Remote land and people of the Russian Arctic The Biden Administration’s efforts to put on fast track Sweden’s accession as a NATO member petered out as Turkiye balked, exercising its prerogative to withhold approval unless its conditions regarding Stockholm’s past dalliance with Kurdish separatist elements is fully addressed. President Biden was bullish and insisted publicly …
Continue reading “Sweden hustled into military pact with US”
Building hit by 6 US-made HIMARS missiles on New Year Day killing at least 89 Russian conscripts, Makeyevka, Ukraine In all probability, the message conveyed to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov from his American counterpart Antony Blinken via Israel’s new foreign minister Eli Cohen concerned the Ukrainian missile attack on Makeyevka (Donetsk) on New Year …
President Vladimir Putin addressed an expanded meeting of the Russian Defence Ministry Board, Moscow, Dec. 21, 2022 The defining moment in US President Joe Biden’s press conference at the White House last Wednesday, during President Zelensky’s visit, was his virtual admission that he is constrained in the proxy war in Ukraine, as European allies don’t …
Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) with Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, Minsk, December 19, 2022 The visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin to Minsk on Monday, accompanied by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, turned out to be immensely consequential for European security. Putin drew attention to it rather obliquely at his news …
Defining moment in the Battle of Donbass, as the 4-month long defiant Ukrainian resistance to the Russian offensive is ending The meet-up location of NATO foreign ministers on November 29-30— Bucharest — was where ten years ago, former US President George W. Bush persuaded America’s transatlantic partners that Ukraine and Georgia should one day join …
Continue reading “Conflict in Ukraine is doomed to escalate”
Statue of Fidel Castro, first of its kind anywhere in the world, was unveiled by President Vladimir Putin, Moscow, Nov. 22, 2022 A three-meter-tall bronze statue of Fidel Castro was unveiled on Tuesday in the Fidel Castro Square in Moscow’s Sokol District by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel in memory of the …
US president Joe Biden (R) and Chinese president Xi Jinping met at Bali, Nov 14, 2022. Biden said they discussed their responsibility to prevent competition and find ways to work together. The seventeenth G20 Heads of State and Government Summit held in Bali, Indonesia, on 15–16 November stands out as a consequential event from many angles. The international politics …
Very innocuously, the Biden Administration has ‘sensitised’ the world opinion that American troops are indeed present on Ukrainian soil in Russia’s immediate neighbourhood. Washington made a “soft landing” with an unnamed senior Pentagon official making the disclosure to the Associated Press and the Washington Post. The official gave an ingenious explanation that the US troops …
Russian Duma ratified the accession of four Ukrainian territories into the Federation, Moscow, October 3, 2022 [This is an abridged version of my column featured by The Cradle, published from Beirut, which can be seen here.] Russian Duma’s ratification of the annexation of four regions of Ukraine (Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as …
The referendum on September 23-27 in the Donbass and southern Kherson and Zaporozhye regions of Ukraine on their accession to Russian Federation is, prima facie, an exercise of the right of self-determination by the native population who reject the western-backed regime change in Kiev in 2014 and the ascendancy of extreme nationalist forces with neo-Nazi …
