Russia Launches Drills in Serbia as NATO Tensions Increase

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Russia and Belarus are to send troops for a week-long military drill in Serbia for the second time this year, the Serbian Ministry of Defense has announced.

The drill, entitled the Slavic Fraternity, will involve the deployment of paratroopers across several locations, including in the outskirts of the capital city of Belgrade. The exercise will engage 212 Russian troops, 56 Belarusian troops and 450 troops from the host country Serbia.

Forced to Flee (IV)

BERLIN/PRIŠTINA (Own report) – Germany is significantly responsible for helping create the conditions causing tens of thousands to flee from Kosovo. This has been confirmed by an analysis of the development that seceded territory has taken since NATO’s 1999 aggression, in which Germany had played a leading role. Prominent German politicians have also played leading roles in establishing Kosovo’s subsequent occupation, helping to put the commanders and combatants of the mafia-type Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) militia into power in Priština. They created social conditions that have drawn sharp internationally criticism. In 2012, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) reported that organized crime continues at “high levels” in Kosovo. The Council of Europe even discerns some of the highest-ranking politicians, including a long-standing prime minister, as being members of the Mafia. Poverty is rampant. After 16 years of NATO and EU occupation, around one-sixth of the children suffer from stunted growth due to malnutrition. Germany has played an important role in organizing the occupation. If it were not for cash transfers refugees send home, many Kosovo families would not be able to survive. In the first semester of 2015 alone, more than 28,600 found themselves forced to apply for refugee status in Germany – with little chance of success. Berlin is now seeking more rapid ways for their deportation.

How China Is Building the Biggest Commercial-Military Empire in History

 

China’s outsized latticework of global infrastructure is said to be rooted in a fierce sense of competitiveness which they claim they learned from 19th century America.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the sun famously never set on the British empire. A commanding navy enforced its will, yet all would have been lost if it were not for ports, roads, and railroads. The infrastructure that the British built everywhere they went embedded and enabled their power like bones and veins in a body.

Great nations have done this since Rome paved 55,000 miles (89,000 km) of roads and aqueducts in Europe. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Russia and the United States established their own imprint, skewering and taming nearby territories with projects like the Trans-Siberian and the Trans-Continental railways.

Now it’s the turn of the Chinese. Much has been made of Beijing’s “resource grab” in Africa and elsewhere, its construction of militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea and, most recently, its new strategy to project naval power broadly in the open seas.

The Hegemony over Southeast Europe

BERLIN/BELGRADE (Own report) -The “Western Balkans Conference”, opening in Berlin today, is overshadow [sic] by the dispute over sanctions against Russia and criticism of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND). Serbia, a participant in the conference, has declared, it will not join the EU’s sanctions. Serbian enterprises are therefore not affected by Russian countermeasures and are even replacing agricultural products, whose importation from the EU has been banned by Moscow. The German government is attempting to prevent this. Berlin, in turn, has been forced to admit that, for years, the BND had systematically spied on Albania. Albania, Germany’s NATO ally, will also attend the conference. Berlin has initiated the “Western Balkans Conference” to shore up the hegemony over Southeast Europe, which it had acquired in the 1990s against the growing influence of China, Turkey and, particularly, Russia.

The Balkan chessboard: Russia’s ruble diplomacy and EU interests

In 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski argued that “a power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent”. His book The Grand Chessboard was indeed a major contribution to geopolitical studies. Depicting the new challenges for US foreign policy in a multipolar world, Brzezinski identifies the geopolitical Achilles’ heel of the 21st century in the area he designated as the Global Balkans, i.e. “the swathe of Eurasia between Europe and the Far East.”