldn't.

That doesn't mean that Russia /can't/ attack Armenia... but it does mean that unless it were to attack Georgia first, its alternative would be a combination of long-range drone and missile bombardment, and smaller attacks by its ground forces. That's not impossible, but it would be tricky, in a way that Russia may not be willing to risk.

[FRONTS PROMO]

We’re going to move over to Georgia in just a moment, but first, a quick pause to tell you all about our new subscriber site. Fronts.co is our outlet for all the stories we don’t have space to do justice here on the main channel – a place where we can dig deeper and go nerdier than we ever do on YouTube.

Every week we upload two exclusive videos, two expert-written articles, and a podcast or two, all covering the conflict and geopolitics stories that matter most to you.

Often, our coverage is focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but we also host plenty of pieces on Iran, Sudan, the Sahel, Europe, and elsewhere – not to mention all the minor conflicts that the rest of the world tends to ignore.

A subscription costs five dollars a month, or fifty dollars a year. That’s Fronts.co – check it out – and now, let’s turn to Georgia.

The Case for Georgia. As tricky as an invasion of Armenia could be for Moscow, the same cannot be said for the nation of Georgia, a country that has already suffered a full-scale Russian invasion within the last twenty years.

That, of course, was the five-day Russo-Georgian War of 2008, where, after escalation between Georgia, Russia, and Georgia’s two breakaway regions, Russia attacked its southern neighbour in battles that left around sixty-five Russians, 180 Georgians, and around sixty separatists dead, along with hundreds of civilians in Georgia and the separatist

Territories.

That conflict ended with a negotiated settlement, very much to Georgia’s disadvantage. But the bigger problem for Georgia today, is the issue of democratic backsliding amidst the rise of a political party called Georgian Dream.

First established by a Georgian oligarch who made his fortune in Russia, Georgian Dream took control of the country in the same year it was founded.

Since then, Georgian Dream has slowly but surely gained in power, and after years of quietly pulling Georgia away from the West, the country’s leadership refused to join sanctions against Russia at the start of the full-scale Ukraine invasion.

From there, Georgian Dream started to repress the media and civil society more openly, culminating in a definitive victory by Georgian Dream in a 2024 parliamentary election. That election drew intense condemnations from much of the world, with Georgian Dream accused of widespread fraud, but it hasn’t mattered.

Ever since that election, Georgian Dream has used its judiciary as a weapon against the opposition, forced dissidents into exile abroad, and made the necessary preparations to convert Georgia’s once-promising democracy into an authoritarian government.

All the while, Georgian Dream has gotten much closer to Russia, deepening economic dependence and modelling Russian legislation meant to suppress and control the media.

Just this week, Georgia created a so-called “Russophobia Monitoring Council”, a body that will hunt down what it calls anti-Russian discrimination and hate speech—in a country where pro-European protesters still demonstrate in the capital, every single night.

Given that Georgian Dream is drawing so close to Russia, it might seem strange to suggest that Russia could try and launch a Ukraine-style invasion. Indeed, if this were to happen, Russia would not be trying to push Georgian Dream out of power. Instead, Georgia presents a very unique opportunity.

It’s a place where Russian troops could make an entrance, in response to some real or contrived provocation, while working with a ruling government that could be trusted to portray Russian soldiers as heroes.

Like Armenia, Georgia’s military is quite weak; it’s only got about thirty-seven thousand active-duty troops, less than a dozen combat aircraft, and a military that hasn’t attempted any serious combat since well before the start of the global shift to drone warfare.

But Georgia’s pro-Russian leaders can order those troops to stand down, and allow the Russians in to address, say, a protest movement that Georgian Dream claims to be an internal security threat.

Or, if proud anti-Russian elements within the Georgian military do choose to fight back, then they can be defeated in isolated or localized conflicts, before being condemned by Georgian Dream as the very coup plotters and renegades that Russia needed to stop.

Making matters even easier for Russia, there are lots of ways to go about military action in Georgia specifically. If Georgian Dream is worried about being seen as complicit, then perhaps a column of Russian troops launches a surprise offensive from its oblast of North Ossetia, less than a five-hour car ride from the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.

Or, if that’s too far or there’s a risk of Georgian troops actually fighting back, maybe Georgian Dream can conveniently ignore the signs of a Russian buildup in the separatist region of South Ossetia, where the regional capital is less than a two-hour drive from Tbilisi.

Russian troops can come over the border, or launch a massive wave of missiles and drones, or conduct bomber flyovers, all to create enough of a threat that Georgia’s pro-Russian leadership can justify rolling over. “Oh, yeah, looks like you’ve got us outmatched, come fetch the keys to the kingdom.” If Russia doesn’t want to endure the headaches of

Annexation, it can, shall we say, “stabilize” Georgia for a little while before withdrawing, maybe annexing the two breakaway regions in the process—all steps that wouldn’t quite mirror Russia’s actions in eastern Ukraine, but they’d certainly rhyme.

And if Russia were to establish conditions in Georgia that gave its troop columns freedom of movement in the future, then Armenia is in even deeper trouble. If you, as an ordinary civilian, were to start a road trip tomorrow, you could drive from Tbilisi to Yerevan in about five hours.

In Russia's moment of desperation, as it looks to reverse the stagnation and embarrassment of its operations in Ukraine, Moscow is hunting for a way to reassert power.

In Ukraine, in Georgia, in Europe, or anywhere else, Russia's conduct under Vladimir Putin is consistent: it will present its adversaries with a show of force, and challenge those adversaries to call Putin's bluff. More times than not, those adversaries back down, and hand Russia major concessions on a silver platter.

Here at WarFronts, after more than four years watching Russia's conduct in Ukraine, we would hope that the rest of the world would see an unprovoked attack on Armenia—or worse, a farcical dog-and-pony show in Georgia—for what it would be: a desperate attempt to project power, by a desperate leader who's allowed his own ambition to back him into a corner.

But this is Vladimir Putin, operating on Putin's logic, using Putin's tactics, on the basis of the completely non-credible information that he has. We are confident that an action like this, targeting Armenia or Georgia under the current circumstances, would be a very stupid decision that ends in failure. We are not confident that Putin won't try anyway.

Thank you for watching.