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The leaked US intelligence documents that have surfaced in recent weeks contain an array of heterogeneous data, and there is a lot of information about Russia. Yet while some of it looks plausible, others appear to be outright fabrications or, perhaps, information from a conspiracy Telegram channel.
Yet the document claiming that Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi allegedly instructed his military to produce up to 40,000 missiles for covert shipment to Russia can still be placed in the first category.
While the Washington Post reported Monday on additional documents revealing that Cairo had paused this plan following talks with US officials, instead deciding to produce ammunition for Ukraine (although ultimately there is no indication it proceeded with either), there are some indications in Moscow the initial report has some truth to it.
One indication that the intelligence was likely accurate is the reaction of pro-Russian bloggers and experts, as it was the only one from the whole trove of leaked documents that caused any semblance of polar opinions in Russia.
For example, Andrei Klintsevich, who for a long time oversaw the development of Russian youth military-patriotic programs, did not publicly rule out the real nature of the report.
"Egypt has both stockpiles of these missiles (122-millimeter unguided rockets) and production capabilities. When there is an opportunity to make money, as they say, why not?" Klintsevich unashamedly pointed out in an interview, despite the strict laws in Russia about the spread of fake news.
The ultra-patriotic Telegram channel Rybar, which is associated with the Ministry of Defense and which American think tanks like to quote, also did not rule out the possibility. Its authors acknowledge Cairo's close military technical cooperation with Washington, and the annual military aid of about $1 billion. Still, they wrote that any loss of US aid "will not hit the Egyptian economy as hard as the deterioration of relations with Russia," because the Egyptian army has a significant number of MiG-29M fighters and Ka-52 helicopters, and the economy is highly dependent on Russian tourism and trade.
"Therefore, Egypt would hardly risk refusing to sell the ammunition mentioned in the documents: the lot is not that big and several tens of thousands of shells will suffice for at most a week of combat operations of medium intensity," Rybar noted in a post.
Yet not everyone in Russia agrees. Russian military expert Yury Lyamin, on the contrary, thinks that Cairo will not risk the entire spectrum of relations with the Pentagon for the sake of ammunition sales to Moscow. And Kirill Semenov, an expert at the Russian International Affairs Council, suggests that the document may be disinformation on the part of American opponents of excessive military aid to Egypt.
However, we should pay attention to another point that has escaped the attention of both Russian and American — and Egyptian — analysts.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, speaking at a press conference in January 2023, pointed to the development of military-technical cooperation between Moscow and Cairo. He cited the meeting of the two countries' commission on military-technical cooperation and the fifth joint naval exercise Bridge of Friendship, both "last December."
But this is incorrect information, and Lavrov obviously got the dates mixed up — consciously or not. The fifth exercise Bridge of Friendship was held in the Mediterranean Sea in December 2021, before the outbreak of war in Ukraine. The seventh meeting of the joint commission on military-technical cooperation also took place in August 2021 in Moscow. The eighth meeting, which was scheduled for July 2022 in Cairo, was canceled, according to Al-Monitor sources close to the expert council of the board of the Russian Military-Industrial Commission.
Also, in 2022 Egypt and Russia refrained for the first time since 2016 from holding airborne forces exercises. The only bilateral contacts in the defense sphere concerned a meeting of the Russian-Egyptian Working Group on counterterrorism through the Foreign Ministry and the call of Russian ships to Alexandria in December 2022 to replenish supplies.
No Egyptian units were at the Vostok-2022 exercise involving foreign troops, with which Moscow was trying to demonstrate its potential, despite the unsuccessful course of action on the Ukrainian front.
However, in 2022 Egypt did hold maneuvers with Oman, Greece, and joint exercises with the United States and Spain. The plans for 2023, which were announced by the Russian Ministry of Defense in January 2023, also do not include either naval or land-based joint exercises with Egypt.
It was probably Cairo that initiated the suspension of military activities with Russia after the outbreak of war in Ukraine in February 2022. The one issue that is probably of extreme concern to Cairo is the supply of wheat. The Egyptian government subsidizes bread for nearly two-thirds of the country's population. At the end of 2022, Egyptian officials reportedly relied more on imports of Russian wheat, despite the sharp decline in grain imports and the diversification of suppliers of the commodity.
Could Egypt seriously consider supplying missiles to Russia when it chose to limit military contact with Moscow? It would seem to contradict the logic that Cairo has followed since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
Supplying 40,000 rockets would really help the Russian military industrial complex, which, according to some estimates, produces about 20,000 large-caliber (152-mm and 122-mm) shells a month. However, since the Russian artillery uses from 20,000 to 60,000 shells per day during intense combat, 40,000 from Egypt is still a drop in the ocean.
