Russia risks becoming embroiled in a “terrible quagmire” if it invades Ukraine, British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is to warn Friday in a speech in Sydney.

The UK’s top diplomat will tell Russian President Vladimir Putin that he is on the brink of making a strategic blunder by launching military action and “has not learned the lessons of history.”

According to prepared remarks to the Lowy Institute, Truss will urge Putin to “desist and step back from Ukraine before he makes a massive strategic mistake.”

“Invasion will only lead to a terrible quagmire and loss of life, as we know from the Soviet-Afghan war and conflict in Chechnya.”

Tens of thousands of Russian troops have massed on Ukraine’s border, and the drumbeat of invasion has been growing for months.

Few military experts believe that Kyiv’s smaller forces could repel an outright invasion.

But Truss will become the latest official to raise the spectre of a protracted and bloody Ukrainian resistance that ensnares occupying Russian forces.

The top diplomat is currently on an official visit to Australia alongside British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace.

Speaking in Sydney at the conclusion of the talks, Wallace and his Australian counterpart Peter Dutton drew a parallel between rising tensions today and the pre-war 1930s.

Wallace noted the two countries had “fought side-by-side then against authoritarian and totalitarian regimes” during World War II.

“Eighty-one years ago to the day, men of the Australian 6th division and the British 7th division captured Tobruk from the Nazis,” he said.

“We won not just because of the bravery of those men who died, many of them, for the sake of freedom, but because we have an alliance.”

Australian Defence Minister Dutton said: “We would be in a very different situation if, during the 1930s and 1940s, the United Kingdom hadn’t stood up to malign forces.”

‘Step up’

The trip comes as Western officials engage in frantic shuttle diplomacy, in part to prevent war, but also to overcome differences in how to respond to any Russian aggression.

Truss will urge allies to “step up” in the face of the crisis, linking the Ukraine conflict to a slew of increasingly emboldened authoritarian regimes who are looking to “export dictatorship.”

“Together with our allies, we will continue to stand with Ukraine and urge Russia to de-escalate and engage in meaningful discussions. What happens in Eastern Europe matters for the world,” she will say.

Truss’ call won support in Australia — which has come under fierce diplomatic, economic and political pressure from China, another authoritarian power, in recent years.

A slew of Australian goods are currently banned from China or under punitive tariffs, following a row over Beijing’s influence in Australia and the region.

Dutton echoed Truss’ call for “the free world to stand its ground.”

“When you see Russia act the way they do, it encourages other bullies and other dictatorships to do the same, and particularly if there’s no pushback from the rest of the world,” Dutton told the Seven Network.

“Thousands of people will die and that is not a circumstance that anyone wants to see prevail. The build-up of the Russian troops is incredibly concerning.”

Source: AFP

U.S. President Joe Biden predicted on Wednesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin will make a move into Ukraine and said Russia would pay dearly for a full-scale invasion, with its businesses possibly losing access to the U.S. dollar.

“My guess is he will move in,” Biden told a news conference. “He has to do something.”

The Kremlin has massed some 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders, a buildup that the West says is preparation for a war to prevent Ukraine from ever joining the NATO Western security alliance. Russia denies planning an invasion.

Biden told reporters he believed Putin would test Western leaders and he said that the response to any Russian invasion would depend on the scale of Moscow’s actions and whether U.S. allies squabbled over how to react.

“Russia will be held accountable if it invades – and it depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and we end up having to fight about what to do and what to not do, et cetera,” Biden said.

“But if they actually do what they’re capable of doing … it is going to be a disaster for Russia if they further invade Ukraine,” Biden added.

Biden and his team have prepared a broad set of sanctions and other economic penalties to impose on Russia in the event of an invasion.

Biden, pressed on what he meant by “minor incursion,” said NATO allies are not united on how to respond depending on what exactly Putin does, saying “there are differences” among them and that he was trying to make sure that “everybody’s on the same page.”

“Big nations can’t bluff, number one. Number two, the idea that we would do anything to split NATO … would be a big mistake. So the question is, if it’s something significantly short of a significant invasion or … just major military forces coming across. For example, it’s one thing to determine if they continue to use cyber efforts; well, we can respond the same way,” he said.

U.S. officials reject limiting NATO expansion as a non-starter, but Biden suggested there could be a deal under which the West might not station nuclear forces in Ukraine.

Visiting Kyiv in a show of support, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Russia could launch a new attack on Ukraine at “very short notice” but Washington would pursue diplomacy as long as it could, even though it was unsure what Moscow really wanted.

Source: REUTERS

Joe Biden 1.0 was a calming, grandfatherly figure, a low-key veteran coming out of retirement in 2020 to heal a nation deeply divided by Donald Trump. A year later, meet Biden 2.0 — the frustrated, angry fighter.

“I’m tired of being quiet,” he said last week in a blistering speech.

Biden was referring specifically to his many fruitless “quiet conversations” behind the scenes with senators in a doomed effort to get his signature legislation on voting rights passed. He could just as well have been summing up the exasperation of his first 12 months in the Oval Office.

And if 2021 saw mild Biden, 2022 looks set to feature a louder, more pugnacious version — a president running out of time, patience and allies to save what remain of his ambitions.

Biden took office January 20, 2021 — at 78, the oldest man to ever become US president — facing incredible challenges.

Covid-19 was out of control, Trump’s supporters had just two weeks earlier tried overturning the presidential election, the economy was comatose, and around the world US allies were reeling in Trump shock of their own.

Biden’s answer to all that — not to mention to the explosive tensions over racism after a series of Black Americans were killed during botched arrests — was to promise competency, old-fashioned decency and unity.

“My whole soul is in this. Bringing America together, uniting our people,” Biden pledged in his inaugural address.

And he even seemed to have a chance of pulling it off.

Democrats narrowly controlled both houses of Congress, Trump had been banished from Twitter, and Covid vaccines were ready.

“There were high expectations that Biden, given his experience and his knowledge of Washington, would be able… to make the trains run on time again,” said Lara Brown, director of the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University.

“It was all about a return to normalcy.”

Fast forward to the start of Biden’s second year.

Beset by the Delta and Omicron Covid variants, an ever-more divided America, and the likely loss of Congress to the Republicans in November’s midterm elections, Biden’s luck at the age of 79 seems to have run short.

With a majority of just one in the Senate and barely more than that in the House, his huge social spending plan — called Build Back Better — is dead in the water. Ditto the voting rights package he says is needed to save US democracy from Trump’s supporters.

A centrist at heart, Biden has failed to connect with the right or satisfy his own party’s left. As he’s discovering, the center today is hard to find.

Average approval polls on fivethirtyeight.com are at a lowly 42 percent, down from 53. A recent Quinnipiac poll, while an outlier, posted a disturbing 33 percent approval.

Abroad, the picture is similar.

While world allies do like having a United States not governed by Trump back, the country’s humiliating military exit from Afghanistan torpedoed the Biden administration’s aura of professionalism. Certainly Russia seems unconcerned, as it masses troops on Ukraine’s border.

It all adds up to a bitter awakening from the days when the White House buzzed with idealism and talk of Biden emulating his hero Franklin Roosevelt, who led America through the Great Depression in the 1930s.

“Their optimism, combined with the public expectation that all of this would be solved, led them down a path of hubris,” Brown said.

‘Less shouting’ or ‘fight’?

There’s still a scenario where Biden comes out on top: the pandemic burns out, the economy stabilizes, inflation recedes, and with the subsequent feel-good factor Biden gets his party to reverse those legislative defeats just in time for the midterms.

Biden’s aides also point out they got Congress to pass the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, juicing a Covid-ravaged economy and preventing more widespread misery. Remarkably, Democrats also got strong Republican support in passing a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package.

All that with a razor-thin majority in Congress.

The more likely outcome for 2022, though, is continued Democratic infighting, followed by Republicans winning one or both chambers of Congress in November.

At that point, Biden can expect aggressive House investigations, and even possibly impeachment, as Republicans seek to further undermine their opponents’ ability to govern.

And it would become increasingly likely a 2024 White House challenge could come from Trump, even as the former president continues to try to subvert the 2020 election.

So much for Biden’s vow to restore “the soul of America.”

David Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist at the heart of the mainstream establishment, advises Biden to pivot back to “less shouting and more of Biden’s trademark common sense.”

But Biden, his back against the wall, is signaling that he sees things more darkly going into 2022.

“I did not seek this fight,” he said in another dramatic speech this month, this time commemorating the anniversary of the January 6 storming of Congress by Trump supporters.

“But I will not shrink from it either,” Biden said. “I will stand in this breach.”

Source: AFP

Russia ruled out Sunday any concession at talks with the United States on soaring tensions over Ukraine as Moscow seeks a wide-ranging new security arrangement with the West but faces strong pressure to pull back troops.

Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov told Russian news agencies ahead of his talks in Geneva the Kremlin was also “disappointed” with signals coming from both Washington and Brussels, where NATO and the European Union are based.

The high-level discussions start a week of diplomacy in which Russia will meet with NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), with the US trying to assure European allies they will not be sidelined.

Russia since late last year has amassed tens of thousands of troops at the Ukrainian border and demanded guarantees that NATO will not expand further eastward.

The Kremlin is insisting NATO must never grant membership to ex-Soviet Ukraine, which is pushing to join.

The United States, to be represented by Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, agreed to talks even though it made plain that many of Moscow’s proposals are non-starters.

Originally scheduled to start on Monday, Sherman is now due to have a working dinner with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov on Sunday evening, said a State Department spokesperson.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, dismissing Moscow’s demands as “gaslighting”, has insisted that talks will yield no progress so long as Russia has a “gun to Ukraine’s head”.

“We’re prepared to respond forcefully to further Russian aggression. But a diplomatic solution is still possible and preferable if Russia chooses it,” Blinken said Friday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin met his US counterpart Joe Biden in Geneva in June and agreed on regular “stability” talks between Sherman and Ryabkov, who will again lead the Russian delegation.

‘Massive’ retaliation

In two phone calls to Putin, Biden has warned of severe consequences if Russia invades Ukraine.

Measures under consideration include sanctions on Putin’s inner circle, cancelling Russia’s controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany or, in the most drastic scenario, severing Russia’s links to the world’s banking system.

A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, warned that Washington would also send more troops to eastern NATO members such as Poland and the Baltics if Russia invaded. 

Europeans have showed solidarity, with EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell visiting the frontline in Ukraine, although some nations are expected to hesitate at the strongest measures.

“Whatever the solution, Europe has to be involved,” EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said.

Russia insists it was deceived after the Cold War and understood that NATO would not expand.

Instead, the US-led alliance accepted most of the former Warsaw Pact nations and the three Baltic nations that were under Soviet rule.

Russia has inflicted intense pressure on neighbouring Ukraine since 2014 after a revolution overthrew a government that had sided with the Kremlin against moving closer to Europe.

Russia seized the Crimean peninsula and backs an insurgency in eastern Ukraine in which more than 13,000 people have died.

At a time that Russia is also intervening to shore up allies facing popular uprisings in Belarus and Kazakhstan, Moscow has insisted it wants concrete progress in talks with Washington.

Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yury Ushakov warned after the call with Biden that the United States would make a “colossal mistake” if it went ahead with sanctions.

‘Gigantic bluff’?

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg, meeting foreign ministers of the alliance on Friday, said there remained real risks of a Russian invasion.

But John Herbst, a former US ambassador to Ukraine, described the Russian troop build-up as a “gigantic bluff” by Putin to seek a negotiated agreement.

“They are trying to see if the Biden administration or Europe will blink,” said Herbst, now at the Atlantic Council think tank.

“As long as the Biden administration remains at least as strong as it is now,” he said, “it probably is enough to keep Putin from striking large into Ukraine, but I don’t rule out something smaller.”

Matthew Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, said the Geneva talks were more about preventing the Ukraine crisis from accelerating than reaching a major deal.

“I think this is about pulling the pendulum back, if we can, towards thicker interaction and more effective diplomacy and communication — not permanent and forever resolution of all problems.”

While also downplaying the possibility of a full-scale invasion, Rojansky said the risks of the Russian build-up were real.

“There is the principle of Chekhov — you put a loaded gun on the stage in Act One and it has to be fired by Act Three.”

Source: AFP