The terms “deterrence” and “coercive diplomacy” have figured prominently in debates over how the West should respond to the ongoing crisis over a potential Russian incursion into Ukraine.
Hamas leaders are not sitting among their people in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank. It is easier and safer for them to call on the Palestinians to send their children to carry out terrorist attacks against Israel while they are relaxing in the comfort of their hotel rooms, villas and gyms in the Qatari capital of Doha. The Hamas leaders are not going to send their own sons and daughters to engage in the jihad against Israel.
Russia is boosting its military buildup and encircling much of Ukraine despite Moscow’s claims that it is withdrawing some troops, the United States and NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday.
Images showed locations in Belarus, western Russia and annexed Crimea on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
Satellite images show Russia has moved some of its military equipment that was deployed near Ukraine, but other hardware has arrived and Moscow still has a lot of forces and equipment near its ex-Soviet neighbor, a private US company said on Thursday.
Russia has denied planning any attacks, while Ukraine military denied accusations that government troops attacked.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Thursday said Russia was violating ceasefire agreements under the Minsk accords after Kyiv earlier accused Russian-backed separatists of shelling a village.
America Must Push Back—Without Getting Dragged In
The day after the military staged a coup in Burkina Faso in January, supporters of the new regime took to the streets waving Russian flags. The scene may sound like a throwback to the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union competed for influence in Africa, but the demonstrators were taken with more recent examples of the Kremlin’s actions on the continent. They spoke approvingly about Russia’s deployment of mercenaries in Libya, Mali, and the Central African Republic (CAR) to fight off Islamist insurgents. “The Russians got good results in other African countries,” a supporter of the coup told The New York Times. “We hope they can do the same here.” According to the Daily Beast, the lieutenant colonel who led the coup, Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, had tried and failed to get the incumbent president to invite in Russian military contractors to counter threats to the government—and now that he is in charge, he may well ask Moscow for military help.
No Russian Invasion Can Undo Ukrainian Nationhood
Russian President Vladimir Putin has made no secret of how he regards Ukraine, the nation he is threatening to invade. At the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, Putin told U.S. President George W. Bush that the former Soviet state “is not even a country.” The Russian president believes the Ukrainians and the Russians are one people. It follows that Ukrainians cannot reject being part of Russia and any “anti-Russian” sentiment in Ukraine must be the result of Western meddling rather than a reflection of the preferences of Ukrainians. Putin has used this argument to characterize peaceful political mobilization in Ukraine as foreign-orchestrated coups. He also dismisses polls showing that Ukrainians now favor European Union and NATO accession over membership in Russian-led political and economic organizations.
Russia has expelled the second-most senior American diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as tensions between the two countries continue to rise over a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, the State Department said Thursday.
It sounds like something that came out of a sci-fi movie, but Brain control weapons are slowly coming to life through Chinese research and the development of biotechnology that can disorient enemies and make them easier to subdue. These types of weapons can potentially change the way we traditionally think about warfare in the future, where enemies could have an influence on a soldier’s cognitive functions.
Iraq’s federal court has ordered the Iraqi Kurdistan government to deliver all of the oil it produces to Baghdad, dismissing an oil and gas law regulating the oil industry in the autonomous region as unconstitutional.