The holder of the highest seat in the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, said that the West is partly to blame for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, the Pope said “that barking of NATO at the door of Russia” has pushed Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, which was not a part of the alliance.
The bottom line
While Russia has made slight progress in the Donbas, the line of control has hardly budged and the Kremlin’s campaign has largely stalled.
The Ukrainian counteroffensive near Kharkiv remains strong, with Russian forces being pushed back toward the Russian border.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin confronts a series of humiliating battlefield setbacks since his February 24 invasion of Ukraine, and amid an increased flow of Western arms into the country, the risk of escalation remains all too real.
If NATO blood would in fact be spilt should Russia invade Poland or the Baltic states, why have we utterly rejected the prospect of spilling it to help protect Ukraine from Putin’s mass killings, torture, rape and destruction? Ukraine is not a NATO member and NATO states have no treaty obligation to come to its defence as they do to each other. But that is surely just a technicality, a few lines on a page. There is no practical or moral difference between protecting a friend who is a member of the alliance and one who is not.
Recently, the central government of China has issued a new policy on the “Opinions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Accelerating the Construction of a Large Unified National Market (hereafter referred to as ‘Opinions’)”. The Opinions propose to speed up the establishment of a large unified national system as well as rules to promote smooth domestic demand. The capital market is very concerned with the creation of an “efficient market” and an “effective government”, particularly on how the “unified”, “efficient” and “effective” are defined and executed. There are different understandings and views on various aspects in this regard. As part of the national unified market, the capital market is generally confused about the future direction and possible trends. To ANBOUND researchers, this raises the question of balancing between an “efficient market” and “effective government” to form a unified capital market structure.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has reaffirmed Russia’s strategic interest to make coordinated efforts aim at building logistics hub along the coastline of the Republic of Eritrea during diplomatic talks attended by Foreign Minister of the State of Eritrea Osman Saleh who, on April 27, paid a working visit to Moscow.
Ahead of the diplomatic talks, there was the speculation that Russia would use Eritrea that voted against the United Nations resolution on March 2. Late February, Russia started “special military operations” directed at demilitarizing and denazifying in the post-Soviet republic of Ukraine.
While the Kremlin is busy in the west, developments to the south promise further threats to its aggressive policy in the borderlands.
Overshadowed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the South Caucasus is witnessing huge developments which could potentially decrease tensions between Armenia on the one hand and Turkey and Azerbaijan on the other. The process might also critically affect Russia’s position in the region and may even give some momentum to the West’s ambivalent policy.
Moscow may be drawing most of its conscripts for the war in Ukraine from ethnic minority regions such as Buryatia and Dagestan (see EDM, May 4), but there appears to be a wartime division of labor amongst the voluntarist Cossack movement as well. In particular, one can observe a distinction between “fighters” and “cheerleaders”—that is, those Cossacks actually engaged in combat in a war zone versus those tasked with maintaining morale back on the home front. Evidence of this seeming division of labor requires a close reading of the local media sources linked to the Cossack movement, such as the website of the All-Russian Cossack Society (Vsko.ru). As of early May, this site published a total of 70 articles related to Cossack involvement in the war effort, of which 21 named a specific host in the title. Fully one-third of those articles (7) concerned the Kuban Cossacks, with most reporting on that group’s combat role.
“Sacramento police want your guns in exchange for gas money,” says a May 6 Sacramento Bee headline. The department asks residents to give away their firearms, which the Second Amendment authorizes them to keep and bear, for a $50 gas gift card that would not even provide a fill-up for many vehicles.
Rights organisations say refugees going into hiding as Home Office admits LGBTQ+ people could face persecution in African country
Ministers’ threats to send unauthorised migrants to Rwanda are having a detrimental impact on the physical and psychological health of people seeking asylum, according to two major refugee charities.