Dec 10 The Saturday Edition
Day 290- Readings and Posts by Gic Zabrinsky Kofman Grozoubinski Davis Jackson Avdeeva Halushka Warrel Troy
Catching up…
EA Worldview’s Ukraine Up-date- hop over to Scott’s amazing hourly Ukraine up-date page. I’ll fill in with some bits and bobs.
Ariana’s tweet hit very hard. I remember when my daughter was in intensive care at birth. She was wisked away for an operation because the lining of her lungs had split to pieces. My husband and I watched her through a small glass window, and we were allowed to touch her only a few times in her first three weeks of life. I paced like a lionesse every day, hoping for a chance to sit beside her incubator, touch her little fingers with my gloved hands.
I can’t imagine being a mother or father in the intensive care unit, in Kyiv or elsewhere, praying a missile doesn’t crash through the sandbags. We know that Putin’s punishment strategy targets hospitals, schools, places where Ukrainians live, work, and gather. This photograph embodies all that is evil and good at the same time- I sat and stared at this photo, not understanding how anyone could do this, willfully.
UN rights chief says Ukraine is ‘human rights emergency.’ About 17.7 million Ukrainians need humanitarian help because of Russia’s all-out war against the country, including 9.3 million who require food and livelihood assistance, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said on Dec. 9.
Zelensky: Russian troops have 'effectively destroyed Bakhmut'. President Zelensky said in his evening video address on Dec. 9 that heavy fighting is ongoing near the towns of Bakhmut, Soledar, Maryinka, and Kreminna in the Donbas.
Bakhmut, Soledar, Maryinka, Kreminna. For a long time, there is no living place left on the land of these areas that have not been damaged by shells and fire. The occupiers actually destroyed Bakhmut, another Donbas city that the Russian army turned into burned ruins.
Explosions in Barnaul and Moscow…
On December 9, 2022 fires exploded in suburbs of Moscow at the OBI store, and at the Altai Tire Plant in Barnaul. Some problems at home?
Michael Kofman, Winter and Beyond: An Inflection Point in the War over Ukraine- WOTR
Mike Kofman and Ryan Evans start this episode by taking a step back to the beginning to put this stage of the war in context. Mike offers possible scenarios on the next few months of the war, discusses Ukraine’s recent strikes on Russian bases deep in Russian territory, and assesses the state of forces, munitions, and kit on both sides.
General Staff: Russian troops attempting to advance in Donetsk Oblast. Russian forces are continuing their efforts to conduct an offensive in the Bakhmut direction while trying to improve their tactical position in the Lyman and Avdiivka directions in Donetsk Oblast, the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces reported in its daily update on Dec. 9.
Russia detains 10,000 men of conscription age in Moscow. Men were grabbed "right on the street and even at work," Russia's independent human rights group Memorial said on Dec. 9. The police took off their identification badges and did not identify themselves, the report read.
The Pentagon has given a tacit endorsement of Ukraine’s long-range attacks on targets inside Russia after President Putin’s multiple missile strikes against Kyiv’s critical infrastructure.
UK Defense Ministry: Russia likely started using new batch of Iranian drones in Ukraine. Russia has likely “exhausted its previous stock of several hundred Shahed-131s and 136s and has now received a resupply” as Ukraine’s General Staff reported attacks by Iranian drones for the first time in three weeks on Dec. 6, according to the U.K Defense Ministry.
Five Big IR Stories of the Week…
Dmitry Grozoubinski: we're going to tackle five big IR stories from the last week and dig into whether the US and EU are headed for a trade war (probably not, but things could still get messy).
2022 World Cup in Qatar- Scandal…
Eva Kaili, a Vice-President of the European Parliament from Greece, has been placed in detention by Belgian authorities; suspected to be involved in a bribe scandal related to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. According to a report by Le Soir, Kaili and at least four others have been detained by agents of the Central Office for the Suppression of Corruption in Brussels. The arrests are believed to have taken place after the individuals accepted bribes from a “Gulf state”.
James Jackson, The War in Ukraine Is Emboldening Germany’s Far Right- Time
“How did an ideology-driven elite manage to completely destroy the livelihoods of such a well-educated people as the Germans?” shouts Karin Viehweg, a far-right activist in her late 50s, over the loudspeaker in late November, nodding to the cost-of-living crisis and Germany’s left-leaning government led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz. “The citizens of the GDR didn’t go into the streets in 1989 to land in a new Red-Green socialism, did they?” she adds, referring to the Communist and Soviet-backed German Democratic Republic that ruled East Germany from 1949 to 1990. As Viehweg speaks, the crowd holds up posters demanding an end to arming Ukraine and restarting gas imports from Russia, calling sanctions “economic suicide.”
Staff, The Turkish connection: How Erdoğan’s confidant helped Iran finance terror- Politico
The meeting was a secret one, between a delegation of senior Iranian military and government officials and a business group from Turkey led by a confidant of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Both sides were keen to deepen their partnership smuggling Iranian oil to buyers in China and Russia to raise funds for Tehran’s terror proxies, according to Western diplomats.
A little more than a year after the meeting, all of the key attendees would find their names on U.S. sanctions lists, with one important exception: Turkish businessman Sıtkı Ayan, a friend of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — the two men attended the same high school — and the man at the center of it all.
Helen Warrell, The secret lives of MI6’s top female spies- The Financial Times
My journey to the school for spies starts in the half-light of a waking city. I do not know where I am going and have only been instructed to meet my contact at a central London landmark. We travel by car, boat and train to a place where officers of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, the overseas espionage agency known as SIS, learn their craft. I am not allowed to describe it to you, but I can tell you this: it is giant and austere and the slicing wind makes my eyes water.
Dave Troy, The Coming Cryptopocalypse- Byline Times Supplement
A major economic disaster is on its way and Vladimir Putin is poised to profit from it, reports David Troy
The highly visible collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX bears the familiar scent of rogue trading scandals and Ponzi schemes gone sour: the befuddled previously invincible frontman (it’s almost always a man, often a young one), billions gone missing, and once-promising “innovation” revealed as simple fraud.
It would be easy to dismiss this situation as just another instance of technology getting ahead of regulation, and fools being parted from their money. The conventional wisdom would suggest that cryptocurrencies are on the wane while fiat currencies remain dominant — especially the dollar.
