Doubts grow on how bloc of 65 million can function at critical time in EU history.
Central Europe’s unity is cracking.
The common purpose the region rediscovered during the refugee crisis has frayed in recent months amid differences over matters large and small, concerning everything from regulatory fine print to the future of Europe.
FIFTY frail Slovak octo-and-nanogenerians, their uniform jackets adorned with shiny medals, sat patiently in the sun on August 29th through speeches and performances (pictured). Seventy years ago, these men and women joined a bloody uprising against the Nazi occupiers. But the event that should have been a celebration of their bravery was hijacked by politics.
Shortly before leaving office in mid-June, the former Slovak president, Ivan Gašparovič, invited his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin to join the ceremony. After all, some 140,000 Red Army troops lost their lives when liberating former Czechoslovakia from the Nazis, said those who defenders the invitation, which was made after Russia annexed Crimea.
Continue reading The Slovak National Uprising – A celebration hijacked by politics
Kiev (AFP) – President Petro Poroshenko instructed his government on Thursday to consider temporarily closing Ukraine’s porous border with Russia to help halt its “intervention” in the Westward-leaning former Soviet state’s affairs.
A decree published on the presidential website ordered the government “to settle… the issue of temporarily closing checkpoints on Ukraine’s state border with the Russian Federation to cars, sea and pedestrian traffic.”
Continue reading Ukraine May Temporarily Close Border With Russia
Turkish and Russian officials will meet to finalize Turkey’s S-400 surface-to-air missile systems deal in the coming week, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday.
Turkey has been negotiating with Russia to buy the system for more than a year. Washington and some of its NATO allies see the decision as a snub because the weapons cannot be integrated into the alliance’s defenses.
Continue reading Turkey, Russia will meet to finalize S-400 defense deal in coming week
A colossal cyberattack on Tuesday has been wreaking havoc oncountries and corporations across the globe, and some cybersecurity experts are zeroing in on a familiar name as the possible culprit.
The attack, dubbed “Petya,” is a ransomware worm that has so far targeted, among others, Ukrainian banks and airports; Russian state-owned oil giant Rosneft; British advertising company WPP, US pharmaceutical giant Merck; and shipping company AP Moller-Maersk, which said every branch of its business was affected.
The blast also destroyed or badly damaged a number of civilian vehicles nearby.
A suicide bombing near the U.S. embassy in Kabul on Wednesday killed four people and wounded at least 22, Afghan officials said, in an attack on a convoy of armoured personnel carriers used by the NATO-led Resolute Support mission.
Continue reading Suicide attack on NATO convoy in Kabul kills four: At Least 256 Killed
From the northern tip of the Baltics to the southern edge of the Balkans, Russia is stepping up spying on its neighbors, according to numerous reports from the region.
The most recent notice of such activity comes from Estonia, whose intelligence service’s annual report says the “Baltic Sea area is especially vulnerable to threats from Russia.”
According to Estonia’s national intelligence service, Russia, acting through its military intelligence agency, the GRU, and its Federal Security Service, or FSB, has taken a special interest in the foreign and security policies, defense planning, armed forces, arms development, and military capabilities of its neighbors.
Continue reading A new report says Russia is intensifying its spy game in Eastern Europe
A call by the British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, for targeted sanctions against senior Russian and Syrian figures has been rejected by fellow G7 foreign ministers.
At a meeting at Lucca in Italy, the group said there must be an investigation into last week’s chemical weapons attack in a rebel-held town before new measures could be adopted.
Continue reading G7 rejects UK call for sanctions against Russia and Syria
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has arrived in Brussels to attend a March 31 NATO meeting that was rescheduled to allow him to attend.
A senior State Department official told reporters that Tillerson will push alliance members to increase their defense spending and will work with allies to press Russia to abide by the Minsk agreement to end the crisis in Ukraine.
Continue reading Tillerson To Push NATO Allies On Military Spending, Press Russia On Ukraine
US President Donald Trump unleashed a diatribe against Germany on Saturday, saying Berlin owes NATO “vast sums of money” and must pay the United States more for security.
His latest tweetstorm comes a day after he met German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Washington, where the two leaders showed little common ground over a host of thorny issues, including NATO and defense spending.
“Germany owes vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!” Trump tweeted on Saturday morning.
He prefaced his statement by lashing out at the news media. “Despite what you have heard from the FAKE NEWS,” he tweeted, “I had a GREAT meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.”
British troops began a long-term deployment to Estonia on Saturday as Germany’s intelligence chief warned Russia had doubled its military presence on its Western border.
An advanced contingent of 120 British soldiers landed at Estonia’s Amari airbase late on Friday night as part of a new Nato deployment designed to deter Russia from attempting a repeat of its invasions of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in the Baltic.
Eight hundred British troops with Challenger 2 tanks, AS90 self-propelled guns, and Warrior armoured vehicles, will be based in the town of Tapa, 80 miles from the Russian border, from next month.
A British Army AS90 self propelled gun arrives in the port of Emden, Germany to be loaded and transported to Estonia Credit: Dominic King/Army press office Germany
The paratroopers are an elite unit of the Russian military, with great significance in the Ukraine conflict.
Russia has appointed the man accused of presiding over operations that led to the annexation of part of Ukraine as the commander of the its infamous airborne forces (VDV), the Ministry of Defense announced on Monday.
Continue reading Putin Picks New Paratrooper Chief With Crimea Experience
NATO continues to support Ukraine with military equipment against pro-Russian rebels in Donetsk.
Ukrainian troops on Monday were battling a Russian tank contingent in the eastern city of Lugansk, Kiev said, accusing Moscow’s army units of moving into large cities in the region.
Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has stated that he can bring troops into Warsaw, Vilnius and a number of other capitals of the EU and the NATO countries.
This information is revealed in a short message of the EU foreign policy service, a German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung writes.
As stated by the newspaper, Putin had told so to Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko.
In his turn, Poroshenko passed along the content of the conversation to the president of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso, “Evropejskaya Pravda” informs.
“If I had wanted, I would have brought troops within two days not only to Kyiv, but to Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn, Warsaw and Bucharest,” Putin told to Poroshenko.
Besides, as the German newspaper informs, Putin recommended the Ukrainian president “not to rely on the EU too much”, as if required, he can “influence and block passing a decision at the level of the European Council.”
Hackers thought to be working for the Russian government breached the unclassified White House computer networks in recent weeks, sources said, resulting in temporary disruptions to some services while cybersecurity teams worked to contain the intrusion.
White House officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said that the intruders did not damage any of the systems and that, to date, there is no evidence the classified network was hacked.
“In the course of assessing recent threats, we identified activity of concern on the unclassified Executive Office of the President network,” said one White House official. “We took immediate measures to evaluate and mitigate the activity. . . . Unfortunately, some of that resulted in the disruption of regular services to users. But people were on it and are dealing with it.”
The FBI, Secret Service and National Security Agency are all involved in the investigation. White House officials are not commenting on who was behind the intrusion or how much data, if any, was taken.
“Certainly a variety of actors find our networks to be attractive targets and seek access to sensitive information,” the White House official said. “We are still assessing the activity of concern.”
U.S. officials were alerted to the breach by an ally, sources said.
Recent reports by security firms have identified cyber-espionage campaigns by Russian hackers thought to be working for the government. Targets have included NATO, the Ukrainian government and U.S. defense contractors. Russia is regarded by U.S. officials as being in the top tier of states with cyber-capabilities.
In the case of the White House, the nature of the target is consistent with a state-sponsored campaign, sources said.
The breach was discovered two to three weeks ago, sources said. Some staffers were asked to change their passwords. Intranet or VPN access was shut off for awhile, but the email system, apart from some minor delays, was never down, sources said.
White House officials said that such an intrusion was not unexpected.
“On a regular basis, there are bad actors out there who are attempting to achieve intrusions into our system,” said a second White House official. “This is a constant battle for the government and our sensitive government computer systems, so it’s always a concern for us that individuals are trying to compromise systems and get access to our networks.”
The Russian intelligence service was believed to have been behind a breach of the U.S. military’s classified networks, which was discovered in 2008. The operation to contain the intrusion and clean up the computers, called Buckshot Yankee, took months.
That incident helped galvanize the effort to create U.S. Cyber Command, a military organization dedicated to defending the country’s critical computer systems — including those in the private sector — against foreign cyberattack, as well as helping combatant commanders in operations against adversaries. The command is expected to have some 6,000 personnel by 2016, officials said.
When directed by the president or defense secretary, Cyber Command can undertake offensive operations.
A CONTINENT separates the blood-soaked battlefields of Syria from the reefs and shoals that litter the South China Sea. In their different ways, however, both places are witnessing the most significant shift in great-power relations since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In Syria, for the first time since the cold war, Russia has deployed its forces far from home to quell a revolution and support a client regime. In the waters between Vietnam and the Philippines,
America will soon signal that it does not recognise China’s territorial claims over a host of outcrops and reefs by exercising its right to sail within the 12-mile maritime limit that a sovereign state controls.
For the past 25 years America has utterly dominated great-power politics. Increasingly, it lives in a contested world. The new game with Russia and China that is unfolding in Syria and the South China Sea is a taste of the struggle ahead.
As ever, that struggle is being fought partly in terms of raw power. Vladimir Putin has intervened in Syria to tamp down jihadism and to bolster his own standing at home. But he also means to show that, unlike America, Russia can be trusted to get things done in the Middle East and win friends by, for example, offering Iraq an alternative to the United States (see article).
Lest anyone presume with John McCain, an American senator, that Russia is just “a gas station masquerading as a country”, Mr Putin intends to prove that Russia possesses resolve, as well as crack troops and cruise missiles.
The struggle is also over legitimacy. Mr Putin wants to discredit America’s stewardship of the international order. America argues that popular discontent and the Syrian regime’s abuses of human rights disqualify the president, Bashar al-Assad, from power. Mr Putin wants to play down human rights, which he sees as a licence for the West to interfere in sovereign countries—including, if he ever had to impose a brutal crackdown, in Russia itself.
Power and legitimacy are no less at play in the South China Sea, a thoroughfare for much of the world’s seaborne trade. Many of its islands, reefs and sandbanks are subject to overlapping claims. Yet China insists that its case should prevail, and is imposing its own claim by using landfill and by putting down airstrips and garrisons.
This is partly an assertion of rapidly growing naval might: China is creating islands because it can. Occupying them fits into its strategy of dominating the seas well beyond its coast. Twenty years ago American warships sailed there with impunity; today they find themselves in potentially hostile waters (see article).
But a principle is at stake, too. America does not take a view on who owns the islands, but it does insist that China should establish its claims through negotiation or international arbitration. China is asserting that in its region, for the island disputes as in other things, it now sets the rules.
Nobody should wonder that America’s pre-eminence is being contested. After the Soviet collapse the absolute global supremacy of the United States sometimes began to seem normal. In fact, its dominance reached such heights only because Russia was reeling and China was still emerging from the chaos and depredations that had so diminished it in the 20th century.
Even today, America remains the only country able to project power right across the globe. (As we have recently argued, its sway over the financial system is still growing.)
There is nevertheless reason to worry. The reassertion of Russian power spells trouble. It has already led to the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of eastern Ukraine—both breaches of the very same international law that Mr Putin says he upholds in Syria (seearticle).
Barack Obama, America’s president, takes comfort from Russia’s weak economy and the emigration of some of its best people. But a declining nuclear-armed former superpower can cause a lot of harm.
Relations between China and America are more important—and even harder to manage. For the sake of peace and prosperity, the two must be able to work together.
And yet their dealings are inevitably plagued by rivalry and mistrust. Because every transaction risks becoming a test of which one calls the shots, antagonism is never far below the surface.
American foreign policy has not yet adjusted to this contested world. For the past three presidents, policy has chiefly involved the export of American values—although, to the countries on the receiving end, that sometimes felt like an imposition.
The idea was that countries would inevitably gravitate towards democracy, markets and human rights. Optimists thought that even China was heading in that direction.
That notion has suffered, first in Iraq and Afghanistan and now the wider Middle East. Liberation has not brought stability. Democracy has not taken root.
Mr Obama has seemed to conclude that America should pull back. In Libya he led from behind; in Syria he has held off. As a result, he has ceded Russia the initiative in the Middle East for the first time since the 1970s.
All those, like this newspaper, who still see democracy and markets as the route to peace and prosperity hope that America will be more willing to lead.
Mr Obama’s wish that other countries should share responsibility for the system of international law and human rights will work only if his country sets the agenda and takes the initiative—as it did with Iran’s nuclear programme. The new game will involve tough diplomacy and the occasional judicious application of force.
America still has resources other powers lack. Foremost is its web of alliances, including NATO. Whereas Mr Obama sometimes behaves as if alliances are transactional, they need solid foundations. America’s military power is unmatched, but it is hindered by pork-barrel politics and automatic cuts mandated by Congress.
These spring from the biggest brake on American leadership: dysfunctional politics in Washington. That is not just a poor advertisement for democracy; it also stymies America’s interest. In the new game it is something that the United States—and the world—can ill afford.
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