Großwald Curated No. 35 — Named, in writing, with budget lines

Breuer signed Germany's first Military Strategy (Militärstrategie der Bundeswehr) on 22 April. The document, together with the redesignated Plan für die Streitkräfte (formerly the Capability Profile), forms the Overall Concept for Military Defence (Gesamtkonzeption der militärischen Verteidigung). The full versions are classified. An unclassified extract was published the same day, alongside a personnel growth plan, a revised reserve strategy, and the EMA26 debureaucratisation agenda.

The public extract names six national capability goals supplementing Germany's NATO capability targets: deep precision strike and air/missile defence across all ranges; information superiority and information speed; networking and digitalisation toward multi-domain operations; national command and control including cross-domain command of deep precision strikes; preservation of Germany as an operational base; and national crisis and risk provision. The Capability Profile is described as the central requirements-defining document — the instrument that establishes what the Bundeswehr needs. Its priorities shape procurement, force structure, and resource allocation. A full-equipment principle binds across all formations including reserves, with weapon-system-specific major equipment reserves for sustainment beyond the operational fleet.

Force development follows three phases. Phase 1 to 2029: focused growth maximising defence readiness from existing resources. Phase 2 to approximately 2035: structured growth across land, air, sea, cyber/space to reach 460,000 soldiers (260,000 active, 200,000 reserve). Phase 3 to 2039 and beyond: technologically superior forces. Tagesspiegel reported a concrete 2029 milestone of 204,000 active soldiers (from approximately 186,000 today), with an approved mechanism for oversubscribing training locations at up to 130 per cent capacity. The 260,000 active ceiling is described as a peacetime upper limit.

The strategy names Russia as the greatest and most immediate threat to German, European, and transatlantic security for the foreseeable future. Russia is assessed as creating the preconditions for a military attack on NATO states and already conducting hybrid operations against alliance members including Germany. In an interview published concurrently, Breuer stated the Bundeswehr assumes Russia could be capable of a large-scale attack on NATO territory from 2029. The strategy describes the anticipated war picture as the dissolution of boundaries — between home front and battlefield, civilian and military, internal and external security, combatant and non-combatant — and states that adherence to recognised ethical and legal principles cannot be relied upon. Four military-strategic priorities are named: deterrence and defence; mitigation of hybrid attacks below the threshold of war; stability in Europe's southern neighbourhood; protection of international sea and communications lines.

The strategy describes Germany's role in alliance reassurance and deterrence in terms of scale — largest European economy, largest allied power without nuclear forces of its own — and binds it to particular responsibility for the defence of NATO. The permanent stationing of a combat brigade in Lithuania is named as the visible expression. The strategy also introduces a One-Theatre-Approach: the Bundeswehr must think and act across geostrategic spaces, connect theatres and domains, and generate strategic effects with a single set of forces rather than treat individual theatres in isolation.

Pistorius presented the documents in Berlin alongside the EMA26 debureaucratisation agenda — 153 measures with 580 implementation steps — and asked reporters who might obtain the classified versions not to publish them. Asked whether the classified strategy addresses a scenario in which the US withdraws from Europe: yes.

At the informal European Council in Nicosia on 24 April, Cypriot President Christodoulides confirmed that leaders had agreed the previous evening that the European Commission will prepare a blueprint on how the EU responds when a member state triggers Article 42.7 of the Treaty on European Union. "Let's say France triggers Article 42.7. Which countries are going to be the first to respond to the request of the French government, what are the needs of the government or the country that triggers Article 42.7? All those will be put in a blueprint." Article 42.7 is the EU's mutual-assistance clause; it has been invoked once, by France in 2015. HR/VP Kaja Kallas briefed leaders on ongoing work; her team is scenario-planning across hybrid attacks, conventional attacks, and a case in which both Article 42.7 and NATO's Article 5 are triggered in parallel.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the structural gap directly: the treaty is clear about the what, not about who does what when. The complementarity formulation in the senior-EU-official briefing to Reuters names the EU's instruments as sanctions, financial assistance, and humanitarian aid; member-state military contributions remain voluntary, and NATO is described as the bedrock of collective defence. Latvia's Braže and Lithuania's Nauseda held the Article-5-first line; that is the binding constraint on the work and explains the complementarity language.

Polish Prime Minister Tusk, in an FT interview published on 24 April, questioned whether the United States would be loyal to its NATO Article 5 obligations and warned that Russia could attack an alliance member in months rather than years. He cited the September 2025 Russian drone incursion into Polish airspace as a case where some allies pretended that nothing happened. Tusk framed his intervention not as Article 5 scepticism but as a call for Article 5 guarantees to change into something very practical. The push for the blueprint itself came from Cyprus, which sits outside NATO and was directly affected by the drone strike on the British Akrotiri base during the Iran war. No public delivery timeline for the Commission draft has been set.

Signal No. 38 committed this publication to a falsifiable two-threshold test on April Russian export revenue: above $16.5 billion with Brent below $95 revises the fiscal-compression reading; below $14 billion with Brent at or above $90 and no fresh outage sustains the March-anomaly reading. Two weeks of subsequent data require this Curated to specify the test more carefully than the original framework allowed. The result is a method, not a finding.

The market state on 24 April sits outside the Signal 38 framework's discriminating range. Brent settled at $105.33, up approximately 16 per cent on the week, with the Strait of Hormuz on the EIA's characterisation in extreme market tightness in the very short term — Dated Brent spot trading at a premium of more than $25 per barrel to front-month futures in early April. The two-week US–Iran ceasefire from 8 April was extended indefinitely while Washington awaits a new Tehran proposal. Brent above both thresholds through the test window means the framework cannot discriminate price from volume as specified.

The IEA's April Oil Market Report, published 14 April — the same day Sig 38 went out — already reported Russian oil export revenue rising to $19 billion in March against $9.75 billion in February. That is above both Sig 38 thresholds at first print. The proximate facilitating instrument was the US Treasury 30-day waiver for the delivery and sale of Russian crude loaded between 12 March and 11 April; whether Treasury renews it is one of the variables shaping April. March does not read cleanly as a one-off anomaly. It carries war-driven price elevation through to revenue realisation.

The discriminator the Signal 38 framework underweighted is payment lag. Sergey Vakulenko (Carnegie, 20 April) sets out that most Russian crude is sold six to eight weeks after loading at Russian ports, priced on benchmark formulas at delivery in China and India. March's $19 billion reflects January–February shipments at higher post-Iran-war prices. The late-March port-strike shipment decline that Vakulenko quantifies — daily seaborne exports falling from 5.2 to 3.5 million barrels per day between 25 March and 11 April — will substantially print in May or later revenue, not April. April export revenue, when it prints in the May OMR, will largely reflect price effects on shipments loaded before the strikes.

The volume side of the cross-pressure is real. Four major Russian refineries are confirmed offline simultaneously per the 22 April Reuters compilation: Syzran, Novokuibyshevsk, Tuapse, NORSI; combined nominal capacity above 730,000 bpd. April crude output is down 300,000–400,000 bpd against the Q1 average per a five-source Reuters exclusive — the sharpest monthly decline since the pandemic. The IEA cut its Russian supply projection for the remainder of 2026 by 120,000 bpd. Druzhba southern-branch pumping resumed at 09:35 GMT on 22 April; the northern branch closes 1 May as Moscow ends Kazakh KEBCO transit to Schwedt. The 20th sanctions package adopted at Coreper on 22 April adds asset freezes on seven Russian refineries that overlap directly with the facilities Ukraine is bombing offline, plus 46 vessels added to the shadow fleet sanctions list and a maritime services ban agreed in principle pending G7 coordination. None of this prints in April export revenue. Most of it prints in May or June.

The specified test, therefore, runs across two prints, not one. The May OMR (~15 May) prints April export revenue; on the data above, it is largely a price-effect read against pre-strike shipments and is most useful as a confirmation of the price line, not the volume line. The June OMR (~15 June) is the first to substantially carry the late-March port-strike volume effects via the payment-lag mechanism; it is the report against which the volume side of the cross-pressure can be read. Vakulenko's interim measurement — in the two weeks following the strikes, notional weekly Russian oil revenue ran 17 per cent below the preceding two weeks but still 62 per cent above late-February levels — is consistent with this construction: the price effect dominates the volume effect at the weekly notional level; whether it continues to dominate at the monthly realised level is the question the June OMR resolves.

Triangulation across CREA, KSE Institute, and the Moscow Times confirms the same picture from different methodologies. CREA: Russian fossil-fuel export revenues +52% month-on-month in March to €713 million per day, with crude oil revenue +94%. KSE Institute: the Iran war fundamentally reshaped the Russian revenue outlook, with Urals and ESPO prices up roughly $40 per barrel between February and 18 March. AriCapital CEO Tretyakov, cited in the Moscow Times: Russia could collect approximately 1 trillion rubles ($12.7 billion) in oil and gas budget revenue in April, twice January–February levels and 40 per cent above March; FT-cited estimates put incremental daily federal revenue at up to $150 million.

The framework error in Sig 38 is acknowledged. The threshold construction underweighted Brent above $95 for the duration of the test window, did not carry payment lag explicitly, and named the May OMR as the resolution checkpoint when the May OMR is in fact the price-line checkpoint and the June OMR is the volume-line checkpoint. The revised test is sequential, not single-threshold: May OMR for the price-effect read against the upper Sig 38 threshold; June OMR for the volume-effect read against a threshold this Curated commits to specify once April production and shipment data are sufficient to construct it. The directional read on Russian fiscal compression for April is parked between the two prints.