Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday debriefed Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly on a tough talk between Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin over the Russian troop buildup on the Ukraine border.
Blinken’s office said in a statement that he and Joly discussed “shared priorities, including a strong, united response to further Russian aggression against Ukraine.”
As was reported yesterday, President Joe Biden took a call from Russian President Vladimir Putin where the two leaders discussed the situation on Russia’s border with Ukraine, among other matters. Despite the best efforts of the State Department to put some positive spin on the discussion, it doesn’t sound as if things went very well. Both sides wound up sticking to their previous positions and Putin sounded increasingly frustrated and belligerent over what he perceives as NATO’s stubborn refusal to comply with his demands.
The Ukraine crisis should be a wake-up call for European nations to boost defense spending and finally take seriously France’s calls for European strategic autonomy. And yes, Americans should cheer them on.
Presently, Europe is heavily dependent on decisions made in Washington regarding whether or how to counter the Russian threat, largely because they lack the collective military heft to deal with Russia on their own. Washington, however, has good reason to dither; few have any appetite for a war with Russia, or for “dying for Kyiv.”
Russia’s Supreme Court has ordered the closure of International Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights group.
Memorial worked to recover the memory of the millions of innocent people executed, imprisoned or persecuted in the Soviet era.
Formally it has been “liquidated” for failing to mark a number of social media posts with its official status as a “foreign agent”.
That designation was given in 2016 for receiving funding from abroad.
But in court, the prosecutor labelled Memorial a “public threat”, accusing the group of being in the pay of the West to focus attention on Soviet crimes instead of highlighting a “glorious past”.
He’s prepared to make war at a time of his choosing.
Russian President Vladimir Putin scored major propaganda points in his over four-hour annual press conference this week. He turned attention away from Russia’s invasion of Crimea, support of Russian separatists in the Donbas region (Donbas), and troop buildup on Ukraine’s borders. Instead, Putin guides the untrained eye through the conflict in terms of Russian grievances. In Putin-speak, the Ukrainian conflict is a product of Ukrainian persecution of Russians and separatists, and NATO’s expansion eastward. Putin also used the news conference to showcase the growing Russia-China strategic partnership.
Dec 24 (Reuters) – New satellite images captured by a private U.S. company show that Russia has continued to build up its forces in annexed Crimea and near Ukraine in recent weeks while pressing the United States for talks over security guarantees it is seeking.
Reuters could not independently verify the latest images from U.S.-based Maxar Technologies. The Kremlin reiterated on Friday that it reserves the right to move its own forces on Russian territory as it sees fit and that Western countries were carrying out provocative military manoeuvres near its borders.
Canada’s long-standing, stalwart support of Ukraine will be under new and intense pressure early in the new year, say experts and a former top military commander, as the West braces for possible military action by Russia, perhaps as soon as late January.
There could be as many as five possible scenarios on how the current crisis in Eastern Europe might play out, and they’re almost all bad.
The assembly of over 100,000 Russian troops on Ukraine’s eastern border and the possibility of a full-blown invasion has riveted the attention of western leaders and policy-makers.
Will Russia invade? That’s doubtful, in fact I suspect they’ll get what they want through threats alone.
Whether they do or don’t remember Czechoslovakia.
NATO will do nothing except hasten its own end as it is exposed as a sham alliance.
Canada will do nothing beyond sanctions, if that.
Biden will get his 10% so America will do nothing. The American, Ukrainian, Russian and Euro Oligarchs recognize war is sometimes bad for business.
Chrystia Freeland will be sad so she’ll dream up some horrid domestic policy to punish Canadians.
Meanwhile Canada’s armed forces will be tasked with developing a Quick Deployment Pride Parade Brigade.
This is likely a more realistic take on things by a Polish MEP, and few know Western and Russian treachery better than Poland.
‘The current situation reeks of a new Yalta’ – Polish MEP warns over potential deal between US and Russia
… “Poland is in a difficult geopolitical situation. The U.S. wants to draw Russia to its side against China. If this works out, Russia will demand some kind of payment. What will it be? We need to remind ourselves of history. Poland must arm up and build a coalition of states which will not accept another Yalta,” he said.
The Yalta conference saw much of Europe carved up between the great powers in preparation for the end of the Second World War. The allies recognized that the USSR had a sphere of influence over much of Eastern Europe, and essentially green lit the Soviets taking control of Poland.
Washington is pretending that Russian president Vladimir Putin is bluffing about invading Ukraine. He isn’t, and he may strike before the new year.
There are at least four reasons why. Putin, as I wrote in November for Foreign Affairs, is thinking about his legacy. Great Russian leaders grab land. Second, he doesn’t see anyone stopping him. Third, he’s convinced that Ukraine isn’t a real country. Fourth, Putin hasn’t been able to get a deal out of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Putin sees approval for NATO membership in Ukraine only growing.
Team Biden has tried to cool down the situation, but it hasn’t worked. The number of Russian forces on the border continues to increase.
MOSCOW, Dec 23 (Reuters) – Russian mercenaries have deployed to separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine in recent weeks to bolster defences against Ukrainian government forces as tensions between Moscow and the West rise, four sources have told Reuters.
In recent weeks, Russia has moved tens of thousands of regular troops to staging posts closer to Ukraine and followed up by demanding urgent security guarantees from the West designed, Moscow says, to prevent Ukraine and other neighbouring countries being used as a base to attack it.
US President Joe Biden’s willingness to appease Russia over its aggressive conduct towards Ukraine is threatening to create deep divisions within the NATO alliance — a result that would doubtless delight Russian President Vladimir Putin. NATO was created specifically as a collective defense against potential Russian aggression.
With an estimated 100,000 Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border, Western leaders have sought to present a united front to dissuade Russian President Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine.
There is mounting concern among Western intelligence services, which is also shared by the Ukrainian government, that the presence of a well-armed Russian battlegroup close to the Ukrainian border indicates that Moscow could launch a full-scale invasion as soon as next month.
Google and Meta face the threat of multi-million-dollar fines for failing to delete content that the Russian government considers illegal – but a close look at court papers reveals these are often simply posts about protests in support of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
In the summer of 2018, a Russian poet writing under the pseudonym Siberian Viking posted a caricature on his Facebook account. It showed the double-headed eagle of the Russian coat of arms, with the bird’s heads replaced by faces of President Vladimir Putin and the then-prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev.
Alongside it was a short poem, alleging that the eagle was twice as greedy as others, lied twice as much and carried out surveillance with four eyes. It ended with an emotional cry: “When will Russians awaken to remove this contagion?”
Russia has demanded strict limits on the activities of the US-led Nato military alliance in the countries neighbouring its borders.
Tension has been rising between Russia and Western countries, who fear Russia plans to invade its neighbour Ukraine.
Russia denies this, but says Nato must rule out Ukraine and others ever joining Nato to defuse the situation.
Moscow wants urgent talks with the US – but its proposals are being viewed as a non-starter in Washington.
A fighting force of almost a million regular soldiers and reservists is on alert because of the constant threat of a Putin-ordered invasion
For Denis Semyrog-Orlyk, it is not a question of whether the Russians will invade Ukraine, but when. On a cold, drizzly evening last week, the affable 46-year-old architect was sitting with fellow members of the 130th battalion of the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces in a hut on the outskirts of Kiev, taking lessons on how to stop the invaders in their tracks.
The Ukrainian capital, a bustling place of picturesque golden domed churches and horrendous traffic jams, does not feel like a city on the verge of war. There are no signs of panic buying; no mass exodus to the countryside. The estimated 100,000 Russian troops positioned menacingly on the country’s northern, eastern and southern borders feel far away.
For Misha Novitskyi, the question of whether Russia will invade Ukraine is not theoretical. The enemy is just 50 metres away behind a concrete slab. From time to time Russian voices float eerily across a wintry no man’s land of ragged trees and scrub.
“When they light their stoves you can see the smoke,” Novitskyi – a senior lieutenant in the Ukrainian army – said, speaking from what is in effect Europe’s eastern front with Russia. He added: “Every day they shoot at us.”
The conflict between Kyiv and pro-Russian separatists has gone on for nearly eight long years. There are first world war echoes. Both sides face off along a fixed 250-mile “border” or line of contact which snakes across Ukraine’s Donbas region.
Also… How a Russian invasion of Ukraine could spill over into Europe
A senior Western intelligence official has warned that if Russia decides to invade Ukraine, a conflict could spill over further into Europe.
Speaking to journalists, including the BBC, the senior intelligence official, who asked not to be named, said: “Let’s not be blind. If Russia initiates a scenario of any kind it will also initiate action against Nato members”.
“To think war could be contained to one nation would be foolish,” they added.
Those concerns have been echoed by Britain’s most senior military officer.
“Opponents of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was recently completed, argue it would make Russia less reliant on the Ukrainian gas pipeline network, potentially stripping a key deterrent to invasion, according to The Wilson Center. Nord Stream 2 would remove both a key revenue source from Ukraine and a powerful tool the nation has in defending itself against Russian aggression.”
