Nine-year-old Artem Panchenko helps his grandmother stoke a smoky fire in a makeshift outdoor kitchen beside their nearly abandoned apartment block. The light is falling fast and they need to eat before the setting sun plunges their home into cold and darkness.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been packing Russia’s front lines with demoralized men with little to no military training and scant gear as he scrambles to sustain his military campaign amid mounting battlefield casualties.
“[T]his relationship [between the US and Saudi Arabia] should be based on reciprocity. If Washington is looking for its own interests, as with the Iran nuclear deal or the cancellation of the [Iranian-backed] Houthi group’s designation as a terrorist group, Saudi Arabia also has the right to seek its own interests….” — Rami Al-Khalifa, Syrian author, Elaph, October 12, 2022.
U.S. forces are equipped to handle multiple conflicts abroad simultaneously, though positioning troops and weapons throughout the Indo-Pacific to challenge threats from China poses logistical issues because it is such a vast region, Air Force Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost said Monday.
After Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the jihadi faction that runs the northwestern province of Idlib, moved into Afrin, Turkey stands to gain.
With the world’s attention focused on Ukraine, a potentially transformative development in northern Syria went largely unnoticed. On Oct. 13, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the jihadi faction that runs the northwestern province of Idlib and is by far the most powerful of all the Sunni rebel groups in Syria, moved into Afrin, the Kurdish-majority enclave that was occupied by Turkey in 2018. It did so at the expense of rebel factions operating under the umbrella of the Syrian National Army (SNA) and with the help of other factions also allied with the SNA. The latter include the Sultan Suleyman Shah Division, the Hamza Division and Ahrar al-Sham, which all have close ties to Ankara.
Russia has approximately 300 Iranian drones left in its arsenal but plans to buy thousands more, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said on Friday evening, even as on Sunday morning Iranian officials continued to deny the sale of any weapons to Moscow for use in the invasion of Ukraine.
A Diplomat Defects From the Kremlin
For three years, my workdays began the same way. At 7:30 a.m., I woke up, checked the news, and drove to work at the Russian mission to the United Nations Office in Geneva. The routine was easy and predictable, two of the hallmarks of life as a Russian diplomat.
Americans may not even know that China has struck the first blow until months after it has occurred… Americans think China’s war planners think like America’s war planners. Unfortunately, the Chinese ones do not. First strikes, despite what former intelligence officials believe, do not have to look like the invasion of Normandy in 1944.
The Wakhan Corridor, a narrow strip of territory in the Badakhshan Province of Afghanistan, is situated at the crossroads of four countries: China, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Wakhan Corridor is about 350 km long with 16 to 64 km wide at its eastern end, the corridor forks into two prongs that wrap around a salient of Chinese territory, forming the 92 km boundary between the two countries.
The difficult reality is that we may never know what would push Putin to make the decision to go nuclear…. The U.S. objective should be to deter him: make the potential cost to him so high that it would be suicidal for him even to try.
The clearest and most welcome statement was made by Biden himself in March: he stated, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”