... Violation of Sanctions: Businesses on US Treasury Radar
On April 6, 2018, for example, the US Department of the Treasury introduced sanctions against a number of Russian individuals and legal entities, including high-ranking officials, CEOs and companies (Rusal and En+, among others). Almost all of them were put on the SDN list over Ukraine, but two – Rosoboronexport and the Russian Financial Corporation – were targeted due to their involvement in Syria. Somewhat earlier, the same measure was applied to two Russian banks – Tempbank and the Russian International Bank – that had cooperated with Syria. The two banks and their top managers are still on the US black list despite the fact that the ...
... second in command. For this reason, US plans to establish some form of NATO in the Middle East are doomed to failure. Eventually I don’t see any streamlined collective security system in the Middle East.
The main goal today is to end the conflict in Syria and embark on economic recovery there. Russia will not be able to do this single-handedly but from the viewpoint of the future this is very important. Syria has always been at the crossroads of trade in the Middle East. Now it is necessary for everything ...
Realistically, it is impossible to sit all regional and international players around the same table
Despite eight years of horrific conflict, and over 500,000 thousand deaths, a stable peace in Syria remains elusive. The two writers of this article may disagree on what the final outcome should be, but they share the same concerns regarding the potential risks of new escalations in the near future. Such risks are increasing, partially because ...
It is becoming increasingly more difficult for Moscow to retain its position as an honest, if not completely independent, broker
On February 14, the leaders of Russia, Turkey and Iran will meet in Sochi to discuss Syria and hold separate bilateral meetings. Recently, new developments have emerged that could prove dangerous if each state pursues its own hidden agenda. The three states depend on the Astana format for settling the Syrian issue.
By 2019, the Syrian ...
... fraudulent Russiagate attacks on him, as has been evident again in the attacks on his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria. For example, James Clapper, President Obama's Director of National Intelligence, when asked on CNN whether American's are ... ... allies "confused" and "bewildered." This was echoed in an op ed in the New York Times on December 23, by Susan Rice, National Security Advisor to Obama, titled "The Threat in the White House." Rice laments that, "We are ...
...
Judging from the new State Armament Program for 2018-2027, which Putin signed off in December 2017, many of the most ambitious and expensive aerospace and naval weapons programs have effectively been pushed back to the mid-2020s or even beyond 2027.
In Syria, Putin will keep trying to convert the military success of the Russian intervention into political and diplomatic gains, but he will be hampered by the growing Syrian involvement of the United States. Unlike Moscow, Washington has no constructive ...
... issues include allegations of possible Russian connections into European politics, or perhaps also the other way around (we never hear about that). And the Skripal case. All these are secondary and solvable, issues, once the above hard-points are solved.
Syria
Andrey Kortunov:
Russia: the Power Broker in the Middle East?
If it is at all possible to speak of any “winner” in such an ugly civil-war, with perhaps 400,000 dead people and 5 million refugees out of 22 million previous inhabitants, it must ...
... broker’ in the region. Neither Israel, nor Iran is completely happy with the Russian policy of balancing its relations with the two states; each of the parties tries to pull Moscow to its side of the conflict. The risks of alienating either Teheran or Jerusalem, or even both of them, are on the rise.
Finally, if Damascus finally has a complete military victory and regains control over most of the Syrian territory, its current dependence on Moscow will inevitably decrease. Russia and its partners can arguably win the war, but they cannot win the peace in Syria in the sense that they do not have resources needed to launch the process of the post-conflict ...
... against it. In fact, this theory is more plausible than the one which states that Damascus has no chemical weapons. Indeed, the Syrian chemical stockpiles were withdrawn from the country and destroyed, but chlorine is easy to produce if need be. However,... ... hand, as we have already mentioned above, it makes sense to the radical Islamists and jihadists, which number in the tens of thousands in Idlib (Gen. [retired] Amos Yadlin, Director of Israel’s Institute of National Security Studies and former Head of ...
... states is what led to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi. Considering the results of these approaches, as well as the destructive influence of the actions of Western governments in Afghanistan and Iraq, Russia and China took a different decision on the Syria issue.
While Russia and the United States had an active military presence in Syria, China adopted a more flexible position, one that left room for manoeuvre. However, Beijing expressed its general attitude towards regional conflicts at the very ...
