“Ukraine – Russia”

Ukraine accused Russia on Wednesday of bombing a children’s hospital in the besieged port of Mariupol during a supposed ceasefire to enable some of the hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in the city to escape.

Russia had said it would hold fire to let civilians flee Mariupol and other besieged cities on Wednesday. But the city council said the hospital had been hit several times.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a tweet that “children are under wreckage," claiming Russian forces dropped a bomb on a children’s hospital in Mariupol on Wednesday. He called for the sky to be closed to “stop the killings."https://t.co/n6ZDBcyqtG pic.twitter.com/FGnzCYOopW

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) March 9, 2022

Russia will soon be unable to pay its debts, according to a leading credit ratings agency.

Fitch Ratings downgraded its view of the country’s government debt, warning a default is “imminent”.

The move comes amid increasing international sanctions against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine.

A credit rating is intended to help investors understand the level of risk they face in buying a country’s debt – or bonds.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was given a stark reminder of wars present and past on Wednesday in Berlin.

Prior to his first bilateral meeting with Germany’s new chancellor, Trudeau spoke with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, telling him Canada will ship more specialized military equipment.

The federal cabinet has approved an additional $50 million in military and humanitarian aid, Trudeau said during a media availability at the German Chancellery building on Wednesday. Trudeau also invited Zelensky to address Parliament virtually — something the embattled president has agreed to do.

The buck-passing between Poland and the US over the possible use of elderly MiG-29s to hit Russian forces inside Ukraine is one of the west’s few diplomatic failures of the past month. It also raises questions about how far European countries are prepared to escalate militarily before they believe they will touch a dangerous Russian tripwire.

The US and Europe have worked hard to keep their differences over sanctions and oil embargos to a public minimum, and tried to accommodate each other’s national interests. So it was striking on Tuesday when first the Pentagon described a Polish offer to send planes to the US airbase in Ramstein as “untenable”, and then the deputy US secretary of state said the US had not been consulted about the plan.

When Donald Trump was making his most strident complaints about NATO allies spending too little on defence, some member nations — Canada, the Netherlands and Germany, in particular — seemed largely unmoved by the now-former U.S. president’s broadsides.

But Russia’s war on Ukraine — with all of its brutality and destruction — over the past two weeks seems to have succeeded where Trump and his predecessor, Barack Obama, failed.

In a speech to Republican donors in New Orleans, Donald Trump said the US should put the Chinese flag on F-22 jets and “bomb the shit out of Russia” in retribution for its invasion of Ukraine.

The Washington Post reported the remarks, which were made on Saturday night.

To laughter, the paper said, the former president said: “And then we say, ‘China did it, we didn’t do it, China did it,’ and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch.”

According to the Post, Trump also called Nato a “paper tiger”, said the US military had won “skirmishes” against Russian troops while he was president, and claimed to have been tougher on Vladimir Putin than any other US leader.

Vladimir Putin has unleashed a war of militaries and also of narratives

Like Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic, Vladimir Putin clearly believes that justice is whatever serves the interest of the strongest. It’s the code of the mafia godfather—and, for a supposed master manipulator of information, Putin has wasted little effort trying to cloak with fine ideals his application of brute force against Ukraine.

The pretext for the conflict—a “neo-Nazi” regime in Kyiv conducting “genocide” against ethnic Russians—seemed almost intentionally lame. No attempts were made to persuade or demoralize the public, either in Ukraine or in the Western democracies, ahead of what was to be the most egregious act of aggression in Europe in at least a generation. Even Russian troops at the front have often looked uncertain about the nature of their mission.

LVIV/IRPIN — Russia warned that oil prices could surge to $300 a barrel and it might close the main gas pipeline to Germany if the West halts oil imports over the invasion of Ukraine as peace talks on Monday made little progress.

The incursion, the biggest attack on a European state since World War Two, has prompted 1.7 million people to flee, a raft of sanctions on Moscow, an exodus of foreign firms, and fears of wider conflict in the West unthought-of for decades.

Sieges and the bombing of Ukrainian cities continued.

When Hungarian rebels arose in 1956 to overthrow the Communist regime imposed by Joseph Stalin, President Dwight Eisenhower refused to send U.S. forces to aid the Hungarians.

Ike would not take America to war with Russia over a small country in Central Europe.

While the Hungarians were heroic and inspirational, Hungary was neither a member of NATO nor a vital U.S. interest. Moreover, it was on the Soviet side of the Yalta line dividing Europe, and agreed to by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at Yalta in 1945.

For similar reasons today, President Joe Biden has refused to send U.S. troops, ships or planes to attack Russian forces invading Ukraine.

Food for thought.

#Ukraine: The practical implementation of tactics to destroy supplies – a Russian convoy of 6 fuel trucks was destroyed near Pryluky, #Chernihiv Oblast. pic.twitter.com/B8ftEklMl2

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 7, 2022

The Russian Air Force (VKS) has procured 350 modern combat aircraft in the last ten years and the question that must be on every Russian’s mind in the second week of the Ukraine War is: What did we get for our money?

Because by all accounts, the Russian Air Force is nearly AWOL from Russia’s biggest battles since 1945.

A major state actor could now legalise internet piracy and hacking

Today gas prices in Europe rose to 800p per therm — an eighteen-fold increase in just one year. Meanwhile, fertiliser prices are set to rise and with them food prices, with wheat prices basically doubling since last year. Financial markets are now openly fretting about stagflation (the combination of soaring inflation and stagnation in the economy). We have not seen it since the 1970s and it is unclear how our now overly financialised economy will respond to it, but my bet is that economies today are far more prone to stagflationary chaos than they were in the 70s.

The number of Ukrainian refugees in Poland, mostly women and children, is on course to top the number of migrants taken by Germany during the 2015 migrant crisis.

Germany, with a population more than double Poland’s, said it had taken in 1.1 million asylum seekers in 2015, when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the country’s borders to migrants to distant Syria — although only around 40 per cent of the influx actually claimed to be Syrians.