The war in Ukraine has spurred the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War. According to EU border and coastguard agency Frontex, by the end of 2022, 15 million Ukrainian citizens had fled to Europe since the beginning of the war, with roughly 3 million choosing to stay.
The Biden administration has acknowledged neither its responsibility for the pipeline bombing nor the purpose of the sabotage
I do not know much about covert CIA operations—no outsider can—but I do understand that the essential component of all successful missions is total deniability. The American men and women who moved, under cover, in and out of Norway in the months it took to plan and carry out the destruction of three of the four Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea a year ago left no traces—not a hint of the team’s existence—other than the success of their mission.
Discussing the faint mumblings in western capitals about “negotiations” over Ukraine last week, I pointed out how insecure and fragile the collective western strategic ego is, and how little opposition or criticism it can actually tolerate. It struck me that it might be worth expanding on that a bit, since it helps us to understand why the West has gets itself into such shambolic situations, Ukraine of course being the current one. I’ll also try to explain how both fervent admirers of western policy and its bitterest critics are actually part of the same incoherent strategic discourse. It all starts with ethnocentrism
By drawing attention to the crimes that this Nazi’s division committed against Poles like Ambassador to Canada Witold Dzielski did and pushing for his extradition like Minister for Education Przemyslaw Czarnek is attempting, Poland is showing that it wants the whole world to know the dark truth about Ukraine’s “heroes”.
How Western Inaction Enabled Azerbaijan and Russia
The third war over Nagorno-Karabakh, the long-disputed Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, ended almost as soon as it began. At 1 PM on September 19, Azerbaijani forces began attacking the territory with artillery and drones in what it called an “antiterror” operation. Within 24 hours, the Karabakh Armenians, a population that has been pushed to the brink of famine by a months-long economic blockade, capitulated, leaving Azerbaijan in effective control of the territory.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has hardly changed the foreign-policy mindset in Berlin. Only a robust, long-term containment strategy can help the West curb Russia’s expansionist ambitions.
Has Russia’s war against Ukraine fundamentally changed the thinking of policymakers in Berlin? Have they really understood that in the future European security must be framed against an aggressive Russia? And that Germany must strengthen its own resilience and defenses across the board because it is in the crosshairs of Russian great-power dreams?
Non-state actors make the perfect saboteurs
So whodunnit? Who destroyed the Nord Stream 2 at three minutes past midnight on September 26, 2021? Explosives set 262 feet below the surface of the Baltic caused a blast registering 2.5 on the Richter Scale. It ripped apart the $11 billion gas pipeline that fed Russian gas directly into Germany and Western Europe and blew up global geopolitics as well.
Que sait-on de ces armes sur la base de nouveaux principes physiques ? Enquête internationale approfondie.
Alors qu’il s’adressait au Forum économique oriental au début de ce mois, le président russe Vladimir Poutine a annoncé que la Russie travaillait sur «des armes basées sur de nouveaux principes physiques» qui «assureront la sécurité de tout pays dans une perspective historique proche «.
La semaine dernière, le secrétaire d’État Blinken, dans un discours prononcé à l’université Johns Hopkins, a déclaré sans ambages :
«Ce à quoi nous sommes confrontés n’est pas un test de l’ordre de l’après-guerre froide. Les pays et les citoyens perdent confiance dans l’ordre économique international – leur confiance est ébranlée par des failles systémiques… Plus ces disparités persistent, plus elles alimentent la méfiance et la désillusion des gens, qui ont le sentiment que le système ne leur donne pas une chance équitable».
A number of flashpoints around the globe could spiral from minor border skirmishes into full-blown conflagrations that could drag their broader regions into conflict.
Given the tectonic shifts in the international system and renewed focus on great power competition, the prospects of inter-state warfare are now receiving more scrutiny.