France is planning to intervene in Niger, as it continues to deploy troops to several countries in the region, the West African state’s military government has claimed. Relations between Niger and former colonial power France have deteriorated since a coup in July.
The military governments of three African states, which all deposed their Western-backed leaders in recent years, have agreed to assist each other, individually or collectively, in case of any external aggression or internal threat to their sovereignty.
Poland is unprecedentedly important nowadays, but Germany still remains in control of the EU’s foreign policy. What changed over the past year, however, is that Berlin has finally decided to jump on Warsaw’s Russophobic bandwagon in an attempt to lead this trend. Its policymakers decided to do so in order to most effectively advance their country’s national interests as they now understand them to be in this new environment. The Kremlin must urgently acknowledge this reality and formulate policy accordingly.
The German leader just published what can be interpreted as his manifesto explaining why his country must supposedly restore its prior hegemonic status, and it was released by none other than the same magazine run by the Council on Foreign Affairs, which is regarded as among the most influential policymaking platforms in the US-led West’s Golden Billion. The very fact that they ran his manifesto can be regarded as this de facto New Cold War bloc’s tacit support for Germany’s hegemonic ambitions.
Turkey’s crackdown on the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) following a suicide attack in Ankara has left the US in a difficult position.
While Washington has condemned the attack and voiced support for Turkey’s right to defend itself, mass arrests and air strikes in Kurdish areas of Iraq have led to the US needing to walk a fine line.
The US, along with Turkey and the EU, regard the PKK as a terrorist entity. But Turkey’s counter-terrorism measures have included rounding up nearly 1,000 people in raids across the country as well as striking targets inside Iraq.
In the past, US President Joe Biden’s administration has expressed concern over human rights breaches in Turkey, including in a 2022 country report in which the State Department claimed there were “credible reports” of killings, suspicious deaths of people in police custody, arbitrary arrests and the “continued detention of tens of thousands of persons”, among other issues.
On Sunday, Turkey launched attacks on 20 targets in northern Iraq – a move that drew condemnation from Baghdad.
“These violations are rejected by the Iraqi people, the [Kurdistan] region and all of Iraq’s inhabitants,” Iraq’s President Abdul Latif Rashid said in an interview with Saudi-owned television network Al Hadath.
Washington, which remains close to Baghdad, has been placed in a delicate position, as relations with Nato ally Turkey have become frayed in recent years.
“We recognise the legitimate security threat the PKK poses to Turkey and we urge Turkey to pursue joint counter-terrorism co-operation with Iraq in a way that supports and respects Iraqi sovereignty,” US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters on Monday.
Though the US views the PKK as a terrorist organisation, it is allied with the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is primarily made up members of the Kurdish-led People’s Defence Units.
The US sees the SDF as critical in the fight against the remnants of ISIS in the region.
It is a partnership that has angered and frustrated Turkey for years.
“This policy of the United States supporting the PKK’s Syrian franchise has been one of the top two or three irritants in US-Turkish relations since that policy was adopted in 2014,” Richard Outzen, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and retired colonel in the US military, told The National.
Mr Outzen believes that at some point, US support for the SDF will have to end.
“The returns have dropped and the costs remain exceptionally high,” Mr Outzen said.
“The contradiction within this policy is that we would somehow expect our Turkish Nato ally to provide broad geopolitical and security co-operation elsewhere in Syria, Iraq and in Ukraine and in broader strategic terms at the same time that we are arming, equipping and training part of their number one security threat could not be sustained forever.”
He called Washington’s support of the SDF a “flawed policy,” but acknowledged the US had invested too much to simply abandon it.
Meanwhile, Ankara has steadily reduced the PKK’s abilities in Turkey and elsewhere.
“With a steady drumbeat, they are really attriting large numbers of PKK leadership, even junior leadership,” Mr Outzen said.
When asked about whether Turkey’s targeting of the PKK makes long-term support for the SDF untenable, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said only that the US military’s Central Command remains focused on defeating ISIS.
“Any actions that further destabilise our mission, which is the enduring defeat of ISIS, don’t serve that mission,” she said.
The three energy companies, which are already operating in another block in Lebanese waters in the Eastern Mediterranean, submitted their tenders for offshore exploration in blocks 8 and 10.
Lebanon’s Ministry of Energy and Water announced on Monday that a coalition of international oil giants applied for the second gas offshore licensing round in two blocks in Lebanese waters.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the removal of Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov on September 3 in what was the biggest change among the country’s political leaders since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion more than eighteen months ago. Reznikov’s departure comes following weeks of speculation over allegations of financial improprieties at the Ministry of Defense, and reflects Ukraine’s desire to demonstrate a zero tolerance approach toward allegations of corruption.
Ukraine is an East European territory which was originally forming a western part of the Russian Empire in the mid-17th century. That is a present-day independent state and separate ethnolinguistic nation as a typical example of Benedict Anderson’s theory-model of the “imagined community” – a self-constructed idea of the artificial ethnic and linguistic-cultural identity. Before 2014 Ukraine was a home of some 46 million inhabitants of whom, according to the official data, there were around 77 percent of those who declared themselves as the Ukrainians. Nevertheless, many Russians do not consider the Ukrainians or Belarus as “foreign” but rather as the regional branches of the Russian nationality. It is a matter of fact that, differently to the Russian case, the national identity of Belarus or the Ukrainians was never firmly fixed as it was always in the constant process of changing and evolving [on the Ukrainian self-identity construction, see: Karina V. Korostelina, Constructing the Narratives of Identity and Power: Self-Imagination in a Young Ukrainian Nation, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014].
The slow rate of [Ukrainian] progress has also prompted politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to question whether it is worth continuing to support Ukraine’s military effort or instead concentrate their efforts on negotiating a peace settlement between the warring countries.
The apparent assassination of Yevgeny Prigozhin from the crash of his private jet between Moscow and St. Petersburg represents an inflection point in Russia-Africa relations. Prigozhin, leader of the notorious Wagner Group, was the point man for Russia in Africa since Wagner first began operations on the continent in 2017. Its leaders have been sanctioned by 30 countries for the group’s destabilizing activities.