Tag: Europe

Besides making it harder for Putin to fund a prolonged war, West’s mission was to deny him access to technologies at the core of modern warfare…reports Asian Lite News

US President Joe Biden and his Western allied have chalked out a master plan to inflict maximum pain on Russian President Vladimir Putin, making it harder, if not impossible, for him to fund a prolonged war in Ukraine, media reported.

As a first step, Biden had quietly sent a team of officials to European Union headquarters in Brussels days before Putin started his Ukraine invasion.

These were not spy chiefs or generals, but experts in reading fine print and tracking the flow of money, computer chips and other goods around the world, the Associated Press said in a report.

Besides making it harder for Putin to fund a prolonged war, their mission was to deny him access to technologies at the core of modern warfare, it was reported.

US officials reportedly said that there were intense meetings in February in the major European capitals – Brussels, Paris, London and Berlin – as the allies tried to craft the details of a historic economic blockade.

According to the media report, some of the exports the US wanted to ban were met with reluctance by the Europeans, who would essentially be telling their own companies to forgo several billion dollars in annual revenues from Russia.

When there was a deadlock, U.S. negotiators would put Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on the phone.

“You can say ‘no’ now, but when the body bags are coming out of Ukraine, you’re not going to want to be a holdout,” Raimondo said she told allied counterparts. “Do the right thing.”

Everyone signed on — and before the invasion.

Raimondo said what ultimately drove the agreement and the fast timeline was the threat of Putin’s imminent attack on Ukraine.

“We all got religion fast that it was time to band together and stick together,” she said. “If you cause enough pain, isolate Putin, it will bring this war to an end.”

Putin changes tactics

After failing to capture Kiev, President Putin has been forced to change his war tactics in Ukraine and is moving to a strategy of “protecting key territorial goals”.

This was reported by The Wall Street Journal citing unnamed high-ranking US officials, said UNIAN.

One of the interlocutors said that, given the data received, the effective defence of the Ukrainian Armed Forces prompted Putin to adjust his tactics.

Now the Russian President wants to force Kiev to accept Moscow’s claims to the southern and eastern territories of Ukraine.

Thus, Russia wants to create a “land corridor” between the west of the country and the occupied Crimea in 2014, as well as expand control over Donbas.

At the same time, Putin will continue his military pressure, including shelling of cities, hoping that this will force Zelensky to give up hopes of joining the alliance with the West and agree to neutral status and other demands of the Kremlin, the report said.

If Putin’s demands are not met, then, according to US officials, Russia will try to keep all the territories occupied by its regular troops and continue to escalate.

“Based on our military assessments, it seems that Putin is returning to the blockade tactics,” one of the officials said.

According to him, for citizens in the surrounding cities, this means weeks, and possibly months of missile and artillery attacks by the Russian army.

Former senior State Department official Daniel Fried said Putin’s goal of seizing Ukraine has not changed, “only his tactics have changed”.

ALSO READ: Putin moving to ‘Plan B’ in Ukraine

Biden, who faces growing dissatisfaction over his approach to the war, will travel to Brussels on Thursday and then on to Poland, it was announced on Sunday night….reports Asian Lite News

 Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US Ambassador to the UN, has warned that there was little immediate hope of a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine, as pressure continued to build on American President Joe Biden ahead of a crucial NATO summit in Europe this week, the Guardian reported.

Biden, who faces growing dissatisfaction over his approach to the war, will travel to Brussels on Thursday and then on to Poland, it was announced on Sunday night.

He will hear a proposal from Poland for NATO to send a peacekeeping force into Ukraine, something Thomas-Greenfield said was unlikely, according to the Guardian reported.

The Ambassador said she saw little chance of a breakthrough.

“We have supported the negotiations that (Ukrainian) President Zelensky has attempted with the Russians, and I use the word attempted because the negotiations seem to be one-sided, and the Russians have not leaned in to any possibility for a negotiated and diplomatic solution,” she said.

“We tried before Russia decided to move forward in this brutal attack on Ukraine and those diplomatic efforts were not responded to well by the Russians, and they’re not responding now. But we’re still hopeful that the Ukrainian effort will end this brutal war.”

Thomas-Greenfield talked down the prospects of a NATO peacekeeping force in Ukraine.

“I can’t preview what decisions will be made and how Nato will respond to the Polish proposal… What I can say is American troops will not be on the ground in Ukraine at this moment. The President has been clear on that.

“Other NATO countries may decide that they want to put troops inside of Ukraine, that will be a decision that they have made. We don’t want to escalate this into a war with the US but we will support our NATO allies,” the envoy added.

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Turkey is hoping to organise the meeting between Putin and Zelensky after which further progress can be made in the negotiations….reports Asian Lite News

Turkey, which is trying hard to bring Moscow and Kiev to the negotiating table in an effort to end the ongoing war, has said that Russian President Vladimir Putin is still not willing to meet his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky.

Speaking to local media outlets, Ibrahim Kalin, a government spokesman in Ankara, said that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has proposed a meeting between the leaders of the two warring nations in Turkey in an effort to end the ongoing war, reports Ukrayinska Pravda.

“Zelensky is ready to do this. Putin, by contrast, believes that the parties have not yet reached a common vision sufficient to conduct negotiations at the head-of-state level,” Kalin was quoted as saying.

According to the spokesman, in Erdogan’s proposed meeting, the main point of focus will be on a possible compromise between Ukraine and Russia, after which detailed negotiations on the agreement will continue.

Kalin said that Putin, during a conversation with Erdogan, put forward six main points, which were Ukraine’s neutrality and refusal to join NATO in future; ‘demilitarisation’ and mutual provision of security guarantees according to the Austrian security model; de-nazification; removal of “obstacles” to the widespread use of the Russian language; status recognition of the “Donetsk People’s Republic”, “Luhansk People’s Republic”; and recognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

According to the spokesman, the Ukrainian delegation apparently discussed the first four points with the Russians, but is not prepared even to discuss the fifth and sixth, Ukrayinska Pravda reported.

Therefore, Turkey is hoping to organise the meeting between Putin and Zelensky after which further progress can be made in the negotiations.

Kalin further said that neither Ukraine nor the world community is likely to easily agree to the recognition of Russia’s occupation of Crimea and the Donbas region, which comprised Luhansk and Donetsk, as “this is a flagrant violation of international law”.

He added that Russia was trying to negotiate from a position of strength, but “it should not be forgotten that the continuation of the war will primarily hit the Russian army and economy”.

On March 10, under Turkey’s initiative, a tripartite meeting of the Foreign Ministers of Moscow, Kiev and Ankara took place in Antalya.

However, no progress was achieved on a truce.

Russian authorities on March 16 announced their readiness to continue negotiations with Ukraine in the tripartite format.

Earlier this month, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had assured that Russia was not against personal talks between Zelensky and Putin.

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