Author: M Barbu

Top Russian Commanders Arrive in Belarus for Military Drills

Top Russian commanders arrived in neighboring Belarus on Wednesday, set to oversee 30,000 Russian troops as they train for 10 days with the Belarusian military in the latest show of Moscow’s force along the Ukrainian border.

Russia has moved two battalions of S-400 surface-to-air missile systems and numerous fighter jets into Belarus for the exercises, with Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian armed forces’ General Staff, in command of the drills that start on Thursday.

Turkish-Israeli Rapprochement On The Eastern Mediterranean: Geostrategy And Possible Reflections On Military Project Of PESCO Framework

The Permanent Structured Cooperation, or PESCO, is one of the building blocks of the EU’s Defense policy. It was set up in 2017 to enable EU member states to work more closely together in the area of security and defense. This permanent framework for defense cooperation allows willing and able member states to jointly develop defense capabilities, invest in shared projects, and enhance the operational readiness and contribution of their armed forces. To date 25 EU Member States have joined PESCO and subscribed to more binding commitments to invest, plan, develop and operate defense capabilities more together, within the Union framework. The objective is to jointly arrive at a coherent full spectrum of defense capabilities available to Member States for national and multinational missions and operations. The Council European Union today established the general conditions under which non-EU countries could exceptionally be invited to participate in individual PESCO projects, thereby paving the way for stronger and more ambitious defence cooperation with partners in the EU framework

Robert Reich: The Four Horsemen Of The Neoliberal Apocalypse

The biggest stories this week are likely to be the continuing standoff between NATO (led by the United States) and Putin in the Ukraine, the new Russo-Chinese detente, and the Republican Party’s continuing drift toward Trumpism. One way of tying these together to reveal a larger pattern is to talk about the expanded Child Tax Credit. You heard me right. The fate of the expanded Child Tax Credit illustrates a basic problem that runs through all this.

The Weaponization Of Economics (Part II)

Slippery slope

However, interesting as those experiments and observations might be, they are still the result of specific parameters within a particular setting and an environment that doesn’t resemble real life. Serious and honest behavioral economists both understand and freely admit this. Just because there was one experiment in which 12 university students chose to receive 1 chocolate today rather than 2 tomorrow, one cannot extrapolate from it that the entire country needs a public pension system and a central authority to oversee it, since all citizens are clearly incapable of saving.

The Russian Navy In The Russia-Ukraine War Scare – Analysis

Shortly after the conclusion of the Russian-Belarusian strategic Zapad-2021 exercise, open-source analysts, corroborated by U.S. intelligence findings, began reporting a new build-up of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border. Though most tracking concentrates on the movement of Russian Ground Forces equipment, the Russian Navy has also been moving, albeit at a smaller scale.

To Change Putin’s Behavior, the West Needs a New Strategy

Although the response in Western capitals to Russia’s aggressive military posturing on its border with Ukraine has been couched in clear diplomacy-first terms, military contingency planning has stepped up a notch in recent weeks. The intent of these moves, at least judging from the rhetoric of U.S. and NATO leaders as well as respected commentators, is to strengthen deterrence.

Belgian anti-terror police make 13 arrests in Antwerp

Belgian police arrested 13 suspected members of an Islamist terror group in an operation in Antwerp on Tuesday.

The suspects were detained for spreading jihadist propaganda on social media, though police said it was unclear whether they had made concrete plans to launch an attack. Around 100 police officers were deployed at 13 different addresses during the raid.

US Centcom nominee urges ‘pragmatic’ co-operation with Taliban in anti-ISIS fight

Lt Gen Erik Kurilla, the nominee to head Centcom, floated the prospect of co-operation as ISIS step up attacks in Afghanistan

President Joe Biden’s nominee to oversee US forces in the Middle East and Central Asia is floating the possibility of co-operating with the Taliban in certain instances to take out ISIS targets in Afghanistan.

Lt Gen Erik Kurilla — who is the Biden administration’s pick to head US Central Command, or Centcom — raised the idea during his nomination hearing before the Senate on Tuesday.