The Pentagon on Friday called on Russia to stand down on Ukraine as tensions rise over the threat of a Russian military invasion.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in a briefing with reporters said Moscow has for months been deploying forces along Ukraine’s border at a “consistent and steady pace,” which has been supported by Russian naval activity in the northern Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea.
Ukraine’s leader and his defense and security aides are assessing Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s intentions differently from many of their Western counterparts. Are they just more stoical after eight years of persistent Russian provocations and a long-running war in eastern Ukraine—or are they misreading their Russian adversary?
The chart of the week shows how surging energy costs have boosted inflation, especially in Europe, after fossil-fuel prices nearly doubled in the past year. Rising food prices have also helped to boost inflation.
Meanwhile, continuing supply chain disruptions, clogged ports, logistics strains and strong demand for merchandise have broadened these price pressures, especially in the United States. Higher imported goods prices have contributed to inflation in some regions, including Latin America and the Caribbean.
Strategic bottlenecks in US domestic and foreign policy over the last decade sounded the alarm about an imminent world order change in Obama and Trump’s Presidency. The AUKUS Pact seems to be the way out of Washington and London’s strategic impasse of the post-World War II order which should begin the process of paving the way for the emergence of a new Protestant White Anglo-Saxon Order (WASP).
The Biden administration has signaled how it will use its power to designate different groups as terrorists as part of its foreign policy efforts.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken took the Colombian rebel group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, off the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations list at the end of 2021.
I know the importance of this decision because I worked on adding and deleting groups and individuals on multiple lists, including the Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
The deployment, which Moscow has described as routine exercises, risks escalating a flashpoint in the strategic sea lane that Russia has previously used to pressure Kyiv.
Russia deployed more than 20 warships into the Black Sea on Wednesday, representing a troubling new source of potential military escalation at a time of already heightened tensions with Ukraine and its Western backers.
A massive and well-planned operation by the Islamic State to free thousands of the terror group’s fighters from a prison in northeastern Syria is over, more than six days after the attack plunged the facility and surrounding neighborhoods into chaos.
The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) announced Wednesday they had taken full control of the al-Sina’a prison in Hasakah, a make-shift detention facility that housed an estimated 4,000 IS fighters, as well as about 700 to 850 boys and teenagers from IS families.
Uncertain about the U.S commitment to secure the Persian Gulf, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is looking to France and others to help fulfill its security requirements.
The UAE and other Gulf states likely see France as leverage to secure additional U.S support, rather than an as a possible replacement for the U.S. security umbrella.
The January visit of Iran’s President Ibrahim Raisi to Moscow aligns Iran and Russia more closely.
The two countries see common interest in countering growing pressure on them from the United States and other western powers.
Iran and Russia are negotiating a long term economic and military accord similar to that between Iran and China.
Violence in Yemen’s Marib governorate is intensifying as warring parties fight to claim control over the strategically important region. According to local authorities, the population of Marib city, which was once less than half a million, has swelled to nearly three million as people are displaced by the fighting. Most who fled their homes are now totally reliant on humanitarian assistance, though it does not always reach them.