A slowdown for good or a temporary lull during the storm of war?
While the number of refugees who have flooded out of Ukraine nears 4 million, fewer people have crossed the border in recent days. Border guards, aid agencies and refugees themselves say Russia’s unpredictable war on Ukraine offers few signs whether it’s just a pause or a permanent drop-off.
The effects of the war in Ukraine are already being felt across the world, from rocking world energy markets to spurring a growing refugee crisis in Europe.
But the conflict could have more ripple effects, including sparking a global food crisis.
The Ukrainian military has benefited significantly from security cooperation efforts of the U.S. and its allies, which have provided Kyiv with training and weapons that have proved crucial so far in bleeding Russian forces.
In addition to training provided by the U.S., the U.K. and Canada have also provided training, while a plethora of Western and NATO countries have provided supplies, equipment, weaponry, and ammunition.
Since 2014, the U.S. has supplied Ukraine with more than $2.5 billion in military assistance, including supplying the Ukrainian military with everything from counter-mortar radars to Javelin anti-tank missiles.
According to a recent report from Yahoo News, secret support provided by CIA paramilitaries was indispensable to Ukrainian forces, including snipers and other elite units who benefited from this covert action training program.
In Ukraine, the Russians are still launching airstrikes on the capital city of Kyiv, but it appears the Russian military is less interested now in conducting ground operations there than they have been in the past and are instead now focused on an eastern area of the country known as the Donbas.
On Feb. 27, nothing less than a revolution took place in Germany. In a 30-minute speech to parliament, Chancellor Olaf Scholz overturned all the old certainties that have dominated German security policy for over 30 years. He replaced them with an ambitious agenda that had defense, a topic with which Germany normally only reluctantly engages, at its core.
At the NATO summit this week, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine lamented what he viewed as the failure of the United States and its allies to help establish a “no-fly zone in any way” over his nation. This follows his earlier pleas for a no-fly zone imposed by NATO or the United States soon after Russia began bombarding Ukraine. The Biden administration and NATO leadership as a whole have continued to reject proposals to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine. They are right to do so.
Germany is considering buying gas from Qatar amid the war in Ukraine and the United States has been pushing the Gulf state to send more gas to Europe.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced today that Russia will accept gas payments in rubles and not euros or dollars. Putin said the stipulation applies to an unspecified list of “unfriendly” countries, the official TASS news agency reported.
With the war in Ukraine raging, and no sign of an exit in view, a Polish peacekeeping proposal is unlikely to gather steam. But it is not too early for policymakers to start thinking about what tasks a future peace operation might undertake.
The Russian stock market opened Thursday for limited trading under heavy restrictions for the first time since Moscow invaded Ukraine, coming almost a month after prices plunged and the market was shut down as a way to insulate the economy.
Trading of a limited number of stocks, including energy giants Gazprom and Rosneft, took place under curbs meant to prevent a repeat of the massive selloff on Feb. 24 that came in anticipation of Western economic sanctions.
While the world’s attention is focused on Ukraine, Afghanistan has plunged into darkness. The Taliban are tightening their control amid growing reports of detentions, rapes, and summary executions of minorities, rights advocates, women, and people associated with the old government or the new resistance.