Rusia

As the Cold War began to wane, multipolarism became a rallying cry for everyone sick and tired of superpower politics, nuclear standoffs, and the banal bipolarism of Soviet misinformation and American propaganda.

This “rise of the rest” was prefigured in the Non-Aligned Movement that began in 1961, the New International Economic Order that the United Nations launched in the 1970s, the consolidation of an economically powerful East Asia and a single European market in the 1980s, and the south-south cooperation that emerged in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, after a couple of papers by Morgan Stanley, of all places, the BRICS bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa was christened and then institutionalized.

Since its mutiny, the Russian private military company “Wagner Group” has redeployed to Belarus and is now training troops near the Polish border while President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko makes belligerent statements. However, Telegram channels, including that of Wagner Group head Yevgeny Prigozhin, as well others reporting on Wagner Group and Belarus, report that Wagner Group personnel are also training Belarussian internal security forces.

1. Wagner Begins Training the Belarusian Military’s Elite Units

Open-source intelligence this week revealed that the Wagner Private Military Company has begun training elite units of the Belarusian Armed Forces in Belarus. Yevgeny Prigozhin’s fighters are now training the 38th Air Assault Brigade, which falls under the Belarusian Special Operations Command, and they may start training the 5th Spetsnaz Brigade and the 103rd Airborne Brigade later. Hudson Institute’s Ukraine Military Situation Report will continue to monitor open-source intelligence for signs that other Special Operations Command formations are cooperating with Wagner.

Following Ukraine’s successful Kherson counteroffensive in the fall of 2022, the war in Ukraine has moved into the Materialschlacht, or war of attrition phase, which is rapidly depleting critical resources. Typically, when discussing resources in this sense, Ukraine is most often referring to the tanks, missiles, ammunition and other materiel that it needs from its partner countries.

The U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on July 25 repeated U.S. warnings that Russia could use sea mines to blow up a ship and blame the attack on Ukraine.

Ambassador Michael Carpenter said Russia would use such an incident — known as a false flag attack — to justify further attacks against civilian ships in the Black Sea.

The Costs of Expanding the Alliance Outweigh the Benefits

As the war in Ukraine grinds on, policymakers and pundits, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the former U.S. ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder, are pushing for NATO to offer Ukraine what French President Emmanuel Macron calls “a path toward membership” after the conflict concludes. This is not just show. Ukraine’s membership aspirations will now be a central topic of debate at NATO’s summit next week in Vilnius, with Ukraine arguing—as its former defense minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk wrote recently in Foreign Affairs—that it “should be welcomed and embraced” by the alliance. The way in which this issue is settled will have serious consequences for the United States, Europe, and beyond.

The U.S. Empire has its iron rules, and you cannot expect that it doesn’t use its power to pursue its interests. But the means can vary a lot.

European media are fanning the flame of war in Ukraine, apparently unaware that it would happen in their courtyard. As with the Euro missiles crisis at the end of ’70, Washington is always delighted to sacrifice Europe, playing it against Russia. Informed to dead by too much news, the people are often unable to check the accuracy, especially when blatant propaganda depicts the sources as trustable by default.