Je tiens à remercier l’un de mes lecteurs, Paul S., qui m’a signalé cet article de Newsweek remarquable et hilarant, écrit par Bill Arkin, qui est un exemple classique de la façon dont la CIA a jeté l’Ukraine sous le bus et a évité d’être tenue pour responsable du désastre militaire qui se profile à l’horizon. Je commencerai par citer la conclusion de l’article :
The hypothesis that the Anglo-Saxon axis is pivotal to the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is only partly true. Germany is actually Ukraine’s second largest arms supplier, after the United States. Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged a new arms package worth 700 million euros, including additional tanks, munitions and Patriot air defence systems at the Nato summit in Vilnius, putting Berlin, as he said, at the very forefront of military support for Ukraine.
A long convoy transporting Wagner troops entered Belarus from Russia on July 15, the independent Belarusian military monitoring project Belaruski Hayun reported.
The column included at least 60 vehicles, including pickups, large trucks, vans, and at least three buses, and was escorted by Belarusian traffic police, Belaruski Hayun said in a tweet.
The 2023 NATO Summit at Vilnius, Lithuania, is now but a memory. If I could characterize the summit in just two words, I would say, “reality bites.” And it bites both ways.
On the one hand the US and its NATO allies came face to face with the reality that endless promises of “unlimited” military aid to Ukraine to defeat Russia would not achieve that goal. Five weeks of the much-anticipated Ukrainian counter-offensive have produced zero results. They have only snuffed out another estimated 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers, this time mostly drawn from the shrinking pool of forced – and barely trained – conscripts.
Russia may have already lost upwards of 50,000 men in Ukraine, along with untold economic costs from sanctions, direct expenses and forgone labor. Many in the West have hoped that Russia’s invasion, failing to take the whole of Ukraine in the early stages of the war, will prove to be just a costly blunder from which Russia will eventually have to retreat. They are wrong. Russia can and will continue to fight.
The future of the Wagner Group is in doubt. Less than a week after Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin launched his march on Moscow on June 23, which was then aborted mid-coup, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered Wagner fighters who participated in the rebellion the option of relocating to Belarus. Putin also reportedly met with Prigozhin in the days after the mutiny, perhaps to press the mercenary boss on the details of the operation and to force him to lay out the inner workings of Wagner’s global enterprise.
China may have the opportunity to turn Russia into its vassal, but it has no compelling reason to do so.
Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia-China cooperation has grown in all directions. Moscow makes no bones about the fact that it is betting on China in the global confrontation with the West, seeing Beijing as an alternative center of power with similar interests and values to itself.
Putin’s former bodyguard and current Tula governor Alexei Dyumin is eternally tipped for a position in the federal government, yet is still waiting after seven years.
Alexei Dyumin, a former bodyguard of Russian President Vladimir Putin and now governor of the Tula region, has been the subject of much discussion since the short-lived mutiny led by the Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin last month. Although Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko got the official credit for persuading Prigozhin to stand down, many social media channels and anonymous sources claimed it was in fact Dyumin who had played the decisive role in the negotiations and, as a result, strengthened his already special place in the president’s inner circle.
If Putin changes his mind about Prigozhin and initiates some sort of revenge, Minsk will not be able to protect the Wagner leader, who knows that full well. Lukashenko in turn cannot believe the promises of Prigozhin, a warlord who has just betrayed his patron, to diligently follow Belarusian rules.
One of the strangest twists in the short-lived Wagner mutiny in Russia was the involvement of Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, who allegedly brokered the deal between mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Kremlin, and is even willing to host Wagner in Belarus.
Yevgeny Prigozhin’s attempted insurrection against the Russian Ministry of Defence (MOD) last month created massive confusion. The rebellion raised many questions about what might come next for the war in Ukraine and the future of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule.