In a press briefing on Tuesday, the spokesman for the U.S. Department of State, Ned Price, renewed his country’s concerns about a breach of the 2019 ceasefire agreement in northeast Syria and said that any escalation by Turkey would affect the battle against the Islamic State Organization (ISIS).
President Bashar al-Assad has stressed that Russia is subjected to a war that cannot be linked to the issue of NATO expansion alone. Instead, it is a continuous war that did not stop even before communism or World War I, affirming that the strength of Russia today constitutes a restoration of the lost international balance.
Fondul Monetar Internaţional a avertizat guvernul că trebuie să ia măsuri fiscale, reforma impozitelor şi taxelor şi creştrea lor pentru a reface spaţiul fiscal sub 3% din PIB şi a preveni astfel deteriorarea finanţelor publice. Instituția estimează o creștere economică de 3,5 – 4,5% în 2022 și 2022
IRAN
In a 30-2 vote (with three abstentions), the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Board of Governors on Wednesday passed a resolution censuring Iran’s lack of cooperation in answering agency safeguards concerns on activities at undeclared sites.
When Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov visits his Turkish counterpart, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, in Ankara this week, Turkey’s proposal to establish a safe transport corridor for Ukrainian grain exports will be a top agenda item. If realized, the Black Sea corridor would require a naval escort, mine-clearing, and inspections to ensure that grain ships do not transport weapons—delicate tasks that necessitate a Turkish role because of the country’s geography. There is plenty at stake: The United Nations and economists are warning that continued blockage of Ukrainian grain exports could lead to famine and instability in Africa and privation elsewhere. Meanwhile, Ukraine has accused Russia of looting its grain.
When Mali’s government saw Tuareg separatists and jihadists storming from the north toward the capital Bamako in 2012, it turned to France—a former colonial power—for help. Operation Serval stopped the advance and was later transformed into a regional counterterrorism operation, dubbed Barkhane. France was gradually joined by other European countries, and the Sahel region had come to host the largest deployment of European forces abroad—with around eight thousand troops.
The Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security is delighted to invite you to a conversation on “Allied resolve: NATO perspectives on the Russian invasion of Ukraine” with four former NATO Secretaries General on Wednesday, June 15 from 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. EDT (16:00 to 17:00 CET) on Zoom. This edition of the Atlantic Council’s Front Page event series will feature Secretaries General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Lord George Robertson, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, and Javier Solana in a discussion on how to better address the crisis.
Ukraine’s successes in resisting and even turning back an invasion by a numerically superior Russian force has raised expectations in East Asia that smaller nations in the region could conceivably fend off an attack from a large military like China’s. Taiwan, of course, has long struggled with executing such a defense strategy, but since its strategic considerations are in many ways unique, other countries nominally threatened by China may not be able to draw as many lessons from Taipei’s experience. Ukraine’s performance in its war against Russia, on the other hand, may look to them like a more relevant model—for better or worse.
While the war in Syria has receded from the international spotlight, residents in the country’s northeast are bracing for a new wave of armed conflict. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has for months threatened to launch a military invasion of the region to push back Syrian Kurdish fighters and create a buffer zone in the border area between the two countries. Turkish military deployments and diplomatic outreach to Russia suggest that a decision from Ankara to launch a military operation is likely and may even possibly be imminent.
Back in June 2011, when news began to filter out from Syria of the first signs of armed resistance against the Baathist regime of President Bashar al-Assad, few could have predicted the level of disruption to the global order that the conflict in Syria would go on to produce. After months of brutal violence against protesters inflicted by the Assad regime, local inhabitants around the town of Jisr al-Shughour in the northern province of Idlib seized a police station on June 4, triggering a major shift whose implications few observers fully understood. Two days later, armed resistance led by police officers who had defected to the opposition in the face of approaching Syrian military units marked the beginning of a conflict that would reshape the politics of the Middle East and Europe.