China on Tuesday vowed to take countermeasures after the US announced a plan to sell $100 million worth of Patriot missile upgrades to the island of Taiwan, which would be the first US arms sale to the island in 2022 and the second under the Biden administration.
French President Emmanuel Macron said Tuesday there is an opportunity for further negotiations to de-escalate the crisis on the Ukraine-Russian border, after talks with his Ukrainian counterpart, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in Kyiv.
“Our desire for the following weeks and months is for the situation to stabilize and for us to be able to re-engage through new mechanisms of guarantees, a sustainable de-escalation,” Macron said Tuesday.
Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday afternoon, stressing the further deepening of “back-to-back” strategic coordination in upholding international fairness and justice and adhering to the four consensuses in supporting each other’s sovereignty, security and development interests to better tackle external interference and regional threats, as they exchanged views on a series of major issues regarding global strategic security and stability.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping have called on the West to “abandon the ideologized approaches of the Cold War” as the two leaders showed their deepening “no limits” relationship amid a standoff between Moscow and the West over Ukraine.
Complex ties stretch across centuries and continents, but Turkey’s affinity for its ethnic kin is taking a backseat to global relations with Russia.
Ilmi Umerov, a Crimean Tatar political leader, was lying on a hospital bed in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea in his pajamas when Russian secret service agents carted him off to the airport and put him on a plane to Ankara with fellow Crimean Tatar political detainee Ahtem Chigoz.
War would bring Turkey under intense pressure from its Western allies to join putative sanctions against Russia, a critical trading partner and supplier of natural gas.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Feb. 3 meeting with his counterpart Volodymr Zelensky in Ukraine yielded a string of accords aimed at deepening economic and military ties between Ankara and Kyiv and thereby significantly raised the stakes for both sides should Russia attack the former Soviet state.
Grupul Wagner, o grupare de mercenari condusă de unul dintre cei mai apropiați aliați ai președintelui Rusiei, Vladimir Putin, transferă zeci de luptători din Africa în Europa de Est, unde forțele ruse amenință Ucraina.
“There is a growing threat that seeks to transform the European Union into an ideologically charged federalist super-state; a corporation which disregards national identity and sovereignty, and therefore democracy, plurality and the interests of the citizens of the nations that form the Union. This drift endangers the Union itself by moving away from the Christian European ideals on which it was founded…. We should cooperate and join forces to protect Europe from enforced ideologies and anti-democratic drift that are leading to its downfall.” — Joint Statement, Madrid Summit, January 29, 2022.
Crisis in Guinea-Bissau, coup in Burkina Faso reflect how ‘stabilization’ policies fall short.
The government of Guinea-Bissau says it survived an attempted coup d’état yesterday, just days after Burkina Faso suffered the fifth coup in nine months around the greater Sahel. These upheavals cement this African region as the most pronounced center of a global crisis: Poor and authoritarian governance is breeding extremism and transnational criminality, igniting violence and undermining efforts to build democracies. Following last year’s military power grabs in Chad, Mali, Guinea and Sudan, the new crises highlight widening risks to security — for the 135 million people of the Sahel region, and ultimately for Europe and the United States. They also point to changes needed in U.S. and international policies.
U.S. and other donors must engage Taliban on their finances so that aid doesn’t pay for costs already covered by Afghanistan’s government budget.
Although economic and humanitarian conditions in Afghanistan continue to deteriorate, the Taliban have taken some positive steps toward financial stability by publishing a fiscally responsible three-month budget and raising considerable amounts of domestic revenue — especially through customs duties, which have risen with a crackdown on corruption.