Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is condemning Russia’s attack on Ukraine and calling on Russian President Vladimir Putin to withdraw all military forces from the country.
“Canada condemns in the strongest possible terms Russia’s egregious attack on Ukraine,” Trudeau said in a statement late Wednesday.
In a pre-dawn TV statement Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia did not plan to occupy Ukraine and demanded that its military lay down their arms.
Moments later, attacks were reported on Ukrainian military targets.
Ukraine said that “Putin has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.
Russia’s military breached the border in a number of places, in the north, south and east, including from Belarus, a long-time Russian ally. There are reports of fighting in some parts of eastern Ukraine.
Russia attacks Ukraine; conflict reverberates around globe
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia launched a wide-ranging attack on Ukraine on Thursday, hitting cities and bases with airstrikes or shelling, as civilians piled into trains and cars to flee. Ukraine’s government said Russian tanks and troops rolled across the border in what it called a “full-scale war” that could rewrite the geopolitical order and whose fallout already reverberated around the globe.
It is doubtful that Beijing is poised to invade Taiwan or that it would assume that the deployment of sizable U.S. ground forces to Europe provided an opportunity to strike the island.
In a February 13, 2022, essay that was published in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Ukraine Is a Distraction From Taiwan,” Elbridge Colby and Oriana Skylar Mastro argue that the United States will increase the danger of prompting an opportunistic Chinese attack on Taiwan if it deploys military forces to deal with Russia’s threat to Ukraine.
To support this argument, the authors assert that “…China poses an increasingly imminent [emphasis added] threat to Taiwan,” and, given its huge military power, “…reasonably doubt[s] that the U.S or anyone else would mount a meaningful response to an invasion of Taiwan.” In addition, the authors assert that any additional U.S. ground troop deployments to Europe will weaken the U.S. capacity to defend Taiwan, and hence will indeed tempt China to attack.
Putin announces military operation in Ukraine
Russia’s Putin announces military operation in Ukraine
Breaking: Video reportedly shows large explosion in Kharkiv, Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/mX9QWr6my2
— PM Breaking News (@PMBreakingNews) February 24, 2022
From RT – Putin announces ‘special operation’ in Donbass
The special military operation will be aimed at “the defense of” the newly-recognized republics of Donetsk and Lugansk
Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced he ordered his country’s military to conduct a special operation in the Donbass region after the leaders of the breakaway republics asked Moscow for military assistance in response to what they claim is an increase in “Ukrainian aggression.”
Assuming that remains the goal then nothing has really changed.
Mariupol pic.twitter.com/6VokxlCAGS
— Андрей (@AndreyZhukovv) February 24, 2022
Russian forces massing near Ukraine’s borders can only remain in position for a few days before they have to be sent back to nearby bases or risk their capability being significantly degraded, western officials and experts believe.
That means that President Vladimir Putin will come under increasing pressure to use them in a full invasion of Ukraine – or send them back to staging areas, still in Russia’s south or west, but tens or even hundreds of kilometres back.
Such advance positions, often with poor protection from the cold, can be held only for a short period – and there is some evidence on social media of the poor conditions endured by soldiers near the border.
“… Trudeau said the first round of economic sanctions will ban Canadians from all financial dealings with the breakaway regions Putin recognized, Donetsk and Luhansk. The sanctions will also target members of the Russian Parliament who voted for the decision to recognize the separatist regions, as well as ban Canadians from engaging in purchases of Russian sovereign debt, Trudeau said.”
WTF? We Buy Putin’s Oil?
Did you know that Eastern Canada buys over $550 million of Russian oil each year? https://t.co/q2kwcntjXw pic.twitter.com/2ScicoSmhZ
— Martin Pelletier (@MPelletierCIO) February 22, 2022
The optics look dreadful.
Russia has deployed more than two-thirds of its military combat capability to within striking distance of Ukraine’s borders.
Its 30,000 troops that were supposed to withdraw from neighbouring Belarus at the weekend are still there. So are pontoon bridges and other logistic equipment needed for an invasion.
Violence is flaring in the two Russian-backed breakaway republics in Eastern Ukraine. Russia’s demands from Nato remain unmet and diplomacy has so far failed to bring about any significant withdrawal of Russian forces.
On Saturday, in a novel way to appeal for support, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky denounced world leaders for not aligning themselves more forcefully with his country. At the annual security conference in Munich, where Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2007 had originally decried what he depicted as America’s hubristic quest for global hegemony, Zelensky upbraided various governments for “arrogance” and “appeasement.” Even as Zelensky issued his complaints, however, Putin continued to up the pressure on Ukraine, conducting nuclear drills and taking in civilians into Russia from Donetsk.
Hillary Clinton slammed former President Trump, the GOP and Fox News while speaking at New York Democratic Convention on Thursday.
“We can’t get distracted. Whether it’s by the latest culture war nonsense or some new right-wing lie on Fox or Facebook,” Clinton told the crowd in New York City.
The former secretary of State and presidential nominee went on to allude to Fox News’s coverage of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan addressed the British Parliament, expressing optimism about the “global campaign for democracy now gathering force.” Less than a decade later, the Soviet Union collapsed. After that, it was widely believed that authoritarianism was in decline and that the community of free nations was bound to grow and prosper.
That belief was incorrect. These days we monitor what political scientist Larry Diamond dubbed the “democratic recession.”
After a news report alleged in October 2016 that a server in Trump Tower was communicating with the Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank, the Clinton campaign seized on the moment and claimed it was proof that then-candidate Donald Trump was colluding with Russia.
A manufactured war opposite a foreign tyrant to distract from the real resistance to tyranny at home here and elsewhere in the world?
Great article by Dana Loesch – covers a lot of ground.
They rushed to bolt the door and lock the windows of the little wooden house. It trembled from the battering of the men outside. Petro Mohalat, now aged 95, remembers the first food raids in the winter of 1932.
He was five years old when the communist “brigade” arrived in the village. His grandmother told the children to hide anywhere they could.
“It was very scary. The brigade had pitchforks and they came to every house searching for bread,” he recalls. “They used crowbars to come inside. Then they went to all the barns trying to find any buried bread.”
In his lightning trip to Beijing on February 4, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a “Strategic Partnership” treaty with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. The event coincided with the 20th anniversary of another “Strategic Partnership” deal that he had signed in 2002, with then US President George W Bush.
So, did the Beijing signature represent a reversal of course in Russian foreign policy that, since Russia’s admission into the G7 club (later G8), had been focused on forging closer ties with the United States?
Sitting in a cafe in an upmarket Moscow suburb, the former mercenary Marat Gabidullin looked a long way from the battlefields of Syria where he fought half a decade ago.
Gripping his recently finished memoir, In the Same River Twice, the first published account of fighting for the secretive Russian mercenary outfit Wagner, Gabidullin said: “I wrote this because I realised it’s time for our country to face the truth: mercenaries exist.”
At 55, he’s an imposing figure, with his face and muscular arms covered in scars. “We, in Russia, prefer not to discuss our mercenaries,” he added. “It doesn’t fit the official narrative.”
