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Russia explains why there is no more diplomacy with NATO
1 Nov, 2021 13:19
arrive for a meeting in New York in September 2021. © Sputnik / Russian Foreign Ministry
Past negotiations between Moscow and NATO wound up achieving nothing as the US-led military bloc was more interested in lecturing the Russian side and looking to score political points, the country’s top diplomat has claimed.
Speaking to reporters in Rome after the G20 leaders’ summit on Sunday, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the efforts of long-running Russia-NATO Council meetings, designed to reduce tensions, had largely failed. According to him, “when there were still meetings between the council and our representatives, they only wanted to teach us how to live.”
“Every time, they demanded to convene the council to discuss Ukraine. Their whole interest was whipping up propaganda and putting pressure on Russia,” Lavrov argued. “We rely on facts, and the facts are that NATO does not want any co-operation with us.”
“We rely on facts, and the facts are that NATO
does not want any co-operation with us.”
Sergey Lavrov
Last month, the bloc announced it would expel eight Russian diplomats from its Brussels headquarters, reportedly over claims of involvement in undisclosed ‘espionage’. In response, Moscow said it would suspend all direct bilateral ties with NATO, bringing home its entire delegation and shuttering the bloc’s offices in Moscow.
Since then, Lavrov has claimed that the state of relations between Russia and NATO can’t be described as “catastrophic,” because “to be catastrophic you have to have at least something.” Instead, he said, there are now no formal ties between the two, and the Kremlin has instead built relations with individual member states on their own.
The bloc’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, has insisted it is ready for constructive talks with Moscow, insisting that “the proposal to convene a meeting of the Russia-NATO Council remains relevant. And now it depends on Russia whether it will react in a positive way.”
However, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has written off the offer as empty rhetoric. “Yes, we heard the statement by Mr. Stoltenberg about his alleged readiness to discuss security issues with Russia,” she confirmed. “There is nothing behind these statements in practical terms.”
US-trained Afghan soldiers & spies joining ISIS terrorists
to ‘resist’ Taliban – reports
1 Nov, 2021 01:49 /
September 5, 2021 © Reuters / WANA
The Taliban has long accused Washington of funding ISIS, and now they’re indirectly right, as a growing number of US-trained Afghan soldiers and intelligence officials are joining the terrorist group’s ranks to fight the Taliban.
The US spent a staggering $88 billion arming and training Afghanistan’s military, only for Afghan forces to crumble before the Taliban’s lightning fast reconquest of the country in August. Though the Taliban have promised amnesty to these personnel, stories of violent reprisals have circulated, and according to the Wall Street Journal, a “relatively small, but growing” number of former Afghan soldiers and spies are flocking to the only outfit currently resisting Taliban rule – Islamic State terrorist group.
Islamic State’s Afghan offshoot, IS-K, is eagerly absorbing these US-trained recruits. According to the former security officials and Taliban members the Wall Street Journal spoke to, some former government troops have joined for a paycheck, and others for lack of a better alternative to Taliban rule.
“If there were a resistance, they would have joined the resistance,” former spy chief Rahmatullah Nabil told the paper, adding that “For the time being, ISIS is the only other armed group.”
Though IS-K and the Taliban are both Islamic fundamentalist groups, their ideologies differ. The Taliban are a predominantly Punjabi nationalist organization with no stated goals beyond Afghanistan’s borders, and a tolerance for the country’s other Muslim sects. IS-K, by contrast, view Shiites and other Muslim sects as apostates and aim to establish a worldwide Islamic caliphate, as IS attempted to do several years ago in Iraq and Syria.
Initially suppressed by the Taliban, IS-K mounted a resurgence amid the chaos of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, carrying out a suicide bombing outside Kabul Airport in August that killed around 200 Afghans and 13 US troops. For the US military, it was the deadliest day in Afghanistan since 2011.
It is unclear what “critical expertise in intelligence-gathering and warfare techniques” these new recruits will bring to IS-K, given that the supposedly 300,000-strong Afghan military they came from folded before the Taliban in a matter of weeks, with its members often fleeing or surrendering without firing a shot.
However, the fact that these US-funded fighters are signing up to a hardline terror group within months of the US leaving Afghanistan illustrates a problem that decision-makers in Washington evidently haven’t learned from in four decades of experience.
Just as the US-funded Afghan Mujahideen would eventually morph into the Taliban in the late 1980s and 1990s, and the Afghan military is on track to bolster ISIS-K’s ranks, the disaffected Iraqi soldiers left without a job following the US invasion in 2003 ended up providing a steady stream of recruits for ISIS several years later.
Of course, the quality of these 'soldiers' has to be rather questionable.
The US security establishment has already begun to sound the alarm about ISIS-K’s resurgence, with US Undersecretary of Defense Colin Kahl telling the Senate last week that the group could be in a position to attack the West from Afghanistan within six months.
So, it sounds very much like the USA is not happy about their US-trained Afghan soldiers bolstering ISIS-Ks ranks as they present more of a danger to the USA than the Taliban.
The Taliban, at least publicly, are unperturbed. “We are not faced with a threat nor are we worried about them,” Mawlawi Zubair, a senior Taliban commander, told the Wall Street Journal. “There is no need, not even a tiny need, for us to seek assistance from anyone against ISIS.”
Russia reveals size of growing drone army
2 Nov, 2021 15:43
Russian Ministry of Defense conducts a test-flight of a new reconnaissance drone in 2019.
© Russia’s Defense Ministry
The Russian military is expanding its arsenal of unmanned vehicles, allowing operators to watch and engage hostile forces from the safety of command posts miles away from the action, President Vladimir Putin has revealed.
During a meeting with defense chiefs in the south-coast city of Sochi, Putin disclosed that the country has at least 2,000 drones for use in reconnaissance missions and, increasingly, to play combat roles. According to him, scientists and engineers now “need to continue working on them, working as hard as we have been recently, using artificial intelligence and the most up-to-date achievements of modern technology.”
“We know very well how unmanned aircraft has proven itself in armed conflicts in recent years, how effective and also how dangerous it can be for us, bearing in mind what we saw in Syria – terrorist attacks using unmanned aerial vehicles. We have learnt to repel these attacks, and we are doing it quite effectively,” the Russian president went on.
In July, Russian state-backed developers unveiled a deadly new Orion-E drone, equipped with rockets and bombs, that could destroy both tanks and armored infantry carriers while flying at high altitude.
Several weeks ago, Moscow used the Zapad 2021 military exercises to show off new unmanned combat robots that can destroy tanks without putting Russian ground units in harm’s way.
According to a report last month by specialists at one of the country’s top military academies, Russia would be able to repel any incoming amphibian craft along the country’s vast coastline using a huge fleet of attack drones to conduct an air assault before the targets were able to reach the shore.
Prince Charles calls for ‘military-style campaign’ to force
‘fundamental economic transition’ & combat climate change
May the Queen live forever!
2 Nov, 2021 02:20
in Glasgow, Scotland, November 1, 2021. © Reuters / Yves Herman
The heir to the British throne warned the audience during his speech at the COP26 climate conference that world governments had no choice but to engage in a “military-style campaign” across an otherwise-doomed planet.
The countries of the world must put themselves “on a war-like footing” to address the looming climate crisis, Prince Charles said in his opening speech to the climate conference in Glasgow on Monday. He warned the assembled heavies that climate change posed “an even greater existential threat” than the Covid-19 pandemic.
Acknowledging that tackling climate change “will take trillions, not billions of dollars,” he admitted that some countries, “many of whom are burdened by growing levels of debt, simply cannot afford to go green.” The prince then proposed a solution beloved by green-minded billionaires around the globe: “putting a value on carbon, thus making carbon capture solutions more economical.”
Carbon credits – which effectively allow companies to buy rights to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide – have been the focus of climate change jet-setters for years, unlocking the ‘value’ of nature’s commons without forcing the emitters-in-chief to actually cease their environmentally-unfriendly activities.
The prince issued a plea for “countries to come together to create the environment that enables every sector of industry to take the action required,” without specifying what exactly that action might be – only that it must involve a “military-style campaign” if it hopes to achieve success.
Here we need a vast military-style campaign to marshal the strength of the global private sector. With trillions at its disposal, far beyond global GDP and with the greatest respect beyond even the governments of the world’s leaders, it offers the only real prospect of achieving fundamental economic transition.
He reminded the attendees that “the eyes and hopes of the world are upon you” because “time has literally run out,” presumably referring to event organizers’ insistence that it would be one of the last chances to rope the world’s governments into committing to carbon-cutting goals that would keep planetary warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above “pre-industrial” levels. That was the goal agreed upon in Paris in 2015, and for deep-pocketed environmentalists like the prince, it remains an absolute-must in order to “lay the foundations for a sustainable future.”
Does a 'sustainable future' include the future of the poor and middle-class? Or does it just include the elite and wealthy people?
The conference was a high-enough priority that leaders like Prince Charles and US President Joe Biden flew their less-than-sustainable private jets to Scotland for the occasion, hosted by UK PM Boris Johnson. The decision to hold such a gathering in-person during a global pandemic may have contributed to several regrets on the conference’s invitations list, as China’s Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin did not travel to the event.
The prince on Sunday deemed the conference the “last chance saloon” to save the planet after declaring last week that world leaders faced a “dangerously narrow” window to fight climate change. Predicting environmental catastrophe has become something of a hobby for the royal, who was also an early proponent of the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” and its now-ubiquitous “Build Back Better” slogan.
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