Monthly Archives: May 2022

Last week, Russia reversed, at least temporarily, a months-long series of military failures in Vladimir Putins brutal invasion of Ukraine. The fall of Mariupol, after a monumentally heroic holdout defense by Ukrainian forces, represents a much-needed victory for Putin on several levels. When the history of what transpired there is written, it also may be seen as an additional failure of the United States and NATO to do all that they could have done to hasten Russias defeat before the war metastasizes into a wider European conflict.

Putin has gained more than control of a partially-demolished old steel factory where several thousand Ukrainian civilians and a thousand fighters had held out for two months against the Russia onslaught. He also has partially erased the image of inevitable Russian losses in the face of Ukrainian valor and competence that refuted the earlier consensus on Russias inevitable conquest of Ukraine.

Tactically, the end of the Mariupol siege also frees up the thousands of Russian forces concentrated there, enabling them to engage in the equally critical campaign in the Donbas region, where Ukraine is trying to push the Russians out of eastern Ukraine and Putin is trying to expand his control.

In addition, the forced surrender of Ukrainian soldiers makes them useful trading material for the release of captured Russians. More ominously, Putin could retaliate for Ukraines first war crimes trial of a Russian soldier by prosecuting captive Ukrainians in staged show trials. To bring Ukraines international standing down from its moral high ground, Moscow probably will recycle rigged Soviet-style proceedings and coerced confessions to expose the latent Ukrainian Nazism Putin has ranted about.

Finally, on a strategic level, elimination of the Mariupol resistance removes the final obstacle to Putins objective of establishing a land bridge from Russian-occupied Crimea along the Black Sea coast to Odessa. That opens the door for Putin to declare the entire sliver of Ukrainian territory as a separate, Russian-oriented independent republic, just as he is threatening to do with the eastern Ukraine territory Russia has occupied since 2014.

The Biden administration and NATO, playing geostrategic catch-up, have dramatically increased the flow of U.S. arms to Ukraine and it clearly has benefited the defenders. But Biden is still withholding weapons that President Volodymyr Zelensky has urgently requested from the outset, including fighter aircraft, large-caliber artillery, and longer-range missile systems. The hesitancy adds to the list of what-ifs that history will use to judge the Wests response to Putins aggression during four U.S. presidencies.

The Biden administration fears providing such arms might be provocative to Putin, who, entirely unprovoked militarily, already has launched the largest European conflict since World War II. As Putin continues to escalate his aggression and threats, the West worries that he will deem its own defensive measures as escalatory. It has even hesitatedabout providingthe necessary security forces at the newly reopened U.S. embassy in Kyiv, a definitionally defensive deployment, for fear of angering Putin. Refreshingly, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin struck the right note when he declared the purpose of U.S. support for Ukraine: We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it cant do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.

Russia is systematically bombing railroad stations, where it kills Ukrainian civilians trying to escape, as well as rail lines, to cut off Ukraines access to markets for its grains. It is attacking grain production facilities and crops in the field, complementing Russias naval blockade of Mariupol and Odessa, the Black Sea ports from which most of Ukraines wheat, barley and other grains are exported to countries in Africa and the Middle East.

It is clear that the multi-pronged attacks on Ukraines food supply are not merely incidental to the conduct of military operations collateral agricultural damage but are part of a comprehensive strategy. Denying Ukraine economic connections to the global market drives up prices beyond the reach of tens of millions of hungry people in poor countries, creating an international food crisis and pressing Ukraine and the West to settle the conflict on Putins terms.

As such, the matter no longer is simply a Russia-Ukraine or Russia-NATO conflict but one more manifestation of Russias challenge to the rules-based international order. In the most basic and tangible way, Putin effectively has declared war on the people of the world, and the West has an international humanitarian obligation to stop him. That means sending Ukraine not only the nature and quantity of weapons, and intelligence assistance, it needs to defeat Russia decisively in the airspace and on the ground of Ukraine, but also in the Black Sea domain.

Ukraine struck a major blow to Russias maritime might when it sank its flagship, the Moskva, using its own homemade Neptune missiles, perhaps assisted by U.S. targeting intelligence. Other Russian vessels have been destroyed. If the West supplies Ukraine with more such weapons and technical support, Russias entire Black Sea fleet, with the possible exception of submarines, could be neutralized and the food blockade broken.

If the West does not give Ukraine the weapons it needs to open the Black Sea to normal commerce, the U.S. Navy and NATO allies must do it, perhaps by providing security escorts to grain convoys. The international waterway cannot become what Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdoan has called a Russian lake particularly when international food experts say mass starvation is a real consequence. Turkey, NATOs unreliable ally under Erdoan, controls access to the Black Sea and must be pressed to allow U.S. ships ready access to free up the worlds food supply.

Washingtons unwillingness to intervene directly in collective self-defense of a fellow democracy that has not requested it is understandable. But U.S. skittishness about providing Ukraine all it needs to defend itself is not. And Russia cannot be allowed to impede freedom of navigation and trample on yet another international norm.

Meanwhile, Chinas leader, Xi Jinping, watches with great interest since he already treats the Taiwan Strait as a Chinese inland sea that its aircraft carriers periodically transit, while only smaller U.S. Navy ships have entered it since 2007. Putin cannot be allowed to scare off frequent Western use of the Black Sea, especially when a humanitarian disaster looms.

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.

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Biden and NATO must help Ukraine get its wheat to the world - The Hill

Ernie Regehr is a senior fellow in defence and Arctic security at The Simons Foundation Canada.

Russias recent threats to add nuclear attacks to its brutal assault on the people and infrastructure of Ukraine is a cruel reminder of the harsh, inescapable reality of nuclear deterrence the very existence of nuclear weapons carries the ever-present danger that they will be used.

Every state with nuclear weapons threatens to use them. In the case of Russia, President Vladimir Putin recently promised his adversaries consequences you have never experienced if he decides to unleash these weapons. The more measured language of the 2021 Summit Communiqu of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, meanwhile, said that the organization would only use nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to impose costs on an adversary that would be unacceptable and far outweigh the benefits that any adversary could hope to achieve. Russias threat of nuclear warfare is more immediate and therefore much more dangerous in this moment, but the point is that both statements clearly threaten the use of nuclear weapons as a possibility. These weapons, both warn, are always at hand and could, in desperate circumstances, be unleashed.

By the simple fact of their Damoclean presence, in both wartime and peacetime, nuclear weapons impose on humanity the relentless task of keeping them from being launched. It is an imperative dangerously dramatized by the Ukraine war, with United States Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin coming to the only credible conclusion nuclear war is where all sides lose. That truth applies regardless of which side makes the first move.

The preamble to the international Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons states that any use of a nuclear weapon would be abhorrent to the principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience. Unfortunately, that doesnt change the tragic fact that neither Ukraine nor its NATO neighbours have the means to prevent a Russian nuclear attack. We can continue to discourage the use of nuclear weapons in our appeals to Russias leadership, but in the end we are left waiting to see what the dangerous vagaries of the Kremlin will bring next.

Humanity remains hostage to a global security system based on threats and counter-threats of nuclear attack. Russias stance is clear, while NATOs official nuclear doctrine (outlined in its strategic concept, which was last revised in 2010) insists that nuclear weapons are the supreme guarantee of security for NATO allies. At the same time, NATO also promises to work toward the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons.

This inherent contradiction has never been in greater need of resolution and the opportunity to advance that effort will present itself at the NATO Summit scheduled for Madrid at the end of June. As a member of NATOs Nuclear Planning Group, Canada has a key seat at the table.

The transition from claiming that nuclear weapons are the supreme guarantors of security to creating a world without them will hardly be managed in a single meeting, but the upcoming summit does offer a timely opportunity to challenge nuclear orthodoxy and Canada, along with like-minded partners, has the opportunity and obligation to help drive change.

A modest but worthwhile effort would be to press for a shift in NATOs nuclear rhetoric to acknowledge nuclear weapons not as fundamental to security but as a problem to be overcome.

A more concrete and widely encouraged measure would be for NATO to pledge that it will never be the first to use nuclear weapons, and to adjust its war planning measures accordingly. A no-first-use commitment should really be a straightforward matter of heeding American security realist Henry Kissinger, who told the Munich Security Conference in 2009 that any use of nuclear weapons is certain to involve a level of casualties and devastation out of proportion to foreseeable foreign policy objectives.

NATO currently hosts U.S. tactical nuclear gravity bombs in five European countries, each with fighter aircraft tasked to deliver those B61 bombs to NATO-defined targets. It is an arrangement meant to signal NATOs technical and political capacity to launch nuclear attacks in the event of a war in other words, the capacity to start a war that all sides would lose.

Combined with a no-first-use pledge, returning those tactical nuclear weapons to the U.S. would be a prominent turn toward nuclear de-escalation. And removing these barbarous weapons that are, in the end, unusable by any state at all attuned to the dictates of public conscience can only enhance security.

Mr. Putins brazen threat to launch nuclear attacks presents us with the reality of the use of nuclear weapons the mass killing of civilians and soldiers alike, as well as vast physical and environmental destruction. In Madrid, Canada will have the opportunity to challenge its NATO partners to take some modest but deliberate steps away from the abyss that nuclear weapons promise.

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Opinion: NATO has a chance to step back from the edge of a nuclear abyss - The Globe and Mail

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko attends a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia March 11, 2022. Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via REUTERS

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May 23 (Reuters) - Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said on Monday he was concerned about what he called moves by the West to "dismember" Ukraine, and accused Poland of seeking to seize the Western part of the country.

He offered no evidence for his assertions.

"What worries us is that they are ready, the Poles and NATO, to come out, to help take western Ukraine like it was before 1939," Lukashenko said during a televised meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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Lukashenko, a close ally of Putin, said Kyiv would eventually have to ask for help in preventing the seizure of western Ukraine.

Moscow has in the past suggested that Poland seeks to establish control over historical Polish lands in Ukraine, a claim that Warsaw denies as disinformation. read more

Poland is one of Ukraine's strongest supporters, sending weapons across the border and taking in more than 3 million Ukrainian refugees.

Belarus said in March its armed forces were not taking part in what Moscow calls its "special operation" in Ukraine, but it did serve as a launchpad for Russia to send thousands of troops across the border on Feb. 24.

Under a non-aggression pact signed in 1939 just before the outbreak of World War Two, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union carved Poland up between them. Most of the territory seized by Moscow is now in either Belarus or Ukraine. Kaliningrad, formerly German East Prussia, became an exclave of Russia.

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Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Angus MacSwan

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Lukashenko accuses Poland and NATO of plotting to partition Ukraine - Reuters

Quad Meet: Quad Members stress it is not an "Asian NATO".

Leaders of the "Quad" -- the United States, India, Australia and Japan -- met in Tokyo on Tuesday, cementing an alliance designed to counter China's push across the Asia-Pacific region.

The grouping has risen and fallen in prominence over the years, but gained new traction following deadly border clashes between India and China in 2020, and a recent surge in Australian diplomatic and commercial confrontations with Beijing.

Members stress it is not an "Asian NATO", and portray it as a group that can offer others in the region an alternative to China in areas including Covid-19 resources, disaster relief and cybersecurity.

Roots in 2004 tsunami relief

The four countries first came together for relief operations after the Indonesia earthquake of January 26, 2004 sent devastating tsunami waves along India's eastern coastline, killing about 230,000 people.

Three years later, the countries formed the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. Japan's prime minister at the time, Shinzo Abe, was said to be a driving force in the effort.

The Quad's first main act was to conduct joint naval exercises under the existing US-India bilateral Malabar exercise format.

But a year later, then-Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd backed away from the nascent alliance, not wanting to be part of a group seen as openly challenging China, which had become a powerful economic partner of Australia.

Australia returns to fold

A decade later, China's increasingly aggressive push to build regional networks and project its military power -- especially in the South China Sea -- as well as its violent border clashes with India, prodded the four back together, with Canberra now a more committed partner.

They all participated in the 2020 Malabar exercises, making the group appear increasingly like a military alliance.

Beijing lashed out in response, branding it a Cold War-type organisation dedicated to containing China. Foreign Minister Wang Yi has compared the grouping to "ocean foam", something that will make waves but quickly dissipate.

Biden's stamp

While the Trump administration put some effort into sustaining the Quad, President Joe Biden went further, virtually convening the first summit of Quad leaders in March 2021 just weeks after taking office.

In September 2021, the four met in person in Washington, elevating the grouping further -- but still without creating a formal institution.

It was an example of Washington's new approach of building coalitions of countries and institutions around specific mutual needs, regionally and globally, rather than traditional security alliances.

That means, Washington says, the Quad can work with other groupings, such as ASEAN, when interests overlap.

Wooing India

For the United States, Australia and Japan, the Quad is very much a long-term courtship of India. New Delhi is traditionally insistent on its non-aligned status when it comes to contests between superpowers.

Deadly fighting that broke out in 2019 between Chinese and Indian troops in a disputed Himalayan border region appeared to have moved India off that stance.

But India, citing "neutrality", has continued to offer material support for Russia amid the invasion of Ukraine, creating a new source of friction.

India is "the critical, crucial member in the Quad", Kurt Campbell, the White House's national security coordinator for the Asia-Pacific region, said in November.

In its strategic planning for the region, the US has stopped saying "Asia-Pacific" and now studiously refers to it as the "Indo-Pacific".

Vaccines and climate change

But officials from all four countries say the Quad has to offer more than defence. None are pushing for a formal alliance -- India, analysts say, remains deeply wary of that -- and there are doubts it could effectively challenge Beijing's military might anyway.

Instead, the four democratic countries are looking to other "soft power" activities that offer the rest of the region a contrast to authoritarian China.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been central to giving the grouping greater meaning. The four countries used the Quad framework to commit to distributing 1.3 billion vaccine doses, with more than 485 million already delivered.

Other issues they are working on within the Quad format: "clean" shipping, fighting global warming and building more secure IT and internet infrastructure.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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Checking China: What Is The Quad Alliance - NDTV

An RA-89075 Ir Aero Russia Superjet 95-LR-100 and an RA-89085 Sukhoi OKB Russia Superjet 100-95B were seen flying in opposite directions around Turkey at around 12.20am. The two Russian registered jets were travelling at between 452.6 and 392.5 nautical miles per hour respectively.

@CivMilAirshared screenshots showing the two Kremlin-backed jets flying over Turkey.

They said: "Meanwhile, not avoiding Turkish airspace... 2 x Russian registered jets.

"Turkey - the ONLY@NATOmember country that still allows Russian registered aircraft to come & go freely."

In comparison, the UK clamped down on Russian aircraft shortly after Vladimir Putin launched the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine.

JUST IN:Ukraine's bid to join EU could take up to 20 years as calls for alternative alliance made

Writing on Twitter on February 25, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said: "Putins actions are unlawful and anyone benefiting from Russias aggression in Ukraine is not welcome here."

The Welwyn Hatfield MP added: "Ive strengthened our ban in the UK so that no Russian private jet can fly in UK airspace, or touchdown effective immediately."

Another separate post highlighted how a US Air Force aircraft flew over Bulgaria to avoid Turkey's airspace.

The RQ-4 Global Hawk could be seen moving away from Turkey while flying over neighbouring Greece as it moved towards the Balkan EU member state.

However, Turkey has described the invasion as a "war" and blocked Russian warships from the Black Sea.

Ankara has also frustrated Kyiv by refusing to sanction the invaders.

According to the Washington Post, Turkey hopes to encourage sanctioned Russian oligarchs to plough their wealth into Turkeys tanking economy and continue importing Russian oil.

However, Ankara announced that Turkish air space had been closed to military and civilian planes carrying troops from Russia to Syria in April.

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Russian jets fly into Turkey's NATO airspace hours after US Air Force flies around area - Express