A number of U.S. veterans are reportedly training Ukrainian soldiers near the frontlines of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, said the New York Times in an article — In Ukraine, U.S. Veterans Step In Where the Military Will Not — on July 3, 2022, Sunday (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/03/us/politics/american-combat-volunteers-ukraine.html).
Kyiv’s Theory of Victory
As Russia’s all-out war of aggression in Ukraine drags on for a fourth consecutive month, calls for dangerous deals are getting louder. As fatigue grows and attention wanders, more and more Kremlin-leaning commentators are proposing to sell out Ukraine for the sake of peace and economic stability in their own countries. Although they may pose as pacifists or realists, they are better understood as enablers of Russian imperialism and war crimes.
Kurds are suffering the greatest collateral damage form the war in Ukraine. Ukrainian refugees attract global attention, but the Ukraine war has opened the door wide to the mass expulsion of two million Syrian Kurds, which is likely to take place in the coming months. Turkey is threatening to complete the ethnic cleansing of Kurds from northern Syria which it began five years ago.
The Moscow branch of United Russia, the country’s ruling party, has prepared a set of “recommendations for covering the special operation” for candidates planning on running on the party’s ticket in the September municipal elections.
Immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, world oil prices jumped above US$100 per barrel, hitting US$130 for Brent crude on March 8. The prevailing fear was that substantial Russian supplies would be lost to the world market either through western sanctions or a voluntary decision by Moscow in retaliation to western support for Ukraine. This was especially worrying when the world was already struggling to secure enough additional oil to meet rapidly growing demand as the COVID restrictions began to ease.
Most summits bill themselves as “historic” and those who attend invariably talk about “forging a new consensus”. But Nato’s Madrid summit can credibly make such claims, for there is no question that a military alliance that only a few years ago was famously dismissed by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, as “brain dead” has regained vitality and reaffirmed its strategic purpose.
Putin Returns to the Historical Pattern
For half a millennium, Russian foreign policy has been characterized by soaring ambitions that have exceeded the country’s capabilities. Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, Russia managed to expand at an average rate of 50 square miles per day for hundreds of years, eventually covering one-sixth of the earth’s landmass. By 1900, it was the world’s fourth- or fifth-largest industrial power and the largest agricultural producer in Europe. But its per capita GDP reached only 20 percent of the United Kingdom’s and 40 percent of Germany’s. Imperial Russia’s average life span at birth was just 30 years—higher than British India’s (23) but the same as Qing China’s and far below the United Kingdom’s (52), Japan’s (51), and Germany’s (49). Russian literacy in the early twentieth century remained below 33 percent—lower than that of Great Britain in the eighteenth century. These comparisons were all well known by the Russian political establishment, because its members traveled to Europe frequently and measured their country against the world’s leaders (something that is true today, as well).
Will Ukraine Bring Russia the Superpower Status It Seeks?
On Saturday, Russia invaded and effectively annexed Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea. In doing so, Russian President Vladimir Putin shrewdly took advantage of the political uncertainty that arose when Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s former kleptocratic president, took flight last week and was swiftly replaced by a hastily formed provisional government in Kiev. Russia might justify its behavior by speaking of a need to protect ethnic Russians but, in reality, the move was a thinly veiled attempt to forward Putin’s real agenda: reestablishing Russia as a resurrected great power.
Contrary to Russia’s expectations, the Ukraine war and entailing crises not only did not damage EU-US relations but also improved them to the extent that France proposed “strategic autonomy” for Europe is now consigned to oblivion.
As in the Cold War, Russia sought to exploit the rift in transatlantic relations under Trump and weaken the political and economic Europe-US alliance. However, except for some limited success in Serbia and Hungary, Moscow has failed to achieve its goals.
Between the fourth quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022, the number of Russians classified by the Russian government as poor rose by 8.5 million, according to Russian government statistics, Maksim Blant of Radio Liberty reports (svoboda.org/a/armiya-bednyh-kak-voyna-vliyaet-na-urovenj-zhizni-rossiyan/31895963.html).