Group items tagged

slander charges that he has denounced as politically motivated.

Navalny, who narrowly survived a poisoning in August that is widely seen as an attempted assassination by the Kremlin, was jailed after his return from Germany, where he was receiving treatment after the attack.

The slander charges against Navalny stem from his alleged defamation of a World War II veteran who appeared in a video backing constitutional reforms aimed at allowing Putin to extend his stay in office past 2024.

Last week, the EU's high representative for foreign policy, Josep Borrell, visited Russia, reportedly to plead for Navalny's release and in hopes of easing tense relations with the Kremlin. Instead, he was rebuffed and embarrassed, with Russia expelling three EU diplomats while he was holding talks.

He said the Kremlin sees democracy as an "existential threat."

"Domestically, it reinforces official propaganda about hostile interference from abroad, incursions on Russia's sovereignty and the activity of foreign agents," Frolov wrote. "On the foreign policy front, it frees the Kremlin from having to stage what the West calls 'malicious actions' with the goal of provoking retaliatory anti-Russian actions that would consolidate Russian society around the flag of the ruling regime."

The Cold War was fought and won pretty much exclusively on military and cultural terms. The economic side was relevant only because the Soviets' doomed model inhibited any real competition. We were neither competitors nor partners in the economic space. A new Cold War between the United States and China would be something else entirely. It is difficult to see how it could be fought effectively, not to mention successfully.

This is by no means to question the need to respond to increasingly aggressive behavior by China. But the U.S. response must be coherent, disciplined and sophisticated. It must balance capabilities and objectives

Reverting to a Cold War mentality will drive us toward belligerent posturing that has little or no chance of changing Chinese behavior and could, on the contrary, provoke overreactions and dangerous miscalculations on both sides.

China has recognized, far earlier and far more clearly than any of the rest of us, that technology is the determining factor in the decisive battle of this moment in history. Beijing is working hard to create an overwhelming Chinese advantage in this battle.

This is very hard work, requiring patience, conviction and broad political support. It also requires the full participation of our allies, both in the region and elsewhere. We must undertake these efforts with the imperative of preventing a downward spiral toward armed conflict.

the Chinese are clearly pursuing their foreign policy goals according to a carefully calculated long-term strategy.

China’s strategy also aims to encircle the West technologically, dominating all the advanced systems of data collection and manipulation, including artificial intelligence, robotics, aerospace and quantum computing, always taking into account potential military applications

Above all, we must create a deliberate strategy that is aimed at managing this great-power conflict rather than vanquishing a foe.

Nearly spontaneous and seemingly unconnected irritations such as closing a consulate, imposing sanctions on a few officials, tweaking tariffs or sanctioning individual companies merely provoke countermeasures that will inhibit real management of this immense and complicated problem.

The Guardian Council is charged with ensuring draft laws do not contradict Shi’ite Islamic laws or Iran’s constitution

Tehran would give two months to the deal’s European parties to ease sanctions on Iran’s oil and financial sectors, imposed after Washington quit the pact between Tehran and six powers in 2018.

In reaction to U.S. President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy on Tehran, Iran has gradually reduced its compliance with the deal.

The law

would make it harder for U.S. President-elect Joe Biden

to rejoin the agreement.

Biden has said he would return to the pact and would lift sanctions if Tehran returned to “strict compliance with the nuclear deal”.

Rouhani, the Iranian architect of the 2015 deal, criticised parliament’s move as “harmful to diplomatic efforts” aimed at easing U.S. sanctions.

The deal caps the fissile purity to which Iran can refine uranium at 3.67%, far below the 20% achieved before the deal and below the weapons-grade level of 90%. Iran breached the 3.67% cap in July 2019 and the enrichment level has remained steady at up to 4.5% since then.

Looking forward the most worrying issue for the Kremlin is the isolation of the country’s economy. Since the start of the war the Russian stock market has closed, interest rates have doubled, inflation has shot up, and the value of the rouble has plummeted. One recent estimate suggests that Russia faces a drop of from 7 to 15% in GDP in 2022. It risks defaulting on it’s debts.

it is hard to see how Russia is going to have much spare capacity to compensate Ukraine for the damage it has inflicted upon it, even in the unlikely event it was prepared to offer to do so as part of an agreement.  

Second, given what has happened over the past few weeks to the population of these territories, those remaining will be more hostile to Russia and will likely resist an imposed government.

At the very least Moscow will want the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in their entirety, and not just the previous separatist enclaves, to be annexed or given some independent status. This was, after all, the demand with which Russia entered the war.  

It is, however, by no means straightforward even from a Russian perspective.  

First, if Ukraine has not otherwise been defeated and so “demilitarised” then this will be a frontier that will require defending for the indefinite future.

There is a further issue here even if there is no agreement. The cities and towns that have suffered the worst as a result of Putin’s war are those that were once claimed to be pro-Russian and so required “liberation” from Ukrainian “genocide”.

So the cost of occupying even this limited part of the country will be considerable and that is before even thinking about the expense required to render those horribly damaged towns and cities at all habitable, with effective infrastructure and accommodation.

Their economies were in decline before 2014 and that process has since accelerated. They are now poorer than other parts of Ukraine and prone to criminality.

The capital Grozny was rebuilt but the economy functioned thereafter at barely a fraction of pre-war levels. Despite efforts to make the economy more productive, in 2017 it was estimated that Chechnya required 80% of the government budget to be subsidised.

The other implication is that while economic sanctions have not yet given the West much leverage over Putin’s war strategy they do offer it leverage over his peace strategy.

Attempts to turn the situation around have not been helped by Chechnya’s rampant corruption. So this relatively small territory is already costing Moscow close to $3 billion a year. Crimea, annexed in 2014, may be costing a similar amount.  

Or take Syria. Here Russian air power was also used in a  brutal way, this time against rebel populations and in support of the Assad regime. That campaign succeeded in keeping Assad in power but Russia lacks the resources to reconstruct Syria

“Now moving into its eleventh year, the conflict in Syria has inflicted an almost unimaginable degree of devastation and loss on the Syrian people and their economy. Over 350,000 verifiable deaths have been directly attributed to the conflict so far, but the number of unaccounted lethal and non-lethal casualties is almost certainly far higher

More than half the country’s pre-conflict population (of almost 21 million) has been displaced—one of the largest displacements of people since World War II—and, partly as a result, by 2019, economic activity in Syria had shrunk by more than 50% compared to what it had been in 2010.”   

Syria was a far cheaper war for Russia to wage, probably in the low billions of dollars, in fuel, ordnance, and personnel cost. Far less has gone into economic assistance and much of that has been returned to Russia as arms sales and gas and infrastructure contracts

The strains on the Russian war effort are already evident, from the army’s hesitation about trying to fight their way into cities and the recruitment of mercenaries, to the reported appeal to China for help with supplies of military equipment and Putin’s fury with his intelligence agencies for misleading assessments and wasting roubles on Ukrainian agents who turned out to be useless

He is now having to choose between a range of poor outcomes, which the US suggests may include escalation to chemical use (which would be both militarily pointless and test further Western determination not to get directly involved).

War is rarely a good investment. Putin has acted for reasons of political and not economic opportunism. The prospects for any territory “liberated” by Russia is bleak. They will not prosper and will remain cut off from the international economy. To the extent that people stay they will have to be subsidised for all their needs while there will be little economic activity.  

Because of the destruction the short-term prospects will be bleak even if these territories are fully returned to Ukraine. But over the longer-term they will be much better off because of the amount of economic assistance Ukraine will receive and its integration into the international economy.

as Germany and Japan showed after 1945 even shattered economies can be rebuilt to even greater levels of efficiency with sufficient resilience and resources. That is another reason why Western financial assistance and investment will be especially vital - Ukraine’s full recovery will serve as a testament to Putin’s failure.

 it is worth keeping this analysis in mind when considering prospective peace deals. The Russians may have underestimated the costs of conquest from the start but their approach to war has raised those costs considerably, especially in those parts of Ukraine close to Russia.

Third, these territories will be economically wrecked and with no prospect of recovery so long as they are separated from Ukraine. 

The question of the future of sanctions and how they might be unwound is not one to be discussed separately from any peace talks. They are a vital part of the negotiations. As there can be no Western-led peace talks without Ukraine, it should be made clear to Moscow that for now this is a card for Zelensky to play.

The future of the Russian economy can then be in his hands. Should a moment come to start to ease sanctions, some leverage will be required to ensure that any agreement is being honoured. There could be a link  to reparations for the terrible damage caused.

As his original war plans failed Putin has insisted his forces follow a disruptive and cruel strategy that has put his original aims even more out of reach and Ukraine with a say over the future of the Russian economy.

Putin may be possessed by neo-imperial dreams of Russia’s place in Europe, but he is presiding over a state of affairs that has steadily given Beijing more leverage over Moscow. Far removed from the days of the Cold War when the Kremlin viewed communist China as its “poorer cousin,” Russia — isolated and enfeebled — is sliding inexorably into the role of “junior partner” to the Asian giant.

The war in Ukraine has rendered Russia increasingly dependent on China: Sanctions have curtailed the global market for its exports and thinned out possible suppliers for its exports. Enter China, whose imports from Russia have surged, jumping 80 percent in May compared with last year, largely in the form of oil and other natural resources. The Russian market, left bereft of many European products, may get all the more flooded by Chinese goods and technology in the months and even years ahead.

Gabuev suggested that current trendlines could see China’s renminbi, which has already outperformed the euro on Moscow’s stock exchange, becoming “the de facto reserve currency for Russia even without being fully convertible,” and thereby “increasing Moscow’s dependence on Beijing.”

Imbalances that already existed between both countries are only amplifying. China is edging closer to Russia as a leading arms supplier to developing countries. Russia was compelled to significantly discount oil sales to China, while Chinese car manufacturers — recognizing the paucity of options now facing Russian consumers — have in some instances raised prices for their vehicles in Russia by 50 percent

Gabuev unpacked the geopolitical ramifications of Russia’s supplication to China. “To keep China happy, Russian leaders will have little choice but to accept unfavorable terms in commercial negotiations, to support Chinese positions in international forums such as the United Nations, and even to curtail Moscow’s relations with other countries, such as India and Vietnam,”

Even in the remote scenario where Putin himself falls, it’s hard to imagine the broader tectonic realignments taking place would shift all that much. “Russia is turning into a giant Eurasian Iran: fairly isolated, with a smaller and more technologically backward economy thanks to its hostilities to the West but still too big and too important to be considered irrelevant,

With China as Russia’s biggest external partner and major diplomatic ally, Gabuev concluded, “the aging ruling elite in the Kremlin, myopically fixated on Washington, will be even more eager to serve as China’s handmaidens as it rises to become the archrival of the United States.”

“The best way for the West to deal with the China-Russia alignment is to acknowledge that these bonds are strong and to improve its own resilience and deterrence capacities,” wrote Justyna Szczudlik, a China analyst at the Polish Institute of International Affairs.

But using them would mean cutting a deal with a brutal leader closely allied with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, underscoring the painful moral and political decisions that now confront Western leaders as they scramble to avert a global food crisis.

The Lithuania route appears to be the most promising for getting food quickly to areas like the Middle East and Africa that need it the most, even if it is also a long shot.

“This is a decision that politicians need to take not me,” Mr. Latakas, the Klaipeda port director, said. “It is up to them to decide what is most important.”

Western nations like the United States, as well as Ukraine, oppose lifting sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion but have not ruled out a deal with Belarus.

The war has halted those shipments, leaving around 25 million tons of grain, according to U.N. estimates, from last year’s harvest stranded in silos and at risk of rotting if it is not moved soon. A further 50 million tons is expected to be harvested in coming months. The grain elevators in Ukraine that have not been damaged or destroyed by shelling are quickly filling up. Soon, there will be no room left to store the incoming harvest.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, said severe bottlenecks meant that the existing routes through Poland and Romania “can provide only limited alleviation of the food crisis” given the volumes that need to be moved.

Warning of an approaching “hurricane of hunger,” the head of the United Nations, António Guterres, has sought to negotiate a deal under which Ukrainian grain would be transported out of the country by ship or train, and in exchange Russia and Belarus would sell fertilizer products to the global market without the threat of sanctions.

That means that Western governments and Ukraine are left to try out a range of possible solutions fraught with problems. Test runs of trains carrying grain from Ukraine through Poland to Lithuania, for example, have taken three weeks because of different track gauges in neighboring countries, requiring cargos to be loaded and unloaded multiples times.

Turkey has proposed using its ships to transport grain from Odesa, which, in addition to getting Ukraine to demine the port, would require an agreement from Russia not to hinder vessels.

But faced with the considerable challenges of executing such a plan, the best option for getting large quantities of Ukrainian grain to hungry people is probably by rail through Belarus to Klaipeda and other Baltic ports in Latvia and Estonia.That “won’t solve everything, but it would significantly alleviate the situation,”

Ukraine is opposed to any easing of sanctions against Russia but, increasingly desperate to move grain trapped by the war, is more open to the idea of a temporary easing of sanctions against Belarusian potash.

Roman Slaston, the head of Ukraine’s main agricultural lobby, said one challenge was that many rail connections through Belarus had been blown up by Belarusian railway employees sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause.

“Given that the Russian Army is still in Belarus, who is going to pay to repair that now?” Mr. Slaston asked. “This is like some kind of madness.”

We don’t grow food to store it,” he said. “People in Africa won’t be fed by our grain sitting in bags in our fields.”

Europe faces the prospect of Russia throttling the flow of piped gas. Even in the absence of a cut-off, it was expected to spend $1trn on energy in 2022, twice as much as in 2019.

Russia would also suffer heavy sanctions. Its banks would be harshly penalised and its economy deprived of crucial American high-tech components.

Perhaps, then, he will start with a less ambitious invasion. However, a limited war could claim many lives and be hard to contain.

Perhaps Mr Putin is planning a full-scale invasion, with Russian forces thrusting deep into Ukraine to seize the capital, Kyiv, and overthrow the government. Or he may seek to annex more territory in eastern Ukraine, carving out a corridor linking Russia with Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula Mr Putin grabbed in 2014. Then again, he may want a small war, in which Russia “saves” Kremlin-backed separatists in Donbas, an eastern region of Ukraine, from supposed Ukrainian atrocities—and, at the same time, degrades Ukraine’s armed forces.

The global order has long been buttressed by the norm that countries do not redraw other countries’ borders by force of arms. When Iraq seized Kuwait in 1990 an international coalition led by America kicked it out.

if he seizes a bigger slice of Ukraine, it is hard to see him suddenly concluding that the time has come to make peace with NATO.

More likely, he would push on, helped by the newly established presence of Russian troops in Belarus to probe NATO’s collective-security pact, under which an attack on one member is an attack on all.

Not only would he relish the chance to hollow out America’s commitments to Europe, but he has also come to rely on demonising an enemy abroad to justify his harsh rule at home.

Meanwhile, diplomats should keep talking, looking for common ground on, say, arms control and pressing for a face-saving climbdown that Mr Putin and his captive media would be free to spin however they wish.

We see that fight now in the anti-war comments and peacemaking efforts of Russia’s elites, after just a few days of sanctions pressure. They’re behaving exactly as sociologists would expect when status is threatened among a group accustomed to impunity: They’re angry, and they’re anxious.

But Ukrainians never thought that the alliance and the allies were different."Zelenskyy told NATO that his country still needs more military equipment, specifically tanks and fighter jets, and chided them for not establishing a no-fly zone.

Biden has committed $2 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since the start of his presidency, including an $800 million military package last week.

The NATO summit was followed by a meeting with leaders of the Group of Seven leading industrial nations and an address to European Union leaders, the White House said.

The U.S. also said that international organizations and multilateral corporations should no longer conduct their activities with Russia in a business-as-usual manner, the second official said. “Our purpose here is to methodically remove the benefits and privileges Russia once enjoyed as a participant in the international economic order,” the official said.The new sanctions include 328 Duma members; Herman Gref, the head of Russia’s largest financial institution Sberbank and a Putin adviser since the 1990s; member of the Russian elite Gennady Timchenko, his companies and his family members; 17 board members of the Russian financial institution Sovcombank; and 48 large Russian defense state-owned enterprises

As the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II enters its second month, the discussions here could be among the most consequential of Biden’s presidency. When Biden was asked as he was leaving the White House for Brussels how likely he thought the threat of chemical warfare was, he said, “I think it’s a real threat.”  

“We are united in condemning the Kremlin’s unprovoked aggression and in our support for Ukraine sovereignty and integrity," NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said ahead of the meeting. The group would also discuss efforts to strengthen the military alliance's defenses in the short and the long term, he said.

Biden plans to travel to Poland on Friday to offer support as it deals with millions of refugees who are fleeing the conflict and to thank U.S. troops stationed there.

But the sanctions in place are almost exclusively focused on nuclear and ballistic missile activity.

One nuclear test will not make China’s new administration decide to ‘abandon North Korea,’ but it will definitely worsen China-North Korea relations

there is little chance that the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, will move quickly to change the nation’s long-held policy of propping up the walled-off government that has long served as a buffer against closer intrusion by the United States on the Korean Peninsula.

Chinese military strategists adhere to the doctrine that they cannot afford to abandon their ally, no matter how bad its behavior, analysts here say.

Indeed, relations between the two countries are conducted largely between the two parties rather than between the two foreign ministries, the more normal diplomatic channel.

China will almost certainly join the United States in supporting tougher sanctions over Tuesday’s test, accompanied by sterner reprimands from Beijing against its recalcitrant ally in Pyongyang, which ignored Chinese entreaties not to take provocative actions.

With Hu out of the picture, the administration is intent on determining whether Xi Jinping will prove more attentive to U.S. security concerns

China’s calculations will be crucial to what happens at the Security Council, where the policy has always been to pursue unanimity over toughness; it is considered far better to get all members on board to send a message to North Korea rather than have China abstain or worse, veto.

“Threatening a missile-capable warhead with a successful third nuclear test gives the United States, South Korea and Japan good reason to step up their regional ballistic missile defense capabilities,” said Siegfried S. Hecker,

Some experts say it needs to keep up the tough talk, even if it understands that its efforts at the Security Council may not do much to limit the North’s capabilities.

Now experts say the North may be simply trying to wait the United States out, hoping it will eventually recognize its program as it did Pakistan’s.

As the world’s powers struggle to refine their policies, North Korea continues to make technological advances. A long-range rocket test in December has been judged by outside experts to have been a success after many failures.

“It moves the question of North Korea as a nuclear contender from ‘if’ to ‘when,’ ” said one senior Obama administration official. “The ‘when’ may still be years away, but at least now it is in sight.”

The US and European Union both imposed sanctions on Russia after it seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 -- those sanctions were extended for a further six months in December 2016.

Pyongyang is thought to have a handful of likely crude atomic bombs, but there is considerable outside debate about the state of its arsenal.

Kim made the most recent warning while guiding the test-firing of a new large-caliber multiple launch rocket system, the report said.

South Korea's Defense Ministry said the North Korean projectiles, fired from the eastern coastal town of Wonsan, flew about 60 to 90 miles. Ministry officials said they couldn't confirm whether the projectiles were those fired by the weapons system KCNA referred to.

The U.N. sanctions include mandatory inspections of cargo leaving and entering North Korea by land, sea or air; a ban on all sales or transfers of small arms and light weapons to the North; and the expulsion of North Korean diplomats who engage in "illicit activities."

North Korean state media earlier warned that the imposition of new sanctions would be a "grave provocation" that shows "extreme" U.S. hostility against the country. It said the sanctions would not result in the country's collapse or prevent it from launching more rocket

at a North Korean launch site where the country fired a long-range rocket on Feb. 6, according to an analysis by the North Korea-focused 38 North website.

The deployment of the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, is opposed by North Korea, China and Russia. Opponents say the system could help U.S. radar spot missiles in other countries.

In January, North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test, which it claimed was a hydrogen bomb. Last month, it put a satellite into orbit with a long-range rocket that the United Nations and others saw as a cover for a test of banned ballistic missile technology.

In January, North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test, which it claimed was a hydrogen bomb. Last month, it put a satellite into orbit with a long-range rocket that the United Nations and others saw as a cover for a test of banned ballistic missile technology.

It was the first time in half a century that a NATO member shot down a Russian plane and drew a harsh response from Moscow.

Putin has denounced the Turkish action as a "treacherous stab in the back,"

After the incident, Russia deployed long-range S-400 air defense missile systems to a Russian air base in Syria just 30 miles south of the border with Turkey to help protect Russian warplanes,