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.
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.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that the West was “preparing for the invasion of our land, including Crimea,” during the noticeably smaller May 9th Russian Victory Day Parade.
“The West was preparing for the invasion of Russia, NATO was creating tensions at the borders. They did not want to listen to Russia. They had other plans,” Putin claimed.
An interminable and unwinnable war in Europe? That’s what NATO leaders fear and are bracing for as Russia’s war in Ukraine grinds into its third month with little sign of a decisive military victory for either side and no resolution in sight.
Although great empires rank among the most powerful engines of world history, they are also among the most dangerous, especially as they brood over their decline.
The UAF does not have similar weapons, and it is almost impossible to hide from the impact of thermobaric missiles.
TOS “Blazing Sun”
On May 6, there were reports that the TOS-1A “Blazing Sun” destroyed several buildings used by the Ukrainian army as strongholds in the defence of Krasny Liman— a city in the Kramatorsk district of the DPR. There is no official confirmation of this information yet, but in this case something else is curious. Rocket artillery is increasingly being used as a high-precision weapon: a quarter of a full volley of “Blazing Sun” was enough to destroy the enemy’s fortifications and break the resistance.
The Ukrainian news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda reported May 5 that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson used his surprise visit to Kyiv last month to pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to cut off peace negotiations with Russia, even after the two sides appeared to have made tenuous progress toward a settlement to end the war.