Grand Ole' Global Eyes

The Cosmopolitan Globalist's famous, patented, every-region-of-the-world news survey. It will make you smarter. Guaranteed. Today only: Paywall-free.

I earnestly meant to mail this out last night, but by the time I finished it I knew I didn’t have any concentration left to proofread properly. I figured I’d get some sleep and do it in the morning. (Glad I did. It was full of typos.) But then I realized this morning that it was a day out of date, and required updating … and somehow it’s already dinner time here in Paris.

Much has happened since the last issue of Global Eyes, but if you read the US media, you could be forgiven for thinking that the only story in the world is Tucker Carlson being canned. That’s a significant (and gratifying) story, but how many times do we need to hear about it to get the point?

The reason it’s all-Tucker, all-day, if you’re wondering, is because readers are guaranteed to click stories about him. It’s made-in-a-lab culture-war chum. But if you’re already as bored of the end-of-Tucker stories as I am, there’s a simple way to make it end.

Then you can read the Cosmopolitan Globalist, instead. ⬇️

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Note: Elon Musk continues to harass writers on Substack. Previews aren’t displayed when we post articles to Twitter, and we can no longer embed links from Twitter into Substack posts. It’s wildly petty. And it really hurts us.

Musk has made it impossible for us to embed Tweets in Substack posts, so I can no longer include newsworthy Tweets or interesting commentary from Twitter in Global Eyes. For now, I’ll screen-shot Tweets that seem important to me and provide the link to them separately, but this is a clumsy solution—videos, for example, won’t load that way, and you have to leave the newsletter and open a new window to read a thread. I’m sorry for the hassle.

We’re getting much less new traffic from Twitter now. It seems those previews were a big lure. So if I could ask you for a favor—would you please help us spread the word about Global Eyes? Word of mouth is now the best way for us to find new readers. I’ll make you a deal: I’ll comp you a free month for every ten people you tell about us.

Further note: Would you like to have one of the Cosmopolitan Globalists on your podcast? Get in touch. We’d be happy to join you, separately or together.

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GLOBAL

For the Western democracies, to not have a strategy is to abandon the world to the grip of criminal powers.—Nicolas Tenzer

The debate below was held at the Hudson Institute, and I thought it substantive and serious. The motion: “Winning in Ukraine is critically important for deterring a war in Taiwan.” Hudson’s president, John Walters, defended the proposition. Strategy of Denial author Elbridge Colby opposed it. I wish Walters had put in a stronger performance, because Colby—with whom I passionately disagree—seemed to me better prepared and the winner of the debate.

Walters would have done well to read Robert Zubrin’s recent essay on the subject. (I think I linked to this before, but it’s worth reading twice).

• The ‘Desert Ukraine to defend Taiwan’ fallacy. Abandoning Ukraine will destroy Taiwan:

  … the necessary and sufficient instrument to defend Taiwan is the US Pacific Fleet. No one is suggesting that we send that to Ukraine. Cutting off arms aid to Ukraine would not help Taiwan one bit. On the contrary, it would doom the island to invasion, devastation, and conquest.

  If the US were to cut off arms to Ukraine, that country would be conquered. Russian forces would then advance to the borders of NATO countries Poland and Romania, and the expansionist Putin regime would be greatly strengthened both economically and politically.

  Furthermore, by conquering Ukraine Putin would delist the million-man Ukrainian army from the West’s order of battle and eliminate Russia’s gaping strategic weakness along its southwest border. With this weakness cured, Russia would be free to invade the Baltic States. Under such circumstances the US would be forced to reposition massive armed forces to defend Europe. This would greatly weaken our ability to defend Asia, both by draining our treasury and directly diverting our military capabilities.

Robert is not only right, he’s overwhelmingly right. That said, we’re now hearing variants of Colby’s argument from many quarters, often proposed by people who, unlike Colby, aren’t remotely serious about defending Taiwan but eager to find excuses for isolationism. So I’m glad the Hudson Institute provided a serious forum to debate the question, even if I wish Walters had done a better job.

As I watched it, it occurred to me to wonder why we don’t see debates like this—good faith debates in which the participants try, at least, to make cogent arguments and be truthful—on prime time cable news. There’s no law of nature that says the networks must offer their viewers shows that insult their intelligence. It’s perfectly possible to imagine a universe in which Americans instead watched serious policy debates among well-informed speakers who are given enough time to make proper arguments (instead of gurgling out a spray of resentment and partisan soundbites). Why doesn’t this happen? I genuinely don’t know.

Related:

• Fighting China over Taiwan could cripple the US military:

  As virtually every wargame has conclusively shown, however, directly fighting a war with China on Taiwan’s side would mean death of American service members in great numbers, and widespread destruction of our ships, planes, and other weapons of war. In a report last January, the Center for Strategic and International Studies released the results of a series of 24 war games that examined what might happen in a war between the U.S. and China. The US-Taiwan side defeated the Chinese side in all the games, but the cost was astonishing. … The losses across all categories would leave America’s entire Pacific air and sea fleets catastrophically weakened, but they would also dramatically reduce our ability to defend our interests worldwide. Since Washington would surge all available ammunition stores from Europe and America to the Indo-Pacific, we would have insufficient missiles to defend ourselves anywhere else in the world. For the first time since before World War I, our military would be so weakened that our ability to defend our very shores would come into question. … The United States has no vital national interest in Taiwan that is worth risking our ability to defend our own country. 

• “There is no evidence that China is in a hurry to attack Taiwan, despite a number of US government and military officials citing 2027 or even 2025 as a potential deadline for forcible unification,” said Zhiqun Zhu, an international relations professor at Bucknell University.

• What the United States does in Ukraine won’t matter in Taiwan.

  Despite the historical evidence, this bogus credibility claim still drives US foreign policy:

  Not one of these claims [about US credibility and China’s behavior] is supported by solid evidence. In fact, there is a substantial amount of scholarship on the significance of credibility, and the findings lead to the opposite conclusion. For instance, in Calculating Credibility, a seminal work on the subject, Dartmouth University professor Daryl Press concludes that leaders assess a nation’s credibility on whether it has the interest and power to deliver on a threat—not on what it did in the past in a completely unrelated context.

• Will Russia’s struggle in Ukraine help Taiwan or hurt it? The answer may lie in the differing personalities of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

• War in Taiwan will dwarf Ukraine unless the US shows China its teeth.

• What the war in Ukraine means for Taiwan:

  There has been much speculation that Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine makes a Chinese invasion of Taiwan more likely because Beijing could take advantage of US attention being diverted to Europe. This line of thinking has two major flaws. First, the recent deployment of 14,000 additional US troops and six F-35 aircraft to Europe in response to the Russia invasion does not significantly impair the ability of the US military to fight in the western Pacific. The officers of the US Indo-Pacific Command responsible for preparing and executing war plans and recommending courses of action to the White House are focused on developments in the Indo-Pacific, not Europe. The Biden administration’s attention to the war in Ukraine did not prevent it from thinking to send a delegation of former US defense officials on a reassurance visit to Taiwan. Second, the idea of coordinated invasions of Ukraine and Taiwan assumes Beijing has already made the decision to use military force to compel cross-Strait unification and is waiting for an opportunity to strike. This outlook does not account for Beijing’s political calculus. China-Taiwan relations operate according to their own logic and timetable, independent of what is happening in Europe or even Hong Kong. Attempting a military conquest of Taiwan has always been a last resort that China would consider only when compelled to by Taipei moving unambiguously to a permanent political separation from China.

• US aiding Ukraine won’t deter China. The US should engage in a more intense and uncompromising dialogue about the division of labor and the hard trade-offs between allies:

  … While the weapons needed by Taiwan differ in important cases to those needed by Ukraine—and there are other reasons for the backlog in weapons shipments to Taipei—there is still a basic truth that American efforts are being diverted. There are also significant overlaps. Anti-aircraft missiles, or anti-tank missiles or rocket artillery launchers sent to Ukraine can also be used against an invading force of landing craft or helicopters. Generating capability is a more complex matter than simply re-routing ships and equipment, but fundamentally, material resources (in the form of personnel, money, industrial plant or presidential time) devoted to one theater cannot be allocated to another. The aid program to Ukraine has also been accompanied by a partial strategic re-pivot to Europe. Washington has shifted thousands of troops, and valuable air, naval, logistics, surveillance and reconnaissance assets back to Europe at the very time China is enhancing the weight of force it can apply in the region it prioritizes.

• 🎥 The debate: After Ukraine, Taiwan? (Shows like this are regularly aired on French prime time.)¹

• Leaderless, cut off, and alone. The risks to Taiwan in the wake of Ukraine:

  Many observers have become more skeptical that China would launch an assault on its “wayward province” after seeing Russia struggle on the battlefield and suffer an economic backlash. Some have become more optimistic that Taiwan could defend its de facto sovereignty as Ukraine imposes heavy costs on invading forces. And others have become more confident that the United States can rely on “integrated deterrence” to manage the threat of Chinese aggression, which was beginning to appear close at hand. Yet the war in Europe might instead convince Chinese leaders to double down on efforts to shatter Taiwan’s will to resist should deterrence break down. Indeed, Russian failures and Ukrainian successes to date might incentivize China to issue threats and use force earlier to make US military intervention less likely and Taiwanese capitulation more so.

• America’s will in Taiwan is at stake in Ukraine:

  … Today, the Russians are counting on the erosion of America’s will to support Ukraine. Americans must understand: This is no mere territorial dispute. This is one nation saying another has no right to exist. Vladimir Putin is intent on rebuilding an empire. If he swallows Ukraine, he won’t stop there. The Chinese are watching. So are our Asian allies. If Ukraine is abandoned, some of them may decide they have no choice but to join Team China. Others may resist by developing their own nuclear weapons. Neither is in our interest. … Actions speak louder than words. Equipping Ukraine will have a far more deterrent effect than abandoning strategic ambiguity. If the US cannot stay the course in Ukraine even though it’s not incurring casualties there, it will embolden the Chinese. As Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warned during his recent visit to Kiev, “Ukraine today, East Asia tomorrow.” The best thing we can do to avoid a Chinese military takeover of Taiwan is to avoid a Russian military takeover of Ukraine.

• Taiwan must not suffer Ukraine’s fate. The democratic world failed to deter a Russian attack on Ukraine—we must not make the same mistakes with China. We must learn the right lessons from the war in Ukraine to prevent one in the Taiwan Strait:

  The first lesson is that Ukraine remains a free country because its people were prepared to fight. Weapons supplies have only proved effective because the Ukrainian people were willing to die to protect their homeland. Deterring an attack by China relies on the credible belief that any invasion would come at an immense cost. … The second lesson is the importance of a strong and unified response from the democratic world. Since Russia’s invasion, Ukraine’s allies have supplied weapons and imposed economic sanctions. If we had shown this unity of purpose after Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, it could have deterred a full-scale invasion. Democratic leaders must make clear that any attempt by China to forcibly change the status quo in Taiwan would spark an equally unified response. European politicians must stop sending mixed signals. China relies on exports to global markets to fuel its growth. It is far more entwined in global supply chains than Russia, so spelling out the economic consequences of an attack in advance can act as a powerful deterrent. … Third, ultimately weapons are what counts. … To be an effective deterrent, we should give Taiwan the weapons it needs to defend itself now. … The final and most important way to deter a Chinese move on Taiwan is to ensure a Ukrainian victory in the current conflict. If Russia can gain territory and establish a new status quo by force, it sets a dangerous precedent. China and other autocratic powers will learn that the democratic world’s resolve is weak and that nuclear blackmail and military aggression work.

• Resolver: Ukraine and Taiwan. The roads to escalation and disaster lead through Ukraine and Taiwan. They have moved from the geopolitical margins to center-stage. These dilemmas are the price of past mistakes. If Western decision-makers had taken a more robust and consistent attitude in past years, Ukraine and Taiwan would both be in far better positions. Signal weakness for long enough, and adversaries take note.

• China’s Ukraine peace plan is actually about Taiwan. Beijing’s phony proposal lays bare its conditions for winning an East Asian war.

  … Cue Beijing’s peace plan, both a masterstroke at misdirection as well as a not-so-subtle admission that Western unity, sanctions, supply chain instability, and potential grain disruption could derail China’s Indo-Pacific revisionism. … Beijing rightly understands that any plan to retake Taiwan—or at least any plan that carries the least risk—is predicated upon manifesting and subsequently sustaining the twelve conditions found in its Ukraine peace plan. In recent years, Washington has made tremendous strides strengthening its alliance network in the Indo-Pacific, as well as better aligning and boosting regional partner capability. Efforts are also underway to undercut China’s supply chain dominance in certain sectors, as well as to dent Beijing’s ability to leverage its grip on critical minerals to advance its foreign policy objectives. But to undermine China’s other strategic pillars, much work remains.

• Why Taiwanese are among Ukraine’s foreign fighters. “The main reason we came to Ukraine is to defend Ukrainians’ safety,” they say, while holding a Taiwan flag. “We are also afraid that if Russia wins, China will do the same to Taiwan. So we are willing to come to Ukraine to sacrifice our lives and the freedom for the safety of the people here.”

• Time for Beijing to rethink Taiwan. Beijing may reckon it has underestimated Western backbone, the difficulties of seizing Taiwan, cost as measured in lives, economic, and reputational harm to China.

• ★ Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Five lessons for Taiwan. Beijing is closely watching the West’s response to the 24 February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine for its own plans regarding the eventual subjugation of the independent country of Taiwan. The West’s desultory response to the crisis has revealed plain vulnerabilities and false assumptions about what the West would likely do in the event of an amphibious invasion or blockade of Taiwan by mainland China.

Global military spending increases for eighth year in a row. Not surprisingly, the biggest surge in spending came in Europe, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:

More spending was common across the world, with 12 of the top 15 countries—including India, Saudi Arabia, and the UK—spending more than they did in 2021. Every region of the world, with the exception of Africa, experienced an increase.  The increases in spending were particularly notable in Europe. Ukraine’s 640 percent jump from 2021 marked the largest single-year increase in one country’s expenditure ever recorded in SIPRI data. Elsewhere, Central and Western European states returned to Cold War levels of spending, with these countries surpassing the totals from 1989 for the first time. [But] the majority of this increase came from frontline states such as Poland and countries hoping to join NATO like Finland and Sweden, while the major increases in spending pledged by major Western European powers have yet to materialize. Italy was one of the three countries in the top fifteen whose spending decreased in the last year. In addition, “many former Eastern bloc states have more than doubled their military spending since 2014, the year when Russia annexed Crimea,” said Lorenzo Scarazzato, a researcher with SIPRI’s Military Expenditure and Arms Production Program. Russia’s spending also increased almost 10 percent. 

In Asia, China’s military expenditures increased for the 28th consecutive year, reaching an estimated US$292 billion, and a number of other countries, notably Japan, increased their defense spending, likely in response to the perceived threat from China. 

Hacktivism’s Cold War turns hot. Hacktivism’s definitive role in the Ukraine-Russia conflict shows that the future of war is already here and it’s digital:

… The perfect storm created by the pandemic, the rise of working from home, a polarized political landscape and the Russian invasion of Ukraine revived hacktivism. With the start of war in Ukraine, hacktivist activity reached unprecedented levels, as Anonymous declared war against Russia and engaged in a wide array of hacks exposing information from Russian government agencies and corporations, and even taking control of Russian media to communicate the realities of the war to the Russian public. Ukraine’s then vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, took to Twitter to ask for volunteers for “Ukraine’s IT Army” in February 2022. … Contemporary events show us that hacktivism has become mainstream and is now an inevitable dimension of political conflicts, even those that end up in kinetic clashes between states, testing the virtual limits of symbolic, sensationalist hacks, vigilantism, cyberespionage, and even cyberwarfare.

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RUSSIA-UKRAINE

Institute for the Study of War:

• Russia appears to be continuing a deliberate depopulation campaign in occupied areas of Ukraine in order to facilitate the repopulation of Ukrainian territories with Russians. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar stated on April 26 that Russia is trying to change the ethnic composition of Ukraine by actively conducting a large-scale resettlement of people mainly from poorer and remote regions of Russia into Ukraine. Malyar noted that the most intensive efforts are ongoing in occupied Luhansk Oblast and remarked that Russia is also deporting Ukrainians and forcibly resettling them in Russia. … Russia may hope to import Russians to fill depopulated areas of Ukraine in order to further integrate occupied areas into Russian socially, administratively, politically, and economically, thereby complicating conditions for the reintegration of these territories into Ukraine.

• Competition among Russian private military companies is probably increasing in Bakhmut. Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin probably views the proliferation of mercenary groups around Bakhmut as competition, and it appears that the increased prevalence of other private military companies around Bakhmut is causing substantial friction.

• The Kremlin continues measures to codify conditions for domestic repression. The Russian Federation Council approved three bills on April 26 that would allow for the deprivation of Russian citizenship for discrediting the Russian Armed Forces and for actions that threaten national security, allow for life sentences for high treason, and allow for five-year sentences for those who promote the decisions of international organizations in which Russia does not participate

• Comments made by Russian officials and prominent voices in the Russian information space continue to highlight a pervasive anxiety over potential Ukrainian counteroffensive actions. Increasingly despondent and panicked rhetoric emanating from prominent information space figures suggests that the Russian information space has not yet settled on a line about how to address significant and growing concerns about the near future.

• Chinese President Xi Jinping explicitly recognized Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence, stating that mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity are foundational to Ukrainian-Chinese relations in a conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Xi’s statement made China’s position on Ukrainian independence clear, rejecting Chinese Ambassador to France Lu Shaye’s April 22 statements that post-Soviet states lack a basis for sovereignty.[

• The Kremlin is probably attempting to reassure Armenia that it is a reliable partner even though the war in Ukraine is limiting Russia’s ability to play a larger role in mediating the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The Kremlin may attempt to use conscripts to maintain peacekeeping operations in Nagorno Karabakh and preserve relations with Armenia and other Collective Security Treaty Organization member states.

• Russian military bloggers continue to argue amongst themselves about Ukrainian activity along the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast.

• Russian authorities have started sending military registration summonses that include threats of “restrictive measures.”

• Russian sources claimed that the Russian Federal Security Service prevented an attempted attack in Crimea.

• A Ukrainian military official claimed on April 25 that Ukrainian forces are achieving “impressive results” in counter-battery combat against Russian forces on the Russian-occupied eastern (left) bank of the Dnipro River.

• Russian ultranationalists continue to advocate for the Kremlin to adopt Stalinist repression measures.

• The Russian Ministry of Defense is attempting to offer financial incentives to Russian prisoners to fight in Ukraine, offering them compensation equivalent to that of Russian volunteers.

At least seven civilians were killed and 33 injured in the past day, Ukraine’s presidential office said, including one person killed and 23 wounded—including a child—when four Kalibr cruise missiles hit the southern city of Mykolaiv. Defense officials said the missiles were fired from somewhere in the Black Sea.

★ With most Russian positions frozen in expectation, only Wagner Group is persistently storming Bakhmut:

The Russian assaults on different segments of the frontline are increasingly sporadic, even though the invading forces haven’t yet quit trying to advance. Still, their efforts across the board are positional in character and often boil down to shelling the other side while being shelled in return. We saw a similar picture in July and August 2022, when, after capturing Lysychansk, Russian troops did not stop advancing immediately. Instead, their offensives grew less and less determined, as if their momentum was gradually running out. Last November, the Ukrainian offensive, which drove the Russian forces beyond the secure barrier of the Dnipro River, ended in a similar way, as the Ukrainian side’s assaults on the Russian positions in the north of the Luhansk region gradually waned in December.

This dynamic signals a transfer of initiative from one of the adversaries to the other. Russian formations are likely expecting a Ukrainian offensive. For the time being, this keeps them from wasting strength and ammunition in localized tactical attacks. The one exception to this state of affairs is Bakhmut, where Ukrainian formations still control the western quarters of the city, staving off the critical prospect of being completely surrounded.

Xi and Zelensky spoke for the first time since the war began:

… Zelensky said he and Chinese leader Xi Jinping had a “long and meaningful” phone conversation Wednesday, their first known contact since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine more than a year ago. The phone call, which official said lasted nearly an hour, is a significant development in efforts to resolve the conflict. It comes two months after Beijing, which has long been aligned with Russia, said it wanted to act as a peace mediator in the war against Ukraine and after Xi visited Moscow last month.

• China won’t add “fuel to the fire” in Ukraine. While Xi’s remarks made no specific reference to international fears that China could send arms to Russia’s invading forces in Ukraine, his words will be read as a signal that Beijing won’t give direct military assistance to Russian President Vladimir Putin.  

• China can’t be trusted to mediate peace between Russia and Ukraine, says Czech President Petr Pavel.

Forty-four Ukrainian and forty Russian soldiers exchanged in prisoner swap.

Russian fighter jet crashes in Murmansk region.

Russia expels ten Norwegian diplomats in retaliation for Norway’s expulsion of fifteen Russian diplomats on April 13.

Google updated its satellite images of Mariupol for the first time since 2021. The photos show destruction on a catastrophic scale.

Ukraine’s former ambassador to Berlin Andrij Melnyk, who has been deeply critical of Germany’s hesitation about providing weapons to Ukraine, says Germany is still failing to provide the support it should. (In German.)

“Our offensive is going to happen, and the Germans think: ‘We’ve delivered 18 Leopards (tanks), ticked that off the list, finito.’ As if the war had been won with these tanks. The coalition government has … convinced the German public that regarding military help, everything is sorted. Which is not true.”

Putin, the Satanic wimp. Signs are emerging that there is deep worry among Russia’s wealthy and powerful about their future:

We hear very little from senior Russians speaking en clair, offering their true thoughts on events inside the country and their leader, Vladimir Putin. That spell of silence was broken in March when a purported wiretapped discussion was posted on YouTube by an unknown source. It has caused much comment and (according to the Russian investigative website, Istories) an FSB investigation ahead of unspecified “action.” 

The recording indicates a less-than-admiring view of Putin, who is described as Satan and as a lowlife, among other things. The exchanges between the music producer, Iosif Prigozhin (no relation to the Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin) and former senator of the Federation Council, the billionaire Farkhed Akhmedov, may of course be atypical for the Russian elite. But if they express anything close to a mainstream opinion among the wealthy and powerful, Russia’s most privileged people are frustrated, angry, and deeply worried about the future.  

★ The Admiral Kuznetsov, Russia’s only aircraft carrier, has no crew. Now what? The Russian Navy needs to rustle up about 1,600 sailors for its 2024 deployment—and that’s only half the battle:

… This latest problem is not so much a sign of the widespread corruption, incompetence, and poor leadership endemic in the Russian military, but of the reality when a naval power operates a single, large, specialized warship. Moscow could easily make the problem go away by retiring the carrier altogether, but after a year of stinging battlefield defeats in Ukraine, Russia needs something to remind the world of its great power—now more than ever. Unfortunately, that something is Kuznetsov.

★ 🎧 Empire, Integration, and Ukraine. A lecture by Timothy Snyder on the historical, political, and moral stakes of the war.

Yale has also made public all the lectures from Timothy Snyder’s class, “The Making of Modern Ukraine.” I haven’t watched them yet, but I’d like to. It’s amazing that we live in a world in which we can watch these not only without going to Yale but without leaving the couch—and for free. (Again, why don’t Fox and CNN replace the hosts they’ve just fired with these lectures? Before dismissing the idea as ridiculous, think how strange it is that the idea seems ridiculous. When and why did the news networks conclude that Americans are severely mentally handicapped and adjust their broadcasts accordingly?)

Fourteen months after Russia’s all-out attack on Ukraine, Nicolas Tenzer writes, democratic governments still lack a long-term view and strategy:

… Despite the military support for Kyiv, which remains insufficient for this very reason, there is no common understanding among the Allies of what victory means for Ukraine, let alone a common will to totally defeat Putin’s Russia. One can reasonably doubt that there is also a clear conception of the future of Ukraine, not to mention that of Russia. Certainly, especially in the latter case, there can be no certain prediction, at best contrasting scenarios, but this does not exempt governments from having at least a vision of what is desirable and realistic means to achieve it.

No one can minimize the concrete impact of this strategic vacuum. It explains the wait-and-see attitude disguised as caution, the halfway actions that take on the mask of wisdom, and the prevarication dressed up as supposed pragmatism. It is the main reason for the drip-feed of arms to Ukraine, especially on the American side, which cannot as easily invoke the limits of its production lines and military under-investment over the past two decades as some European countries. It is at the origin of the recurrent talk of possible peace negotiations without even the recovery by Ukraine of its entire territory, the return of deported children and the punishment of crimes for which there is no statute of limitations being, at least, a precondition. It resonates strangely with the lack of strong words from certain heads of state and government to welcome the historic decision of the International Criminal Court indicting Putin for war crimes. This strategic vacuum, finally, makes it possible to understand the fear that still animates some people of a collapse of Russia, as if, on the one hand, it constituted the most likely scenario in the event of Moscow’s total defeat in Ukraine, and on the other hand, we were deprived of any control, at least partial, over Russia’s future. … For the Western democracies, not to have a strategy is to abandon the world to the grip of criminal powers.

★ Halting Russia’s invasion before 2024 is possible, but only if the West learns to be bolder and more decisive:

Boldness is everything. In the spring, Ukraine will likely try to combine two main strategies:

• Suffocate Russian forces using long-range strikes against logistical centers and depots.

• Use new mechanized formations, created with the latest imported Western equipment, to strike deep behind frontlines at the core of Russian forces.

Judging by the sum of the available factors, Ukraine’s Armed Forces will have a harder time advancing this spring than they did in the fall. But a counteroffensive now is necessary to deny the Kremlin the time it needs to resupply, draft, and train more soldiers. Giving Moscow this breathing room would prolong the war without eliminating the risks of uncontrollable escalation that so much trouble Ukraine’s Western partners. A bolder Western approach to military aid (for example, supplying fighter jets) could potentially help Ukraine through this stage of the war. True, the time it takes to train pilots means warplanes wouldn’t join the Ukrainian arsenal until summer or later, but it is largely the Western countries’ decisiveness and boldness that will determine the progress made by either Ukraine or Russia (and what conditions they might be able to impose on the other).

What we know about Russia’s plans to defend against Ukraine’s counteroffensive. Moscow’s forces are digging in furiously in the south of Ukraine, as they prepare to defeat Kyiv’s upcoming offensive, but that won’t be easy and it might not work:

The Russian army has shifted over to a full defensive stance which it hopes will allow it to break Kyiv’s upcoming major counteroffensive with a hard-core defense employing air power, extensive fortifications and massed concentrations of men and machines. Analysts and Ukrainian officials feel that a combination of Russian manpower problems and Ukraine’s incoming western equipment won’t make it easy for them.

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of the Russian Security Council, once again threatened to use nuclear weapons, which he considers to be the “backbone by which the state is held together,” and said Russia might use them first. (In Russian.)

Russia may be the first to use nuclear weapons if there is aggression against it that threatens the existence of the state, Medvedev said. “You said that Russia would never be the first to use nuclear weapons, but this is not quite true,” he said, commenting on the words of one of the participants of the meeting [an education marathon called “Knowledge.”]

The politician quoted one of the points of the nuclear doctrine of the Russian Federation. “It is explicitly stated that nuclear weapons can be used when aggression is carried out against the Russian Federation with the use of other types of weapons that threaten the very existence of the state. This is essentially the use of nuclear weapons in response to such actions. And our potential opponents should not underestimate this,” said the deputy chairman of the Security Council.

In his opinion, the talk that Russia will never use nuclear weapons or, conversely, only scares everyone with weapons, is cheap. “Western analysts and the Western command—military and political leadership—should simply assess our rules and our intentions,” Medvedev stressed.

He also said that the prospect of nuclear war is growing. (In Russian.)

There is a prospect of nuclear warfare, and it is much scarier than climate change, which humanity has been watching for a very short time, said Deputy Chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev, speaking to the participants of the “Knowledge” marathon on Tuesday. … “Stop suffering because the temperature has increased by one degree in such a year or during such a period. Humanity has been watching this for a very short time. Do you really care about the climate to such an extent? In my opinion, this is nothing compared to the prospect of being in the epicenter of the explosion with a temperature of five thousand kelvins, a shock wave of 350 million per second and a pressure of three thousand kilograms per square meter, with penetrating radiation, that is, ionizing radiation and electromagnetic pulse. Is there such a prospect today? Alas, yes. And it is growing every day for well-known reasons.”

He added that a new world war is likely, but not inevitable. (In Russian.)

“The world is sick and it is likely on the verge of a new world war. Is it inevitable? No, it isn’t,” said the politician. ... “I can’t say what will be the last straw that will become a trigger. But at some point it may happen. Therefore, we all need to work to ensure that this threat of world confrontation, hot, full-fledged Third World War is not realized.” … Speaking about the current situation, Medvedev noted that Russia did not want such a development. “But the world is really electrified to an absolute degree.” The Deputy Chairman of the Security Council recalled that in his youth he and his peers “also talked all the time about the confrontation with the United States, the confrontation between the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Alliance. … Then it seemed that it was some kind of hypothetical, unrealizable story, an impossible scenario. But now I can’t say so, no matter how sad it sounds.”

★ The role of US diplomacy in countering Russia’s nuclear threats:

During the current Ukraine crisis, diplomacy between Moscow and Washington has stagnated, with neither capital willing to engage except on focused issues. Certainly the Biden administration has been clear that it will not negotiate about Ukraine if Kyiv is not in the room—the president has been forceful on that point since February 2022, when the war began. But by limiting diplomatic engagement so narrowly, the administration has been missing opportunities to pursue a goal that is clearly in the US national interest: bringing down the nuclear temperature with Moscow. Moreover, it is losing the chance to deliver clear deterrence messages directly at the negotiating table. …

Nowhere is diplomacy more important than in the nuclear realm, where escalation must be avoided at all costs. Threats of nuclear use are about an existential threat to humanity. They should therefore be treated as problems of importance and priority to humanity as a whole. Attempts to address them are not “rewards for bad behavior” or “responding to nuclear blackmail.” If a productive process can be established and sustained, then America will be better off than it is today in terms of its ability to deter Russian nuclear threats. At a minimum, Washington will have strengthened lines of communication that will afford it more opportunities both to deter and to challenge threats put forward by politicians in Moscow. At a maximum, the United States will have bolstered a deterrent against Russian nuclear use by reestablishing the shared interest in a stable nuclear relationship that the two countries have developed over the past sixty years.

“It is astonishing that a contemporary, modernized, and urbanized society is capable of degrading at such breakneck speed, particularly ethically and psychologically. Even if we suppose that a major part of that society doesn’t support Putin and the special operation, merely coming to terms with it, not offering resistance, and adapting to external circumstances still looks like support in a practical sense.”

Is there hope for Russia after Putin? Quite how and when Vladimir Putin will lose power is unclear, but the inevitable event will offer Russia another opportunity to break with its Soviet past:

For Putin and his ilk, there is little hope of epiphany, but while a majority of Russians, especially within the power elite in general and security apparatus in particular, may share certain nationalist assumptions, they do not necessarily hold them in the same way and to the same degree as Putin’s cohort. As the scholar Gulnaz Sharafutdinova argues, today’s Russians—rich and poor, powerful and marginalized—are no longer Homo Sovieticus. On a purely subjective level, my own interactions with officials and officers in their 50s and early-to-mid-60s have not suggested the same emotional baggage as Putin’s people. They consider themselves patriots (even as they embezzle from their nation with abandon and, largely, impunity) and often betray ingrained racism toward the people of Central Asia and the North Caucasus, as well as assumptions of superiority over Ukrainians. However, they also tend to be pragmatic, acquisitive, increasingly nostalgic of the “good old days” of Putin’s early years, when the funds accumulated from stealing at home could freely be banked and spent abroad. The latest iPhone, the Western luxury car (and now the spare parts to repair it), the skiing holidays in Courchevel, the pied à terre in London, and the opportunity to send your children to a British or American university: these were all considered the essential perks of their position.

★ How Putin came to hate Ukraine. An interesting report in the Russian-language outlet Verstka. It claims to be sourced to “former and current officials in the Russian and Ukrainian authorities” who “occupy a certain place either in the Ukrainian political establishment or in the Russian one.” (In Russian.)

The motives for Putin to start a war with Ukraine were personal resentment and a desire for revenge. The last straw was the closure of the media assets of his godfather Viktor Medvedchuk. Putin decided to attack Kiev in February-March 2021, according to Verstka sources. Preparations for the invasion lasted almost a year, but all this time the Kremlin proceeded from incorrect prerequisites and calculations.

🧵 Read the thread here.

“Doctor, will I always be like that now?” Another Russian-language article, also in Verstka, about the psychological state of soldiers returning from the war:

… Verstka studied court files and found that Russians who returned from the war are often detained for committing criminal offenses—shooting in a public place, buying drugs, robberies, beatings. In most cases, men commit crimes while intoxicated. For example, in February 2023, the Mozhginsky District Court of Udmurtia began to consider the criminal case of Sergei Batuyev. The man returned from Ukraine and, according to the investigation, shot and then strangled his friend, a veteran of the Chechen war. The murder took place in the garage where Batuev and his friend drank alcohol. The witness told the investigators that Batuyev first wanted to feed the body of the deceased to the piglets, but then decided to hide it in the forest. …

All this is quite typical behavior for those who have returned from the combat zone, explains clinical psychologist Marina Suraeva.

Claire—good luck, Russia.

• Related: “Now I can feel like a real man.” After six months with Wagner Group, a Russian man who murdered his girlfriend’s mother is free and back home.

Navalny says he may face life sentence. He said he was facing new extremism and terrorism charges as authorities set the stage for a new trial:

Navalny said by video link from prison during the hearing that the extremism charges which he rejected as “absurd” could land him in prison for thirty years. He noted that an investigator had told him he also would face a separate military court trial on terrorism charges that could potentially carry a life sentence, adding on a sardonic note that the charges imply that “I’m conducting terror attacks while sitting in prison.”

Why Russia won’t disintegrate along its regional borders:

Since its invasion of Ukraine, maps depicting the collapse of Russia by 2025 have proliferated online. These fantastical graphics carve the country up into dozens of independent republics. The maps betray a delusion on the part of their authors that is common to many political forecasters. These observers—all map fetishists—mistake the administrative boundaries of Russia’s provinces for real borders of socioeconomic life, unaware that the true divisions in Russian society almost never coincide with the arbitrary lines drawn by Communist Party functionaries in the first half of the last century. Russia is extremely unlikely to disintegrate along its regional borders for geographical, sociological, economic, and political-administrative reasons.

★🎥 “Hard power is a reality.” Christopher G. Cavoli, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, offers an overview of NATO’s military response in Ukraine and personal observations of the war. This is three months old, but worth your time.

Here’s a transcript of the first part of his remarks.

“The Pentagon must be a mess.” How the Russian political establishment made sense of the recent US intel leak:

Two sources close the president’s administration said the Kremlin generally views the leak as something that Washington knew about and deliberately ignored. They are also convinced that major American news outlets wouldn’t have published the leaked intelligence documents without Washington’s express permission. Although they have no supporting evidence for this view, they believe it to be true, based on their own experience of how the pro-Kremlin media operate in Russia. Their expectation is that major US outlets must behave similarly.

Russia laments the loss of Tucker Carlson. The Kremlin’s talking heads were appalled by the loss of a valued voice from the airwaves, but soon made the most of it:

The departure from his job as Fox News host Tucker Carlson on April 24 sent ripples all the way to Moscow. The decision seemed so important to the Kremlin that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov publicly questioned it and RT, Russia’s most prominent propaganda network, immediately offered Carlson a slot. 

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EUROPE

Berlin swings right for the first time in over two decades. Despite a larger-than-expected victory after a right-wing campaign, the new Christian Democratic mayor will still have to cooperate with the Social Democrats in a coalition:

The right has returned to Berlin. Barring a last-minute surprise, Christian Democrat Kai Wegner (CDU) will be elected on Thursday, April 27, to head the German capital, whose mayor’s office has been held by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) since 2001. The SPD will not be joining the opposition, however: after coming second to the CDU in the February 12 elections, the SPD decided to join forces with the CDU to form a majority. As a result, the outgoing mayor, Franziska Giffey, who has governed the city with the Greens and left-wing party Die Linke for the past two years, is expected to remain deputy mayor, in charge of the economy, in the new CDU/SPD coalition led by the conservative Wegner.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classified the youth wing of the AfD, a prominent far-right party, as an extremist group that threatens the constitution:

… Despite marching with neo-Nazis in street rallies against coronavirus regulations and in protests against Germany’s support for Ukraine against Russia, the AfD enjoys pockets of support in state entities like the police and the military. Debate over potential far-right infiltration into the heart of German democracy turned into concrete threats over the past year: Some AfD members were involved in a fantastical plot to try and overthrow the government, which German security forces foiled quickly in December. Just a few months later, Germany’s foreign intelligence service caught a mole in its own ranks who had been passing information to Russia. The man was also a supporter of Alternative for Germany. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, AfD lawmakers regularly traveled to Russia, where they were sometimes hosted at length by the foreign minister. The government also labeled two other far-right institutions as right wing extremists on Wednesday—the Institute for State Policy and the One Percent group.

“There is no longer any doubt that these three groups of people are pursuing anti-constitutional aspirations,” said the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the intelligence agency known by its German initials BfV. … Germany’s domestic spy agency said that the Young Alternative had made “agitation against refugees and migrants a constant, central theme,” particularly against Muslims. The group is also working against “the principle of democracy,” by denigrating political opponents and the state, the BfV said. “The Youth Alternative is not concerned with debate of matters at hand but a general disparagement of the democratic system of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

Can Europe come to NATO’s defense? Despite the Russian threat, few European states are committed to their own defense. NATO solidarity is transatlantic only—if it exists at all.

Is there a military strategy in Europe? Some 23 authors try to answer this question in Military Strategy in the 21st Century: the Challenge for NATO, and they find that there is little systematic strategic thinking in the political class—with some exceptions, such as France. … Perhaps this is because the long period of deep peace did not demand strategy. Now, however, the need is very obvious indeed. China and Russia stress the importance of military power in foreign and security policy, and terrorism and other non-state violence is rampant in Europe. In addition, there are cyber attacks across a range of targets. … The lack of European interest in Europe’s own deterrence is striking, and a clear indicator of a near total lack of strategic sense.

★ The paradox of Europe’s defense moment:

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has done more to wake up Europeans on the subject of defense in eleven months than have years of American cajoling about burden-sharing and European grand plans for strategic autonomy. The war has shattered the foundations of European security, causing many European governments to finally start taking defense seriously. This has translated into some concrete action, most visibly regarding defense spending, military assistance to Ukraine, and NATO’s defense and deterrence. Although this is not enough, it is more action than we’ve seen before. This is good news.

And yet, Europe’s defense moment is not necessarily strengthening European defense either in terms of industry or operational capacity. There is a serious risk that the opposite will occur in the form of a weakening of the European defense industrial and technological base and the reduction of European responsibility and risk-taking in their troubled neighborhood to the east and south. European strategic autonomy on defense remains an ever-distant chimera.

Macron dances to China’s tune (but not for long). His gaffe will boomerang:

Macron’s words had a singular merit, neither expected nor sought: no European leader now will be able to express indifference about Taiwan or to imagine a third way between America and China. As with the French president’s futile pre-invasion flirtation with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, he has given the impression of an attachment to an obsolete strategic conception, this time about China. …

And yet, the French President’s verbal gaffes represent, perhaps paradoxically, an opportunity for Europe to strengthen the transatlantic alliance without undermining a strong European commitment to its defense. The continent now can and must unambiguously affirm that a state’s democratic character governs our understanding of international relations. … Already, positive signs are visible. France moved to reassure its allies by sending a frigate to patrol the Taiwan Strait during the most recent Chinese military exercises. Illusions about Europe’s quest for strategic autonomy—a polysemous notion actually—on this matter have been disabused. The French President and his advisers took pains after the trip to China to say that there can be no policy of equidistance between Russia and China and that they still stand for the status quo regarding Taiwan. 

Macron exposes Europe’s “fractured glass” policy on China. Policies that look united and coherent from a distance turn out, on closer inspection, to have significant splits:

… Asked in a TV interview whether Crimea was part of Ukraine, Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to France, appeared to cast doubt not merely on Crimea, which is occupied by Russia but remains part of Ukraine under international law, but other ex-Soviet countries as well. “These ex-Soviet Union countries do not have effective status … under international law,” Lu said. … Lu’s comments, or rather the response from European countries to them, perhaps better illustrate the fractured glass. Those countries that fear Russia most led the charge against the comments in the most forceful language; Latvia called them “completely unacceptable,” Estonia “incomprehensible,” and summoned the Chinese ambassador. But for others, the response was more muted. Germany asked for “clarification” and Italy’s foreign minister said he disagreed with the remarks. Neither appeared to have summoned the respective Chinese ambassadors for an explanation. The message was the same, but the way it was conveyed varied widely.

For Beijing, such fractures, though small, are important.

French politicians the target of choice for Russian spies, says DGSI:

The head of French counter-espionage, Nicolas Lerner, provided an overview of the current situation in before a parliamentary committee of inquiry on foreign interference. … “Since I have been in charge of this service [from 2018], we’ve detected efforts by certain intelligence officers to make approaches targeting the entire political spectrum,” said Lerner. “According to my information, individual approaches are happening and some people have been able to enter into relationships not allowed under French law. I do have some examples in mind.” The head of the DGSI said that “in recent months,” he had to carry out “awareness-raising” actions within Parliament after having detected “contacts with Russian intelligence officers under diplomatic cover.”

★ France tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile:

To deter attack, France relies on a dyad of air- and sea-delivered nuclear forces. The air component consists of 50 Rafale multi-role fighter jets with pilots trained to launch the Air-Sol Moyenne Portée (ASMP-A) nuclear-tipped, ramjet-powered cruise missile. ASMP-A has a range of 310 miles, and carries a 300-kiloton thermonuclear warhead. … France’s most powerful and survivable nuclear weapons, however, are at sea on the four Triomphant-class ballistic-missile submarines of the Marine Nationale (French Navy). French missile submarines have been on continuous patrol for fifty years, with at least one submarine at sea at all times.

France may have just 290 nuclear weapons compared to Russia’s 1,588 deployed weapons, but a single ASMP-A, launched against Red Square in Moscow, would kill an estimated 556,000 and injure 2.1 million; a French retaliatory nuclear strike against Russia could devastate up to 16 cities. France doesn’t have the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, but it has enough nuclear weapons to deter any enemy from launching a surprise attack.

Azerbaijan accuses France of failing to use its influence to calm tensions in Nagorno-Karabakh:

French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna began a visit to Azerbaijan on Wednesday as fresh tensions rage between Baku and Yerevan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. It was the first visit of a French foreign minister to Baku in six years. …

Speaking to reporters alongside Colonna on Thursday, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov said: “Over these past years, France has never appealed to Armenia.” France has a large Armenian minority, and President Emmanuel Macron has sought to retain Paris’s influence over resolving the decades-long Karabakh conflict. Last weekend, Baku set up a checkpoint on the Lachin corridor, the only land link between Armenia and Azerbaijan’s Armenian-majority region, sparking new tensions.

Europe’s dangerous dependence on China. Europe is waking up to the malevolent influence of the Chinese regime. European leaders need a common political and economic strategy to manage China’s irreversible rise:

… [Europeans] dislike the fierce contest and confrontation between the United States on China, which Xi will no doubt try to exploit … but the Europeans increasingly understand the security and investment risks China poses to the bloc’s strategic sectors and how their dependence on the Chinese market makes them vulnerable. Yet some EU countries, notably Germany, seem oblivious to the cost of its economic reliance on China. Despite reservations by his Green coalition partners, Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited China last November, accompanied by a large business and trade delegation. It’s as if the energy crisis and Germany’s (now broken) dependence on Russian gas hasn’t made Berlin aware of how it is creating another dependence—this time on China for rare earth materials.

• Can Europe forge a common China policy? EU member states’ policies toward China have been hardening, but different national interests prevent a joint, coherent approach to Beijing. It may take a conflict over Taiwan to unify Europe.

Transatlantic unity on China runs through AI. Although the transatlantic partnership displayed remarkable unity in the face of Russia’s war in Ukraine, it must accelerate cooperation in emerging technology. The global fight for democracy is at stake:

France’s President Emmanuel Macron contends that Europe should pursue its own strategic autonomy. In his telling, the result is a stronger Europe contributing to a stronger Western alliance of democracies. Yet President Macron’s recent comments on Taiwan and the transatlantic alliance weakened both. They created cracks, sending a message to the rest of the world about our disunity and ultimately emboldening autocrats. Instead of transatlantic dissembling, now is the time for a renewal of our partnership. The basis of such a renewal should be technology cooperation.

★🎧 Russia’s influence in Hungary. Journalist Szabolcs Panyi discusses the money trail from Moscow and Russian espionage in Hungary. Think-tanker Andras Tóth-Czifra talks about Hungary’s response to the invasion of Ukraine. And university lecturer Zsuzsanna Vegh treats the way Orbán’s Russia policy puts Hungary at odds with the rest of Europe.

★ The new Warsaw Pact. Poland is taking on a leadership role in Europe. The combination of Russian threats, western European passivity and Anglo-American support has paved the way for an eastern regional alliance:

The question for the eastern Europeans now is whether they can really rely on their western counterparts to come to their defence, having seemingly failed Ukraine during its hour of need. Ukraine may not be a member of NATO, but what does western Europeans’ reluctance to confront Russia say about their commitment to its immediate neighbors? How much blood and treasure would they expend if Russia invaded the Baltic states?

At the same time that western Europeans reveal their ambivalence, the US and the UK have been intensifying their steps to weld the eastern Europeans into a new alliance outside the framework of NATO. Officials in Washington have called explicitly for the creation of a new political and military alliance comprising Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the UK, while London itself has signed a succession of defense treaties with the region, most notably a trilateral security pact with Poland and Ukraine in February last year, just prior to Russia’s invasion.

Europe’s Solidarity Ring gas project promises disunity:

At first sight, the project, previously known as Eastring, now dubbed Solidarity Ring, may seem a sensible attempt to diversify resources. The route would allow Azerbaijan, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia to move gas from the South Caucasus to Southern Europe and beyond. On closer inspection, however, it should raise serious concerns. The route can be used by the Kremlin to circumvent Western attempts to phase out Russian gas and by Turkey to pursue its own interests. It would also present European taxpayers with the bill.

An interesting Czech v. Slovak split over China policy:

Just a few weeks after the speaker of the lower house of Czech Parliament, Markéta Pekarová-Adamová, led a 150-strong delegation to Taiwan, her Slovak counterpart, Boris Kollár, found himself on an official visit to China from 16-20 April. It may matter more than you think. Czechs and Slovaks share a common history and cultural ties, but their foreign policy outlooks are not always in sync. In the Czech Republic, the extravagant promises of Chinese investment never materialized and the former president Miloš Zeman’s sycophancy toward Xi Jinping, whom he hosted at a extravagant state visit in 2016, provoked a wide revulsion.

In contrast, Slovakia has avoided a real debate about its relationship, economic and political, with China, straddling between more hawkish voices in its neighborhood, most prominently Czech and Lithuanian ones, and the China doves in countries such as Hungary. Because of Kollár’s trip, Slovaks might finally have a conversation about the subject. That said, their answer to the China question may not be to the liking of those who would are hoping for a more unified European voice, ideally aligned with the emerging American consensus.

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ASIA

US to dock nuclear submarines in South Korea for first time in forty years. The dock visits are a key element of what’s called the “Washington Declaration.”

Presidents Joe Biden and Yoon Suk Yeol on Wednesday will sign an agreement that includes plans to have US nuclear-armed submarines dock in South Korea for the first time in more than forty years, a conspicuous show of support to Seoul amid growing concern about nuclear threats by North Korea, according to senior Biden administration officials.

The planned dock visits are a key element of what’s being dubbed the “Washington Declaration,” aimed at deterring North Korea from carrying out an attack on its neighbor. It is being unveiled as Biden is hosting Yoon for a state visit during a moment of heightened anxiety for both leaders over an increased pace of ballistic missile tests by North Korea over the last several months. … The agreement seeks to allay South Korean fears over the North’s aggressive nuclear weapons program and to keep the country from restarting its own nuclear program, which it gave up nearly fifty years ago when it signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Yoon earlier this year said his country was weighing developing its own nuclear weapons or asking the US to redeploy them on the Korean Peninsula.

Biden warns North Korea that a nuclear attack would mean end of the regime:

Joe Biden warned North Korea on Wednesday that any nuclear attack on the United States or its allies would result in an end to the isolated regime while promising closer cooperation with South Korea on deterring the nuclear threat “Look, a nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its allies or partisans or partners is unacceptable and will result in the end of whatever regime [takes] such an action,” Biden said during a press conference following a summit with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who arrived in Washington on Monday for a six-day official state visit. During their meeting, the two leaders recognized the importance of the South Korea.-US Alliance, now in its 70th year, which Biden called a “linchpin” of security in the Indo-Pacific region, and “an alliance of values based on [Seoul and Washington’s] shared universal values of freedom and democracy.”

“Our mutual defense treaty is ironclad, and that includes our commitment to extended deterrence, and—and that includes the nuclear threat and—the nuclear deterrent,” Biden said.

What does it mean for India to overtake China? There is more to becoming a world power than sheer numbers:

For India truly to overtake China and become a new emerging world leader, it would need to learn two essential lessons from China. One lesson, relatively easy to do, is to greatly improve the quality of education and boost the quantity of the workforce. The government then would have to eliminate corruption at every level and bureaucratic red tape to make foreign direct investment easy and attractive. FDI creates jobs and raises GDP.

The second lesson, much more challenging, is to launch a cultural revolution on a scale that surpasses even the one in China, but with a constructive end-point rather than a destructive one. The objective of an Indian revolution is to truly eliminate caste, liberate women, and give all the opportunity to realize their potential.

Singapore executes a man after a judge found he was the owner of a phone number used to coordinate an attempt to sell a kilo of cannabis. Tangaraju Suppiah was hanged despite international pleas and concern that he lacked access to a lawyer or interpreter:

In November last year, when Tangaraju filed an application for his case to be reviewed after an unsuccessful appeal, he represented himself in court. Activists say he is one of a growing number of death row prisoners doing so, because of difficulties in accessing lawyers.

On Tuesday night, Tangaraju’s family filmed a video appeal, asking the public to continue calling on Singapore’s president, Halimah Yacob, to stop his execution. They would not give up hope, said his niece. “They will kill him at 6 a.m., we’ll keep the hope until 5.55 a.m.” she said. “My uncle is a very good man, he didn’t have education or money but he worked very hard to look after us.”

Junta raids force more than 7,000 villagers to flee Salingyi. The township in Myanmar’s Sagaing region is home to a Chinese-owned copper mine.

The military has intensified an already bloody campaign in Sagaing region this year, declaring martial law in 11 townships in February to try to wrest control of them from People’s Defense Forces and defend foreign-owned mining interests. This month alone, troops have torched hundreds of homes in Sagaing region, and killed around 200 civilians in the bombing of Pa Zi Gyi village. There were more than 1.8 million internally displaced persons across Myanmar as of April 10, 2023.

Southeast Asia’s human trafficking crisis:

An immense humanitarian crisis has developed in the Southeast Asian Mekong region due to the growth of online fraud companies and illegal casinos. Despite attempts to crack down on criminal gangs, the ever-changing nature of human trafficking and illicit scamming activities is becoming an increasingly destructive force. Recent raids on several casinos in Myanmar’s epicenter of human trafficking, Shwe Kokko, led to fierce and deadly fighting between ethnic rebel groups and the Myanmar military. Thousands of people fled to neighboring Thailand.

Meanwhile, the lack of law enforcement in conflict zones like Myanmar has allowed criminals to relocate and rapidly establish new “slave compounds” where trafficking victims are held against their will, abused, tortured, and even killed. As the scale of the crisis becomes more apparent and traffickers target citizens outside Southeast Asia, civil society groups and rescuers are calling for urgent action to identify and combat these crimes.

Vietnam speeds land reclamation in South China Sea. Developments include new harbors, helipads and radar domes but no military installations.

Satellite images obtained via Planet Labs, a US Earth imaging company, show that reclamation works have been carried out at many of the 27 maritime features under Vietnam’s control in the Spratly archipelago. New harbors that could serve as shelters for ships have been developed at five more features including Tennent Reef, Pearson Reef, Namyit Island, Barque Canada Reef and Sand Cay, bringing the number of such facilities to at least nine.

Cambodian opposition parties delay registering for election due to intimidation:

The main opposition Candlelight Party is having difficulty recruiting candidates because of intimidation and physical assaults against its activists. Some supporters are afraid of publicly campaigning for candidates. “Activists, especially those in Phnom Penh, were physically attacked,” said Candlelight Party spokesman Kim Sour Phirith. “They are being threatened emotionally. It is not good for our country that one party is discriminating against its opponent.”

As US Congress debates budget, Pacific island nations are watching with concern:

US President Joe Biden has pledged generous funding for tuna treaty and other regional initiatives in a bid to offset China’s growing influence. But Republicans are looking to make cuts in foreign aid and the Pacific Partnership might be a victim …

Announced in September, the Pacific Partnership Strategy—intended to help the US catch up with China’s growing influence in the region—committed to spending more than US$800 million on priorities like climate change, fishing disputes and maritime security. … Kuper called the COFA commitment “a litmus test for US credibility” in the region. He said that the three island nations had a close relationship with the US and that if the COFA funding is not secured, “the rest of the Pacific will start to wonder whether or not this Pacific Partnership Strategy, and whether or not the summit that happened, was just a temporary phase.” Collins of the Lowy Institute added that failing to deliver could damage “Washington’s authority in the region”“It’s safe to say that some Pacific leaders would already be skeptical about the sincerity of Washington’s promises.”

The Taliban killed the mastermind of 2021 Kabul airport bombing:

The IS leader, whose identity has not yet been released, was killed in southern Afghanistan in early April as the Taliban conducted a series of operations against the Islamic State group, according to one of the officials. The Taliban at the time were not aware of the identity of the person they killed, the official added. The US military has informed families of the 11 marines, one sailor and one soldier killed in the blast during the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Threatened by China, Taiwan builds a culture of resilience. How civil society networks are mobilizing in the face of Beijing’s growing threats of “reunification.”

… I asked Chen to reflect on whether China was going to invade Taiwan. His answer, delivered without hesitation and with a pang of anger: “The CPC is already invading through cyber-intrusions and economic coercion. The invasion has already started.” We talked about how Taiwan has responded to China’s cyber-attacks with waves of media literacy workshops and the launching of a flurry of fact-checking organizations. These public efforts at debunking China’s disinformation machine serve as heartfelt forms of civic engagement and national defense, yet Chen was clear—echoing a sentiment shared by everyone I spoke to—that the key element in protecting Taiwan’s sovereignty is the perception of American resolve to defend the island in the case of an attack. Back in September, President Biden made headlines when he stated on “60 Minutes” that the US would indeed defend Taiwan if China invaded. (He has reiterated this position several times. On each occasion, White House staffers try to walk it back in an attempt to placate Beijing, but Biden does not.) I asked Chen what he thought about the comment, which he called “perfect.” Like almost everyone I spoke to, he argued that the US foreign policy machine needs “more strategic clarity, not more strategic ambiguity.”

Taiwan seeks closer ties to the EU. Facing tensions with Beijing, the island wants to strengthen its diplomatic and security relations with the European Union, beyond its healthy trade relationship:

Diplomacy, economy, security: Taiwan would like to expand bilateral co-operation with the EU-27, as much to assert itself on the international stage as to be less dependent on the United States. But from Taipei’s point of view, “the European Union is sending contradictory signals,” said one senior Taiwanese diplomat. This was an implicit reference to Emmanuel Macron's recent comments. “I am neither Taiwan nor the US. As a good stoic, I can only deal with what depends on me,” said the French head of state during his trip to China in early April.

China sends top wolf warrior Lu Shaye to the dog house. China’s ambassador to Paris is in trouble over comments questioning the sovereignty of ex-Soviet states:

Less than three weeks after French President Emmanuel Macron returned from a three-day visit to China, where he hailed “common ambitions” with Beijing, China’s top Paris-based wolf warrior lashed out—again. The outrageous diplomatic faux pas from Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to France, where he questioned the sovereignty of former Soviet states on French television last week, was just the latest in a series of provocations. The Chinese ambassador has built a reputation for an at times flagrant disregard of diplomatic protocol, spreading disinformation and going a bit rogue on Twitter. …

But this time around, Beijing failed to back him, swiftly re-stating its respect for the sovereignty of ex-Soviet states and disavowing Lu’s remarks as “personal comments.”

China vows to retaliate if US continues case against police officers accused of targeting dissidents in America. Earlier this month, the US Department of Justice announced that 44 people had been charged over what it said was a “transnational repression scheme” harassing Chinese nationals living in the US, including the New York metropolitan area.

China reaches out to Central Asia in push to end Ukraine war. Russia’s invasion ranks high on agenda during meeting between Chinese foreign minister and counterparts from five Central Asian countries. The gathering comes a day after long-awaited phone call between Xi Jinping and Volodymyr Zelensky.

Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang said China was willing to work with five countries in Central Asia—where Russia has substantial influence—to push for a consensus in solving the Ukraine crisis. “China and the Central Asian countries share a similar view and stance on the crisis in Ukraine,” Qin said on Thursday after meeting his regional counterparts in the northwest city of Xian to prepare for next month’s China plus Central Asian countries (C+C5) summit.

Qin said the foreign ministers of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan—all former Soviet states—spoke highly of the constructive conversation between Xi and Zelensky and believed it would be helpful for achieving a ceasefire and peace talks soon, according to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Claire—interesting. Very interesting. I wonder what kind of threat or signal this represents?

China and Russia’s military academies, branches and theater commands will work together more closely, the countries’ defense chiefs said. Chinese General Li Shangfu told his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu that China’s military would promote cooperation with Russia’s armed forces, including on military technology. The two sides also pledged to support each others’ “core interests.”

A most rebellious territory. Xinjiang’s Uighurs live under the heaviest surveillance in the world, victims of a long battle between China and Russia to settle their Central Asian borderlands:

… Most outsiders do not know that on three occasions—in 1934, 1937 and 1945—the Soviet Union seized control of parts of Xinjiang, while Muslim separatists twice declared independence. Nor are they aware that as late as the year 2000, groups based in Kazakhstan, the successor state to the Kazakh Soviet Republic, were waging an armed struggle against China. The Chinese government has assuredly not forgotten. When it was weak, China’s existential fear was neither militant Islam nor the oft-proclaimed foreign “plots” to divide the country. It was the presence of the Soviet Union, a big nuclear weapons power, on its border, at intervals hostile or comradely depending on the despots of the day. That has not changed. …

“There’s nothing we can do but wait.” For workers from Nepal, the road to Romania is long and uncertain:

Since joining the European Union in 2007, Romania has seen its workforce dwindle steadily. Given the right to live and work anywhere in the bloc, millions of Romanian nationals have gone abroad and, in doing so, helped fill labor gaps in the EU’s wealthier member countries. Today, however, Romania finds itself on the other side of the equation. Faced with a labor shortage of its own, Bucharest is turning to Asia to boost its workforce, recruiting tens of thousands of workers from as far away as Bangladesh and Vietnam. After increasing its annual quota for non-EU workers to 100,000 last year, Romania registered more than 10,600 new employment contracts with workers from Nepal alone. But securing the necessary paperwork is just one of the many hoops Nepali migrants have to jump through.

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MIDDLE EAST

Erdoğan had to abruptly cancel campaign events after he was taken ill on live television:

Cameras abruptly cut away from Erdoğan to one of his interviewers, Hasan Öztürk, who looked perturbed and began to rise from his chair before the broadcast cut entirely. In footage distributed by the president’s Justice and Development party, shot in the same location, Erdoğan explains that he contracted stomach flu following intense work on the campaign trail weeks before the pivotal election.

Health concerns haunt Turkey’s leader amid election campaign:

As Turkey approaches its most important election in its post-Ottoman history, rumors have been circulating about the health of its long-standing leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The country is grappling with the dual crisis of an economic downturn and the impact of devastating earthquakes in February that claimed over 50,000 lives. The president’s popularity is at an all-time low, and his support base appears to be dwindling. …

Erdoğan’s recent bout of illness came in the midst of a hard-fought campaign. He had three appearances planned in central Anatolian provinces on Wednesday, but he canceled all of them due to a “stomach bug.” In a statement on his official Twitter account, the 69-year-old leader said he would be resting at home upon the advice of his doctors and that Vice President Fuat Oktay would take his place instead.

Claire—I’ve been hearing rumors that he’s on death’s door for years and years. I’ll believe it when I see it. Meanwhile, while Turks are busy gossiping about his health, he’s busy having his enemies arrested.

• Warrants for detention of 128 in operation targeting Kurds included no accusations. The former head of the bar association in the predominantly Kurdish province of Diyarbakır has said the detention of more than 100 activists, lawyers and journalists on Tuesday was made without any official charges against the detainees.

• Detention of 25 lawyers in Turkey is unlawful, violates right to liberty, advocacy group says. The lawyers were detained in raids conducted in 21 provinces on Tuesday as part of a counterterrorism operation, just three weeks before the country’s May 14 elections.

• Green Left Party parliamentary candidate detained after being targeted by interior minister. YSP candidate Ayten Dönmez was detained in İstanbul over alleged involvement in activities of the outlawed PKK.

Turkey’s jailed electoral kingmaker predicts Erdoğan’s demise. Millions of Kurdish votes will prove decisive in the May 14 election, say Selahattin Demirtaş:

Selahattin Demirtaş, a former presidential candidate and party leader, is spending his seventh year behind bars on terrorism charges in a high-security prison near the Greek border. Even so, he still wields huge influence in the knife-edge May 14 presidential and parliamentary election, largely because of the votes of millions of Kurds, who represent around a fifth of the NATO member’s population of 85 million. Those Kurdish votes are now likely to prove decisive, and Demirtaş estimates his party, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, represents about two-thirds of them… . “I believe that Erdoğan will lose in the first round of the election by a large margin.”

… Turkey’s election is turning into one of the most closely watched political showdowns of the year, with massive strategic implications for Europe and the Middle East. Many see the vote as a crux moment to wrest democracy back from Erdoğan’s increasingly centralized rule, but the Islamist populist president himself will be hard to beat, being a veteran campaigner with deep grass-roots support, who can draw on the full resources of the state and a pliant media culture.

Institute for the Study of War on Iran:

• An unidentified man shot and killed Shia cleric and Assembly of Experts member Ayatollah Abbas Ali Soleimani in a bank in Babolsar, Mazandaran Province. The assailant was a bank security guard who intentionally targeted Soleimani, although his motive remains unclear. Soleimani most recently represented Sistan and Baluchistan in the Assembly of Experts, the regime body responsible for selecting the supreme leader. … Soleimani’s connections to the historically restive Sistan and Baluchistan Province are noteworthy following heightened tensions between Iranian officials and Sistan and Baluchistan residents in recent months. Soleimani’s murder follows a series of attacks on clerics within the past year.

• Authorities arrested two former advisors of reformist politician Mir Hossein Mousavi. Iranian media tied the arrest of Alireza Beheshti Shirazi, who previously advised and managed Mousavi’s public relations office, and Ghorban Behzadian Nejad, who headed Mousavi’s 2009 presidential campaign, to their participation in a virtual conference titled “Dialogue to Save Iran” on April 21. Anti-regime outlet Iran International reported that the conference included the discussion of the Islamic Republic’s collapse and a new constitution. Mousavi had previously called for ”foundational change” in Iran.

• Qom Provincial Governor Mohammad Taghi Shah Cheraghi said that the provincial government should take “negative measures” against unveiled women “in accordance with the law” during a 19 Dey Headquarters meeting.

• Regime security forces have renewed their efforts to combat popular celebrity figures who publicly oppose the mandatory hijab law.

• Human Rights Watch reported that state security services have tortured, sexually abused, and killed children since the beginning of the Mahsa Amin protests.

• At least three protests occurred in three cities across three provinces.

• A senior Iranian military delegation paid an official visit to Moscow to meet with Russian, Syrian, and Turkish officials.

• IRGC Ground Forces Commander Brigadier General Mohammad Pak Pour appointed Brigadier General Ahmad Ali Faizollahi as the Saberin Special Forces Brigade commander.

Tens of thousands rally for court overhaul in Israel in show of right-wing political muscle. At least 80,000 reported at demonstration outside Knesset, with attendees waving flags and calling for the Knesset to pass the proposed changes to the judiciary without compromise

Yair Netanyahu’s vanishment cements him in Israel’s political sphere. The public disappearance has deepened questions about his actual role in his father’s public life:

His disappearance from the public eye more than two weeks ago, only to show up halfway around the world, has sent Israel’s rumor mill into overdrive, with various insinuations that Yair is in some sort of rehab or was sent away by his parents, who finally snapped after the US State Department was forced to condemn their son’s claims. …

The younger Netanyahu is considered the leading edge of his father’s association with global alt-right peers, like Bolsonaro and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Even when they lean into overt antisemitism, Yair enthusiastically engages. The Hungarian-born philanthropist George Soros, a Holocaust survivor and left-leaning benefactor, is a particular focus of his contempt, to such an extent that the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, in 2017, called Yair a “total bro” when he posted on his Facebook page a cartoon showing George Soros and reptilian animals as puppet-masters of his father’s political rivals.

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AFRICA

The Sudanese army pounded paramilitaries in Khartoum with air strikes while fighting flared in Darfur as the clock ticked down on a fragile US-brokered ceasefire now in its final full day. Late yesterday, the army said it had agreed to talks in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, about extending the three-day truce which expires tomorrow “at the initiative of IGAD,” the East African regional bloc.

Scramble to evacuate from Sudan continues as UN warns of “immense suffering for years.”

• Omar al-Bashir is in custody in a military hospital amid reports of RSF prison breaks. Sudan’s army said the ousted former president was being held in a military hospital under police custody.

• The British Red Cross has warned that the “desperate” humanitarian need in Sudan risks becoming “catastrophic.”

• Ahmed Harun, a leading figure of the regime of deposed dictator Omar al-Bashir, says he has escaped prison. Harun, who led the regime’s infamous counter-insurgency campaign in the western Darfur region in the mid-2000s and is wanted for war crimes by the international criminal court, said he had broken out of the capital’s Kober prison.

• A truce in the 11-day conflict was undermined by Sudan’s army and paramilitary force.

• Crowds of families have been growing at Sudan’s border crossing with Egypt, desperately trying to escape the violence and sometimes waiting for days with little food or shelter.

• Sudanese authorities and the RSF have traded accusations over the release of prison inmate. Thousands of convicted criminals, including some sentenced to death, were held in the vast Kober prison in Khartoum, along with senior and lower-ranking officials from the Bashir regime, which was toppled four years ago.

🎧 How two generals led Sudan to the brink of civil war. As they talked peace, the military leaders were preparing to turn their forces on each other—devastating a country of 45 million people.

🎧 Egypt and the crisis in Sudan, Part I and Part II. Part of Nervana Mahmoud’s new Egypt podcast, which is sure to be excellent.

The civilian transition caught between armed rivals. Sudan’s regular armed forces and Rapid Support Forces are at war. As both sides fight it out, the civilian organizers are caught in the middle:

Civilians are caught in the middle as the rival armies use heavy artillery and airplanes in an effort to exterminate each other. The stories of terrified families trapped and killed in their homes are heartbreaking. Another story concerning civilians is getting less attention but will probably have more severe long-term consequences for the country: The people in the streets, whose prolonged protest led to the demise of Bashir, and the organizations that have continued to confront the military ever since, have been pushed aside in the fighting.

A coalition of professional syndicates and NGOs, the Forces of Freedom and Change, was able to force the military into negotiations and to reach a remarkable although shaky power-sharing agreement meant to lead to a return to civilian rule. With two fully armed adversaries fighting it out in Khartoum and the provinces, civilian voices have been silenced. There is a real danger that civilians will not be able to reassert any influence in the foreseeable future, leaving Sudan completely under military domination, as is the case in neighboring Egypt. But such an outcome is not a foregone conclusion.

The World Health Organization says there’s a “high risk of biological hazard” at a laboratory caught up in the conflict in Sudan:

Officials said it was unclear who was behind the occupation of the National Public Health Laboratory in the capital Khartoum. … Officials said that a broad range of biological and chemical materials are stored in the lab. The facility holds measles and cholera pathogens, as well as other hazardous materials. A lack of power is also putting depleting stocks of blood bags stored at the lab at risk of spoiling.

… WHO officials said it is conducting an “extensive” risk assessment of the potential public health threat following the seizure of the lab. Fillipa Lentzos, Associate Professor in Science and International Security at King’s College London, said: “It could create a risky situation, but it’s a regular health lab, not a high containment facility. The agents which are in the lab are all diseases which are endemic in the region anyway, so they wouldn’t really be classified as high risk.”

Mass killing of civilians by security forces in Burkina Faso:

The accounts are horrific. Women killed while carrying babies on their backs, the wounded hunted down and villagers watching the execution of their neighbors, fearing they’d be next. These are some of the atrocities allegedly perpetrated by Burkina Faso’s security forces in the north of the country, according to a statement Tuesday by locals from the village of Karma where the violence took place. … At least 150 civilians may have been killed and many others injured in the violence, said the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ravina Shamdasani, in a statement Tuesday. The UN is calling for a prompt, thorough, independent and impartial investigation into what it called the “horrific killing of civilians.” …

Jihadi fighters linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group have waged a violent insurgency in Burkina Faso for seven years. The violence has killed thousands of people and divided the country, leading to two coups last year.Since Capt. Ibrahim Traore seized power in September 2022 during the second coup, extrajudicial killings of civilians have increased, according to rights groups and residents. This incident—one of the deadliest against civilians by security forces—comes amid mounting allegations against the military for committing abuses against those it believes to be supporting the jihadis. … The abuses will create a backlash against Burkina Faso’s junta and drive people into the hands of the jihadis, say conflict analysts.

EU preparing to leave Bangui as Russian influence grows:

Russia is gaining power in the Central African Republic as the EU pulls out, amid similar developments in neighbouring Sudan. “The influence of the Prigozhin network connected to [Wagner Group] is increasing in the security sector and beyond,” the EU foreign service said in a CAR strategic review. … [The report] painted a picture of almost complete state capture by the Kremlin’s shadow army. Wagner was “heavily involved” at the highest political level in a “project to revise the constitution, which would enable [CAR president Faustin-Archange] Touadéra to stay in power beyond the present limit of two terms,” the EU said. “To muster support for that project, Wagner has a network of political advisers, troll farms, and pro-Russian activists who devise and implement strategies to manipulate public opinion.” It has also run anti-Western “demonization” campaigns on “an industrial scale” with “the desired effect.” In military terms, “a significant amount of the deployed FACA [CAR’s army] units outside Bangui operate under the direct command or supervision of Wagner Group mercenaries, which have in parallel deeply infiltrated the [FACA] general staff.” And on the economic front, Wagner was “engaged in the diversion of fiscal revenue of the Central African state, they now hold a pervasive position in the country’s economy.”

★ Following a checkered history of security engagement in Africa, the United States is rolling out a new conflict mitigation strategy on the continent—but African governments must also play an essential role:

As a first matter, the United States should internalize that preventing conflict and promoting stability in fragile and conflict-affected states in Africa might first require the United States, and other major powers, seriously rethink their military interventions, which have historically led to disastrous consequences for countries on the brink of fragility. For instance, the Sahel region, West Africa, and even Central Africa have undoubtedly borne the brunt of the prolonged effects of Libya’s collapse after NATO military intervention. … Decisions on Libya were taken in the UK and in France, with more weight given to domestic political considerations and calculations than to the future of Libya and its African neighbors in the Sahel and beyond. It is not only the failure to plan for the aftermath that should be questioned but the course of the military intervention itself and the decision to prioritize it above other possible options. “Do no harm” should also mean that US engagement supports, rather than weakens, regional organizations and intraregional cooperation within Africa.

In addition, prevention of conflict in the longer term in Africa also requires massive investments in education and human capital development. … Reforming education systems and policies will be critical for the stability of the region; improving states’ capacities to produce public goods further strengthens political legitimacy. … Similarly, the United States must prioritize patient but determined construction of effective civil and military administrations—a necessary task if the countries of the region are ever to achieve political stability and decent levels of security.

Claire—I heard the same themes last week in Senegal.

★ Will the invasion of Ukraine change Russia-Africa relations? Russia’s influence in Africa is likely to be diminished by any outcome of the war in Ukraine. Western governments will need to take Africa into their confidence regarding geopolitical matters rather than berate the sovereign stances of countries that feel unseen and neglected by them:

… To assume that Africans are more susceptible to Russian propaganda is a simplification and discounts that Africans feel ignored by the West. African countries have long bemoaned economic and political marginalization at international forums like the UN, where many feel unheard. … In addition to feeling ignored, members of the African diaspora regularly experience racism and xenophobia in the United Kingdom, Europe, and China, with the two most recent instances being in China and Ukraine. In Guangzhou, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Africans were evicted by landlords, refused restaurant service, and forcibly tested for coronavirus. At the start of the war in Ukraine, African students and professionals trying to flee the fighting were forced off busses and trains to make space for Ukrainian citizens. Images of these scenes were widely shared across social media and have done little to generate sympathy for the plight of Ukraine among Africans. Russia effectively leverages this sentiment, using hints of truth mixed with blatant propaganda that offers both African citizens and leaders a sense of relevance, even if Africa is less of a priority for Russia in the broader global power play than many on the continent would like to believe. For Russia, Africa is a useful theater in which it can distract the attentions of the West from its own regional ambitions and force Western countries to spread their diplomatic, military, and financial resources more thinly to assuage fears of Russia’s growing presence on the continent. All of this is done by committing very limited Russian resources, the bulk of which are private, and extracting mineral resources and wealth in the process. …

At the very least, Russia offers Africa perceived relevance and a voice for a continent relegated to the sidelines of the global geopolitical stage. The West is seemingly becoming more insular and more consumed by great power competition with China. China itself is increasingly focusing its investments and financial engagements on both the domestic economy and its immediate neighborhood in Asia. Within this shifting geopolitical landscape, Russia is not inattentive to Africa, even if the continent is not its top priority. … African states and leaders have actively courted Russian involvement as much as Russia has sought to deepen its ties and presence in Africa. This is often a response to a perceived Western vacuum or lack of interest. …

The likeliest outcome for Africa from any eventuality of the war in Ukraine is that Russia’s capabilities, influence, and presence on the continent will be blunted by Russia’s financial, military, and personnel-related overstretch in Ukraine. It is important not to overstate Russia’s role in Africa and instead acknowledge that its presence on the continent is driven by opportunism as much as by invitation. Russia is not heavily invested in Africa, and the continent is less a strategic and geopolitical priority than Russian leaders want African officials to believe. Once the risks outweigh the rewards, Russia may leave a vacuum that could be more destabilizing than its presence.

★ Africa’s infrastructure-led growth experiment is faltering. It is time to focus on agriculture:

Over the past few decades, several low- and middle-income economies in Africa have sought to turbocharge growth by adopting an export-led economic model premised on heavy investments in infrastructure and building up domestic manufacturing capacity. But this strategy has often not produced the economic gains that have been promised for a variety of reasons.

The continued emphasis on infrastructure investments fails to account for the fact that even those African countries that have invested a great deal in infrastructure continue to lag other countries in Asia (like Bangladesh) in key manufacturing sectors like textiles, regardless of infrastructure quality. In addition, this approach overlooks the fact that African countries do not have the same comparative advantages as the Asian countries that perfected and popularized the export-led growth model: While those Asian countries had an abundance of low-wage labor, wages in Africa are typically higher than those of other countries at comparable income levels. Instead of fixating on infrastructure, African countries should look to the experience of Latin American countries with similar resource endowments—a greater relative abundance of land than low-cost labor. As this experience shows, countries can make far more durable, sustainable economic gains by focusing on improving agricultural productivity with relatively low-cost improvements targeted at smallholder farmers for whom a boost in productivity would have the largest impact. 

🎥 Tunisian city of Sfax becomes hub for migrant crossings to Italy:

In Tunisia, the number of migrants leaving for Italy has increased since the start of the year. Coastguard officials in the southeastern Sfax region say there’s been a 300 percent increase compared to 2022. The region has over 150 kilometers of coastline and Sfax is also the country’s economic capital, but it’s now become a hub for crossings for both Tunisians and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa. President Kais Saied’s racially charged speech on February 21 targeting black migrants has pushed more of them to attempt the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean.

Families of jailed opposition leaders say EU must sanction Tunisia’s Saied:

The European Commission has been asked to use its international human rights regime to sanction the Tunisian president and several leading ministers in his government. ... The families of jailed opposition leaders in Tunisia urged the EU to impose sanctions against President Kais Saied, citing “the ongoing arrest, torture and in some cases killing, of anyone deemed to be in opposition” to his regime. … In recent months, dozens of prominent activists, politicians and trade unionists have been arrested, detained without charge, or charged with treason or endangering national security.

At least fifty-five people drowned after their boat sank off the coast of Libya, the latest in a series of deadly accidents in just a few days involving migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.

Comoros row with France escalates:

The Comoros government vowed not to accept illegal migrants expelled from the neighboring French island of Mayotte and urged France to step back from a planned operation that could see their forced return. In an escalating diplomatic spat, the Comoros government has already asked France to abandon the planned Operation Wuambushu (“Take Back”) that was to involve evictions, destruction of illegal housing and arrests in Mayotte, a French department in the Indian Ocean facing a galloping crime rate, against the backdrop of a migration crisis.

As part of the operation, which was approved by French President Emmanuel Macron in February, those without papers were to be sent back to the Comoran island of Anjouan, 70 kilometers away. … While Mayotte is France’s poorest department with around 80 percent of the population living beneath the poverty line and high levels of social delinquency, it also benefits from French infrastructure support and welfare, and this has caused an influx from the nearby Comoros.

The EU has provided a fresh credit facility of 32.7 million euros to the Democratic Republic of Congo to provide assistance to people in the eastern region where populations have been affected by fighting between the army and rebel groups. The loan will be channeled through humanitarian organizations to meet immediate needs such as nutrition, health care, water, hygiene, shelter, and protection.

UNICEF report warns of “backslide” in vaccination of children in Africa:

… The disruptive impact of the Covid19 pandemic has left the continent vulnerable to even more outbreaks of disease and facing a “child survival crisis.” Amid a global “backslide” in childhood immunization over [the three years of the pandemic], which UNICEF said is the worst regression for childhood vaccinations in 30 years, Africa is the region with the highest number of unvaccinated and under-vaccinated children. According to the report, Africa accounts for half of the twenty countries in the world with the largest number of children without any vaccinations—referred to as “zero-dose” children. … UNICEF’s report comes as Africa, but also other parts of the world, report disease outbreaks on a scale not seen in years. More than 1,000 people died in a cholera outbreak in early 2023 in Malawi, the worst outbreak in the southeastern African country in two decades. In Zimbabwe, where children were unvaccinated against measles, nearly 700 children died in the disease outbreak last year.

A statue of Buddha has been discovered in Egypt’s ancient seaport of Berenice on the Red Sea:

A Polish-US mission discovered the statue “dating back to the Roman era while digging at the ancient temple in Berenice.” The find has “important indications over the presence of trade ties between Egypt and India during the Roman era.”

Claire—wow, it sure does.

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AMERICAS

TikTok’s Chinese ownership isn’t the real problem. The US’s lack of privacy protections is:

The push to ban TikTok comes only because its owner is a Chinese company, ByteDance. No evidence exists that such ownership itself creates problems of collection, addictiveness, personalized ads, or disinformation—from Beijing or elsewhere. These problems are associated with any social media site that depends on advertising, whatever its ownership. … Rather than “protecting” Americans from the “evil, wicked, mean and nasty” TikTok, US politicians want to “protect” Americans from their own failure to address the problem of data collection and manipulation. They want to protect themselves, at the expense of democracy. In so doing, they play into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó ejected from Colombia. Guaidó lands in Miami after failed bid to attend summit hosted by leftwing president, with return to Venezuela looking unlikely:

Venezuela’s best-known opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, has touched down in the United States after being unceremoniously ejected from Colombia while attempting to gatecrash a summit about the political future of his crisis-stricken homeland. … The 39-year-old’s star has waned dramatically as a result of his failure to unseat Hugo Chávez’s political heir. Maduro has crushed street protests and consolidated power. Most of the international community has abandoned Guaidó’s parallel “presidency” and “interim government.”

Late on Monday, Guaidó announced he had crossed into Colombia on foot to escape Maduro’s “persecution” and attend an international summit which Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, is hosting, in an effort to solve Venezuela’s deeply entrenched political crisis. However, hours later Guaidó was removed from the South American country by migration officials and boarded a plane to the US, where he landed early on Tuesday. “Unfortunately, the persecution of the dictatorship spread to Colombia today,” he said in a video statement filmed inside.

Argentina to settle Chinese imports in yuan as China marches into South America to dethrone US dollar.

Argentina will pay for US$1.04 billion of Chinese imports in April in yuan instead of US dollars and then US$790 million per month from May. The yuan has surpassed the US dollar for the first time in cross-border transactions amid increasing de-dollarization efforts. … Discussions over de-dollarization in the Asian market have increased recently after Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim revived a decades-old proposal for the establishment of an Asian monetary fund during a recent meeting with President Xi Jinping, while Brazil and China have agreed to trade in their respective currencies.

Neighborhood fights Haiti gangs after vigilante killings:

Armed with machetes, bottles, and rocks, residents in the hilly suburbs of Haiti’s capital fought back against encroaching gangs Tuesday, a day after a crowd burned 13 suspected gangsters to death in a gruesome outburst of vigilante violence. Tired of relying on an understaffed police department, scores of men in the Canape Vert neighborhood of Port-au-Prince spent the night on roofs and patrolled entrances of their community blocked with big trucks spray-painted with the words, “Down with gangs.” …

On Monday, UN Secretary General António Guterres urged the immediate deployment of an international armed force to Haiti—a request Haiti’s prime minister first made in October last year—and warned in a report that violence in Port-au-Prince “has reached levels comparable to countries in armed conflict.” More than 130,000 Haitians have fled their neighborhoods as gangs break into homes, kill and rape residents in a fight to control more territory, and nearly 40 percent of them are now living in makeshift shelters lacking basic services, according to the UN.

★ Haiti’s perfect storm, and how to get out of it:

Haiti is one of the “pilot countries” for the Global Fragility Act, along with Libya, Mozambique and several others. There may be a narrow window for Haiti and its international partners to solve Haiti’s short-term crisis, and then undertake the longer-term recovery to finally escape the fragility trap.

This opportunity began on December 21, 2022, when a coalition of business, civil society and political actors quietly signed an accord with Haiti’s prime minister, Ariel Henry, that outlined a transitional arrangement leading to elections. The accord calls for a three-member High Council of Transition to be selected from civil society, political leaders, and the private sector. The current HCT was installed on February 7 and could be expanded as needed. It will advise the prime minister based on the results of extensive roundtables, a kind of national dialogue that channels Haitians’ opinions and mobilizes expertise. These roundtables will require a tremendous amount of support to function. But their success could shift the country’s power structure in an entirely new, citizen-led direction.

Secret recordings, million-dollar rewards and family betrayal. How the US hunted down El Chapo’s sons:

The judicial crackdown against relatives, old partners and informants has been decisive in detaining top members of the Sinaloa Cartel. The evidence collected will be key to putting the capo’s heirs on trial.

… More than 130 pages of court documents have come to light, detailing how cartel members fed their enemies to tigers, set up clandestine laboratories to traffic fentanyl, created a Pan-American drug trafficking corridor from Peru to the US and wove alliances in Asia, using cryptocurrency payments that didn’t leave a trace. Meanwhile, DEA agents infiltrated the criminal group for a year-and-a-half.

• El Chapo’s sons tortured victims with corkscrews, fed enemies to tigers.

Why Chile is home to the fastest trains in South America. The government of Gabriel Boric is set to unveil six new high-speed machines that will cut down the trip between Santiago and Chillán to under four hours.

Eyes on the prize: Lula’s outbursts won’t deter EU from chasing Mercosur deal. Brazilian leader’s erratic geopolitics are testing the nerves of EU trade negotiators:

The EU is on a charm offensive as Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva tours Portugal and Spain—part of a courtship that seeks to mark progress on a deal with the Mercosur trading bloc at a major EU-Latin America summit in Brussels in July. Lula’s behavior of late has hardly helped the cause: He had been due to welcome European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen a couple of weeks back, but instead flew to China. There, he railed against the West in general, and the United States in particular, calling on Washington to “stop encouraging war” in Ukraine. Lula’s comments triggered a storm of criticism from Washington and Brussels, amid concern that the West had lost the Brazilian leader just months after he returned to power. …

Securing an accord with the Mercosur countries—Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay—thereby winning a market of over 260 million people would be a welcome boost for Brussels, which is ramping up so-called values-based trade with like-minded partners around the world to cut the EU’s trade dependency on countries like Russia and China.

Mexico’s army ignored cartel warnings before mass student kidnapping, emails show:

The Mexican military received nearly a dozen complaints about cartel activity in the region where 43 students were abducted in September 2014, emails hacked from the country’s defense ministry reveal, but the armed forces apparently did little to tackle organized crime in the area. The students’ kidnapping and disappearance, which took place in the city of Iguala in Guerrero state, was one of the most horrific and high-profile human rights abuses in Mexico’s recent history, and remains unsolved despite years of protests and a relentless pursuit of justice by the students’ parents. …

The complaints are part of the more than four million emails and documents leaked in September last year by the hacker group calling itself Guacamaya. The hack of more than six terabytes of information is one of the most serious breaches ever of Mexican national security.

Jair Bolsonaro questioned by police investigating Brazil coup attempt:

Brazil’s former president has been ridiculed by his political opponents after he was questioned by federal police as part of a criminal investigation into January’s alleged coup attempt and claimed he had shared a video questioning last year’s election result “by mistake.” Bolsonaro spent more than two hours in the company of police investigators on Wednesday morning, nearly four months after thousands of hardcore supporters ran riot in the capital, Brasília, in what the new administration called a botched coup intended to reinstall the far-right former army captain as president. …

The federal police investigation is far from the only legal difficulty facing Bolsonaro, who is widely expected to be stripped of his political rights in the coming months by Brazil’s electoral court as a result of an investigation into online disinformation.

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WHO KNOWS?

Lue Elizondo ran the Pentagon’s UFO Unit. He says the government is withholding what it knows. Official reports show unidentified craft entering restricted US airspace. Elizondo wants to ensure they don’t cause the next Pearl Harbor:

This January, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reported that 366 new UAP incidents had been reported to US intelligence agencies since March 2021. The numbers are such that Sean Cahill, for one, is frightened that humans are “about to get steamrolled by something.” But, he says, “I have really high hopes because we’re having the discussion in the public eye.” Maybe the amplified UAP conversation will prove to be pivotal for humanity, or maybe Mick West will be right, and all of the phenomena will finally be explained away. Maybe the military and NASA will uncover what Leslie Kean calls the ultimate goal: providing “some level of proof … that establishes the reality of this being a nonhuman, non-​manmade technology or phenomenon.”

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🦇 BAT OF THE DAY

Meet deputy Andrei Gurulev of the United Russia party:

“It’s time to reintroduce the concept of ‘Enemy of the People.’ Don’t be shy about it. There are enemies, but there is no concept. I want Stalinist repressions! I want! Moreover, my grandfather served nine years under this article. He went through the entire war, served time in 1946, and then he was rehabilitated. We understand that at that time it was necessary to do this in the state. Yes, somewhere—there were mistakes, but there was discipline!”

Also … you knew this was coming:

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🥢 SCOLDING OF THE DAY

On Thursday, the giant panda Ya Ya, who had been living in the US for 20 years, landed in China. Ya Ya’s return was highly anticipated and joyful.

However, CNN has published an article on Wednesday, entitled, “‘Bring Ya Ya home’: How a panda in the US turbocharged Chinese nationalist sentiment,” using the panda’s homecoming trip to create hype. CNN not only misinterpreted Chinese people’s attention to Ya Ya as a symbol of Chinese nationalism, but also claimed that the Chinese media uses pandas to fan anti-US sentiment.

CNN discusses Chinese people’s concerns about giant pandas from the perspective of nationalism. This undoubtedly caters to the politically correct atmosphere in the US, which aims at distorting the image of China, and inciting the unhealthy mood and atmosphere towards China.

Xu Liang, an associate professor at the School of International Relations, Beijing International Studies University, noted that CNN’s perspective is full of self-abasement and arrogance. It is quite normal for Chinese people to care about the panda, as Ya Ya is like one of us.

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TODAY’S ANIMAL

Ya Ya the panda:

Tell me—how could you watch that and conclude, as the Chinese apparently have, that we’ve been mistreating Ya Ya? How could they more badly misunderstand our souls?

I have to agree that Ya Ya looks a bit ratty. But so does Zeki—who’s almost as old as Ya Ya—and it’s definitely not because I’m mistreating him. It’s because he’s elderly, and elderly animals, like elderly humans, don’t look as great as they did in their youth.

(We apparently sent him back by FedEx, which kind of amazes me. I didn’t know you could FedEx a panda.)

Related: A zookeeper burps Que Que after giving him his bottle.

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And you did it! You’re now a well-informed person!

1. One of our readers asked what the French thought of Macron’s remarks about China, Taiwan, and the US. This show should give you a sense of the way it’s being discussed here.