Rusia

Only a Comprehensive Pact Can Avoid War

Vladimir Putin has the world on edge. The Russian president has deployed more than 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders and threatened “military-technical” measures if NATO continues to cooperate with Kyiv. He unilaterally drafted two extraordinarily aggressive treaties in December designed to constrain the organization and its members. They contain demands that are such nonstarters—most centrally, closing NATO’s open door to Ukraine and prohibiting organizational forces and weapons in nations that joined after May 1997—that they read more like predicates for war rather than sincere overtures for negotiations.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Friday that the U.S. will sell 250 M1A2 Abrams tanks to Poland, giving a key NATO ally that borders Russia a substantial boost in firepower.

Adding the tanks to the Polish arsenal will ensure more equitable security burden-sharing in NATO, he said, although he noted that no delivery date has been set.

The Ukrainian Government and Russian-backed separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk are currently trading accusations of each shelling the other, further escalating tensions within the Ukrainian border. Ukrainian and United States officials say that these Russian-backed separatists are only pursuing these allegations of shelling as a pretext to invade Ukraine.

President Biden claimed at a brief press conference yesterday that Russian President Vladimir Putin has already decided to invade Ukraine in the coming days. He reportedly received information that Russia has Ukraine completely surrounded and that the Kremlin would be targetting Kyiv. This is a sudden turn-around for Biden, who had just stated 72 hours ago that no final decision from Putin had been made to invade Ukraine. This follows an earlier prediction made by the White House that Russia would invade Ukraine on February 16th.

Seventy presidents and prime ministers from Europe and Africa are gathered today in Brussels for a long-awaited European Union-African Union summit, the sixth such summit between the two blocs. But ahead of that gathering, Europe’s 27 leaders huddled together for an emergency meeting to discuss the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.

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.

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.