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France has sent its first troops officially to Ukraine. They have been deployed in support of the Ukrainian 54th Independent Mechanized Brigade in Slavyansk. The French soldiers are drawn from France’s 3rd Infantry Regiment, which is one of the main elements of France’s Foreign Legion (Légion étrangère). In 2022 France had a number of Ukrainians and Russians in the Foreign Legion. They were allowed to leave the Legion and, in the case of the Ukrainians, return to Ukraine to join Ukrainian forces. It isn’t clear if the Russians returned home. The Legion today is run by French officers but the...

Big trouble may be brewing in little Moldova, which is starting to look like a staging area for the European Union to offset an emerging Russian victory in Ukraine. Whether such a plan, if attempted, would succeed is not clear. But Moldova is not the most stable country in the world with the nation split between pro-EU and pro-Russian elements. US troops are now in Moldova with Romanians, ostensibly for a military exercise called JCET 2024 (Joint Command Exchange Training). The exercise started on April 1 and will continue until April 19. According to a Moldovan Ministry of Defense statement,...

If NATO is so much against sending troops to Ukraine, why doesn’t NATO demand that the soldiers already there be sent home? On Monday, February 26, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that Germany would not provide its Taurus long-range cruise missiles to Ukraine because doing so would require German troops to be sent there to operate them, just as the British are operating the Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles. The British cried foul and accused Scholz of a “flagrant abuse of intelligence” – meaning that Scholz confirmed what everyone already knows, that NATO officers and trained personnel are in Ukraine...

There is a growing consensus that the West (meaning the United States with the help of the UK) wants to replace Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. My friend and colleague Larry Johnson thinks the CIA and MI6 in the UK are already setting the stage. Either Zelensky will be forced to call a Presidential election, scheduled for next March, and then be replaced, or, if he resists, he will be replaced anyway in a Maidan-style upheaval. The US has pushed changes in Ukraine’s leadership before, and the current State Department undersecretary, Victoria Nuland, was behind the earlier operation. A 2014 phone...

While the world is focused on Israel and the Gaza war, the war in Ukraine grinds on. Russian leader Vladimir Putin gave a brief press conference during his China trip and from that we can conclude the following: firstly that the Russians are concerned about the use of the US ATACMS missile against Russian forces, and secondly that the Russians are worried about the arrival, probably around January, although no one is certain, of F-16 fighter aircraft. The Russians understand that the F-16s will challenge Russian air superiority, at least to a degree, and complicate their operations. Meanwhile, on the...

There appears to be a potentially big development in Ukraine focused on a negotiated deal with Russia. “Ukraine is ready for negotiations and a peace agreement,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said – “if Russia changes the previously declared goals of the special military operation.” Okeksiy Reznikov (from Twitter) His statement came after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Kherson on June 8th to be updated on the ongoing offensive in the Zaphorize region. No doubt Zelensky got news that he did not want to hear: The Ukrainian offensive is not going well and Ukrainian army losses have been heavy. The...

Anyone who listened to Vladimir Putin’s TV broadcast to his nation on September 21 had to be shocked by the Russian leader’s tone, incoherence and threat. US President Joe Biden, in a speech to the UN General Assembly, only made matters worse, not better, by putting all of the burden unequivocally on Putin’s head. There are many impacts from these events, including the bitter possibility of a wider war that will spill over into Europe. Both Biden and Putin seem to think they can play this kind of poker. Not only will they both lose, but the world will be...

Just as Ethiopian government forces appear to have turned the tide in the country’s so-called civil war, the Biden administration is pushing for US citizens in Ethiopia to leave and is providing relocation assistance to those who can’t afford to buy a plane ticket. Meanwhile, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has visited Addis Ababa and has made it clear that China backs Ethiopia’s government fully. This, in contrast to the United States which has imposed sanctions on Ethiopia, but not on the rebellious Tigray. As Bloomberg reports: The US last month suspended duty-free access to its exports “because of gross...

The electronic warfare system is known as “Belladonna”, a poisonous plant that gets its name from Renaissance women who used its extract for tinctures to dilate the pupils of their eyes, ostensibly to make them more attractive. While Belladonna translates to “beautiful woman” in English, in Russian it has a second meaning: it is the name of a Russian electronic jamming system now credited with knocking out at least nine Turkish Bayraktar armed drones used by Azerbaijan to target Armenia. If true – and no one has denied it – the system is now operating around the sensitive Russian military...