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Putting British or other NATO boots on the ground in Ukraine would not make sense, but there are other ways of helping Kiev, British Defence Secretary Grant Shapps has said.
Some officials in Kiev have proposed sending Western military veterans as civilian contractors to train Ukrainian soldiers inside the country in order to quickly raise enough brigades to offset battlefield losses. “I don’t want to step over that line that puts British, sort of, troops on the ground in Ukraine. I don’t think that makes sense to do. But what I do think is sensible is potentially moving training closer,” Shapps said on Wednesday, speaking to a Telegraph podcast about the situation in Ukraine. “There may be other models that we could look at. Not something I would want to go into in detail currently,” the defence minister added. He pointed out that the UK has already trained 65,000 Ukrainian soldiers since 2014, most of them since February 2022, and that London’s commitment to Kiev “is absolutely rock-solid.” Shapps admitted that the situation north of Kharkov is rather dire for the Ukrainian military and blamed it on “the civilized world” not paying attention. “I think the world took its eye off the ball,” Shapps told the Telegraph, but added, “I think it’s rescuable, at this stage.” According to Shapps, other “civilized” countries should follow the UK´s lead and send even more money to Kiev, to ensure that Ukraine has all the weapons, training and equipment it needs to defeat Russia. Earlier this week, Shapps told Times Radio that London saw “no sense at all” in persuading or “strong-arming” Kiev into accepting any peace conditions and “giving up some of their territory” to Moscow. Boris Johnson, who was the British prime minister at the time, made a similar argument during his visit to Kiev in April 2022, which was seen as crucial in persuading Ukraine to reject a proposed armistice with Russia and continue fighting. Shapps was appointed defence minister last August. Unlike his predecessor Ben Wallace, he has no military experience, having been a printing salesman before entering politics. He has served in a variety of cabinet posts under several Tory governments, from housing and transportation to Home Office and net zero. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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Poland cannot give Ukraine any US-made Patriot missile systems because it does not have the full system for its own defense, Polish President Andrzej Duda reiterated on Tuesday.
Kiev has been asking its Western backers to provide more long-range air defense systems to repel Russian strikes. Poland has only just started receiving the first elements of the Patriot surface-to-air batteries that it ordered from the US seven years ago, Duda told Bloomberg at the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha. Warsaw is currently in the process of building its own defense shield, part of which will be formed by the Patriot, he added. “It’s difficult to say right now if we could be providing Patriot systems to Ukraine because, as a matter of fact, we still do not have the system in Poland, we do not have it complete to provide for our own defense,” Duda stated. Ukraine earlier received several Patriot launchers, each of which costs more than $1 billion, from the US, Germany, and the Netherlands. The Financial Times reported in April that Kiev was lobbying Poland, Spain and Romania for batteries to be donated. Both Duda and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk stated last month that Poland didn’t have any Patriot missile systems available to donate to Ukraine. Germany and Spain recently agreed to send additional batteries to Kiev. Greece ruled out a donation, and Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu said some members of his government were against the idea of sharing such weapons. Poland has already donated $4 billion worth of weapons to Ukraine, including more than 300 battle tanks and Soviet-designed MiG 29 fighter jets, Duda said on Tuesday. Poland is modernizing its armed forces, and it must replace what it donated to Ukraine, he added. Warsaw spends 4% of its GDP on defense, which is higher than NATO´s 2.5% target. The Polish leader reiterated the claim that if Russia is allowed to win in Ukraine, it will keep attacking, and may target other neighboring countries. The Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – have increasingly voiced fears that they could be next. That would be “a huge threat to the whole world,” Duda said. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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Kiev to get first of F-16s5/13/2024 Ukraine may receive the F-16 fighter jets promised to it by its Western backers “within weeks,” the British newspaper Evening Standard claimed, citing what it called a “high-ranking military source.”
The aircraft were due to be supplied to Kiev either by June or July, the source said. The paper did not report on which nation would supposedly deliver the jets or what their total number is to be. In March, Dutch Defence Minister Kajsa Ollongren said that Denmark would be the first nation to deliver the F-16s and would do it at some point this summer. The Netherlands was to follow soon after and provide Ukraine with their batch of fighter jets “in the second half of the year,” the minister said at that time. Earlier in May, Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Ilya Evlash stated that Kiev could get the jets as early as after May 5. He also admitted that the delivery date had already been “changed several times.” Kiev has been seeking to acquire the US-made jets for quite some time amid its ongoing conflict with Moscow, which entered its third year this February. In 2023, Western countries announced an international coalition to help Ukraine procure US-designed F-16s and train its pilots. More than 40 aircraft were pledged to Kiev in total by several Western nations, including Denmark, which vowed to provide 19 jets of this type, and by the Netherlands, which said it would send 24. The Ukrainian officials admitted that the country may face infrastructure difficulties in maintaining the US-designed jets. Some of the nation’s senior military officials also told Politico in April that the aircraft could even be no longer relevant, since Russia had already taken measures to counter them. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said last November that, although the F-16s would surely add to Ukraine’s capabilities, they would be far from “a silver bullet” that could fundamentally change the situation on the front lines. Russia has repeatedly stated that continued Western arms shipments to Kiev only prolong the conflict without changing its future outcome. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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Switzerland’s neutrality remains unchanged, the country’s foreign ministry has insisted ahead of the peace conference on the Ukraine conflict next month.
Russia has accused Bern of effectively siding with the West and Kiev in the current confrontation, making it an unfit mediator. According to the Swiss government, the ‘Peace in Ukraine’ summit aims to pave the way towards a “just and lasting peace” in the eastern European country. Bern has invited more than 160 delegations from around the world, including members of the G7, G20, BRICS, and EU. However, Switzerland has not extended an invitation to Russia. Moscow has described the upcoming gathering as “pointless,” and said it would refuse to participate even if it were invited. The Kremlin has argued that the conference is based around Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s peace formula, which Russia has dismissed as an unrealistic ultimatum. Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin deemed Bern’s seemingly mutually exclusive statements absurd. He stressed that “we are not being invited there” while at the same time “it is being said that it’s impossible to resolve anything” without Russia. On Friday, Reuters quoted a Swiss foreign ministry representative as stressing that Bern’s neutrality is “constant” and will not be affected by the summit on June 15-16. The statement noted, however, that “being neutral does not mean being indifferent.” “Switzerland strongly condemns Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Outside the military realm, the right to neutrality does not stand in the way of solidarity and support for Ukraine and its people,” the ministry clarified, as quoted by Reuters. Despite not being a member of either the EU or NATO, Switzerland has supported the West’s sanctions against Russia over its actions in Ukraine. Last month, the country’s national agency overseeing sanctions revealed that Bern was holding an estimated 13 billion francs ($14.3 billion) in Russian assets, which remain frozen in its financial institutions. Also in April, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters that “Switzerland simply does not suit us” as a host of any peace negotiations with Ukraine. “It is not a neutral party, it has turned from neutral to openly hostile,” the diplomat claimed at the time. While some political forces in Switzerland advocate aligning the country’s position more with the US and the EU, a poll conducted by the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich, a research university, which was published in March, demonstrated that some 91% of Swiss citizens believe the country should stay neutral. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has condemned the latest remarks from French President Emmanuel Macron about the option of sending troops to Ukraine, and has warned such a move could ultimately spark an all-out nuclear war.
Speaking to French broadcaster LCI on Thursday, Szijjarto was asked for his take on Macron’s renewed threat to deploy his country’s troops to back up Kiev. The diplomat strongly condemned the idea, saying that the French leader’s comments themselves have contributed to escalating the situation. “If a NATO member commits ground troops, it will be a direct NATO-Russia confrontation and it will then be World War Three,” Szijjarto told the broadcaster. Macron made fresh belligerent remarks in an interview with The Economist published Thursday, doubling down on previous statements about the prospect of deploying French troops to Ukraine. The president said his original remarks, made earlier this year, were a “strategic wake-up call for my counterparts.” He suggested that Paris could deploy troops “if the Russians were to break through the front lines” and a request for help came from Kiev. Hungary’s top diplomat also criticized Macron’s idea that France’s nuclear weapons could become a part of a “credible European defense.” “In peacetime it would be different, but in wartime such statements can be misinterpreted and have serious consequences,” Szijjarto stated, warning that, should the situation escalate into a global nuclear war, “it will be over for everyone.” Speaking to Hungarian broadcaster M1 earlier in the day, the minister also rejected NATO’s proposed €100 billion ($107 billion) five-year plan for a war chest to prop up Ukraine, floated by Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, describing it as “madness.” “In the coming weeks during negotiations we will fight for Hungary’s right to stay away from this madness, from collecting these 100 billion and siphoning them out of Europe,” Szijjarto stated. Hungary has been consistently opposed to the growing involvement of both the US-led NATO and the EU in the Ukrainian conflict, refusing to support Kiev militarily, including through sending weaponry or training Ukrainian troops. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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Türkiye has expressed its support for outgoing Prime Minister Rutte as NATO chief. Sources within NATO report this.
Rutte was in Istanbul last week for a meeting with Turkish President Erdogan. Türkiye was one of the last four NATO countries that have not yet expressed support for Rutte. Türkiye's commitment is an important step in Rutte's ambition to become NATO Secretary General. Now only Hungary, Slovakia and Romania need to be convinced. Rutte needs that support, because to be appointed secretary general requires unanimous support from all 32 NATO member states. Visit Erdogan Last Friday, the outgoing Prime Minister travelled to Istanbul in a personal capacity. He bought himself a plane ticket for an injured scheduled flight. That same day he had a "very positive conversation" with Erdogan. The appointment of the new Secretary General was actually expected on April 4, the day NATO celebrated its 75th anniversary. Now that the unanimous support of the 32 countries is not so obvious, the decision is expected to be made no later than the summit in Washington, from 9 to 11 July. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz appeared to have secured Chinese support for the Ukraine peace summit when he was in Beijing this week, though it is still not clear if Xi Jinping will attend.
China is among more than 100 nations invited to Switzerland for the conference in June to discuss how to end the war, which has dragged on for more than two years. While China has yet to confirm its attendance, it has been pushing for Russia to take part, with special envoy Li Hui lobbying in European capitals last month.Observers say Li’s trip achieved little, but that China – aiming to be a peace broker – has seen an opportunity to push for direct talks between Russia and Ukraine, with the Swiss summit the first step. Björn Alexander Düben, an international relations lecturer at Jilin University in northeast China, said Li was sent to Europe because Beijing saw an “opportune moment” to sway Kyiv and Brussels to make concessions amid “shaky” Western support and Ukraine’s recent setbacks on the battlefields. Russia is expanding gains in eastern Ukraine after it took control of Avdiivka, in Donetsk Oblast, in February, and is now trying to seize the strategic city of Chasiv Yar. Ukraine, meanwhile, is running out of soldiers and ammunition amid stalled support from the US. Düben said China’s efforts in Europe could also be seen as “signalling” to the Global South that it is a responsible power. “The most cynical interpretation might be, China just wants to be seen as a peacemaker … when the US is perceived by more people around the world as not so much of a responsible actor in the context of what’s happening in Gaza,” he said. China has sought to expand its influence in the Global South amid an intensifying rivalry with the United States. It also wants to be a global peacemaker, brokering a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran last year and calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The US is meanwhile under pressure over the military funding and support it provides to Israel. In Europe, special envoy Li would have stressed the urgency of negotiations on the Ukraine war given the potential return of Donald Trump to the White House, according to Victor Gao, vice-president of the Centre for China and Globalisation, a think tank in Beijing. Trump has reportedly said he will cut off US aid to Ukraine if he is re-elected in November and has threatened to end the war “in 24 hours” – unsettling many European Union countries including France and Germany, which have made more long-term security commitments to Ukraine. “Now the West or Nato, led by the United States, does not have a unified and consistent position” on support for Ukraine, said Gao, also a chair professor at Soochow University in eastern China. He said Li would have tried to leverage this during his talks in Europe. Li was also on a mission to prevent further “spillover” of the conflict – especially after French President Emmanuel Macron floated the possibility of involving Nato troops, according to Wang Yiwei, a European affairs specialist at Renmin University in Beijing. Germany and Nato rejected Macron’s idea, and US President Joe Biden said he would not involve American troops. Back in Beijing, Li said the “large gap” between the involved parties had made mediation difficult, but they had agreed that the conflict would ultimately be resolved through peace talks. Moscow has said it is open to talks with Kyiv, but Ukraine insists it will not start negotiations until Russian troops are withdrawn from its territory – a condition Moscow does not accept. Li’s trip was met with scepticism in Europe, with some officials in Brussels saying he was just repeating “Moscow’s talking points”. Li had told EU officials no discussion on Ukraine’s territorial integrity would take place until the violence stops, the Post reported earlier, citing people familiar with the talks. He said that could only happen when the EU stopped sending weapons to Ukraine. Beijing claims to be neutral in the conflict, but has drawn criticism for providing economic support to Moscow amid international sanctions. It has not condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nor called on Moscow to withdraw its troops. China’s push for immediate peace talks without calling for Russian troops to withdraw is also “highly unpopular” in Ukraine, according to Iliya Kusa, an international relations expert at the Ukrainian Institute for the Future in Kyiv. “I would say that there are no high expectations from China’s role and that people tend to think that China will not do anything real to pressure Russia to help Ukraine,” he said. Chinese analysts say the West has overestimated Beijing’s influence on Moscow, which will not withdraw its troops when it appears to have gained the upper hand in the war. Russia now occupies nearly one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory, including Crimea and parts of the four provinces in the east. Gao from the Beijing think tank said China’s peace proposal was “realistic”. He also defended China’s neutrality in the conflict, saying it has never recognised Crimea and the four eastern Ukrainian states as parts of Russia, and has stressed that the territorial integrity and sovereignty of all countries are protected by the UN Charter. China called for the charter to be upheld in a 12-point position paper on Ukraine released last February, which also says legitimate security concerns should be properly handled.“China’s logic is very pragmatic,” Gao said. “First to have a truce, then draw a line of actual control and cease hostility along that, to gain time to solve these [territorial] problems.”. Russia has justified its invasion of Ukraine as a response to the eastward expansion of Nato, which Kyiv wants to join, and President Vladimir Putin has said that “Russia will fight for its interests to the end”. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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The owner and chairman of the Czechoslovak Group (CSG), Michal Strnad, has now become a billionaire, reaping profits from the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
The arms maker has seen its revenues surge amid the conflict, with profits growing almost twofold in 2022 to around $1 billion and nearly doubling again last year, reaching $1.9 billion. One of the conglomerate’s divisions, Excalibur Army, has greatly contributed to the profits, manufacturing munitions as well as building new and refurbishing old Soviet-made weaponry. Amid the conflict, the company has supplied some 100 refurbished T-72 main battle tanks to Kiev. CSG’s production of ammunition grew more than tenfold since the escalation in early 2022 of long-simmering hostilities between Moscow and Kiev, with its workforce nearly tripling to 10,000 across manufacturing sites in eight countries. The arms maker is looking forward to benefiting from the Russia-Ukraine conflict for years to come and appears to be very open about that. The highest demand observed since the end of the Cold War for weapons in Europe is here to stay, Strnad believes. “Even if the war were to end tomorrow, it would take years to replenish the empty stocks, not to mention the push to boost defense spending and ramp up production,” “I am confident there will be strong demand for a long time to come.” Strnad said. The company was originally founded by Strnad’s father, Jaroslav, in 1995, who originally sought to procure decommissioned military hardware from members of the defunct Warsaw Pact – the newly-admitted NATO states – to scrap them and sell for profit. The true profit, however, turned out to be in dealing in arms as they were, with the company promptly discovering high demand for spares as well as for refurbished items of Soviet-era military hardware. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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Production of Taurus missiles, which Kiev has been pressuring Berlin to supply for use against Russia, is currently suspended, the head of the German branch of European arms manufacturer MBDA has said.
Around 600 of the missiles have so far been produced at a facility in the State of Bavaria, but the company cannot make more of them because it has no current contract with the German authorities, Thomas Gottschild said in an interview with the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper on Saturday. The production lines for the Taurus are still available, so MBDA could “ramp up” deliveries of the missiles “at any time,” the executive said. “To do this, however, we would need a new order for these weapons,” he added. The company cannot make reserves of the missiles because it is prohibited under German law, he explained. The halt in production is always a “challenge” for the defense industry, Gottschild stressed. “Our suppliers, who are often small and medium-sized enterprises... often cannot afford financially to maintain production lines. So if we were to receive new orders for the Taurus, our suppliers would first have to reposition themselves and, for example, secure the raw materials they need,” he explained. The Taurus missile has a range of over 500km (around 310 miles) and “is only detected very late by radar” as it moves at a low altitude, the executive said. “This capability profile is in high demand, especially in Ukraine.” However, Gottschild declined to answer a question on whether Kiev should be given the missiles, calling it a “political decision” that should be made by the German government. Chancellor Olaf Scholz doubled down on his refusal to provide Ukraine with Taurus missiles in mid-March, telling parliament that “this is a very long-range weapon” that could not be used without the deployment of German soldiers.” The statement was made just over a week after the publication by RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan of a leaked recording, in which high-ranking German officers discussed the possible use of Taurus missiles against the Crimean Bridge, and spoke about maintaining plausible deniability in the event of such an attack on Russian territory. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the leak “once again confirms the direct involvement of… the so-called collective West in the conflict around Ukraine,” while Russia’s First Deputy Permanent Representative at the UN, Dmitry Polyansky, suggested that it revealed Germany’s “new colors,” portraying it as “lying, mean, aggressive, revanchist and Russophobic.” The German authorities confirmed the authenticity of the recording, but claimed that Moscow took the conversation out of context in an attempt to cause division among Ukraine’s allies in the West. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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NATO, as we know it today, is a de facto bulwark against Russian (née Soviet) expansionism into Western Europe and potentially elsewhere. It must have come as a complete surprise when France, Great Britain, and the United States all received letters of intent from the Soviet Foreign Ministry about joining the alliance. Against themselves. Originally a political alliance in Western Europe when it was formed in 1949, NATO became a solid military alliance as well when the Korean War made the idea of Communist expansion by force all too real. The same year the Soviets detonated their first nuclear weapon, the West formed an alliance to neutralize that threat. But before the Soviet-dominated countries of Eastern Europe formed the Eastern Bloc in 1955, Russia made an attempt to join NATO. Guess who’s coming to dinner. Longtime Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin finally died in 1953 and Nikita Khrushchev was the new communist sheriff in town. So in 1954, when Soviets sent the letters of intent to NATO members, there was a renewed spirit of easing tensions. The Soviets reasoned that the aggressive nature of the NATO alliance would be much less dangerous to world peace if their former anti-Hitler ally were allowed to be a member. Forgot about An-dre. But in order to join the alliance, the Soviet Union would have to allow NATO to dictate its military planning and allow the basic tenets of democratic freedoms to bloom in all areas under its control. The debate about potentially allowing Russia to join reminded the member states that the alliance was formed to address threats to world peace when the UN couldn’t — usually because of Russia’s veto power on the Security Council. Allowing the Russians to have a say in NATO affairs would neutralize NATO the way they neutralized the UN Security Council. Can’t blame them for trying. NATO told the Russians exactly that when the alliance rejected Russia’s application for membership, urging it and other Soviet satellites to allow the UN to do its job in keeping the world secure. It was not an unexpected response for the USSR. Nine days later, Russia and those satellites formed the Warsaw Pact, its Eastern Bloc counter-alliance. Europe was officially split for the next 40-plus years. Most likely, the organizers of the North Atlantic bloc will react negatively to this step of the Soviet government and will advance many different objections. In that event the governments of the three powers will have exposed themselves, once again, as the organizers of a military bloc against other states and it would strengthen the position of social forces conducting a struggle against the formation of the European Defence Community,” Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov wrote The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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