Ukraine is using its Turkish-made armed drones to deadly effect against Russian forces. Turkey’s president benefits too.
Given its effectiveness against Russian forces, it should come as no surprise that Turkey’s Bayraktar TB-2 armed drone has its own Ukrainian ‘war song’ on YouTube, with more than half a million clicks.
The Russian army has expanded its military operations in the Syrian desert region since early April, following the decline of its operations in March and late February, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).
The Observatory indicated that the Russian fighter jets launched 240 air raids on the Syrian desert since early April.
Along with China, Iran, and North Korea, Russia is one of a handful of strategic competitors posing a substantial threat to U.S. strategic interests.
Russia has now interfered to some extent in at least three democratic elections in the United States. Russian hackers are probably responsible for the recent SolarWinds attack on U.S. government agency networks. Russia has been aggressively undermining U.S. interests in proxy wars in Syria, Libya, and across the African continent, and it is backing the Taliban against the United States in Afghanistan.
Turkish minister Cavusoglu also raised the question of whether the sanctions against Russia will be lifted in the event that the Kremlin withdraws its soldiers from Ukraine.
On Thursday, Foreign Affairs Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu announced that Turkey will not join the sanctions of the European Union against Russia and will only apply the sanctions determined by the United Nations.
Iran’s future should not be dependent on the success or failure of negotiations to revive the nuclear agreement with the world powers, the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told senior officials on Tuesday, according to state television. Khamenei said that the negotiations, reported to be stalled for the last month over a few remaining issues on which both Iran and the United States blame the other side for intransigence, “are progressing well,” but added that the officials “absolutely do not wait for nuclear negotiations in planning for the country and move forward.” He also called on his country’s negotiators to remain steadfast in “resisting America’s excessive demands.” Some of Iran’s demands include removing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the US terror list and an American promise that there will be no repeat of former US President Donald Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the deal.
Then there was what turned out to be a myth about the success of Turkish drones used by the Ukrainian army inflicting “huge” damage on the invading Russian columns. Drones, regardless of their capabilities, cannot be game-changers in a conflict with such vastly asymmetrical military might. The West must send jets, tanks, anti-aircraft, anti-armor and anti-ship missiles, and other weapons to Ukraine to repel Russia’s Chinese-backed aggression — fast — or the US and Europe will soon find themselves enmeshed in wars even messier to fight.
U.S.-government document shows Russia’s top state companies stand to cash in when sanctions drop
Several of Russia’s top state-controlled nuclear companies stand to gain billions of dollars in revenue as part of a new nuclear accord with Iran that will waive sanctions on these firms so that they can build up Tehran’s nuclear infrastructure, according to a U.S. government-authored document reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
“In Turkey, human rights lawyers are particularly targeted for their work representing human rights defenders, victims of human rights violations, victims of police violence and torture, and many people who simply express dissenting opinions.” — Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, June 9, 2021.
Speaking to reporters this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the future he sees for his country in unusual terms: as “a big Israel.”
Gone, he said, are hopes for “an absolutely liberal” state—replaced by the likely reality of armed defense forces patrolling movie theaters and supermarkets. “I’m confident that our security will be the number-one issue over the next ten years,” Zelenskyy added.
The long-awaited Turkish-US strategic mechanism aims to set up regular channels to help the two countries cooperate where they can and prevent outstanding issues from blowing up into crises.
Following months of diplomacy, Turkey and the United States have launched a strategic mechanism to boost cooperation in areas such as economy and defense.