While Bulgaria will not just benefit from other’s security, Sofia de facto refused an additional presence of NATO forces on the country’s territory in connection with the Ukraine crisis and committed to resolving it diplomatically.
The position of the Bulgarian government is clear – Bulgaria will be a constructive ally in NATO and the EU, and will maintain a responsible and predictable position. This was stated by Prime Minister Kirill Petkov during an extraordinary session of parliament on Ukraine on Wednesday.
Households of Czech seniors are highly vulnerable to current electricity and heating prices spikes. Up to 60% of them are at risk, and around 40% already suffer from energy poverty. However, the current situation related to high gas prices is not the only factor contributing to this negative trend.
As Russia threatens to move its forces across the Ukrainian border, the talk in Washington, D.C. is focused on how many weapons and troops the United States can send and how quickly, how to design the most crippling sanctions, and whether to impose them before or after an invasion occurs.
Why won’t Russia’s Vladimir Putin let Ukraine go? He might not be able to, according to a former head of Britain’s MI6 external intelligence agency, Alex Younger.
In an interview Tuesday with the BBC, Younger said he cannot see how the Russian leader can back down as fears mount that Putin is poised to order a Russian invasion of Ukraine, a former Soviet republic.
“George, you have to understand that Ukraine is not even a country. Part of its territory is in Eastern Europe and the greater part was given to us.” These were the ominous words of President Vladimir Putin of Russia to President George W. Bush in Bucharest, Romania, at a NATO summit in April 2008. (This is the beginning paragraph of Fiona Hills’s article on January 24 in New York Times.)
As the Russian military build-up on the Ukrainian border continues, talks were held throughout the last week directly between US and Russia, followed by the Russia-NATO and Russia-OSCE dialogue. Now, Moscow says, it is waiting for answers on its various demands regarding the security architecture in Europe, before deciding its future course of action.
The United States has emerged as a major architect of the new map of the Middle East while continuing its military disengagement. This aims to extricate itself from a military quagmire as much as to recover forces and concentrate them towards a new objective: The Indo-Pacific zone and China. Washington intends to leave the keys of regional security exclusively to local actors.
The EAEU-Iran preferential trade agreement (PTA) implemented on October 27, 2019, offers lower tariffs on 862 commodity types, of which 502 are Iranian exports to the Eurasian Economic Union. This agreement significantly increased the trade volume between Iran and the member countries of the Union. In the period between October 2019 and October 2020, the trade volume grew by more than 84%. Indeed, the trade flows gradually gathered pace and the value of trade between Iran and the members of the EAEU exceeded $1.957 billion in the first five months of the current Iranian calendar year (March 21 – August 22, 2021), marking 96 per cent growth compared to the same period of the previous year. As the agreement was designed to be in effect for 3 years, it is to expire on October 5, 2022. For this reason, the parties have recently begun technical and expert negotiations to upgrade the PTA to a free trade agreement (FTA). If this happens, the number of items of the agreement will rise to at least 8000, which is sure to set off a massive increase in the volume of trade between Iran and the Union. Although there are various capacities and advantages between Iran and the Eurasian Economic Union, there are also problems that need to be taken seriously in the process of upgrading the EAEU-Iran PTA to an FTA. These include:
The Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the second largest and hugely influential group in the Gaza Strip after Hamas, does not believe that the conflict with Israel is over Jerusalem, settlements, borders, checkpoints or Palestinian prisoners.
Qattati’s article shows that PIJ and its masters in Tehran consider not only Israel as the “enemy,” but the US too. This is the same Iran whose representatives are currently negotiating with the US and other world powers about reviving the 2015 nuclear deal.
‘Cubs of Caliphate’ are among 700 boys held in Islamic State prison, as Syrian Kurdish forces keep up the battle to retake control
Kurdish-led forces in northeast Syria battled for a fifth day to regain full control of the country’s largest prison for Islamic State (IS) detainees, as coalition aircraft bombed jihadi targets in support of the effort to contain the deadliest violence since the territorial defeat of their so-called “caliphate” in 2019.
