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Czech President Milos Zeman rushed to hospital by ambulance
& placed in intensive care right after meeting with PM Babis
10 Oct, 2021 10:30 / Updated 8 hours ago
Czech President Milos Zeman is in intensive care at a Prague hospital. He was rushed there in an ambulance on Sunday, shortly after holding talks with the outgoing premier Andrej Babis about the formation of a new government.
Zeman is being treated in an intensive care unit due to complications related to a pre-existing condition, Miroslav Zavoral, the director of the hospital, told the media, adding that he wasn’t allowed to disclose further details.
In September, Zeman spent eight days in hospital, recovering from what he described as dehydration and mild exhaustion.
The 77-year-old, who has been the head of state since 2013, started using a wheelchair earlier this year due to neuropathy in his legs.
Sources cited by local media insisted Zeman’s hospitalization had been planned. Earlier this week, the president had canceled a TV interview scheduled for Sunday for health reasons.
A legislative election took place (3rd story on blog) in the Czech Republic this week, with Babis’ ruling ANO party losing to the opposition by a narrow margin. The Together opposition coalition and their allies have claimed 108 parliamentary seats out of 200.
Zeman earlier said he would give the PM an opportunity to form a new government if he won a majority. However, if the opposition parties stick to their promise not to work with Babis, one of the country’s richest men, he would be forced to leave the position he has occupied since 2017.
As Turkey turns away from Biden & towards Putin, the US-led NATO
military bloc is on the rocks due to American ambitions in Syria
10 Oct, 2021 12:56
By Glenn Diesen, Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway
and an editor at the Russia in Global Affairs journal.
In the space of nearly 500 years, Russia and Turkey have fought no fewer than 12 wars against each other. Now, even without the tsars or Ottomans, the two old rivals are standing on competing sides once again – this time in Syria.
However, while backing competing factions in bloody fighting across the Middle Eastern nation, the conflict has paradoxically brought the two powers closer together. So close, it seems, that even NATO is worrying about it.
A major breakthrough in relations between Moscow and Ankara was evident when Turkey purchased Russia’s S-400 air defence system in defiance of US threats. The US has subsequently imposed sanctions on Ankara and expelled Turkey from the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. A meeting between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his American counterpart, Joe Biden, was not enough to mend relations.
However, the recent encounter between Erdogan and President Vladimir Putin in Sochi indicates that a grand Russian-Turkish deal might be in the making. A major agreement for defence cooperation could be on the cards, including the development and trade of a second batch of S-400 air defence systems, submarines, aircraft engine technologies, and fighter jets.
A military partnership of such a magnitude would likely be accompanied by a political settlement of the Syrian conflict. Meanwhile, the immense scope of the military arrangement and possible political agreements on Syria would alienate Turkey further from the US, and Washington will likely feel obliged to impose even more sanctions on its NATO ‘ally’.
So, how did we get here?
The Syrian mistake
Much like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US war against the Syrian government is resulting in a disastrous outcome. Turkey previously had good relations with Damascus and initially had to be convinced by the US to support the regime-change war. Assad was expected to be toppled swiftly and Turkey would maintain cordial relations with the new government installed by Washington. However, the string of US-led regime-change wars in the Middle East was interrupted as Russia unexpectedly intervened in 2015, effectively turning the tide of the war.
The leading source of tensions between the US and Turkey has been Washington’s support for Syrian Kurds. The importance of the partnership with the Kurds for the US increased further as Russia pushed American generals to change their strategy. Failing to topple Assad, the US seeks to have a say in the political future of the country by illegally occupying a third of its territory, the resource-rich region in northeast Syria where the US steals the oil and wheat. Cooperation with Syrian Kurds is important towards this end. Washington considers the YPG to be the most effective military partner in the region, a group which Ankara considers to be a terrorist group that can destabilise Turkey’s own Kurdish regions.
Turkey is also apprehensive about the US maintaining the option of playing the Kurdish independence card. Promoting an autonomous or independent Kurdish state would destabilise and weaken four states with major Kurdish populations – Iran, Syria, Iraq and Turkey. Israel would likely support such a policy and American policy-makers have openly played with the idea of Balkanising Syria.
Turkish officials have already accused Washington of being behind the July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey. Erdogan responded to it by purging Atlanticist Gulenists – approximately 140,000 government employees and 30,000 military personnel. Simply put, an abundance of pro-American NATO loyalists within Turkey are gone. A cabal of American neoconservative hawks led by John Bolton have responded to the clearout and the Russian-friendly policies with fury and established the “Turkish Democracy Project” in 2021, which seeks regime change in Ankara. Thus, the deterioration of relations continues.
The language from ‘NATO-ally’ Turkey is unprecedented. Ankara accuses the US of supporting terrorism against Turkey due to its partnership with the Syrian Kurds, and Ankara demands that the Washington ends its occupation of Syrian territory and withdraws.
Towards a Russian-Turkish settlement?
The complexity of the Syrian conflicts makes any Russian-Turkish agreement difficult, yet the incentives are now in place. Russia desires an end of the war against Syria and the restoration of the government’s territorial control. Meanwhile, Turkey wants the Syrian Kurdish issue resolved and believes this can best be achieved by reasserting Syrian territorial sovereignty. Domestically, there are tensions between the Turkish public and the enormous Syrian refugee community in the country, which could be resolved by ending the conflict. Furthermore, Turkey has not been able to moderate and domesticate the jihadists it uses as proxies in Idlib, a region that the Syrian government will most likely seek to retake in the near future.
The rhetoric in Washington about Moscow attempting to reposition Ankara away from the American orbit and into the Russian sphere of influence fails to appreciate the multipolar international distribution of power. Turkey is not looking to shift from a US-led military bloc to a Russian-led alliance, as the bipolarity of the Cold War is long gone. Rather, Turkey seeks to assert itself as an independent actor in a multipolar system, which entails relations with all the major poles of power. Similarly, Russia has neither the capability nor intention of pursuing hegemony.
Russia’s Greater Eurasian Partnership is conceptualized as a counter-hegemonic project. Russia, in partnership with China, aims to counter American ambitions by enabling the major powers in Greater Eurasia to diversify their economic connectivity. Turkey’s ambitions for an independent and diversified foreign policy can easily be accommodated in the Greater Eurasian Partnership, which can replace the bloc politics of the Cold War, including NATO.
A grand Russia-Turkey deal in accordance with the Greater Eurasian Partnership may not materialise, but the former unipolar order is rapidly breaking down due to yet another disastrous regime-change war.
EU summons Latvian, Lithuanian and Polish officials over
concerning reports of migrants stuck on Belarus border
14 Oct, 2021 10:51
A group of migrants from Afghanistan has been stuck at Border Poland-Belarus.
© Maciej Moskwa / NurPhoto via Getty Images
EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson has ordered a meeting with officials from Latvia, Lithuania and Poland on the “dire situation” of migrants stuck waiting at the bloc’s borders with Belarus.
“I’m very concerned about reports of people including children stuck in forests in dire situation at external EU borders with Belarus,” Johansson said on Thursday, revealing she had demanded ambassadors meet with her in Brussels to discuss the situation.
The three EU member states have complained in recent months that there has been an influx of migrants from African and the Middle East from Belarus, with the bloc accusing the Belarusian government of deliberately pushing people across the borders in retaliation for recently imposed sanctions.
The Lithuania government has deployed soldiers to the Belarusian border, ordering them to build a barbed-wire fence to halt migrants, and Polish officials recently approved 1.615 billion zloty ($400 million) to construct a border wall to block illegal immigration into the country. In Latvia, border guards have resorted to pushing migrants back into Belarus, using a state of emergency measure imposed by the country’s government.
The EU’s concerns about the treatment of migrants on the Belarusian border comes after German authorities claimed that there has been a steep rise in illegal migration from Belarus in the past few months, as individuals from Iraq, Iran, Syria and Yemen cross into the EU. “The situation is not dramatic, but it is tough,” Olaf Jansen, the head of the foreigners’ office in the eastern German town of Eisenhuettenstadt, said, revealing concerns about the potential spread of Covid from migrants.
‘There’s no hiding, even in Africa’: Ukraine sends warning to new
Russian ambassador to Cape Verde, wanted in Kiev for treason
14 Oct, 2021 11:08
© Sputnik / Ekaterina Chesnokova
Kiev has issued a warning shot to former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Natalia Poklonskaya after she accepted a job from Moscow as Ambassador to Cape Verde. She is wanted on high treason charges after defecting to Russia in 2014.
Now, Kiev has appealed to the authorities, making it clear to the government in Praia that Poklonskaya is facing several criminal cases in Ukraine.
“The former prosecutor of the Russian occupation administration in Crimea is wanted for treason against our state,” said Oleg Mykolenko, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman. “She is under sanctions from Ukraine, the EU, the US, Canada and Japan. There is no hiding, even in Africa.”
Poklonskaya, who left Ukraine in 2014, gained notoriety for her active pro-Moscow stance during the Maidan events and the reabsorption of Crimea. Her defection and subsequent roles in the Russian government have caused her to be a target of Kiev, and she has been charged with treason.
Even before that she was a heroine in other countries for putting organized crime bosses in prison. She would not last more than a few days in a Ukrainian prison.
She later became an MP in the State Duma, but chose not to run again in last month’s elections. On Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree appointing her as ambassador to Cape Verde, an island located off the Atlantic Coast of Africa.
Following her appointment, she spoke of her delight, calling diplomatic work her “dream” job.
“I’ve been getting to know the country in absentia,” she said. “I know that it is a beautiful country, that there are kind and hardworking people there, that it is a friendly country and that it is necessary to strengthen our good relations.”
Following Ukraine’s warning shot, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called on Kiev to mind its own business.
“Let them first try to apply Ukrainian justice on the territory of Ukraine, and then they will take on Africa,” Zakharova wrote on her Telegram channel.
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