Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has hit back at comments made by his US counterpart Joe Biden about a “minor incursion” by Russia into his country.
Mr Biden had suggested that a “minor” attack might bring a weaker response from the US and its allies.
But Mr Zelensky tweeted: “There are no minor incursions. Just as there are no minor casualties and little grief from the loss of loved ones.”
Russia has some 100,000 troops near the border but denies planning an invasion.
It refuses to provide arms to Ukraine while other NATO members step up to do so.
Fears are rising that Germany is failing to do enough to prevent a Russian invasion and failing to aid Ukraine in the case of an attack amid warnings from the White House that Russian troops could invade at any time.
U.S. officials say there is evidence Russia is planning to overthrow Ukraine’s government and take Kyiv, CNN reported Tuesday. Russia is also deploying troops into Belarus — a development that U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Tuesday shows Russia “is making moves that would suggest that they have plans to invade.”
HALIFAX – A Canadian warship departed for Europe and the Black Sea near Russia on Wednesday, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau admitted to fears of a Russian invasion in Ukraine.
Trudeau went on to accuse Russia of trying to start a fight with Ukraine and promised Canada’s support to the Ukrainian people, who are on edge as 100,000 Russian troops sit on their country’s eastern border.
Yet the prime minister stopped short when asked for details, including whether the government will extend a 200-soldier Canadian training mission in Ukraine whose mandate is set to expire at the end of March.
Pipeline politics have undermined Europe’s strategic advantage over Russia
A pipeline of natural gas from Russia to the West is also, in effect, a pipeline of money from the West to Russia. Neither side can cut off supplies to the other side without cutting itself off.
It’s a co-dependent relationship that has helped to keep to peace for decades. Pipeline politics has been especially helpful to the countries between Russia and Germany — and, in particular, Poland and Ukraine.
Putin sees through the West’s empty rhetoric
Every January I think of eastern Ukraine. Wherever I am in the world, it’s never as cold as the winter months I spent there during the height of war between Kyiv and Moscow between 2014-2015. Technology stops working, your knees groan, your breath is a constant cloud.
But it’s not just the cold that is constant in Ukraine’s east: Russian soldiers have been there for almost eight years — and now the Kremlin looks ready for yet another fight. This latest buildup started early last year when, after a few years of relative quiet, it sent around 110,000 soldiers to the border — the largest military build-up there since 2014. And then: nothing. Until now.
Canada condemns Russian troop movements near Ukraine, mulls weapons supplies to Kyiv
“Canada is deeply concerned with the military build-up done by Russia at the Ukrainian borders and we’re extremely concerned also with the destabilising activities in and around Ukraine,” Joly said.
“We are united in our support to Ukraine and of course any incursion into Ukraine will result in serious consequences including very severe, coordinated sanctions on the part of allies.”
Russia has begun moving troops to Ukraine’s northern neighbour Belarus for joint military exercises, in a move likely to increase fears in the west that Moscow is preparing for an invasion.
The joint military exercises, named United Resolve, are to take place as Russia also musters forces along Ukraine’s eastern border, threatening a potential invasion that could unleash the largest conflict in Europe for decades.
Social media videos from Belarus appeared to show artillery and other military vehicles arriving on flatbed carriages owned by the Russian state railway company, and Alexander Volfovich, the head of Belarus’s security council, said in a briefing that troops were already arriving before exercises scheduled for February.
The mood last week in Ukraine was eerily calm, despite talk of war. The first winter snow blanketed Kyiv. Many were still celebrating Orthodox Christmas – which falls on 7 January – or had left town for the holidays. Bars and restaurants rang out with Dean Martin’s Let It Snow!, while the fir trees in Independence Square looked like a mini-Narnia.
Sure, Russia might invade at any moment. But, as Ukrainians wearily point out, the country has already been at war for eight long years, ever since Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and kickstarted a brutish conflict in the east of the country, which has claimed nearly 14,000 lives. Friday’s dawn cyber-attack on government websites was merely the latest in a series of hostile acts.
Career crook Tito ibn Sheikh appeared in the dock at Southwark Crown Court this week.
But his crime — plotting to launder hundreds of thousands of pounds of stolen money for which he was sentenced to nearly four years — was perhaps less shocking than his notorious family background.
He was born Hamza Mustafa Kamel before changing his name to Tito ibn Sheikh, which roughly translated means ‘son of a venerable man’ in Arabic.
Canada can and should be more engaged in de-escalation efforts at the Ukraine border where Russia is amassing troops but must focus on its diplomatic strengths, says national security experts.
In an interview on CTV’s Question Period airing Sunday, Richard Fadden, former CSIS director and national security adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, said that includes calling out Russian aggression and threatening further sanctions, in union with NATO allies.
“We should be out there beating the bushes with our allies arguing, maybe send some more troops on a rotational basis, make sure sanctions that are now in place are fully respected, argue for bigger sanctions, but I don’t think we can do a great deal on our own,” he said.
There is nothing material that Canada can do either alone or with our paper tiger NATO.
Sanctions like taxes are for the little people to suffer not Oligarchs.
No one wants a war over this latter day Czechoslovakia, not even Putin. Well maybe Freeland.
Putin will grandstand and wring some gains while showing up NATO for the farce it is.
Joe Biden will get his 10% and Germany will get its Russian gas.
It’s doubtful the western Euro’s would or even could defend themselves if attacked so I see little stomach for a war over Ukraine.
The Ukraine crisis may herald the beginning of a New Europe.
If the EU defence force is still on the table it may signal the end of NATO allowing the refinement of coordinated Eurocentric mass surrender skills untainted by American hegemony.
Good Grief. Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly to visit Ukraine as it faces threat of Russian invasion
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration has determined a Russian effort is underway to create a pretext for its troops to potentially further invade Ukraine, and Moscow has already prepositioned operatives to conduct “a false-flag operation” in eastern Ukraine, a U.S. official said Friday.
The administration believes Russia is also laying the groundwork through a social media disinformation campaign by framing Ukraine as an aggressor that has been preparing an imminent attack against Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official wasn’t authorized to discuss sensitive intelligence on the record.
I’d ask around if that anonymous official wasn’t named Hunter.
VIENNA — Russian officials signaled that they could abandon diplomatic efforts to resolve the security crisis surrounding Ukraine, bringing a whirlwind week of European diplomacy to an ominous end and deflating hopes that negotiators could forge a path toward easing tensions in Eastern Europe.
One senior Russian diplomat said that talks with the West were approaching a “dead end,” while another said the Kremlin would wait until it receives written responses next week to its demands from Washington and from NATO before deciding how to proceed.
It was clear that Russia’s next move would be up to President Vladimir V. Putin, who, his spokesman said on Thursday, was being briefed regularly this week on negotiations with the West.
VIENNA/MOSCOW, Jan 13 (Reuters) – Poland’s foreign minister said on Thursday that Europe was closer to war than any time in the last 30 years as Russia gave a bleak assessment of diplomatic efforts this week to defuse tensions over Ukraine.
Russia said it was hitting a dead end as it tried to persuade the West to bar Ukraine from joining NATO and roll back decades of alliance expansion in Europe.
Apparently Canada has a solution to the Ukraine crisis after all. Unfortunately it involves being somewhere else when the trigger, to torture a phrase from Orwell, isn’t pulled. Which won’t save our ally or our credibility.
Back in 1994, as it fled the squalid wreckage of the Soviet Union, various nations promised that if Ukraine gave up the nuclear weapons it inherited, they would ensure that it was never devoured by Russian revanchists. With Russia looking mostly harmless, it seemed like resolve on the cheap. But then along came Vladimir Putin with his characteristically parochial belief that the collapse of the USSR was “the greatest geopolitical disaster in history.” So now what?
Wendy Sherman, one of the world’s most powerful diplomats, is known as the Silver Fox because of her snowy white mane and her canny deal-making style. On Wednesday, she is helping to lead the US-Russia talks in Europe.
Ms Sherman – the US Deputy Secretary of State, one of the department’s top positions – has been meeting Russian officials this week to discuss Ukraine. The stakes are high.
President Vladimir Putin has deployed around 100,000 Russian troops close to the border with Ukraine, prompting fears of an incursion and warnings from the West.
US officials are hoping to defuse the tense situation through negotiations with the Russians – and Ms Sherman is in her element.
If I were Ukraine I’d get a headstart on designing the new national letterhead etc.
No one is going to war over this “quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing”
