The Vilnius Summit Communique is a crude attempt to NATO-ize Washington’s list of enemies in order to enlist broader support for the impending global conflict. The intended targets of this campaign are Russia and China, the main opponents of the so-called “rules-based order”.
Despite sanctions and efforts to curtail the Wagner Group’s illicit activity, the group has successfully evaded financial sanctions through a series of facilitators and front companies around the world.
$5 billion: That’s how much the Wagner Group has made since 2017 mainly from mining, illicit gold trade, and forestry business in Africa, as well as funding from the Russian state.
The key vulnerability in enforcing sanctions against Russia is the gap in beneficial ownership information, including in the case of the oil price cap.
That bar, the Red Star, on the far side of eastern Europe was closed—until the Ukraine war started. So why did the White Moon bar on this side of the street decide to stay open, even extending its drinking hours?
Once the Warsaw Pact closed shop there was no good or honest reason for keeping NATO going. The threat that NATO was created to deter disappeared when the Soviet Union collapsed. Many Europeans thought that. The Americans didn’t.
After weeks of haranguing Russian military commanders, Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin on 24 June ordered his fighters to take over the garrison city of Rostov-on-Don and head for Moscow, sparking fears of civil war in Russia.
Almost as quickly as it began the mutiny was quelled, with Prigozhin and his fighters given the option of an uncertain Belarusian exile or signing up to the Russian military, although the outcome of this ultimatum remains unclear.
Millions of lives at stake. Families in dire need of international aid. Russia plays games with them all at the UN Security Council. Repeat every six months until further notice. Welcome to the Syria debate at the UN.
This has been the case ever since 2014. The UNSC authorizes the UN to use one Turkish-Syria border crossing to deliver aid — just one, at Bab Al-Hawa — while rejecting attempts to open others, as was the case previously. The Ya’roubia border crossing from Iraq into northeast Syria has been closed since January 2020. As a result of the earthquakes that hit southern Turkiye and northwest Syria in February, the Syrian government did make the rare move to allow an extra two border crossings with Turkiye to be used. This approval runs out on Aug. 13.
The Vilnius Summit, convened by the NATO Heads of State and Government on July 11-12, 2023, concluded with the release of an extensive communiqué. This document distinguishes itself from a typical summit declaration, serving instead as a strategic roadmap that outlines NATO’s future direction in an ever-evolving world order.
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.