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”.
Turkey’s two key appointments are new foreign minister and former intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan; and the newly-appointed intelligence chief, Ibrahim Kalın, also an Erdoğan confidant.
Both men have interesting and impressive careers. How both of them have become the only two people who make policy and share power with Erdoğan is illuminating, especially where their careers intersected under the president.
On June 14, a fishing vessel carrying hundreds of refugees, the Adriana, sank off the Greek port city of Pylos. Roughly 600 people, including children, drowned. An investigation by German regional broadcaster NDR, the Guardian, the research agency Forensis and the Greek organization Solomon has now come to the clear conclusion that the Adriana was towed by the Greek coast guard towards Italian waters and then, when this was unsuccessful, capsized.
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.
World War I wasn’t just a conflict between nations—it was a war between empires. Western European empires like Great Britain and France had overseas colonies around the world, while eastern empires like Austria-Hungary and Russia ruled European and North Asian territories connected by land. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on July 28, 1914, was itself an anti-imperialist murder, planned by members of Young Bosnia angry over Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
L’hybris consiste à croire qu’un récit artificiel peut, en soi, apporter la victoire.
L’hybris consiste à croire qu’un récit artificiel peut, en soi, apporter la victoire. C’est un fantasme qui a balayé l’Occident – surtout depuis le XVIIe siècle.
Despite Syrian President Bashar al-Assad being welcomed back onto the international stage, all is not well at home.
His country is broken into three parts, which, at best, are in a state of uneasy coexistence and at worst are stuck in a low-intensity active conflict.
In the country’s northwestern Idlib province, Assad’s forces are engaged in near-daily shelling along the frontlines and Russia has recently resumed airstrikes after a long lull.
Syrians who fled President Bashar al-Assad’s rule fear he may soon be able to choke off badly needed aid as his regime acts to establish sway over UN assistance into the rebel-held northwest, the last major bastion of the Syrian opposition.
A tussle at the UN Security Council over the aid operation has played to Assad’s advantage, with his ally Russia vetoing an extension of its mandate this week and paving the way for the regime to approve one itself – but on its terms.
The resolution to establish an Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria, adopted by the UN General Assembly at the end of June, marks a first, promising step to uncover the fate of over 130,000 people who have disappeared since the Syrian conflict began in 2011.
Most of them are believed to be detained or disappeared by the regime of Bashar al-Assad; according to human rights organisations, this is estimated to be about 85% of those unaccounted for. Others were kidnapped by opposition groups and extremist groups like the Islamic State (IS).