Tag Archives: Russia

Defence, Government, National Security, NATO, Politics, Society

Enlarging NATO will be problematic. But Poland wants new members…

NATO

At a conference in the Polish city of Wroclaw on 12 June, the Polish defence minister, Tomasz Siemoniak, said that Macedonia and Montenegro should be invited to join NATO at next year’s summit in Warsaw. The two former Yugoslav nations want to join the 28-country military alliance, but any move to do so could increase already high-tensions between the Western alliance and Russia.

Any invitation, however, is likely to draw scorn from Moscow. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has opposed any expansion of NATO that includes the former communist nations in eastern and southeast Europe, claiming that it is a purposefully provocative move. Russia’s foreign minister has repeatedly warned against NATO approaching Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro, saying that NATO allowing those countries to join would be solely aimed at undermining Russia.

This type of disagreement – asking countries to choose allegiance to either the West or East – was the ideological barrier that fuelled the Cold War for more than 40 years and lies at the heart of the current conflict in eastern Ukraine. Some believe that the war in the contested region of Donbas, Ukraine, is deliberately designed to stop the country from being eligible for NATO selection, as the alliance does not typically allow nations to join while a conflict remains unresolved. Experts say this tactic, known as a ‘frozen conflict’, was used in the 2008 war in Georgia.

In 1999, former communist countries began joining NATO en masse, including the former Soviet states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania who all joined in 2004. In the Balkan region, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Slovenia and Romania are members of the alliance.

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Britain, Foreign Affairs, Government, Middle East, National Security, Syria

Recent peace talks in Syria have been a complete failure…

SYRIA

The recent round of peace talks in Geneva concerning Syria collapsed in just under 30 minutes. If anyone believed that the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, and his enemies had the slightest intention of making peace, this latest setback should be evidence enough of just how difficult it is going to be in bringing about a peace treaty. At this stage it seems wholly impossible. Just to get the blood-stained dictator and a selection of his foes to the negotiating table required almost three years of international endeavour and a death toll that has now reached 140,000 people since the civil war started. All efforts to bring about peace in Syria have ended in failure.

The crisis has usurped even the bleakest of forecasts. Last year, it seemed reasonable and rational to believe that Assad’s agreement to disable his poisonous gases and chemical weapons would at least rid the conflict of these ghastly weapons. But even that deal is unravelling.

Under the agreed timetable, 700 tons of Assad’s most dangerous chemical agents should have been shipped out of Syria by 31 December, 2013. In January, the best estimate was that a mere 4 per cent had actually been removed. It is understood that a further shipment (of an undisclosed size) has taken place since, but it will not have altered the overall stockpiles of chemical agents being held by the Syrian regime by that much. The agreement was designed to destroy Syria’s entire inventory of some 1,300 tons; less than 50 tons has been deemed to have been disposed of.

More worryingly, hundreds of British Muslims have travelled to Syria’s war-torn country to join the most radical rebel groups, most of which are aligned to Al-Qaeda. British intelligence and senior police officers are gravely concerned of the prospect of these people returning home to the UK with their newly-found skills acquired from Al-Qaeda run training camps disbursed throughout Syria and neighbouring countries in the Middle East. No counter-terrorism official doubts that such radicalised individuals threaten our national security.

Syria is systematically destroying itself before our very eyes. Millions of refugees have been displaced and are placing an intolerable strain on neighbouring countries as they seek refuge and shelter. All efforts to bring peace to this blood-soaked land have been foiled, and have created in the process a new generation of jihadists.

No one should forget that Assad has been aided in his mission – and been given a licence to do what he has been doing – through Russia and Iran who have sustained this war by arming and funding the Syrian regime.

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Government, Russia, Society

The attack in Volograd raises concerns for a peaceful Winter Olympics in Sochi…

Intro: The real threat to the Sochi Games is not a Western boycott but an Islamist terror attack

The run-up to the Winter Olympics in Sochi, which start in February, has been mired in controversy for months. Increasing the minds of politicians and athletes has been on whether they should boycott the Games in protest over Russia’s increasingly harsh treatment against homosexuals and lesbians.

The devastating suicide bombing over the weekend in Volograd, in southern Russia, is an instant reminder that the real threat to the Sochi Games is not a Western boycott but an Islamist terror attack. The blast at a railway station, which has killed at least 18 people, was not the first in Volgograd. In October, Russia identified a woman bomber from Dagestan as being responsible for a bus bombing in which five people were killed. Dagestan is one of a patchwork of small, mainly Islamic, autonomous republics in the Caucasus.

Russia has reason to be concerned for Dagestan is almost as unstable now as neighbouring Chechnya was in the 1990s. Although Russia battled a separatist insurgency there, Chechnya has never been entirely pacified. To add to the charge that Sochi is more of a threat from radical Islamists, rather than matters to do with sexuality, the leader of the Chechen rebel Islamists vowed in July to stop the Games from proceeding over the bones of its ancestors, or over the bones of many dead Muslims. The language used by the Chechen rebels is disturbing for athletes simply wishing to compete in the Games for medals.

So far, though, nothing has happened in Sochi, and the militants seem to have selected Volgograd as an alternative – maybe, because it is the nearest largest urban location north of the Caucasus.

For Vladimir Putin, he will deal with the terrorist threat by tightening a formidable range of security measures already in place around the Olympic village and event locations. Mr Putin will want to honour his previous pledge when he proclaimed in advance that the Sochi Games would be ‘the safest Olympics ever’.

Politically, whether Moscow can ever restore a lasting peace in the North Caucasus is highly doubtful. Russia simply does not have the manpower to keep all the republics in lockdown at the same time. Nor is the policy of periodically replacing stubborn local leaders with more adaptable ones necessarily an effective one.

Was Tolstoy right when he wrote that Russia is paying a delayed price for those colonial 19th-century wars which have saddled Russia with lands that it can neither absorb nor relinquish? Violence now seems par the course for radical Islamists in the Caucuses, if not in Sochi, then elsewhere.

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