A look at how Putin’s War has reversed efforts by the West, and several Russian Leader’s, to step away from the ‘Cold War’ and coexist…
It has forced Germany, the strongest of the Euroepen Union countries to deal with its reluctance to embracing military power…
It has severed ties with Russia on the human and business sides….
And?
After dealing with a American President that wanted to get ‘paid’ for military and economic ties ….
Now they have banned together with an old friend in American President Joe Biden, because Russian President Putin never liked the West and IS pissed that old Soviet states left Moscow’s control and IS fighting one step at time to get it back…WITH FORCE….
The fighting continues… In the Ukraine…..
Russian forces are making slow progress in the Donetsk region….
China is a ‘third wheel’ right now….
“Many of us had started to take peace for granted,” Mr. Niinisto said this month at the Munich Security Conference after leading Finland’s abrupt push over the past year to join NATO, an idea unthinkable even in 2021. “Many of us had let our guard down.”
The war in Ukraine has transformed Europe more profoundly than any event since the Cold War’s end in 1989. A peace mentality, most acute in Germany, has given way to a dawning awareness that military power is needed in the pursuit of security and strategic objectives. A continent on autopilot, lulled into amnesia, has been galvanized into an immense effort to save liberty in Ukraine, a freedom widely seen as synonymous with its own.
“European politicians are not familiar with thinking about hard power as an instrument in foreign policy or geopolitical affairs,” said Rem Korteweg, a Dutch defense expert. “Well, they have had a crash course.”…
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“Zeitenwende,” or epochal turning point, is the term Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany used almost a year ago in a speech announcing a $112 billion investment in the German armed forces. He meant it for Germany, a country traumatized by its Nazi past into visceral antiwar sentiment, but the word also applies to a continent where the possibility of nuclear war, however remote, no longer belongs in the realm of science fiction.
The post-Cold War era has given way to an uneasy interregnum in which great-power rivalry grows. “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia,” President Biden said this past week in Warsaw. He spoke as China and Russia held talks on their “no limits” partnership and Mr. Putin suspended Russian participation in the last surviving arms control treaty between the two biggest nuclear-armed powers.
It is the Age of Reordering, and Europe has been obliged to adjust accordingly.
“The war has sent Europeans back to basics, to questions of war and peace and our values,” said François Delattre, the French ambassador to Germany. “It asks of us: Who are we as Europeans?”…
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In Mr. Putin’s telling, with his self-image as the macho embodiment of Saint Russia, Europeans were part of a decadent West, stripped of any backbone. He was wrong, one of several mistakes that have undercut a Russian invasion that was supposed to decapitate Ukraine within days.
Still, if Europe has held the line, its acute dependence on the United States — nearly 78 years after the end of World War II — has been revealed once more. America has armed Ukraine with weapons and military equipment worth some $30 billion since the war began, dwarfing the European arms contribution.
Without the United States, the heroic Ukraine of President Volodymyr Zelensky may not have had the military means to resist the Russian invasion. This is a sobering thought for Europeans, even if Europe’s response has exceeded many expectations. It is a measure of the work that still needs to be done if Europe is to become a credible military power.
So, as a long war looms along with a possibly protracted stalemate, the European Union will grapple with how to reinforce its militaries; how to navigate tensions between frontline states intent on the complete defeat of Mr. Putin and others, like France and Germany, inclined toward compromise; and how to manage an American election next year that will feed anxieties over whether Washington will stay the course….
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China is set this week to host Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko — a close ally of Putin’s — amid increasing international scrutiny of Beijing’s stance on the war in Ukraine and warnings from Washington that it could be gearing up to supply Moscow with lethal aid. While Western countries have lined up to support Ukraine, Beijing insists it is neutral in the conflict.
Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
- Putin claimed, again without giving evidence, that the West is trying to threaten the survival of the Russian nation, saying in an interview with the state-owned Rossiya 1 channel: “We are forced to respond to it.” Putin has increasingly framed the war in Ukraine as an existential battle between Russia and the West.
- Lukashenko is visiting China at the invitation of President Xi Jinping, according to China’s Foreign Ministry. The visit will start Tuesday and end Thursday. Lukashenko and Xi will discuss how to enhance economic and geopolitical cooperation between their countries, Belarusian state-owned media reported.
- The United States hopes to deter China from supplying Russia with lethal weaponry, CIA Director William J. Burns said in a television interview. “We’re confident that the Chinese leadership is considering the provision of lethal equipment,” Burns told CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” adding that intelligence officials had not yet seen evidence of equipment being shipped and did not believe a final decision had been made.
- Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently communicated to his Chinese counterpart the potential consequences if China provides lethal aid to Russia, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNNon Sunday. “At present, China has not moved forward, as far as we can discern,” Sullivan said. “And I would prefer to keep our messages to China on this question — what the consequences would be — in the private, high-level diplomatic channels.”
- Putin said any negotiations to resume the New START accord should take into account Britain’s and France’s nuclear arsenals, as well as those of the United States and Russia. Last week, Moscow said it was “suspending” its participation in New START, the only remaining nuclear arms control pact it has with Washington — which London and Paris are not parties to. Putin suggested in his interview with Rossiya 1 that discounting the French and British arsenals was unfair to Russia.
- Nine years after Russia illegally annexed Crimea, U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement Sunday that “Crimea is Ukraine.” But in an interview the same day, Sullivan demurred when asked if the United States would support Ukraine retaking Crimea with military force. “What ultimately happens with Crimea in the context of this war and a settlement of this war is something for the Ukrainians to determine, with the support of the United States,” Sullivan told CNN’s “State of the Union.” Russia is holding 180 political prisoners in Crimea, said Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman.
- Russian forces are making “marginal territorial gains” around the front-line cities of Bakhmut and Avdiivka, in the eastern Donetsk region, according to the latest battleground report by the Institute for the Study of Warthink tank.
- British defense officials identified a cluster of 10 destroyed Russian armored vehicles outside the besieged town of Vuhledar in newly released satellite imagery. The vehicles were probably part of Russia’s 155th Naval Infantry Brigade, an elite force that has been “backfilled with inexperienced mobilized personnel,” the U.K. Defense Ministry said in a Sunday update. Russian forces embarked on a renewed push this month to retake Vuhledar, a mostly deserted coal-mining city in Donetsk, 70 miles southwest of Bakhmut.
- The threat of Russian missile attacks across Ukraine remains high, according to the Ukrainian military. Russian forces waged 10 attacks using multiple-rocket launchers on Saturday, in addition to six missile strikes and five airstrikes, Ukraine’s armed forces said.
- An American Army veteran fighting in Ukraine was killed in action on Feb. 16, his family told The Post. Andrew Peters, 28, arrived in Ukraine in November to join the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine, said his father, John Peters….